{"id":12383,"date":"2014-09-03T07:05:12","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T13:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=12383"},"modified":"2014-09-03T07:05:12","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T13:05:12","slug":"ed-wood-b-movie-king-gets-a-film-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=12383","title":{"rendered":"Ed Wood, B-Movie King, Gets a Film Retrospective"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty years ago, Johnny Depp played the title B-movie director in Tim Burton\u2019s frisky biopic \u201cEd Wood.\u201d<\/a> The film introduced the eccentric Wood, then mostly known to fans of cult cinema, to a mainstream audience and renewed interest in his darkly trashy works like the aliens-amok film \u201cPlan 9 From Outer Space\u201d<\/a> (1959), a clunker classic that sits on many a list of the worst movies ever made.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you give him a million-dollar budget, his films would still be strange,\u201d said Joe Blevins, who\u2019s spent the last year writing a column, \u201cEd Wood Wednesdays<\/a>,\u201d for his blog Dead 2 Rights. \u201cThey have a weirdness that a low budget or inexperienced actors can\u2019t explain away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPlan 9\u201d and several of Wood\u2019s other cult pictures, including the mad-scientist yarn \u201cBride of the Monster<\/a>\u201d (1955) and the girl-gang drama \u201cThe Violent Years<\/a>\u201d (1956), a frenzy of female hooliganism, can be seen in The 10th Dimension<\/a>: Edward D. Wood Jr., a retrospective running Sept. 11 to 18 at Anthology Film Archives. But these are practically family films compared with the X-rated turn Wood took later in life.<\/p>\n

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Credit<\/span> Wade Williams Distribution <\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wood, born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was off to an unremarkable start when, in his 20s, he moved to Hollywood in 1947. There, he eventually acted onstage, wrote television pilots and directed low-budget westerns. Although he admired the highbrow work of Orson Welles, Wood\u2019s first films as a director, like the gangster film \u201cJail Bait\u201d<\/a> (1954), pegged him as a B-movie guy. His subsequent movies, especially \u201cPlan 9,\u201d found him immersed in the outr\u00e9, pushing him further to the margins of Hollywood. And he was unable to get substantial work as a director after the 1960 film \u201cThe Sinister Urge,\u201d<\/a> a sexed-up police drama.<\/p>\n

Then the sexual revolution hit, and Wood, attuned to the new vanguard, found plentiful work as a writer. In the late \u201960s and early \u201970s, he was a prolific author for publishers of mass-market erotic paperbacks and sex magazines, jobs that paid the rent. Some of his 100 or so novels, primarily written under pseudonyms, include \u201cDeath of a Transvestite Hooker\u201d and \u201cThe Sexecutives.\u201d With the advent of hard-core filmmaking in the early \u201970s, he turned his interest in smutty fiction into explicit films like \u201cTake It Out in Trade,\u201d