So Bad it's...Wood!

If there's anything the past few years have shown us, it's that we really love a bad movie. Well, you know what I mean by that: a bad movie we can laugh at -- one we can show our friends with the parting words: "It's so bad it's good!" And of course they'll know what me mean. How could they not? If there's anything Internet memes have proven, it's that we love to share awesomely bad crap with each other! One week it's some poor kid in Montgomery, Alabama issuing a warning to all would-be rapists on the evening news ("Hide yo husband cause they rapin' everybody out here!"), the next week it's a promo performance of a community musical theatre show about the Rhode Island mafia.

Like it or not, it's become a new thing to wallow in the tragedy of other folks' artistic mistakes. Take a look at "The Room" and "Birdemic" -- two movies made for nothing, with acting, production design, and special effects so awful they make Roger Corman look like Michael Bay, that gained word-of-mouth and took to the midnight show circuit with a greater flare for self-promotion than Harvey Weinstein at Cannes. Unlike good movies where we respond to everything they're intending to do, we love these so-bad-they're-good movies for everything they're not intending to do.

So that leads me, naturally, to think about Ed Wood, the clown prince of bad cinema, who many believe kick-started this generation of film-goers who love to indulge in celluloid tragedy, and thank God they know enough about what a good movie should be to enjoy themselves adequately.

So why're we still talkin' about Ed Wood?

Make no mistake about it -- Edward D. Wood, Jr. is not the worst director in film history. He most likely wasn't even the worst director in his 1950s Hollywood apartment complex. That period in film was scattershot with obscure B-picture directors who were contracted by third-rate movie houses to shoot seven reels in four days and churn a profit before they were all chewed up and relegated to shooting nudie-cuties in the Valley. What made Ed Wood different to the point of still-being-gabbed-about all these years later is that he actually believed in the crap he was shooting. Even if all your knowledge of the man comes from the genius, albeit loosely-researched, Tim Burton biopic with Johnny Depp, it's hard to deny he replaced his thin-as-cheesecloth budgets with biting passion. If you watch Plan 9, for instance, you only have to imagine that the pie-plates standing in for flying saucers weren't a last minute afterthought by the art department, but rather, props Ed Wood and his girlfriend probably stayed up late making the whole night before shooting, weaving them together and oh-so-carefully sculpting to a rough finish.

Like many great directors, Ed Wood lived, slept, and breathed film. His only tragic flaw in creating a good one of his own was that he was too consumed with the idea of people thinking of him an Orson Welles type of wunderkind genius, rather than actually perfecting a project that would surely cement him as one. That -- and the fact that he seemed to attract the most downtrodden and talentless league of filmland underachievers this side of Bobby Bowfinger's "Chubby Rain" crew. Think about it for a second: Wood could be putting Back to the Future up on the screen, and it would still be stunted by the perfunctory appearance of Tor Johnson as Biff Tannen, or the no-apologies flamboyance of Bunny Breckinridge as George McFly. And Bela Lugosi as the Unsinkable Emmett Brown.

But I digress. Ed Wood's movies were truly horrible, but again, not so horrible that they deserve the moniker, "Worst Movies Ever Made." There have been some movies made just in the past year that are more deserving of the all-time-Golden-Raspberry Award than, say, Wood's bloated masterpiece of tack, Plan 9 from Outer Space. This is only because these flicks were the ingenuine refuse, conceived in economics and dedicated to the ill-minds of target demographics.

It is Wood's self-satisfaction with his own brand of filmmaking that makes his stuff so much fun to watch. Just as it was with The Room and Birdemic, Wood was sincere with his content, and believed wholeheartedly in the underlying messages and brooding consequences in the poetry of his story and themes.

Don't get me wrong. While I make no attempt to romanticize bad movies, there is something truly special about them, and it is the reason I am still watching Ed Wood. His stuff may be awful on the surface, but, at the end of the day, they do the very thing movies should do -- they provoke a response and they inspire opinions. Of course these responses may not be what the director initially wanted, but Ed Wood was a guy who believed in making movies with a close-knit group of folks, and when I watch an Ed Wood movie today, years after his death, I'm usually watching it with a close-knit group of folks. It's hard to believe he would argue with that.