NARRATOR: (MIMICKING DRACULA) Welcome to the Ed Wood DVD.
In this commentary track you will hear the voices of
Tim Burton,
Scott Alexander,
Larry Karaszewski,
Martin Landau,
Colleen Atwood,
Stefan Czapsky,
and thousands and thousands of ghouls.
Tim Burton.
BURTON: Yeah, I saw Ed Wood's films on TV.
And I think the first one I saw was probably
Plan 9 from Outer Space, because that was the most infamous one.
And that would show a lot on Saturday afternoon, Saturday night.
And long before I knew anything about film,
you knew that they were special, you knew that they really...
They were like weird dreams,
because of the weird seriousness, the weird, overly poetic
badness of them was also part of what made them special and good,
and it was the first thing that made you realize
there's a real razor's edge between something that's good and bad.
Because they were powerful and people would laugh at them and all,
but they were deeper than that somehow.
They had a weird, dreamlike power to them.
The other thing that gave it a dreamlike quality, I have to say,
which added power, to me, is... I grew up in Burbank.
And they described Burbank in Plan 9,
and I lived near a cemetery, so I actually thought, when I first saw it,
that it was almost like a weirdly real movie,
because all the locations,
the houses looked like the neighborhood I grew up in,
they talked about the cemetery down the street,
which I lived by a cemetery down the street.
All of the dynamics of it,
it looked and felt like it was actually happening.
So that gave it an extra power as well.
And I realized as I got older, that I do have a love of
what some people consider bad movies.
But I never really considered them bad movies.
There's something more exposed and vulnerable about them
and somebody who has a definite style.
You could look at one of his films, and...
So to see a distinct style, you can't completely say it's bad.
There is some power to that when you can identify a person's work.
NARRATOR: (MIMICKING DRACULA) Scott Alexander.
ALEXANDER: Like most people, I first became aware of Ed Wood
from the Medved brothers' books.
Around 1980, they put out a book called The 50 Worst Films of All Time.
And then after that, they claimed to have held an election
and based on the results, they put out a new book called
The Golden Turkey Awards, and in that book,
Ed had been nominated and elected Worst Director of All Time,
as well as having made the Worst Film of All Time,
Plan 9 from Outer Space.
So then the Medveds started cashing in
on this Ed Wood phenomenon they had created,
and they put together a traveling show of Glen or Glenda,
Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space.
And they would book this triple feature at revival houses around the country.
And audiences would show up and hoot and holler
and make fun of Ed Wood, and the Medveds
would go up on stage between shows and make sneering comments
about the ineptitude of Ed Wood.
And this was the state of his fandom at that time.
And at my second year of college,
I actually put together a proposal for a documentary
called The Man in the Angora Sweater,
which was gonna be a look at his life.
And part of the class was you had to put together budgeting proposals
and letters and documents to impress fictitious backers.
So I made up fictitious letters from Vampira and Lyle Talbot,
saying they were very excited
that somebody had remembered their contributions to film history,
and they'd be very excited to work on this non-existent movie.
NARRATOR: (MIMICKING DRACULA) Larry Karaszewski.
KARASZEWSKI: Scott and I met in 1981.
Strangely enough, when we met,
we met having a conversation
- about another great B filmmaker. - (ALEXANDER CHUCKLING)
KARASZEWSKI: We were both students at USC,
we were standing in line, and we didn't know each other.
And I don't know who started talking about it first,
but Scott was aware that the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles
was about to show a triple bill of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies.
And he had never seen or really heard much
about Herschell Gordon Lewis before, and I had grown up in the Midwest
and I had seen everything Herschell Gordon Lewis had done,
so I was basically holding court on Herschell Gordon Lewis,
and that's how Scott and I became friends.
My introduction to Ed Wood
actually goes back to almost Herschell Gordon Lewis again.
When my parents got divorced, my dad got me one night a week.
And my dad didn't know what to do with a kid,
so I manipulated him into taking me to the drive-in
every weekend, and so we'd go to the drive-in,
and he would fall asleep, and I'd sit there and watch
all these Roger Corman AIP movies.
But for some reason, this is the mid-'70s,
Bride of the Monster was the third feature.
And I remember at the time being like,
"Why on earth are they showing this
"black-and-white Bela Lugosi movie at the drive-in?"
It was really strange.
Clearly somebody, some distributor had a print.
There was some reason it was being run,
and I never could figure it out, but it wasn't till years later
that once again, what Scott was saying,
about when the Medved brothers brought Ed Wood to fame
that I put the two together.
ALEXANDER: Also, Ed Wood's movies never seemed to have clear ownership.
And they would be picked up by companies
that would immediately go bankrupt.
And so it was probably easy for drive-in theaters just to get hold
of a print and run it without having to pay a license fee to anybody.
There are a lot of these directors with a body of work
of forgotten, forgettable, cheapo movies.
Where Ed's movies are distinctive is that
there's such a passion there,
and the passion is oftentimes misguided.
But you look at a movie like Glen or Glenda, which is
rather astonishing, considering it was intended to be exploitation.
And it really is just about a man
tearing his heart out and throwing his emotions up there for 62 minutes.
And you scratch your head, saying,
"What possible audience was this movie intended for?"
But there's a personality to the Ed Wood films
that you don't necessarily get in a lot of these other people's films.
A lot of bad films are simply bad movies,
or incompetently put together.
With Ed, you get a real sense of the filmmaker behind the camera.
It is the auteur theory. You can watch an Ed Wood movie
and instantly know it's an Ed Wood movie,
just because of the obsessions and the fetishes
and the stuff that he's throwing up on the screen.
He's clearly working something out inside of him,
where a lot of these people, like William "One-Shot" Beaudine,
I'm not quite sure if that's the case. He's just a sloppy filmmaker.
Honey, what if I'm wrong?
BURTON: Nobody had his style.
It's there,
and in a weird way, it does translate to the screen.
It is an odd form of transforming.
From film to film, there was a thread of his language and his themes.
That's the thing that I liked about certain films,
even in a film like Plan 9.
It's not like Glen or Glenda,
but you can see the symbols and things that are important to him.
And that's something that I always try to do in any film,
whether it's a big film or a small film,
you have your own cryptic messages in there.
