A first-rate film about a tenth-rate director and the insanities of film making...

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2000)

Well, what is there left to say after the justly deserved accolades laid at the feet of Tim Burton's direction (particularly his inspired decision to shoot in black and white), Johnny Depp's quirky but on-target performance (the real Ed Wood, from what I've read, truly did believe that he was making films of importance), and, of course, Martin Landau's career-best performance as Bela Lugosi (anyone who likes him here should check out his work in the old "Outer Limits" episode, "The Man Who Was Never Born")? Well, how about Burton's subtext about the headaches of getting a movie made?
You see it practically every step of the way. Wood trying to find positives in a decidedly negative review of his play. His trying to convince a producer that only he and he alone can film the story of a transsexual. His infuriating said producer twice, first by changing the story to that of a transvetite, then by making it so badly that the producer will never have anything to do with him again. His pitch session with David O. Selznick, which he had to sell an idea off-the-cuff as it were (I imagine Burton has had to go through similar aggrevation with studio suits, whom Harlan Ellison once described as less literate than a dyslexic). His trying to keep his actors happy with their dialogue, parts, etc. so that they keep working. His never-ending struggle to find financing for his films. His duking it out with his financiers (a Baptist church, no less!) over what his vision of the movie should be. I sincerely believe that there is not a director on the planet who could not relate to at least one of these instances, if not several. The scene where Wood meets his idol, Orson Welles (another director who had to swim upstream for his entire career in film), just underscores many of the points made here.
Not that anything else that's been squeezed into this picture doesn't help make it great. But that little facet of this gem of a film has never been alluded to and I thought that it would be best if it were. I wonder what the real Edward D. Wood Jr. would make of this representation of his life story?