Ed Wood

During these contentious weeks when football and baseball fans argue over the recent picks for their sports halls of fame, it is nice to know that that there are no arguments in the blood sport called Hollywood, at least in the all-important question of “who’s the worst director ever?” Many have tried and failed spectatularly, but none have uncrowned the reigning king. That’d be Edward D. Wood Jr., war veteran, unashamed transvestite, and auteur of unselfconscious awfulness in such atomic bombs as Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 From Outer Space, often commended as the most idiotic film in history. Wood’s abysmal stock cast of Z-grade actors included the memorably enormous Tor Johnson and a morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi, then clinging feebly to the last rung of fame’s ladder and wracked by a late-life jones so bad he made Kurt Cobain seem like Doris Day. In 1994, Tim Burton filmed the biography Ed Wood, a loving look at a man who proved that it certainly doesn’t have to be lonely at the bottom. Johnny Depp is pitch-perfect as the never-say-die Wood, who dreamed of being Orson Welles but wasn’t even Orson Bean, and Martin Landau won an Oscar for a Richard III-like portrait of the pathetic Lugosi.