Or cryptic things that most people wouldn't understand
but are important to you,
things that you don't even verbalize to the studio or anybody
but keep you going through the process.
And you can see that in his films, that kind of
cryptic symbols and things that you know
are things that are important to him,
but they're done under the guise of the genre film or whatever.
Hi.
ALEXANDER: We stumbled into making this movie
after our Problem Child experiences.
The second script we wrote after college was Problem Child.
And the movie got taken away from us,
and what we considered to be a sophisticated adult comedy
got turned into a kiddy comedy.
And the movies were extremely successful, and there was a sequel,
and a cartoon show and a TV movie, spin-off,
but the movies really weren't very good.
And we started talking about how amazing it is
that you can work for years and years trying to make a movie,
and no one's setting out to make a bad movie,
everyone wants to make a good movie.
But it's hard to make good movies
because there's so many variables and there's so many people involved,
and so many things that can go wrong.
And it's really hard when the film shows up in a theater
a couple of years later, that everything turned out right.
And we started talking about Ed Wood and saying,
"He wasn't trying to make bad movies.
"He was trying to make good movies just like we were."
We didn't set out to make Problem Child.
We just ended up making Problem Child.
And he didn't want Plan 9 to be the worst movie ever made, it just was.
And maybe that passion should count for something.
KARASZEWSKI: Right, and basically, we were at a point in our career,
that even though we wrote these hits,
nobody particularly wanted to really work with us
because we were the guys who wrote the Problem Child movies.
We would get offered other kiddy comedy movies,
but it wasn't really the kind of movies that we wrote.
And I remember actually going into an executive's office one day,
and pitching an idea with Scott, and the executive saying,
"Oh, my gosh, that's a great idea for a movie.
"But you guys aren't good enough to write it."
And we walked out of that thing saying,
"Oh, my gosh, we're not good enough to write our own ideas." (CHUCKLING)
And it was just like a stake through the heart.
And so we walked around ashen for about a three-month period,
and we decided to redo our career.
We both started thinking that maybe
we'd got off in the film industry on the wrong foot,
that we should have written that movie from our heart to begin with,
instead of doing the whole Problem Child route.
And we decided
that we were just going to back away from the commercial side of it.
We thought we'd write this movie about Ed Wood,
and we would try to raise independent financing
and get it done for a million dollars or whatever.
We really envisioned it as a low-budget movie.
And at that time, a good friend of ours
who we also knew from film school, a guy named Michael Lehmann,
was coming off an experience on a movie called Hudson Hawk,
where he just totally got slammed in the press, and the movie died.
And we hooked up with him, and we said, "Wouldn't it be funny
"if the director of Hudson Hawk and the writers of Problem Child
"made a movie about the worst filmmaker of all time?"
We would be writing about what we know.
And so when we hooked up with Michael Lehmann,
Michael Lehmann suggested going to a producer named Denise Di Novi,
who he had made a movie called Heathers with.
And we also knew Denise,
and Denise had just recently partnered up with Tim Burton,
and the idea here would be that if Tim Burton put his name
on our Ed Wood script, like a bit of a Tim Burton Presents,
it would be easier to get the financing for a low-budget film.
And so we thought that was a great idea.
And basically we gave a treatment to Burton,
and Burton got extremely excited about it.
He really loved it, and he actually wanted to direct the movie himself,
and so him and Michael had a long conversation.
Michael was about to go off to direct a movie called Airheads,
so basically him and Tim agreed to swap places,
that Tim would direct it, and Michael would be one of the producers,
but the agreement would be that it would have to be Tim's next movie.
The only thing was, at that point, there wasn't a script.
It was just...
ALEXANDER: And Tim had his next movie.
Tim's next movie was supposed to be Mary Reilly,
which was about to be green-lit at TriStar.
And so Larry and I, being mercenaries, said, "If we can write this movie
"in six weeks before Tim contractually has to sign the other contract,
"then maybe we can knock Tim out of Mary Reilly
"and get him to make our freaky little project instead."
KARASZEWSKI: Right, so Scott and I basically
camped out at Scott's apartment,
and just worked nonstop, and in six weeks we had a draft.
It was longer than a script is supposed to be.
It was about 148 pages.
And we talked about maybe cutting some things,
but we decided it was better just to get it in to Tim as quick as we could,
and basically we turned it in on a Friday,
and by Sunday night, he had called.
Tim had called us,
and he loved the script, it was going to be his next movie,
this is what he wanted to do, and he didn't have any notes.
He really just thought the script was fine the way it was,
and he wanted to shoot a first draft.
He felt like if you went in there and started changing things,
incrementally the script would go further and further away
from the story of this lovable loser.
So you think this qualifies you to make my movie?
Yes!
BURTON: I thought the script was great.
And it was probably the first time
that I ever got a script that I said, "Yeah, let's shoot this."
Because I felt very close to it.
Its delusional aspects,
when they're looking at the reviews of the play that they did,
were very close to not only Beetlejuice,
but Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
Pee-wee's Big Adventure got some of the worst reviews I've ever heard,
and the same with Beetlejuice.
Which actually was cathartic,
(CHUCKLING) 'cause it made me not get too big-headed
about the whole thing, you know what I mean?
That's why I still feel close to that character,
because, you know what, I hope at the end of all of it,
I can still maintain some of that Ed Wood enthusiasm
throughout all of the crap.
So this is probably, for me,
the least improv'd, in terms of from a script point of view.
Which I enjoy, because then you had
freedom to improvise on other aspects of it.
It was nice, for a change,
to actually take a script and just do it like the script.
Gee, Mr. Lugosi, I've never had any complaints.
This is the most uncomfortable coffin I've ever been in.
BURTON: The next thing was to do it in black and white.
That was the final hurdle in it, which was...
We pretty much went to every studio in town.
And finally with Disney they said, reluctantly, yes.
But it just needed to be...
KARASZEWSKI: When we wrote the script, we always imagined
that the movie was probably gonna be in color, whatever...
ALEXANDER: That's how you imagine most movies.
KARASZEWSKI: Exactly, we figured the movie would be in color.
Although, strangely enough, my wife Emily,
the first time she read it, she said,
"This movie should be in black and white."
(LAUGHING) And I was like, "Honey, this movie's got enough trouble as it is.
