Coorabell Hall Film Club

Wednesday 1 May

Ed Wood

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

ED WOOD 1994

The mostly true story of the legendary Ed Wood, who filmed countless B-movies without ever becoming famous or ‘successful. He never directed a shot he didn't like. Afterall, it takes a special weird genius to be voted the 'Worst Director of All Time’. He was so in love with every frame of every scene of every film he shot that he was blind to hilarious blunders, stumbling ineptitude, and acting so bad that it achieved a kind of grandeur. But badness alone would not have been enough to make him a legend; it was his love of film, seeping through, that pushes him over the top.

Tim Burton made this film, which celebrates Wood rather than mocking him, and which celebrates, too, the crazy spirit of 1950s exploitation films - in which a great title, a has-been star and a lurid ad campaign were enough to get bookings for some of the strangest films ever made.

In Tim Burton's version, Ed Wood is a man who not only accepts reality, but celebrates it. Far from being secretive about his love of dressing in women's clothes, he treats it as the most natural thing in the world, putting on an angora sweater, skirt and high heels to help himself relax while directing a scene. "Are you a homosexual?" he's asked. "No!" he replies cheerfully. "I'm a transvestite!" Johnny Depp plays Wood as a man deliriously happy to be making movies. Wood rarely makes two takes of the same shot because the first one always looks great to him.

The movie's black and white photography convincingly recaptures the look and feel of 1950s sleaze, including some of the least convincing special effects in movie history. There are also running gags involving Wood's ability to write almost any piece of stock footage into almost any script.

At the heart of the movie is Wood's friendship with Bella Lugosi (winning Martin Landau the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), a man he truly adores, and who comes to depend on him. We see Lugosi alone and lonely in a flimsy little prefab house, inhabiting the deepening gloom of his obscurity and addiction and Wood is able to lift the gloom, if only briefly, in a final series of roles which gave him double immortality: As the star of some of the best horror movies ever made, and then of some of the worst.

See You There!.