ED WOOD

A couple of years back I went and watched The Disaster Artist at the movie theater (note: movie theaters used to be these huge buildings where you could go see movies play on a big screen. Along with watching the film, you could buy a bag of popcorn and soda for $22 and see how long it would take for you to snap and tell someone seated in front of you to either shut up or put their fucking iPhone away). 

At any rate, I didn’t like The Disaster Artist. It felt mean-spirited, like director/producer/actor James Franco was above (way-above) the subject matter — in this case, seminal fringe-filmmaker/weirdo Tommy Wiseau and his movie The Room. Filmmaking holds a pretty wide berth between the haves and have-not’s, and although I hold no sympathy for Wiseau’s lack of talent (or sanity), I really didn’t see the joke of someone as successful and popular as Franco come in and punch down on him. 

From a pure production viewpoint, Ed Wood feels like everything The Disaster Artist couldn’t or didn’t want to do. It would have been easy to make a movie pissing on the real Ed Wood and his assortment of Hollywood fringe dwellers — or even delve into Ed’s darker nature (alcoholism, softcore porn pics, depression). But you feel like the filmmakers actually have empathy and love for him and his work. Even Bela Lugosi’s tragedies are sympathetic. These people had a rough enough go at life as it is; at least their biography is sentimental.

Johnny Depp (still in that magic phase where he could do no wrong) plays Wood like an optimistic, breezy car salesman who seems most alive when he’s surrounded by other misfits, shooting anything, anywhere for a few hundred bucks (the line between film producer and cult leader is a thin one indeed). Martin Landau deservedly won the Oscar that year, I hope just for uttering the words “that limey cocksucker can rot in hell for all I care!”

A lot of us live in this fringe of filmmaking: hustling for cash, doing our best to keep a circle of friends around us involved in our dreams, scrounging creative measures for lack of budget. If anything, Wood is a patron saint to anyone who wanted to hire ILM or KNB and is left downloading After Effects tutorials on the internet.