"We've got transvestites. We've got all these other problems."
And what happened was, Tim was working with Rick Baker,
trying to get the makeup right for Martin Landau.
And it looked pretty good,
but there was something not right about it.
They kept on looking at the...
ALEXANDER: They kept saying, "What color should the eyes be?"
And they were like, "I don't know."
And they realized we'd never seen a color picture of Bela Lugosi.
And then when the dailies got transferred,
Tim went up to the monitor and he turned off the color on the TV.
He said, "Now it looks like Lugosi."
KARASZEWSKI: And that's how the movie became black and white.
BURTON: When you take away color, you focus more on what it needs to be,
the characters, the period.
But it was quite difficult,
because they had all sorts of reasons against it.
And I think, unfortunately, because the film wasn't successful,
it unfortunately fed into,
"You see, if it'd been in color, maybe it would've been a different story."
So it falls into that category of thinking.
But I at least felt lucky to be able to do it in black and white
because it's part of the character of it.
KARASZEWSKI: I remember when Tim told us he was
gonna shoot it in black and white,
we reacted as a mixed blessing.
We knew right away, aesthetically, artistically,
it's gonna be amazing to see this film in black and white.
But we knew right off the bat,
this is gonna eliminate 90% of our audience.
People are gonna be more afraid to see this film now
because it's a weird movie and it's gonna look weird.
But we ended up with, I think, a more artistically satisfying film.
NARRATOR: (MIMICKING DRACULA) Stefan Czapsky.
CZAPSKY: I had shot two other films for Tim,
Batman Returns and Edward Scissorhands before that.
It had already been decided it would be black and white.
That was a fight I wasn't involved in.
The only thing I went to fight for
was that they would process the film in New York City.
It's not asking a small thing.
(CHUCKLING) The film had to be in Los Angeles,
but it just happened to be that the laboratory, the facility
that did all the exceptional black-and-white work,
the Woody Allen movies, probably that Raging Bull movie,
still developed the black-and-white negative
and it did it in Boston sometimes, even, not New York, was Du Art.
I wanted my chance to make a film
that really added to the heritage of black-and-white film-making.
It was actually my opportunity.
I actually think I knew that when I did it,
I might never get another chance to do it.
I think that the chance to do it the way I got to do it
is not maybe that easy to get anymore.
So I feel very happy to talk about it,
because I actually invested a lot of work in it.
I didn't talk to Tim. He didn't really say it.
It's just something that I really surmised by observing what was going on.
He felt that it wouldn't be right for this to be a really prepared film.
He wanted it to be different, he wanted it to really...
He wanted to make it like an Ed Wood film.
BURTON: You're mixing different elements.
You're trying to give a flavor of Ed Wood,
but not be Ed Wood exactly.
So we just basically took it scene by scene.
I had learned by that point,
when you're working with certain actors, you don't think too...
You like to work the scenes out with them.
So we'd just take it pretty much...
We'd get to wherever the set or location we were in,
we would block out the scene with the actors,
Stefan would be there or come into it,
and then look at the general blocking of the scene,
and then light it and shoot it.
But I didn't go too far with that until we blocked it with the actors
because that's where the energy was.
And he was very good at then looking at it
and then we'd discuss, based on what the actors were doing,
what kind of performances and all of that,
the type of shots, angles, lenses, all of that sort of thing.
But we took it much more spontaneously.
It probably doesn't help him much,
because it probably takes longer to light.
In some ways, you're not able to prepare too much in advance,
but it definitely seemed appropriate for this to do it that way.
CZAPSKY: Actually we're in that house,
the house is shot from the outside, we shot inside it,
and it's a really tiny little house.
Poor guy lived there,
but I set the camera there and I don't move the camera, it's just locked off.
What advantage that gives me is I have a top of the frame,
and a left of the frame and a right of the frame.
That's where I have to put my lights, where they're not in the shot.
And I did this with a bunch of little spotlights,
bunch of little lights that get pushed right out to the edge of the frame.
I had a really good gaffer, John Vecchio.
John Cassidy was a grip. I had my own system.
There were spotlights all over the place in the background.
Then I put two lights, probably two lights,
one for Johnny and one for Bela, to do this TV effect.
What I got perfect, what I was so happy about was
when Bela does this thing with his hands, this chant,
and Johnny mimics it,
he's not looking at Johnny's face, but the shadow falls right in his face,
partly because we had the light set exactly right,
but also, he's doing it perfectly.
NARRATOR: (MIMICKING DRACULA) Martin Landau.
LANDAU: One of the things I said to Tim,
"What you've got here is a 74-year-old Hungarian morphine addict, alcoholic,
"who has mood swings."
I would be a Hungarian character. That would be hard enough.
But he has to be Bela Lugosi, who everyone knows.
I said, "This could be the worst thing that ever happened."
I grew up with guys doing... Frank Gorshin and David Frye,
(MIMICKING DRACULA) "I want to drink your blood."
(IN NORMAL VOICE) Jack Carter, everyone,
all the comics were doing Lugosi
'cause he was fair game.
But I wanted to humanize him and yet, it needed a style.
On top of it, it needed a theatricality. It's a Tim Burton movie.
It's not a documentary.
(CHUCKLING)
My aim was to make him sad and funny at the same time
without ridiculing him.
I wanted it to be an homage, a love letter to him
because I became a big fan of his when I watched his movies.
And I realize, in some of the worst turkeys I've ever seen,
he was there doing it.
There's a movie called Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla,
that I think makes the Ed Wood movies look like Gone With the Wind.
I watched it three times in a row because I couldn't believe it.
It was so awful.
There's nothing redeeming in this movie, excepting Lugosi
who's taking this whole thing seriously because he had to
and it only makes it funnier.
ALEXANDER: We felt that a lot of people
make mistakes when they do biopics,
that they have to tell the whole story.
And they have to say where the guy was born,
and they have to show him as a little child
and then they have to show him dying at the end.
We said, "In real movies, you don't do that."
In a normal movie, you just focus on the interesting period
in the character's life.
So we said, "Why is Ed Wood remembered?"
He's remembered because of the Lugosi movies.
As much as we'd like to defend the whole body of work,
people don't watch The Sinister Urge as much as they watch
Plan 9 from Outer Space.
