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ED WOOD IN GLEN OR GLENDA/ 2011
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 3 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0221 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"If you want to know me, see Glen or Glenda. That's me, that's my story, no question. But Plan 9 is my pride and joy."
- Ed Wood
Ed Wood -
Edward Davis "Ed" Wood, Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author, and editor, who often performed many of these functions simultaneously. In the 1950s, Wood made a number of low-budget genre films, now notable for their technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, large amounts of ill-fitting stock footage, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts and outlandish plot elements, although his flair for showmanship gave his projects at least a modicum of critical success.
Wood's popularity waned soon after his biggest name star Bela Lugosi died (in August 1956). He was able to salvage a saleable feature from Lugosi's last moments on film, but his career declined thereafter. Toward the end of his life, Wood made pornographic movies and wrote pulp crime, horror, and sex novels. His infamy began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst Director of All Time.[1] The lack of filmmaking ability in his work has earned Wood and his films a considerable cult following.
Following the publication of Rudolph Grey's biography Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992), Wood's life and work have undergone a public rehabilitation of sorts, with new light shed on his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production. Tim Burton's biopic of the director's life, Ed Wood, earned two Academy Awards.
Movies:
Glen or Glenda
Wood's big break came in 1953 when he was hired by producer George Weiss to make an exploitation film, I Changed My Sex, based on the life of transsexual Christine Jorgensen. After Jorgensen refused to collaborate on the film, Wood wrote a new autobiographical screenplay titled Glen or Glenda, a sincere and sympathetic study of transvestism. Wood directed and, using the alias Daniel Davis, played the titular character who has a fetish for cross-dressing and angora sweaters.
Angora was regularly featured in his films. His wife Kathy O'Hara and others recall that Wood's transvestism was not a sexual inclination, but rather a neomaternal comfort derived mainly from angora fabric (Ann Gora also happened to be one of Wood's pen names). The medical experts in the film go to great lengths to stress that the transvestite is a perfectly normal heterosexual man who simply feels more comfortable and "more himself" when wearing women's apparel. There is even a fantasy vignette showing Glenda rebuffing the advances of a homosexual man. Even in his later years, Wood was not shy about going out in public dressed in drag as Shirley; his alter ego—female characters named Shirley also appear in many of his screenplays and stories.
Most of Wood's films have a rushed quality due to the tight shooting schedule and limited budgets. While most directors film only one scene per day (or just a fraction of one in more contemporary pictures), Wood might complete up to thirty scenes. He seldom ordered a retake, even if the original was obviously flawed. Glen or Glenda, shot in just four days for $26,000, was done in a semi-documentary style. Narration and voice-over dialog was added to generous amounts of film-library stock footage (a cost-saving trick he used in his later films). The love-interest role of Barbara was played by Wood's real-life girlfriend, Dolores Fuller. She went on to appear in his next two films. Bela Lugosi, who was not told the film was about a transvestite, was paid $1,000 in cash for one day of filming. In a dark haunted-house set, speaking in metaphors and nursery rhymes, he played a portentous, omnipotent narrator.
The centerpiece of the film is a 15-minute fantasy sequence that illustrates Glen's tormented state of mind. Wood utilizes a barrage of surreal, dream-like vignettes with personalized symbolism. Producer George Weiss also inserted footage of flagellation and bondage, reminiscent of the fetish films of Irving Klaw, from another production. In this sequence, Barbara is pinned beneath a large tree (in her living room), and Glen rescues her; they are married with the Devil acting as best man; a shirtless man vigorously flogs a woman reclining on a couch; lewd burlesque dancers gyrate to blaring jazz music and tear at their clothes; a woman gagged and bound to a yoke-like pole is untied by another gagged woman; a lust-crazed man roughly assaults a seductress in a flimsy negligee; an enraged Glenda rips Barbara's blouse to shreds after she laughs at his appearance. Bela Lugosi appears in several scenes also rejecting Glenda and repeating the phrase "snips and snails and puppy-dog tails". The film was released under several regional titles such as Transvestite, I Led Two Lives, and He or She?.
Plan 9 from Outer Space
In 1956, Wood planned to follow Bride of the Monster with The Ghoul Goes West (a.k.a. The Phantom Ghoul), which would have been a combination of his two favorite genres: Horror and Westerns. The story was mainly a rehash of Bride of the Monster in a western setting (a synopsis of the screenplay was published in Filmfax no. 18, December/January 1989-90). Lugosi, recently out of rehab for morphine addiction, was to star as the undertaker/mad scientist. Gene Autry and Lon Chaney, Jr. were also attached to the project for a time. Wood could only raise enough money to shoot one day's worth of silent test footage. A few random scenes were filmed of Lugosi at a funeral, in front of Tor Johnson's house, and stalking about in his Dracula costume (possibly intended for The Vampire's Tomb, another unrealized film). The scenes were filmed to show to prospective financial backers. Lugosi died soon afterward on August 16 and the footage became the seed for Wood's next project.
Plan 9 from Outer Space incorporated the final Lugosi scenes into a new story that combined horror and science fiction. Wood's chiropractor, his face hidden behind a cape, doubled for Lugosi in several scenes. Tor Johnson and wasp-waisted Vampira (Maila Nurmi) are memorable, even iconic, as zombies risen from the grave by alien invaders. The film was shot over a five-day period in November 1956 on a budget of around $20,000. All of Nurmi's scenes were filmed in just two hours (she was paid the union minimum wage of $200). Resorting again to the "docu-fantasy" approach, Criswell, the flamboyantly inaccurate TV psychic, acts as on-screen host and narrator. He cryptically describes the story as "something more than a fact". Cost-free stock footage of airliners, explosions and fighter jets were edited in. The flying saucers (made from plastic toy store models) are fired upon by an artillery barrage taken from World War II newsreels. Although completed in 1956, the film was not released until 1959, due to the inability of the producer to secure distribution.
Most notably, for Plan 9 he convinced members of churches of the Southern Baptist Convention (through his landlord at the time) to invest the initial capital, allegedly convincing them that a successful science fiction picture would make enough money to fund their own pet project of 12 movies about the 12 Apostles. They reportedly changed the name of the movie from Grave Robbers from Outer Space and removed lines from the script which they considered profane; one source alleges they required the actors to accept their church's baptism as part of the deal. The grave-diggers in the picture are the two primary backers. Wood's frequently being overruled by producers and financiers was one factor contributing to his depression and was something he personally blamed for his lack of commercial success.[2]
Wood had planned to make another posthumous Lugosi collaboration to be called Ghouls of The Moon using additional unseen footage he had of Lugosi. Described as "wild stuff" by one of Wood's friends, the material was found to have deteriorated beyond usage when Wood opened the film can it was stored in. Thus the project was cancelled, with Wood moving on to Night of the Ghouls instead.
References:
1. ^ Harry and Michael Medved The Golden Turkey Awards, 1980, Putnam, ISBN 0-399-50463-X.
2. ^ a b c d e f Grey, Nightmare of Ecstasy, p.[page needed].
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Wood
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