CARVING OUT AN AFFECTIONATE LOOK AT ED WOOD

By Jay Carr

From The Boston Globe, 10.02.1994

Director Tim Burton has never made a flop. Edward D. Wood Jr. (1924-1978), the cross-dressing director of such '50s genre-busters as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster and Glen or Glenda, never had a hit. In fact, his films are all so laughably amateurish that Wood finally achieved a sort of posthumous fame for the cheesy awfulness of his work. But Burton insists he's a kindred spirit, so much so that he overcame more studio skepticism than any of his other projects aroused in order to get Ed Wood, opening Friday, made. Not as a camp classic, but as an affectionate portrait of maniacal postwar American optimism, with his Edward Scissorhands star, Johnny Depp, in the title role.

"The thing is, you're dealing with someone perceived as the worst director and a transvestite. Those are two of the easiest targets in the whole world, you know? Studio executives made me feel I'd made the worst movie sometimes," says Burton, scissored into a hotel sofa, legs tucked under him, dressed in his trademark black except for a dark blue print shirt, looking cuddly and macabre. "I saw Plan 9 growing up, and when he was branded the worst director, I never saw him as that. I mean there's lots of bad movies, and how one person gets labeled worst director - you have to be more special. What I got from his movies was some other thing. Talent was secondary. I began to realize there's something poetic about his movies. He didn't let technicalities like visible wires and bad sets distract him from his storytelling.

"There was also a bizarre consistency to all his movies and to the people he rallied around him that is just unusual. You don't see that consistency in good movies a lot of the time. Later, I read his letters and they have this great mix of optimism and denial that I can definitely relate to. There's something about his weird passion, his perverted optimism, the people he surrounded himself with, the whole trying-to-get-things-done aspect of him that I just liked. And the misperception of yourself from other people. I always liked that theme."

Burton's own inspiration was the late horror movie star, Vincent Price, subject of his first animated short and his most recent film, Conversations with Vincent, which Burton describes as a loose documentary. Price also starred in Edward Scissorhands. The centerpiece of Wood's repertory company was Bela Lugosi, down on his luck, showing the ravages of years of morphine and alcohol addiction, yet a consummate pro, whose presence lent a certain cachet to Wood's raggedy outings, which also included appearances by bulky, bullet-headed ex-wrestler Tor Johnson (George Steele in the film), slinky Vampira (Lisa Marie), supercilious Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray) and spectacularly wrong-guessing soothsayer Criswell (Jeffrey Jones).

"I remember as a child this odd special group of really weird people," Burton says. "This was memorable. This burned itself in your memory. It's a weird kind of Magnificent Seven-y kind of thing. They were kind of like living in a parallel universe. They were like twisted royalty, with Bela, you know? They thought of themselves as higher than other people saw them, and there's something charming about that to me. Wood's cameraman worked for Orson Welles, and Wood was obsessed with that. He'd equate himself to Welles, which is why we included that scene where Ed meets Orson Welles in a bar. Obviously this is not hard-core biography. But memory is revisionist. I talked to some of the people, and their stories are different and changed from what they were previously."

Landau and Lugosi

Martin Landau, who plays Lugosi and had to sit for 2 1/2 hours each day to be made up properly, watched many of the films of the Hungarian actor forever imprisoned in his cape and vampiric charms by the movie that turned into his tomb, Dracula. Landau was most impressed by Lugosi's dignity, he says in a separate interview. Of all the Lugosi footage, what impressed him most, he says, was a newsreel shot of Lugosi being discharged from a detox center, going down a receiving line, shaking hands, smiling, bowing in his courtliest manner and thanking the hospital staff, all in white. Depp, who agrees that the film's sweet core is the relationship between Wood and Lugosi, said that Wood gave the largely neglected Lugosi new life by employing him and that Lugosi's presence validated Wood. "For Wood to see Lugosi, who was one of his heroes, there reciting his words, I mean the blinkers were so huge that it was just him and Bela in the whole world. In his eyes, it was perfect," Depp says.

Depp, 31, finds himself engaged in a bit of inevitable damage control following reports and photos of him being accompanied by police after trashing a hotel sofa, an incident he wishes to put into perspective by saying in a polite, soft-spoken manner, "The idea that there's a possibility that an actor assaulted a couch, the idea that that could be big news, that that could have equal billing on the front page of a newspaper with the potential invasion of Haiti, in which a lot of men and women could lose their lives, I don't see that balance, man. I think it's ridiculous." What Depp does not find ridiculous, in fact what he finds linking Ed Wood to the '90s, is the film's attitude that it's cool to be cool about sexual choices, which is why, he says, Wood's transvestism is treated matter-of-factly.

Depp in drag

"This guy would come home from work and throw on an Angora sweater and pumps and a skirt and a wig. For him it's the same thing as someone coming home and pouring themselves a glass of Scotch. It was just about sitting and relaxing and taking a breath and letting go. A couple of months before we started shooting, I had the costumer get me some stuff I could wear around the house - pumps and skirts and sweaters and slips. And I got a feel for what it's like dressed up as a woman in drag. By the time we started shooting, it was full throttle. We were shooting on Hollywood Boulevard, and we'd walk around, hang out with the crew, you know, these big, brutish sort of grips. Standing there, smoking a cigarette, talking to 'em in complete drag will certainly break the ice.

"I got a kick out of it because it's funny. You see how uncomfortable it makes 'em. And they start hooting and hollering as a joke, and once that dies down, they don't know what to do. The majority of the public is uncomfortable with a transvestite who they think is a homosexual man. But what really makes people uncomfortable is a heterosexual man dressed as a woman. But it got to be widely accepted. In fact, after a while, a couple of the guys would throw on a wig and fool around with you. Once I went into a bar in costume and hung out. I had a drink, smoked a cigarette. It was obvious that I wasn't a woman. People didn't say much. But again, it was Hollywood."

What took work, Depp says, was getting the tone - with the relationships and the period. "There must have been a kind of optimism that we lack today," he says. "People wore suits then. People wore overcoats and hats. Somehow that meant something to me. People cared. There was a kind of enthusiasm about the country. That was the big thing that had to be put across. It was an innocent time. Ed was driven by, I wouldn't call it ambition, but a need and a hunger to make films. Given what was available to him, he made the best films he could. The toughest thing about our filming was inhaling more Angora than oxygen. It was flying around everywhere. Nobody was clear of this Angora. Nobody was safe."

In the end, Burton says, the singleness of purpose that drew collaborators to Wood was what he and the actors responded to, the thing that made them handle the schlockmeister with such tender care. Meeting Wood's loyal wife and widow, Kathy (played by Patricia Arquette in the film), made a difference, too, Burton says. "They met when he was shooting in Hollywood. She was waiting for a bus and just walked onto the set. One of the most powerful things I found about the story was the moment Kathy accepts him. That's something you don't see very much, that acceptance, and it made me determined that our film wouldn't be judgmental. I was very touched by meeting the real Kathy. There's a sadness to her. She seemed to be very much in love with him, very committed. She never remarried. She talked very glowingly of him. You can still hear the softness and accepting quality in her voice. It's very beautiful, very haunting."