And so we said, "Let's focus on the Lugosi years,"
which was about a five-year period and...
KARASZEWSKI: In all honesty, those were the years
that actually interested us
because we always felt, even from the very beginning, that
the heart of the movie was going to be the relationship between Ed and Bela.
ALEXANDER: But what happens is, by focusing on a period,
you immediately are picking the tone of the movie
because Ed's life really went south after the Lugosi years.
KARASZEWSKI: We discarded any non-Lugosi projects
that Ed was working on during that time.
And in reality, I believe The Violent Years
and The Sinister Urge are also made during this time period.
ALEXANDER: I can't remember.
KARASZEWSKI: But we decided not to concentrate on them at all
and really just make it about the two men.
ALEXANDER: Some people said that Ed Wood
was taking advantage of Lugosi.
He was a drug addict and he was a fallen man,
and that Ed Wood would wave 10 $100 bills in front of him
and say, "Can you show up on my set next Wednesday?"
And Lugosi knew these movies really weren't up to the standard of Dracula,
but Ed wasn't trying to take advantage of him.
Ed just was making the movies Ed wanted to make
and these were the parts he had available for him.
BURTON: Martin, somebody suggested him
and I thought, "Of course."
And I didn't know Martin, but I had this feeling about it.
And I thought about it later and I think it really stemmed from,
"Here's a guy that's been through everything.
"He's worked with Alfred Hitchcock.
"He's also been on Gilligan's Island with the Harlem Globetrotters."
So he's been the full gamut of doing these amazing things to doing...
And so I just felt like,
"Here's somebody who's really gonna understand
"the whole Bela thing."
And the whole dynamic of somebody who's done all this great stuff
and then goes through all these different ups and downs.
And the great thing about Martin is
he's gone through all these ups and downs
and always seems to remain on an up.
So he certainly had the passion and I just felt completely,
he completely got that dynamic of it.
And after the first makeup test, he just got into it,
the gestures, the physical side of it.
The pain, the emotion.
All of that, you can't really tell somebody to do. It's something that...
That's why their experience is important.
And that's why I felt like he'd be just so great at it.
I'll read it as soon as I get home.
KARASZEWSKI: When we gave Tim the treatment early on,
the only thing he said to us was, "Be careful with the cross-dressing."
I don't think it was because Tim was bothered by the cross-dressing.
I just think he didn't wanna make...
ALEXANDER: He didn't wanna make Some Like It Hot.
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah, "Isn't it funny, a guy wearing a dress?"
He also didn't want the movie to turn into
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert either.
The cross-dressing was a major part of Ed's life,
but I think he just didn't want it to take over the movie,
so it was just a big joke of, "Here's this guy in a dress."
ALEXANDER: And for such a loony concept,
it's actually played
- really deadpan in the movie. - KARASZEWSKI: Mmm-hmm.
ALEXANDER: The way Tim shoots it, very matter-of-fact,
and the way Johnny plays it, it's just like,
"Okay, yeah, here I am. I happen to be in a dress.
"Okay, so what were we talking about?"
KARASZEWSKI: It's more played for, as the movie progresses,
as a cry for tolerance.
It's like, "Please accept me for who I am.
"I am just a guy who likes to wear dresses."
ALEXANDER: And it's basically a rhyming scene with this one,
'cause Sarah flips out,
whereas Patricia Arquette just accepts it.
And the fact that she could accept the fact that he's a cross-dresser
and not put him down for it.
KARASZEWSKI: The interesting thing about Ed is that he wasn't gay.
He was a transvestite.
And I think a lot of people, when they see a transvestite,
myself included, is that you'd think that they were gay.
You still think that when you see somebody in drag.
From his letters, he was very casual about it.
So it wasn't a big issue to him.
That's why, when he's sitting around,
part of the time, he's wearing pants and his angora sweater,
it's like he said, it just felt good.
And that's, again, a thing that I think was important to me,
to show the matter-of-fact quality,
that he wasn't really consciously going out of his way to do it
and dress in drag.
NARRATOR: (MIMICKING DRACULA) Colleen Atwood.
ATWOOD: It wasn't like Ed Wood was a jock
that became a woman or anything.
I didn't try to push that in any way.
I liked that, which I like a lot with leading men,
is I liked Ed Wood's clothes to be very simple
and basically some of my reference with Ed Wood
when he was going to studios, trying to take meetings was
in a dark suit, white shirt look.
And I thought it was a great way to keep him very simple that way.
So when he became a woman, it was more of a moment
than having him running around in Hawaiian shirts and khaki pants,
which probably was what a lot of people in LA wore in the '50s.
But I didn't want to do that with Johnny's character in the movie.
I thought it was a bit distracting
and that it was better to go the other way with Ed Wood,
the simple way.
So I definitely pushed it that way, in that direction.
Luckily, Johnny Depp makes all of that very approachable
because he works with you on the character
and he's an actor that really is not a vanity driven person.
So he's willing to go out there.
He borrowed slips in pre-production
to get used to wearing women's clothes.
He got into the character deeply,
which helped me with organizing his costumes as a woman.
And, fortunately, he's got a great body to be a woman or a man.
So, either way, it works on him.
It was helpful that it was him.
It made my life probably easier than it would've been if I'd had somebody
that was overweight or had other weird issues about themselves.
So, Johnny was totally free with that, which is really the spirit of Ed Wood.
He was definitely a free-spirited kind of person,
and I think that Johnny did an amazing job
of bringing that to life in the movie.
BURTON: Johnny, even disheveled and in drag,
is gonna look a lot better than most people anyway,
so it's somewhat romanticized no matter how bad he looks.
But he just definitely had the right quality for that character
and I really enjoyed working with him on that.
And what was amazing,
and it's fun to work with people that you've worked with before,
especially somebody like him.
'Cause Edward Scissorhands was a character that didn't speak
and now we're dealing with a character who won't shut up.
And it's great to see an actor
go from one thing to something completely different.
I can't tell you the energy...
There's a great energy to seeing something like that.
And he's just so willing to do anything, Johnny, that way.
In fact, he wants to usually go further than you want him to go.
And it's nice for other actors to see, you know what I mean?
