• Written and directed by Ted Newsom
• Starring
  • Gary Owens
  • Conrad Brooks
  • Dolores Fuller
  • Kathy Wood

This is a fun though slight documentary on the director whom it’s trendy to appreciate now. Clocking in at less than an hour (with obvious commercial breaks, though I don’t know if it’s ever been shown on TV), it’s obviously meant more as an introduction to His Woodness than as a deep explication of his ouvre for his devotees. Nevertheless, it is clever.

The main conceit is that much of what he wrote and filmed was, on some level, autobiographical. No, he wasn’t ever raised from the dead by electrode-gun-weilding aliens, nor was he ever wrestled to death by a flaccid octopus. But from obvious entries such as Glen or Glenda?, to speeches in Bride of the Monster and Plan 9, to settings and elements of The Sinister Urge (a film about porno makers, made just as Ed was sliding into the business himself), to “humorous” snippets from the skin flicks on which he ended his career, so many bits seemed to be Ed Wood speaking for himself, that documentary maker Ted Newsom edited lots of it together into a rough outline of Ed’s own life — a patchwork autobiography, as it were. Commentary is, if not kept to a minimum, at least consigned to the background (with some precious comments like, “Like a car wreck, [Wood's movies] are grotesquely fascinating”).

Other priceless moments include interviews with many of his principals, including Conrad Brooks (who ever thought someone could have a career of having once been in Ed Wood’s films?), an old military buddy (trying not to look vaguely uneasy while talking about Ed’s transvestitism), former live-in and leading lady Dolores Fuller, producer Stephen Apostolof (who called him “a jackass of all trades”) and of course widow Kathy Wood.

Given that most Wood fandom centers on his earlier flicks, it was interesting to see old Ed in footage from his late porno days — flabby, worn-looking, but still summoning an enthusiasm quite beyond the worth of his material. It’s a sad story, really — a man driven to continually try to break into the big time, far beyond his ability to do so. When it finally looked like his big break was coming — when a young Fred Olen Ray enlisted him to write the script for a short sample of a movie that was never made — Ed was too drunk and unreliable even for the porno business.

Even his widow, Kathy, can’t help but laugh when recalling how seriously Ed took his scripts, and how everyone else laughed at them. It’s a priceless, bitter-sweet moment; even to his wife, Ed Wood was much less talented than he thought he was — laughably so.