Ed Wood. What thoughts come to your mind when you hear that name? I would imagine that with most people, words like inept or silly would probably be some of the first words that would come to mind, but to the initiated, words like this never enter into the picture. Who was the man behind the camera, and what shaped him into the man whose genius would only be realized after his sad and untimely death? Well, let me introduce him to you.

Edward Davis Wood was born on October 10, 1924 in Poughkeepsie, New York to a mother who worked as a jewelry purchaser for a department store and a father who worked as a post office maintenance man.

His love of film came to him early on in life, and when he was eleven years old, he received a film camera, a Kodak City Special, as a birthday gift. He would shoot his own amateur films in his back yard using friends and acquaintances as cast members, and although they probably didn’t mean much to anyone except for him back then, I would hazard to say that if these films were ever found, they would probably be worth a small fortune today. Unfortunately, as with most people’s old films, they’ve probably become lost or ruined somewhere along the course of time. Still though, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see and experience the world of Ed Wood through the eyes of a young boy and an old film camera? I’m sure any film historian worth his salt would kill for the opportunity.

As Ed got older, he began working at the Bardavon Theater where he started out as an usher, and then later on, was promoted to assistant manager. This allowed Ed to feed his love of cinema by collecting countless pieces of movie memorabilia, including stills, posters, lobby cards and more. It also allowed him to see a large number of films that covered many genres, which gave him the opportunity to learn things about filmmaking that the casual film viewer has probably never even considered.

During his teenage years, Ed fell into full fledged transvestism in his private life. It’s been said that his transvestism developed out of a situation where he had an uncaring father and a mother who would have rather have had a daughter than a son. In an effort to gain his mother’s love, he wore the trappings of a girl, and tried to appear to her as the daughter she really wanted. Ed’s desire to receive his mother’s love led him into a life of wearing women’s clothing, even after he had left home and gone his own way, simply because he found comfort in the way they made him feel when he put them on. He apparently had a particular fondness for white angora sweaters.

Although most people would tend to think that his transvestial behavior made him a homosexual, or at least showed him to have homosexual tendencies, this was in fact not the case at all. Ed was not in any way shape or form a homosexual, and in fact, was just the opposite. He genuinely loved women. He had many relationships throughout his life and was married twice. After his long time relationship with Dolores Fuller ended, he married stage and TV actress Norma McCarty. Unfortunately, this marriage only lasted just a bit over four months and ended painfully because of his transvestism. His second wife, Kathy O’Hara Everett, whom he married in 1955, stayed with him until his death on December 10, 1978 when he succumbed to heart failure at the relatively young age of 54.

It was less than two months after Ed’s 17th birthday when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Marine Corps and was assigned to the Pacific theater where he reportedly fought in some of the fiercest battles of the war, and at one point was left with a bullet riddled leg and knocked out teeth after a hand to hand battle with a Japanese soldier. A highly decorated soldier, by the end of the war he had accumulated an impressive number of medals and awards including the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Oak Leaf Cluster, the Purple Heart and a number of others. His stint in the Marines lasted for two years, and it was during his stay in a South Pacific naval hospital that he first learned to use a typewriter. His skill with the typewriter grew quickly, and over time he became a very prolific writer.

Ed was discharged from the service in 1946 at the rank of corporal, and within a year he had made his way to Hollywood where he became a part of the Hollywood sub-culture, hanging out with would-be actors, fallen stars, and a variety of people with ambitions far beyond their means. He had taken one drama class after returning home from the war, and managed to find work in some barebones theater productions while also taking on the occasional job as an extra in various low-budget films. Once he even took a job as an uncredited stunt performer in a 1950 film called The Baron of Arizona.

From 1947 to 1948 Ed produced a rather large number of commercials. He formed Wood-Thomas Productions with his partner John Crawford Thomas, a man whom he had met on the stage of the Gateway Theater on Sunset Blvd. where they performed as fellow cast members in a play called The Blackguard Returns. Thomas provided the offices, the financing, and the connections, while Wood’s role was that of the dreamer. He was the idea man in the outfit, and together they made a series of commercials for a product called PyeQuick and collaborated on a film called Crossroads of Laredo. Ed had actually made approximately one hundred and fifty five commercials from 1947 to 1948. His wife Kathy stated that they had copies of most them when they were evicted from their home on Yucca St., but apparently they have since been lost.

Crossroads of Laredo, was unfortunately, doomed from the start. The project was for the most part being financed by Thomas’ family. Unfortunately, without the money for sound, they envisioned it as a silent film with the appropriate music to be added in later to set the proper moods. The film contained one hundred and thirty camera set-ups, but from all that, they only managed to get twenty minutes of footage. After two months of shooting, Thomas’ family pulled the plug on the funding, and Ed walked away from his partnership with John Thomas without so much as a goodbye.