I could sense between Johnny and Martin,
there was a real respect and a real bonding
that went with them because they were both good in a certain level
and so it was exciting to see that.
And they actually, like in the film,
seem to get that kind of bond between them.
Great to see ya! 8:00 on the dot. Right on time.
- I'm always on time. - Of course you are.
LANDAU: These are two disparate people
who join up because they need each other.
And then, actually, there's this affinity that grows.
I always thought of it as a male love story.
Not a homosexual story, but a love story.
Two guys who really can depend on each other
when push gets to shove and stuff.
And Johnny and I, just upon meeting, it was a great...
We just hit it off very quickly and it was enjoyable to work with Johnny.
No two takes were exactly the same,
which is what I look forward to.
And when it's give and take and moment to moment,
and you don't quite know what's gonna happen next, exactly.
And that's what a good tennis game's about.
You play a better game of tennis
when you're playing with a good player.
Mr. Lugosi, I know you're very busy
but, can I have your autograph?
Certainly.
KARASZEWSKI: This scene here actually gets us
in trouble with a lot of Lugosi purists.
ALEXANDER: Oh, boy!
KARASZEWSKI: That we have Landau swear up a storm here.
ALEXANDER: All over the movie. KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
But it's particularly this scene where he calls Karloff a "limey cocksucker."
ALEXANDER: That's a good line.
KARASZEWSKI: (MIMICKING DRACULA) "Fuck you!"
Karloff does not deserve to smell my shit!
That limey cocksucker can rot in hell for all I care!
KARASZEWSKI: In Nightmare of Ecstasy,
there's a man named John Andrews,
who gives a lot of the interviews and I think what happens is
in a lot of John Andrews interviews, John Andrews swears
and his swearing becomes part of the story.
So we read a couple of these things
where he would talk about Lugosi going off
and Lugosi would say, "Fuck you," and so we thought...
ALEXANDER: Are you allowed to swear in commentary tracks?
KARASZEWSKI: So we actually thought it was funny
that Lugosi would just go off.
And the mention of Karloff as his arch-nemesis,
as this guy who he's always compared with,
this shadow guy who has
such a successful career and Lugosi doesn't.
So we went with it.
There are people like Forry Ackerman and other monster guys who...
ALEXANDER: They hate us for it. KARASZEWSKI: They hate us for it.
They think, "You degraded Lugosi. You have him swear.
"Lugosi never swore like that."
And I think they missed the point,
that this movie is a love letter to Bela Lugosi.
ALEXANDER: This movie loves Lugosi so much.
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
He's not swearing to make him seem like he's a coarse, horrible person.
He's swearing just so you feel his pain.
ALEXANDER: He's human.
LANDAU: I think of the word "fuck" as a term of love.
If you say it properly, it's not offensive.
And the act itself is wonderful, anyway.
Wait!
LANDAU: I realized that that stuff was funny in this picture.
They had to be heartfelt and funny. I just had an affinity.
Now, one of the things that bothered his son initially, Bela Jr.,
who put the movie down before he saw it,
we have to know that he was in his...
I don't think even think he was in his teens yet.
I think he was 11, 12, something like that, maybe 13,
when his father died.
He said, "My father didn't use language like that."
He probably didn't use it in front of his son and may not have used it.
But there's nothing wrong with language like that
if it's expressive and coming from a place.
He doesn't use language like that in front of women, he doesn't...
I tried to dignify him, I really did. I felt this was a love letter to him.
It was a love letter to all actors, I felt.
I really looked at it as, here was a guy who was really talented,
he was incredibly... You couldn't take your eyes off him.
And as things went on, his career diminished,
and the kinds of roles he played,
became a caricature of himself, much like John Barrymore did.
It was a major disappointment how his career went.
And yet, he was quite a spiritual man and I wanted you to understand him
and have empathy, not too much sympathy but empathy.
I didn't want you to feel sorry for him exactly.
I wanted you to understand him.
I kept away from self-pity.
If a character feels sorry for himself, who gives a damn.
I like characters that are always reaching.
I like people like that in life.
I don't care how rough things are.
If you can see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel, move towards it.
And that's what it's about.
BURTON: That's what Johnny captured in his enthusiasm.
I think that you just get it.
You get his joy of it and his enthusiasm for it.
And films have a way of taking on a life of their own that way.
And I think that the beautiful thing about the Ed Wood family
is that it did happen with the actors
in the dynamic of the way it was.
Johnny's portrayal as Ed in his upbeat ways,
he was charming and he was something
that everybody gravitated towards.
And Bela was like the star
and an emotional strength in there,
and that became true.
And you were just mesmerized by his performance.
So that added to the mystique
and the power of him being central to that group.
And I think on some subconscious level,
that was another thing that I gravitated towards.
So, what's up next for you?
I don't believe in thinking small,
so I've got a whole slate...
BURTON: Some of the original Ed Wood letters,
in terms of his enthusiasm
and the juxtaposition of that,
and because there was enough depression,
it senses through him,
that's why we wanted that positive mentality
to be the main aspect of it.
But Johnny has his whole backlog of inspirations
and I threw out a couple.
I was talking about ventriloquist dummies,
and he was talking about Ronald Reagan.
That's a good thing about certain actors.
We can talk on abstract levels,
but still understand each other.
And he had another inspiration, which I can't remember what it was.
I thought it was Ronald Reagan, but I can't remember.
There might have been another one, too.
A sterling, young actress, Dolores Fuller.
ALEXANDER: It's difficult because the movie
rarely interacts with normal society.
Ed and his gang tend to exist in their little hermetic bubble.
And the big joke in the movie is that the, quote, villains or antagonists
tend to be Sarah Jessica's character, Dolores Fuller, and the Baptists.
And these people are being so reasonable.
Sarah Jessica's just saying,
"Do you have to parade around in earrings and my angora?"
And the Baptists are just saying,
"Mr. Wood, can't we just have continuity?
"Can't you just have shots cut together?"
All of the bad guys in this movie,
they're not asking for anything a rational person wouldn't ask for.
But the values in the movie have been so flipped around...
KARASZEWSKI: Hopefully we've got the audience
so much on Ed's side that the audience is saying to these people,
"Leave Ed alone. Let him make the movie he wants to make.
"Let him walk around in a dress."
