Ed Wood

by Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski

Ed Wood is a sweet, sad and very funny valentine to cult film director Edward D. Wood, Jr. The film celebrates the tenacious spirit of an artist who will do anything to see his vision realized on the screen. Wood is an innocent outcast in a world that will not recognize him. His relationship with another outcast, the bedeviled star of Dracula, Bela Lugosi, provides the emotional core to this enchanting film.

Genres: Media Tie In

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Reviews

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spend a fair amount of time talking about authorial intent, whether to my students or my podcast partners. While authorial intent is complex, I content it matters little when attempting to unpack or analyze a text. But then there are figures like Ed Wood. Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's screenplay to the 1994 film Ed Wood suggests that understanding authorial intent, specifically with a filmmaker like Ed Wood, both deepens and demystifies the sense of tragedy surrounding Wood's life.

To be clear, Ed Wood is not a biography, nor does it purport to be. The screenwriters, Alexander and Karaszewski, suggest in the introduction to the screenplay, "We conceived Ed Wood as a rebuttal to the usual film biography: The Great Man Story. We saw Ed as an Anti-Great Man, a loser who could never get things right...An Anti-Great Man presents enormous drama, because he is constantly irritating everybody." (vi). This is an interesting insight, one, ironically for this review, delivered by the closest thing any film has to an author: the screenwriter, or, here, screenwriters. Alexander and Karaszewski labor to show the degree to which Wood saw himself as a Great Man of heroic proportion. For example, take Wood's serendipitous encounter with Orson Welles near the film's end. During this brief conversation, Wood and Welles commiserate over the lack of control and agency they have to make the art they wish to make:

Orson Welles
It's the damn money men. You never know who's a windbag, and who's got the goods. And then they think they're a director...

Ed Wood
Ain't that the truth! I've even had producers recut my movies...

Orson Welles
Ugh, I hate when that happens. (162)

This short, quasi-fantastical exchange with Welles crystalizes Wood's cognitive dissonance. Like any great villain or anti-hero, what Wood thinks of himself lacks any real consistency with who he actually is. This is why I would modify Alexander and Karaszewski's description of Wood as an Anti-Great Man; he is, instead, an Everyman.

But what we also see during Wood's conversation with Welles is another important theme for a screenplay about failure and self-deception: corporate (i.e., studio) interference. Despite what Wood wants to think, he and Welles play in different arenas; Wood makes snuff films, and Welles makes Citizen Kane. However, Ed Wood emphasizes the irrelevancy of this distinction. Whether you are Ed Wood making Plan 9 from Outer Space or Orson Welles making Citizen Kane, someone will unwittingly cause trouble. This is why Ed Wood, a film that seems to glorify and revel in artistic failure, understands something fundamental to the production of any piece of art: all art is compromised art, and Ed Wood's art was as compromised as compromised art gets.

Suffice it to say, I love this screenplay, and I also love reading screenplays. Screenplays have a unique pace and locomotion, and Ed Wood is no exception.

[Jimina Sabadú · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reread this script and I have a very different feeling about filmmaker Ed Wood. This material is an awesome portrait that sells you a romantic stubborn director of B movies. All the dark spots are greatly avoided.
I learnt a lot from it. Thank God I keep good books with me.

[Damien Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Transvestite, alcoholic, hustler, horror nudie film peddler, producer, writer, director and actor. Ed Wood is the embodiment of modern America.