In 1951 Ed produced a one episode television project called The Sun Also Sets. The show was all of twenty minutes long and would be his only job as a producer until 1953 when he became involved in a number of western themed projects. He produced a short film called Trick Shooting With Kenne Duncan, and then in the same year he produced another project for television with a western theme called Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid, and directed another yet another project called Boots that was apparently either a sequel to, or a second pilot for Crossroad Avenger. In addition to the film and television projects he was working on in 1953, he also managed to find time to write a screenplay for another western themed film called Son of the Renegade, on which he was credited under the name John Carpenter. 1954 would see the end of Wood’s involvement with the western genre after he took the job of associate producer on his final western themed project called, The Lawless Rider. Although Ed would never work on another western, his love for the genre continued on throughout his life.

1953 was a big year for Ed. Not only had he done several television projects, but he made his motion picture directorial debut with the film Glen or Glenda?, a docudrama style film that delved into the world of the transvestite, focusing (although not exclusively) on a character named Glen, which Ed played himself. The film, although panned by most critics, was actually a very interesting, informative, and entertaining look into the world of transvestism, and it also marked his first ever theatrical work with film legend Bela Lugosi. Lugosi himself was hesitant about doing the film because of the subject matter, and he knew if he appeared in it, it would mark the end of his career in respectable, mainstream cinema. Unfortunately, those were desperate times for Lugosi, and in the end, it was Lugosi’s wife who made the decision for him. Lugosi appeared in the film, and was paid $1,000 for his work. Lugosi and Wood became good friends and remained so until Lugosi’s death in August of 1956.

After his western period was over, Ed teamed up with producer Alex Gordon to make a couple of so called “roughies”. Not much was documented about the shooting of the first film, Jail Bait, but it is known that Ed managed the production himself with much of the financing probably coming from Alex Gordon and the rest supplied by private investors. The film was shot without the backing of the Screen Actors Guild, and therefore it was considered a scab sort of non-union shoot. Ed worked quickly, shooting the film in three days using locations that were more often than not supplied by his cast members, and which also included an eighteen hour marathon session at the studio. The marathon session came about because the SAG was threatening to close down production. Wood managed to hold them off by writing them some completion bond checks. The checks were worthless, but they held off the SAG long enough for Ed and his crew to complete their filming. Eventually the film was distributed by a Texas firm called Howco Productions, which owned theaters in Texas and Louisiana.

If any money was made from Jail Bait, it never filtered down to Wood or Gordon, and Ed ended up taking a night production job at Universal Studios while Alex went on to form good relationships with Sam Arkoff and James H. Nicholson from American International Pictures, and had his next ten films produced and or distributed by AIP. Over time, Ed became resentful and bitter over his exclusion from their little circle, but continued on, always looking for his next big opportunity. For Ed, this next opportunity came in the form of his next roughie, The Violent Years, which he adapted from an original story by producer Roy Reid. Although the film had the look of a classic Ed Wood film and shared many of his trademarks in its production, he actually had nothing to do with the film beyond writing the screenplay.

Ed had no real love for the roughies, so he went on to take advantage of his relationship with Bela Lugosi and moved into yet another genre that he had a great love for…horror films. The transfer into this new genre led to a series of films that would later be known as “The Kelton Trilogy” because of a single common character, a policeman with the last name of Kelton, who appeared in all three films.

Investors were few and far between at this point as Wood’s reputation for borrowing money and not paying it back preceded him. He took his fundraising activities on the road, inviting potential investors to cocktail parties where they would meet the cast and hear his ideas for the film. Occasionally, he would get enough funding from various sources to shoot a small amount of film, which he would then show to other potential investors in hopes of receiving completion funds from at least one of them. Eventually, Ed did find his one big investor. The man’s name was Donald McCoy, and he agreed to fund the film, but there were a few conditions that went along with the agreement, the first being that Ed cast his son Tony in the leading role. Ed would later say that Tony was the worst actor he’d ever had in a film, which you know is saying something when you consider the quality of some of the acting in his other films. The other condition was that the film was to end with a giant nuclear explosion, so as to express his distaste for the arms race between Russia and the United States. As was promised, the film ended with the killer radioactive octopus blowing up in a spectacular explosion provided ever so graciously by a bit of stock footage.

Bride of the Monster was released in May of 1955, and it would take more than a year for Ed to get his next project off the ground. Unfortunately, it was during this period that Ed’s alcohol problems intensified. It was also during this period that he married his second wife Kathy, and moved into the Mariposa Apartments, a somewhat run down apartment building owned by Edward Reynolds who was a leader of the Baptist Church in Beverly Hills.