ALEXANDER: Look at this, poor Mr. Feldman,
he comes across like a bad guy here.
He's not doing anything wrong.
He's just saying, "What the hell are they showing me here?
"This can't be for real."
KARASZEWSKI: I love the performances
of the two flunkies in the theater.
They're clearly waiting for their boss' reaction,
the, "Is it okay to laugh?"
...long hair, make-up, clothing, the actual contours of a girl.
Oh, God!
Most transvestites do not want to change their life, their bodies.
CZAPSKY: It's easy to like Johnny Depp because
he's not worried about how he looks.
He's concerned with the character.
There's a lot of actors that are much more vain,
maybe 'cause they're not as good-looking as him,
or maybe because they're more insecure about their acting,
I'm not sure.
But I've done two movies with Johnny Depp
and he really is very secure as an actor
and that makes it easy for him to work with.
I think that they tried to shoot location work as much as they could
because I think Tim felt that it led to an authenticity to it.
There's certain, I think, probably budgetary reasons
why they built some of the interiors.
But Tim liked the idea of shooting in as real of a place.
This was actually shot in downtown LA.
It was a big, old wrecked auditorium someplace downtown.
And what's hard about this scene is that Bunny is pure white.
And so for me to not make him just burn out like an apparition,
was fighting his costume.
You don't want the actors in the foreground to be too bright.
It's a hard balance between having your eye
go to the main row there without it seeming too theatrical.
This came out really good, for me.
ALEXANDER: Wrestling was a big deal. KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
ALEXANDER: You had early television, and it had a lot of wrestling on it.
And Tor Johnson, he was a celebrity. He was big-time.
And when Ed snagged him, that was a coup.
KARASZEWSKI: I talked earlier about my father
always taking me to the drive-in.
On the nights that he didn't take me to the drive-in,
I would convince him to drive quite a distance
to take me to see wrestling matches.
Actually, this is the introduction
of George "The Animal" Steele, who was an actual wrestler
who was doing a Tor Johnson act.
Though, as a professional wrestler, George "The Animal" Steele is a bit...
I don't know if I'd call the character he plays retarded,
but there's definitely a simple-mindedness.
ALEXANDER: He's like an animal.
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah, he's just a guy who drools,
where Tor had never had that persona.
It was funny because Tor is such a strange, strange piece of casting,
that you couldn't just go to Drama-Logue and say, "Send me..."
Or the CAA, "Bring in five Tor Johnsons."
And so, literally, Tim opened up the casting and said,
"Anyone from around the country
"who wants to play Tor Johnson, please send me a tape."
- And we had this whole stack of... - ALEXANDER: Terrifying tapes.
KARASZEWSKI: Big, fat, bald guys, basically.
(ALEXANDER MOCK GROWLING)
KARASZEWSKI: There was one that was particularly scary
because it was like a man, a bald-headed guy,
carrying his daughter.
ALEXANDER: Like a handheld, Hi-8 camera
chasing him around his living room.
KARASZEWSKI: And she picks him up and he carries her into the basement.
And I was like, "Oh, lord! This is terrifying."
ALEXANDER: "He's gonna murder her.
"We should call the police."
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
But we went with the most well-known.
People all along were saying,
"You should get George 'The Animal' Steele."
ALEXANDER: Again, this is another meeting scene
that illustrated
how we had a meeting of all the characters we had to make up
and we basically would just try to be as iconographic as possible.
So you meet Lugosi in a coffin,
you meet Tor Johnson in a wrestling ring,
you meet Criswell predicting the future.
KARASZEWSKI: Right. You meet Vampira on her TV show.
So the second you see these people,
you know what they're supposed to be.
ALEXANDER: Because there is a bit of a third-inning,
Dirty Dozen thing going on here
where Ed is accumulating a cast of wackos
to follow him along for the rest of the movie.
And we had to use a bit of shorthand
just to quickly tell the audience who the heck these people are.
Bela?
Bela!
(DOGS WHIMPERING)
Bela!
Bela? What happened?
KARASZEWSKI: The intimate stuff was not really taken
from anything specifically from Ed or Bela's life.
I guess we were trying to do it more universal,
that if you love somebody who is an addict,
this is how you try to take care of them, particularly in an older man.
We really thought
there was this father-and-son bond that these two guys had.
The few writings that you have about Lugosi from Ed,
or transcripts of Ed talking about Lugosi,
don't really talk about the addiction or anything like that.
They talk more about failed projects
that the two of them are trying to get off the ground.
Bela, what's in the needle?
Morphine.
With a Demerol chaser.
Oh, Eddie. Eddie, I'm so broke.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
(SOBBING)
Don't worry, Bela.
I won't let you down.
Mr. Feldman? Ed Wood.
KARASZEWSKI: This is one of the most memorable scenes.
- And Johnny's great in this phone call. - KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
When people come up to me on the street,
they're usually using this line.
ALEXANDER: "Well, the next one will be better. Hello?"
Well, my next one will be better.
Hello. Hello.
BURTON: Yeah, I think we both got a sense from his letter,
this upbeat, "Let's put on a show," Andy Hardy...
And I think that's where Johnny came up with
that over-enthusiastic portrayal.
Which was great, 'cause it was at odds with what was going on.
And I think that that, for me, it struck a balance,
showing you where somebody was at in their own head
versus what was really going on,
which, for me, made him a very endearing character.
Now, this, I think, we were...
There is a dynamic of showing him probably being a bit more enthusiastic
than he probably really was.
Huh? Is he available Friday night?
Well, gee, I suppose so. Why?
(LAUGHTER)
CZAPSKY: You see the lights on the top?
I want those to over expose like that.
So I gotta set them a certain way and make them flair.
It's hard, but a shot like this,
I gotta balance the TV, that's shot live.
It's not a green screen, it's a live video input in there.
We shot that at a really low light level,
'cause Tim liked that old television.
I can only get it a certain brightness.
So, basically, that television monitor is dictating the...
That didn't look like a low light level shot.
It looked like it was in a TV studio.
ALEXANDER: This TV sequence is based upon
a real thing that happened with Red Skelton.
Lugosi did a guest shot and Skelton started ad-libbing,
and Lugosi freaked out and didn't know what to do.
