Ed Wood

Bela Lugosi is about to wrestle with a giant, stolen, cloth octopus in freezing water.

His friend and director Ed Wood forgot the motor that makes the creature’s limbs work. So, Lugosi will, in a moment, through his old body on the ground and flap around to make it seem like he’s fighting for his life. 

But first, he needs to rant. 

“After I did Dracula, the studio offered me Frankenstein! But I turned it down, the part wasn’t sexy enough. It was too degrading for a big star like me,” Bela moans. 

Knowing that this could go on for some time, and will probably include a section on how Boris Karloff was a no talent hack, Wood gently chides his star. 

“Bela, I’ve got twenty-five scenes to shoot tonight,” Wood says. 

“Don’t let me slow you down,” Lugosi replies.

It is a perfect scene in a perfect movie about people who don’t give up even when they get dashed on the rocks of life. People who don’t give up, even when maybe they should. 

Tim Burton’s film, Ed Wood, is ostensibly about the infamous writer, director, and producer of notoriously bad movies, but while Wood drives the action, Burton clearly wants us to sit with aging, drug addicted, and lonely Bela Lugosi. 

Lugosi, having been a movie titan, is washed up, broke and in the final stages of his life. Wood is a fan and a wannabe director who believes that Lugosi can give him a shot at Hollywood success. Their friendship gives Lugosi a chance to act and to dream again. 

And Lugosi props up a guy who, very famously, does not have what it takes. 

“At Universal, they shot two scenes a day. Eddie can knock off twenty or thirty!  He’s incredible,” Lugosi says. 

Ed Wood was the last of the Tim Burton movies that I wished to see but still had not seen. If it’s not his best (my father wasn’t an actor but my father was very much the guy from Big Fish, so I’m particularly partial to that one) it’s near the top of the list. 

Ed Wood is amusing, though, rarely laugh out loud funny. Except, when I went back and read the script I started laughing out loud at the dialogue. 

Late in the movie Bela’s stand-in is doing an impression of him and it is the standard, “I vant to suck your blood.”

Bill Murray, playing one of Bela and Ed’s close friends, Bunny Breckinridge, has a better suggestion. 

“Let’s hear you call Boris Karloff a cocksucker.”

Ok, I howled at that one in the movie and I am howling now thinking about it. It’s interesting to me that the script is funnier than the movie, but I think there’s some genius of Burton and his actors in there. These aren’t caricatures, they are real people who lived and loved and died trying. They are funny people, but you want to laugh with them (not at them) even when they probably deserve to be laughed at. 

So in the hands of Martin Landau, Bela Lugosi is frail and sad and funny. He may be a joke to most of the world but to his friend Eddie he’s still a giant of the silver screen. 

The acting from everyone is great all the way down the line except for Johnny Depp as Ed Wood. 

Depp plays him like an alien who is trying his best to pretend to be a human. I don’t know if that is in any way how the real Ed Wood behaved in real life. But in this great flick about bad movies it’s note perfect.  

One more scene that moved me was Wood meeting his director hero Orson Welles. 

Seeing them together I was reminded that Welles had one of the greatest screenwriters, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and one of the greatest cinematographers, Gregg Toland, of his time by his side when he made Citizen Kane. His editor was Robert Wise, who would go on to direct 20 or 30 classics of his own including West Side Story and The Sound of Music.  

I certainly don’t mean to demean Welles but it does make me wonder what Eddie could have done with a little support. My immediate thought is, “probably not much.” But I hate to be cynical about people who were out there giving it their all.   

In their chance encounter, Wood finds he has a lot in common with the great auteur. Both of them are dealing with producers who want to change their movies, force them to hire people who are wrong for the parts, and generally get in the way. 

Sure, Ed is making schlock in 5 shooting days for almost no money and Welles is spending millions on studio pictures but it doesn’t matter. They’re both filmmakers.

They’re both legends.