Entertaining and thought-provoking

Rating: 10/10 (4 February 2010)

It is a sad fact (well known, but generally ignored by the authors of the self-help books) that some people get the breaks and others don't. Those who don't seldom travel very far or rise very high, no matter how hard they work at it; and this is partly due to the even sadder fact that those who have gotten the breaks all too often take malicious delight in ridiculing and disparaging the efforts of those who have not. As a number of other reviewers have pointed out, Ed Wood was definitely a have-not; and while this film is not an entirely faithful recreation of his life, it does present a fairly accurate account of the general conditions under which the man was forced to work. How many of the supposedly great Hollywood directors (or the critics who lionize them) could have done any better in such circumstances? To compare Ed Wood's films to the multi-million dollar studio productions of the day is comparing apples to oranges, but how many critics have ever bothered to note the distinction?
Ed Wood has been accused of having no talent. A fairer assessment would be that whatever talent he might have had was never nurtured, developed or given one iota of direction by any of the people who could have helped him. If some established Hollywood icon had chosen to take the young Ed Wood under his wing and open a few doors for him, what sort of talent might have emerged? That we can never know. One thing, however, is certain: for all their faults, Ed Wood's films have been entertaining people (one way or another) for the past fifty-odd years, while many of the more expensive and polished films of his day are all but forgotten.