I don't think it was a completely successful scene
in terms of how we wrote it.
The concept that Bela is not hearing the cue lines he was expecting to hear
is a little abstract as a concept to get across to an audience.
KARASZEWSKI: This was actually true in real life,
Bela did not hear that well.
And a really funny story, true story that we didn't work into the film...
ALEXANDER: House of Wax? KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
Was that Bela did a special appearance
at the premiere of House of Wax.
ALEXANDER: Which he's not in. KARASZEWSKI: He's not even in it.
That's how bad Bela's career was at that point.
He was actually showing up at premieres of movies
to promote other movies.
ALEXANDER: Him and a guy in a gorilla suit.
KARASZEWSKI: Right.
He agreed to be interviewed for this radio guy.
But he said, "I have to have the questions in advance."
ALEXANDER: Landau loves this story. KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
So, basically, the guy gave him these five questions
and him and Eddie looked at the questions
and basically he memorized what the five questions were.
(CHUCKLING) And so the guys went to the interview,
and he asked the questions out of order.
But Bela gave the answers in order.
ALEXANDER: Landau does this routine, just like...
"So, Mr. Lugosi, what do you think of the movie?"
(MIMICKING DRACULA) "Thursday!"
(PEOPLE CHUCKLING)
KARASZEWSKI: Just a production note,
the audience that you see for this Red Skelton variety hour
is actually a shot stolen from the end of the movie.
ALEXANDER: Chris Lebenzon stole this shot.
KARASZEWSKI: It's from the premiere of Plan 9.
ALEXANDER: The shot shows up twice.
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah, you actually can freeze frame,
you can see, I think, a couple of Ed's crew people
- are in the front row... - ALEXANDER: Hey, hey, hey.
Hey, gaswad, you're giving stuff away here.
KARASZEWSKI: No, that's the whole point of the DVD commentary.
It's that those Ed Wood freaks who've gotten this far
are digging on the commentary.
ALEXANDER: This is a great shot. There's just so many elements in it.
Ah, cheer up. Don't lose heart over what happened tonight.
I predict your next project will be an outstanding success!
BURTON: Jeffrey's great. I worked with Jeffrey on Beetlejuice.
Somehow, you look at Criswell and you look at Jeffrey,
and, again, it needed somebody who wasn't as well known as Bela Lugosi,
but he was a well-known figure,
and so it was, again, I thought important to get somebody
who had that look and dynamic.
And Jeffrey's got that look, that certain deadpan look
that had that weird mystique of Criswell.
And from Ed Wood,
and then doing Sleepy Hollow, I am now obsessed by Jeffrey in wigs,
because he somehow is just so hilarious.
I guess it's from seeing him in Amadeus or something.
But every time Jeffrey's in a wig, I die with laughter.
CZAPSKY: If you went to shoot this film again now,
I bet you Tim would be shooting close-ups of the people over there.
They would make him do it.
It's a new aesthetic, a new modern day requirement that you shoot close-ups,
that you shoot over-the-shoulder shots. 'Cause stuff goes to television,
all of a sudden, they say that,
"Well, where's the close-ups? I can't see it."
It just affects everything.
Luckily, it didn't affect...
We weren't under those conditions.
The old Brown Derby.
What's hard about that was just making the background disappear.
Behind there, there's actually a big building in real life.
Historically, the Brown Derby didn't have a skyscraper behind it.
It was its own place.
It's a little bit aesthetically,
but it's also a little bit of a thing that they throw on you,
"You'll get rid of that building, right?
"We won't see that."
But if you're standing there, there's a building behind there.
If you went there to visit the set, you'll actually see the place back there.
You have to set your exposures correctly
so that it disappears.
'Cause they're able to do things now.
There's technology now in terms of removing things
that if the movie's already gonna go through
some digital phase or optical phase,
then they'll already put money in ahead of time for that.
ED: Well, goodbye. MAN: Good night, Ed. Keep in touch.
Goodbye.
Well, Eddie, how'd we do?
We didn't make a nickel.
WOMAN: I cannot believe I'm in Hollywood.
You know, Daddy didn't want me to move out here.
BARTENDER: Uh-huh.
Ma'am, your bill comes to $2.20.
WOMAN: Oh. Uh, okay. I hope you don't mind
but all I have is a fifty. I just came from my banker's.
KARASZEWSKI: This is Martin Landau's daughter,
Juliet, who is playing Loretta King,
who actually has the strangest backstory of all time,
which is that she is allergic to water, which was... (LAUGHING)
That's what they claimed, which we don't understand.
How can somebody be allergic to water?
But all the stories say, "Yeah, she couldn't drink water of any kind."
ALEXANDER: There was a lot of legal contention
between Loretta King and the real Dolores Fuller.
Even now, 50 years later, they still argue over whether
Loretta actually promised Ed the money for the budget
or whether it was a misunderstanding,
or whether Ed gave Dolores' part to Loretta
because he thought he was gonna get 60 grand from her,
or whether she only promised him $300.
We actually had to navigate the lines of dialogue
very carefully with the Disney lawyers
so we wouldn't have any of these women suing us all these years later.
Officially, we don't take a stand.
If you watch the lines very carefully,
you know where Larry and I are coming from,
but we couldn't actually say it.
BURTON: Well, I met Juliet because she's Martin's daughter,
but I didn't hire her for that reason,
though she's got a great strange quality.
When the guy offers her water and she says, "No, I don't drink water.
"I'm allergic to liquids," you believe her.
She's got this weird quality to her.
And so she just, again, without having to do anything
just fit right in to the Ed Wood family there.
ALEXANDER: The biggest sequence that was
in our script that did not get shot,
and really it was just because we wrote such a frigging long script,
147 pages,
and all the line producers were just begging us to find something to cut
just so they could shoot the movie.
In the middle of the movie, there was a sequence after Dolores leaves him,
where he meets this girl and he has an instant rebound marriage.
Ed calls up all his buddies and says,
"Come on down to the sound-stage. I'm having a party Saturday night."
And they show up and he says, "Meet my new bride."
And they're like, "What?"
And it's just some girl he just picked up,
Norma McCarty, they get married,
and then there's this wacky sequence where they go off on the honeymoon
and she's a very prim and proper Midwestern girl.
