Ed Wood

Ed Wood (1994) is about the man considered the worst director in cinema, and it never mocks him. Ed Wood makes films in the fifties. He has no budget, his scripts are bad, his casting is wrong, and he never shoots a second take; the first one is always good, he says. But nobody is happier than he is. The film is about his enthusiasm rather than his incompetence. The heart of it is his relationship with Bela Lugosi. Lugosi is old, forgotten and addicted to morphine. Wood finds him and puts him in his films. What passes between them is not pity; Wood genuinely regards him as a great actor, and for the first time in years someone is looking at Lugosi that way. Martin Landau won the supporting actor Oscar as Lugosi. The makeup won as well. Burton insisted on shooting in black and white, and the project stalled at Columbia because of it. The studio head would only agree on additional terms; Burton wanted total creative control, and a month before shooting Columbia put it into turnaround. Warner, Paramount and Fox were interested; Burton took Disney's offer and the film came out under Touchstone. Disney did not consider an eighteen million dollar budget a risk and gave him complete freedom. So a project changed hands over black and white. Johnny Depp's Wood is relentlessly optimistic, and that is deliberately tiring. It lost money. It runs 127 minutes, in black and white. Good for: films about filmmaking, Burton, and performance. Less good for: the pace is slow, and some jokes need knowing who these people were.