Culture Shock 07.10.14: Ed Wood's 'Plan 9' rewards revisiting

Edward D. Wood Jr.'s reputation again needs rehabilitation. Once enshrined as the worst filmmaker of all time, Wood's place atop the auteurs of awful is in jeopardy.

It's an unexpected turn for the man who wrote and directed standouts of shlock such as "Bride of the Monster" (1955) and the semi-autobiographical "Glen or Glenda" (1953).

"Mystery Science Theater 3000," home video and the Syfy channel have exposed audiences to horrors poor Ed could scarcely have imagined. Compared to the films of Coleman Francis ("Skydivers" and "Red Zone Cuba"), rediscovered obscurities such as "Manos: The Hands of Fate" and "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats," and Syfy originals such as "Mansquito," Wood's films barely stand out anymore. They seem almost ordinary, common, unremarkable.

Wood's tin star has dimmed since Michael and Harry Medved first spit on it in their 1980 book "The Golden Turkey Awards," giving Wood a notoriety in death he never had in life. Even Tim Burton's Oscar-winning 1994 biopic "Ed Wood" seems just a distant and sad memory of when Burton and Johnny Depp still made great movies. It's more about them now than it is Wood.

Perhaps we've been looking at Wood's films the wrong way. Maybe they're more than just bad movies. Can your heart stand the shocking facts, my friends?

The obvious place to start digging is Wood's 1959 magnum opus, "Plan 9 from Outer Space."

For decades "Plan 9" has fooled everyone, critics and fans alike. At first glance, it seems like a movie about extraterrestrials coming to Earth and raising the dead. The aliens' plan (their ninth) is to stop humanity from developing a weapon that could destroy the entire universe. (Wood never does anything halfway.) In other words, "Plan 9" looks like a technically inept, dollar store remake of 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still." But despite itself, "Plan 9" is much more than that.

The addition of zombies to the plot is a commercial consideration. It plays to the Cold War fears of the drive-in frequenting youth audience, inculcated since grade school with a dread for the mindless, conformist Red Menace. Yet Wood mines this for an ironic comment on America's Red Scare paranoia. One of his alien visitors, named Eros after the Greek god of love, says, "It's an interesting thing when you consider, the Earth people, who can think, are so frightened by those who cannot: the dead."

Whether intentional or not, Wood both deflates the dead ideology of communism and lampoons a nervous America's dangerous overreaction to it. Only with hindsight and the collapse of the Soviet Union does it become clear.

Tor Johnson, left, and Vampira in "Plan 9 from Outer Space."

Wood's eye toward his teen audience also provides the film with its star power. TV horror movie host Vampira, pro wrestler Tor Johnson and the late Bela Lugosi (plus his stand-in) are the closest "Plan 9" comes to stars, yet all portray the resurrected undead. By accident, Wood gives us a sly take on how the old Hollywood studio system treated its contract players. It brings to mind the quote attributed to Alfred Hitchcock: "Actors are cattle." Here they are less than cattle; they're dead, especially Lugosi, who really is dead and appears only in stock footage Wood clumsily works into the final film.

In the end "Plan 9" is ahead of its time. It plays as a movie about the artifice of Hollywood. From the rickety sets and unspeakable dialogue to the non-acting actors and disregard for basic continuity from one shot to the next, "Plan 9" practically screams, "I am not real! I am only a movie!"

Perhaps "Plan 9" belongs in a different pantheon, among the great movies about movie-making: "Singin' in the Rain," Robert Altman's "The Player," and Federico Fellini's "8½." (OK. Maybe not.)

Wood didn't just make bad, incompetent, baffling films. He made bad, incompetent, baffling films that strove for deeper meaning. When he failed as a filmmaker, which was almost always, he failed magnificently. By a strange combination of delusional ambition and fortunate accident, he made terrible movies that not only are fun to watch but that surprise us with something new every time we revisit them. That is why Wood remains the Orson Welles of ineptitude.

Orson Welles remains a study in fact vs. fiction

Tim Burton’s 1994 film “Ed Wood” features a scene in which one of the greatest directors who ever lived meets one of the worst.

Frustrated with the progress of his latest project, “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp) storms into a Hollywood bar only to meet his hero, Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio). After complaining about his own struggles with financial backers, Welles gives Wood the confidence to return to the set and finish shooting “Plan 9,” making Welles, ironically, responsible for a movie frequently cited as the worst ever made, usually by people who have not seen “Doomsday Machine” (1972).

Of course, like many events depicted in “Ed Wood,” the meeting between Wood and Welles never happened. Oh, yes, Edward D. Wood Jr. was a real director who made some really bad movies, but one must never let truth stand in the way of art. And the meeting between Wood and Welles works beautifully because Wood and Welles had so much in common, except that Welles was a genius and Wood was, to put it charitably, not.

Several years ago, I met Forrest J. Ackerman, the original editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Ackerman was also once a literary agent, representing such renowned authors as Ray Bradbury. He also represented Wood. “I was his illiterary agent,” Ackerman quipped.

Wood struggled to get money to make his schlocky sci-fi and horror movies, and after “Plan 9,” he faded into a more obscure obscurity than he had occupied before, directing sleazy sex films and hitting his friends up for work until his death in 1978 at age 54.

Welles’ problem, however, wasn’t a lack of talent. He had loads of it. Director, screenwriter, producer, actor — Welles did it all. At age 23, he conquered radio. During an Oct. 30, 1938, broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” he fooled (inadvertently) more than a million listeners into believing the Earth was really being invaded by Martians.

He then moved to Hollywood and seemed primed to conquer it, too. But “Citizen Kane,” the film that would eventually establish Welles as a great filmmaker, was a disappointment at the box office. Afterward, Hollywood studios were reluctant to give Welles the total creative control he enjoyed with “Kane.” RKO, which had released “Citizen Kane,” re-edited and re-shot portions of Welles’ next film, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and Universal took over Welles’ 1958 thriller “Touch of Evil,” which was finally re-released in a form close to Welles’ vision 10 years ago.

Welles turned to financing his films independently. He spent years trying to complete his adaptation of “Don Quixote” without success, just one of many projects he left unfinished, usually because of a lack of money. Only one of those films, “The Other Side of the Wind,” seems likely to ever be released. Director Peter Bogdanovich has been working on editing Welles’ footage into a finished product.

As an actor, Welles often took jobs just to finance his movies. Most famously, he became a TV pitchman. He would “sell no wine before its time.” His legendary voice lent authority to everything from frozen peas to a dubious documentary about Nostradamus. He even had a part — his last, as it turned out — in the animated feature “Transformers: The Movie.” As he put it, “I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys.”

But still, Welles carried on, directing films that include an inspired adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and his not-quite-a-documentary “F for Fake,” which was his last completed movie.
Long overlooked, “F for Fake” is one of Welles’ finest films. It’s a meditation on art and fakery, taking as its subjects art forger Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, who wrote a hoax biography of Howard Hughes and a real biography of de Hory. But more than that, “F for Fake” is a magic trick. Welles was an amateur magician and knew all the tricks, especially the fine art of misdirection.

You never let truth stand in the way of art.