One hundred years ago today, the birthday of the man that has long been celebrated as the worst movie director of all time, so bad that some people actually love his movies… Ed Wood.
In fact, some of his biggest fans celebrate each October 10 as “Woodmas.”
Wood was born in Poughkeepsie, New York; he served in the military during World War II.
He’d been a movie buff since he was a kid, so after the war, he ended up making his own low-budget independent movies.
Back then, the movie business had room for people who could crank out a picture – they didn’t even have to be good – on the cheap, and that’s what Wood did.
His most famous work, Plan 9 From Outer Space, is a hot mess, starting with the title.
It was going to be called Grave Robbers From Outer Space, but he got funding from a religious group which thought the title was sacreligious.
(By the way, Wood had gotten their backing after he and the cast and crew all agreed to be baptised.)
Wood had tried to make a different movie with horror legend Bela Lugosi, but then Lugosi died.
No matter, he just put the old footage in Plan 9, and had a completely different guy stand in for Lugosi’s character the rest of the movie.
The alien ship in the movie came from a toy store; on the big screen, it was hopelessly unrealistic.
You could say the same for the acting and the dialogue, too.
No surprise it wasn’t a hit.
But, decades later, movie critics who had a soft spot for weird, schlocky 50s movies gave Wood a posthumous award for being the worst director of all time.
And the thing about being named the worst director is that there are quite a few people who want to see just how bad your movies were.
Fans came to appreciate Wood’s work as a kind of outsider art; he may not have brought much to the table as a film director, but he put everything he had on that table into his movies.
There was an acclaimed Ed Wood biopic in the 90s.
And right now, in Los Angeles, there’s a retrospective of Wood’s films underway at the Los Feliz Theatre.
It’s like what Plan 9’s narrator said: “My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer.”
Starting Saturday at the Sunday River resort in Maine, it’s the North American Wife Carrying Championship.
Couples take on an obstacle course full of logs, sand traps, water and mud.
The winners get the wife’s weight in beer and five times her weight in cash.
Plus they’re automatically entered in the World Wife Carrying Championship in Finland.
Ed Wood, Jr. Centennial: An American Cinematheque Retrospective (American Cinematheque)