The Man With the Plan

Plan 9 From Outer Space: The Musical

The Ashcroft Theatre, 1996

Universally acknowledged as the worst movie ever made, Plan 9 from Outer Space is the flawed jewel in the crown of legendary director Ed Wood. Throughout the fifties, aided and abetted by a “collection of people the Ringling Brothers would have given their eye teeth for”, Wood produced a body of work that for sheer ineptitude has never been equalled. He was an oddball, but a nice guy whose curious mixture of innocence and integrity has secured his reputation as one of three most extraordinary filmmakers in Hollywood’s history.

Look Back in Angora

Edward Davis Wood Jr was born on 10 October 1924 at Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of a postal worker and a jewellery buyer. His mother Lillian had wanted a girl so the young Wood spent his early years in girl’s clothing, a habit he was to carry into later life. The seeds of his career in film were sewn when at the age of eleven he was given a movie camera for his birthday. Then, after graduating from high school in 1941, he went to work as an usher at the local cinema, ending up as assistant manager.

When America entered the Second World War, Wood joined the Marines and saw action against the Japanese at both Nanumea and Tarawa. At Tarawa four thousand Marines went in but only four hundred came out. Wood was one of them. His courage was undoubted, but he did not conceal the fact that he feared injury more than he feared death, mainly because of what he was wearing beneath his battledress: “I didn’t want to be wounded because I could never explain my pink panties and bra.”

The fact that he unblushingly clung to this early sartorial fetish among the body of tough hombres like the Marines speaks volumes for Wood’s self-belief and strength of character., Apart from the cross-dressing he was in all other respects a man’s man, with a deep voice and a masculine manner. He would direct his films like a latter-day Cecil B DeMille, haranguing his cast and crew through a megaphone. The fact that he was sitting there in angora sweater, high heels and a pantsuit in no way detracted from the authority he could command on set.

Enter Lugosi

Following his discharge in 1946, Wood trained briefly as an actor before going on the road as a carnival performer, reaching Hollywood the following year where he acted in several of his own plays. As a stuntman he dragged up to fall off a stagecoach in Samuel Fuller’s The Baron of Arizona, and filmed thirty minutes’ worth of silent footage for a projected Western, The Streets of Laredo, which was never to see the light of day. Then in 1953 he met Bela Lugosi. Lugosi had been Universal’s Dracula in the classic 1931 film of the same name, and Wood had been an ardent fan since boyhood. But of late Lugosi’s fortunes had fallen very low, and he was taking any and every role he could find to finance his drug and alcohol habit.

Their first film together was Glen or Glenda, whose alternative titles – I Led Two Lives, He or She?, The Transvestite, and I Changed My Sex – tell the whose story, ie, Ed Wood’s own. Glen or Glenda already displays many of the traits which would come to characterise Wood’s work – stock footage bulking out the story, one-take acting, and the helpful presence of a narrator to guide the viewer through the intricacies of the plot? In this instance it was Lugosi, sitting in a room full of voodoo paraphernalia, mouthing such abstruse advice as “Beware the green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys.”

Magnum Opus

Their second film together, Bride of the Monster in 1954, introduced another of the Ed Wood stable of performers, Swedish ex-wrestler Tor Johnson. He is described at one point in the film as “gentle as a kitchen” by the ageing Lugosi, who, when told this should have read “kitten”, refused to do a retake. Maybe he was brooding on the film’s climax wherein he was obliged to wrestle with a mechanical octopus which, minus its motor, could not be induced to give the terrifying performance required of it. Lugosi died in August 1956, leaving Wood with a couple of minutes’ footage of his favourite star lurking ominously around his Hollywood home. Aware that he could repackage the material a “Dracula’s last film”, he wove a new story around these fragments and the resulting work, Grave Robbers from Outer Space, previewed at the Carlton Theatre, Hollywood on 15 March 1957. It became its auteur’s “pride and joy”, achieving general release two years later under the new title Plan 9 from Outer Space.

There are many aspects of the film which endear it to naff movie fans everywhere: the hero’s patio furniture turning up again in his bedroom; the obviously cardboard gravestones in the cemetery; the same stretch of wall doubling for interiors, exteriors and even skyscapes; sudden shifts from day to night and back again within the same scene; cushions in the cemetery to break the fall of the zombies’ victim, to name but a few.

The cast, too, is one of Wood’s finest. Lugosi’s replacement was unemployed chiropractor Tom Mason who was instructed to keep his cape in front of his face so as not to confuse the audience. The narrator on this occasion was camp TV psychic Criswell (“God help us in the future!”), while the role of Vampira was played by Maila Nurmi, the exotic hostess of early-fifties horror slots on TV. For $200 she agreed to play the part of a mute, but later tossed in a blood-curdling scream as well. The only element of the movie which had any connection with real life were the police cars and uniforms. To Johnson’s son was a cop who had been able to lay his hands on a couple for nothing.

Onward and Downward

Plan 9 was mainly finances by the Baptist Church who were hoping to use the profits to make religious films. The deal required the baptism of certain members of the cast. This was done in someone’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills, but when it came to Tor Johnson’s turn, the actor pretended to drown, throwing the officiating reverend into a panic. “They came across with a lot of money,” Wood recalled happily.

What was it about him that made people invest in his appalling efforts? Signally lacking in any aesthetic sense, he obviously had talent where it counted – the ability to make people trust him. In return he was generous and loyal, and genuinely wanted to help Lugosi through his final difficult years. “He would virtually give you the shirt off his back,” one friend said. And some obviously believed in his work as much as Wood did. When he died his wife Kathy mourned “The world has lost a great writer,” and why would she lie?

Cult

Wood’s final years were a sad falling off from the dizzying depths he had achieved as a filmmaker. He scraped a kind of living writing pornographic stories for various shady publishing firms, and his final film was a hard-core piece called Necromancy where he himself appeared as a lustful wizard. He and his wife, along with their packs of dogs, were constantly being evicted from a succession of homes due to non-payment of rent, but there was always another friend willing to take them in. Ed Wood died while watching a football match on TV in Los Angeles on 10 December 1978. He was fifty-four.

Since then his fame has grown and Plan 9 has become a cult movie. It was even made into a computer game to coincide with the release of Tim Burton’s biopic of the man in 1994, and how many directors can say they have received that accolade? Oscars may come and go, but Ed Wood’s memory has been preserved on screen forever. If the style is the man, then in the case of Ed Wood what style there was, was of a unique and colourful kind. This drab, perfection-hungry world will miss him.