Edward Reynolds has acquired the rights to The Billy Sunday Story, and wanted to produce it for theatrical release, but didn’t have the funding to do it justice. It was at this point where Ed stepped in and told Reynolds that they could shoot one of his films fairly inexpensively and then use the profits from that film to shoot The Billy Sunday Story. Reynolds agreed, but he could clearly see that Wood’s drinking problem was out of control, and felt that the only way to put some stability into Ed’s life was to bring religion into it. As such, Wood and many of his cast and crew were baptized at the Baptist church. Production went relatively smoothly, and the only real disagreement between Wood and Reynolds was the name of the film. The film was originally entitled Grave Robbers From Outer Space, but Reynolds objected to the title and as such it was changed to Plan 9 From Outer Space. Reynolds tried desperately to find distributors for the film once it was completed, but met with little success. Even after he did manage to secure a distribution deal, the film made little money and left Reynolds himself in poor financial condition with little to no chance of him ever being able to produce The Billy Sunday Story.

It was only a short time later that Ed and his wife Kathy were evicted from the Mariposa Apartments. Not so much because of the failure of Plan 9 to produce the intended financial results, but because of the problems and issues that Ed still continued to experience in his personal life. There were couch burnings and fist fights and all manner of bad things going on, so Reynolds was left with little choice but to evict them from their apartment. It was shortly thereafter that Ed surrendered all rights to Plan 9 to Reynolds for one single dollar.

Not much is known about what Ed and his wife did throughout the following year. Apparently they were living a very active social life and bouncing around from friend to friend going to parties and generally living off the generosity of the people they socialized with. It was during this time that Ed managed to work on a few other relatively minor projects. The Night the Banshee Cried and Final Curtain were the names of the two actual productions he worked on, and he also scripted The Bride and the Beast for Adrian Weiss.

Wood’s third and final film in The Kelton Trilogy, Night of the Ghouls, was funded simply by pure chance. Apparently, Ed was taking a bath one day when suddenly a Fuller Brush man appeared at the door. Ed invited him in, and they had some drinks together. It turned out that the salesman had a friend who had some money that he was going to invest in some apartments. That friend was Anthony Cardoza, and along with his funding, Tom Mason, the man who played Bela Lugosi’s double in Plan 9, also invested a considerable sum of money into the project.

The shoot was trouble from the beginning. Ed often used the shoot money for his own personal vices, such as the alcohol he would consume before filming. Although many of the actors were Wood regulars by this point, many had become painfully aware of his habits of spending the actors’ pay before the shoot even began, and many refused to work unless they were paid in advance.

The film itself, once completed, sat in a film lab unreleased for some twenty years because Ed didn’t have the money to pay for the processing. Ed claimed in a letter to Anthony Cardoza that he had managed to get the film shown both on television, and at The Vista Theater. If true, this would seem to indicate that at least one print of the film was received by Wood, but was probably lost during the course of one of his many evictions, much the same way his commercials had been.

1961 brought about the last of Ed’s productions, The Sinister Urge, which featured his usual cast of regulars. The film was shot in seven days and then saw a very limited release into B-Movie theaters where it sank quickly into unprofitable obscurity.

During the next decade, Ed spent his time writing 58 pornographic novels and saw many of his screenplays turned into films by other directors. It wasn’t until 1969, when he played the part of the photographer in the film The Love Feast (a.k.a. Pretty Models All in a Row) that he made his return to the screen. Unfortunately, by this time Ed’s alcoholism had become progressively worse. Alcohol became the most important thing in his life, and he and his wife had faced several more evictions and had become destitute to the point where he had finally hit rock bottom. He had hocked everything he could, including his beloved typewriter, just so he could get enough money together to buy more alcohol. It had gotten so bad, that after he hocked his own typewriter, he borrowed one from a friend and hocked it as well.

On or about December 1, 1978, Ed and his wife were evicted from their apartment on Yucca St. and were only allowed to take with them whatever they could carry. Most of the things he had collected throughout his life were lost that day, and about ten days later, Ed died of a heart attack. He was then cremated and his ashes were scattered into the sea.

Ed Wood dreamed of being a legend throughout his career, but failed to gain the understanding of the business side of the industry that he would need to be successful. His constant debts and bounced checks caused people not trust him, and although he would never admit to it, he had sabotaged his own career by breaking down those bonds of trust that he desperately needed to bring his career to the fulfillment he’d always desired but never achieved. Ed Wood is a legend, and it’s only sad that the man who dreamed art, was never suitably appreciated in his own time. Imagine what he could have done if he had ever had the proper funding and a good system of distribution channels set up. The end result could have been simply amazing.