And he takes off his wedding tux
and underneath he's got on a brassiere,
and she screams and the marriage ends.
And it's just so depressing for him,
that he can be rejected in that way and it hurts him so much.
And then he ends up later on
meeting the Patricia Arquette character, Kathy.
KARASZEWSKI: I really like the sequence quite a bit,
but it seemed easy to cut out.
It was a thing where you could literally just lift that little seven-page sequence,
and it really didn't affect anything on either side.
Ed's rejection made it a little bit deeper,
you felt a little deeper for his plight, but it worked anyway.
It worked without the sequence, and I think that's why it got lifted.
ALEXANDER: We were talking about how hard it is to make good movies.
Movies are really random,
and stuff gets shot, doesn't get shot,
actors get cast, people don't get cast just for completely erratic reasons.
So something like Ed's marriage being taken out of the movie,
it was taken out because, could be 'cause me and Larry are lazy,
and the line producer was begging us
to find five pages to pull out of the movie.
And it was a five-page lift.
And in a screenplay, a lift means you can just pull out those five pages
and the rest of the movie will make sense
and you don't have to do any other typing.
And we said, "The movie works without the wedding."
We're like, "Tim, what do you think?" He says, "I like it,
"but I guess it's a clean lift."
We're like, "All right. Cool."
Then we could walk right over to the line producer and say,
"All right. We cut out five pages. We're gonna go to lunch now."
KARASZEWSKI: Right. The thing about lifts, though, is that
if it can be done, often it is done,
just because even if they would've shot that sequence,
there's a good chance it would've wound up on the cutting room floor,
because you could snip the beginning and snip the end
and have the same film.
It's a good test.
If you can do that to a scene in your movie,
then maybe the scene doesn't really belong.
ALEXANDER: That's the weird thing with making movies
and trying to have them turn out coherent is
stuff ends up in and out of the movie for just such weird reasons.
It can just be that, "It rained that one day,
"and so they went over-schedule in that location,
"and so the stuff that they were supposed to shoot on Monday
"ended up being shot on Tuesday,
"and the scene that was supposed to be shot on Wednesday,
"you can't shoot now.
"So the scene we're shooting on Wednesday, we're not gonna shoot."
And suddenly that scene that was
supposed to hold the continuity together doesn't get shot.
And it's not like anyone has a bad agenda. It just happens.
Stuff like that happened a lot to Ed Wood,
which is why his movies make no sense.
- Print it. Let's move on. - Don't you wanna do another take, Ed?
Looks like big baldy had a little trouble gettin' through the door.
No, it's fine. It's real.
You know, in actuality, Lobo would have to struggle with that problem every day.
All right, people, let's get ready. Actors!
ALEXANDER: Johnny's great with his megaphone.
KARASZEWSKI: This was actually a true thing about Ed Wood,
is that Ed Wood basically liked to pretend he was a movie director,
even when he was directing movies, but it was like...
ALEXANDER: He'd seen pictures of C.B. De Mille.
KARASZEWSKI: Right.
He reminds me of what Jethro does in The Beverly Hillbillies,
when he pretends to be a movie director.
He speaks constantly in the megaphone,
he wears little stirrups.
ALEXANDER: He's like an 8-year-old boy
who wants to be a movie director.
He's seen a cartoon of what a director looks like.
KARASZEWSKI: Johnny really liked the optimistic part of Ed.
And Johnny said to us that he actually based his performance
on a combination of three things.
It was Casey Kasem, Ronald Reagan,
and the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
And if you watch the movie and this performance
with those three things in mind, you'll just see it.
You'll just see he's doing that head shaking thing
that Reagan does all the time.
"Well, gee, Mommy," and then it is the Tin Man, Ronald Reagan,
and the voice of Casey Kasem.
ALEXANDER: It's fun watching Johnny in these moviemaking scenes,
because we're really going for something with Ed
where Ed wasn't necessarily concerned with the final product.
It wasn't that important whether he made a good movie,
he just wanted to make a movie.
He just liked the idea of being on a set, and there's a camera,
and you got a megaphone and you can yell, "Action!"
And you can say, "Cut."
And so this running gag we do
where he does one take and it's never any good,
and he says, "Perfect. Moving on."
It's like, he just got to experience it.
He just got to experience the joy of saying, "Action!"
And watching the actors say the lines and that's enough for him.
And now I need the other sixty thousand.
What other sixty thousand?
The other sixty thousand you said you'd give to me.
You misunderstood, Eddie.
I gave you everything I have in the world, three hundred dollars.
Well, here we go again.
ED: Let me tell ya, ya can't lose.
It's scary. And if you don't like that, it's romantic.
ALEXANDER: Here, on the left, we have the real Greg Walcott,
the older Southern gentleman here on the left,
saying, "Let's get the hell out of here,"
that's the real star of Plan 9 from Outer Space,
the young pilot, this is his cameo in the movie.
KARASZEWSKI: He had an interesting story in the sense that
he actually had a regular Hollywood career.
He shows up in movies like Prime Cut and Norma Rae,
and he worked in Hollywood for years
and he was always terribly embarrassed of the fact that
he's in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
ALEXANDER: He's only in it because he was in the choir
of the Baptist Church of Beverly Hills
and the guy behind the church was bankrolling the movie
and he did it as a favor.
And it's haunted him ever since.
KARASZEWSKI: So he was never a part of Ed Wood's posse.
And so he always really looked down on these movies,
and he left them off his resume.
And it just is completely fascinating to him
that the last 20 years of his life have been spent
getting a phone call three times a day from someone, somewhere, like,
"Tell me about Ed Wood."
ALEXANDER: He shot four days on it 50 years ago.
- That's all anyone wants to talk about. - KARASZEWSKI: Right.
And all the people in Ed's entourage,
the people who only exist because of Ed Wood,
don't like Walcott, because Walcott tends to always,
"Oh, God, I'm embarrassed by those pictures."
ALEXANDER: He dismisses it. KARASZEWSKI: He dismisses them.
He's too good for them.
And so there's tension between Walcott and the other Woodites.
ALEXANDER: He's very good-natured.
KARASZEWSKI: I think Greg Walcott's a great guy.
...just to say "howdy" to some of the backers.
Look, I'm with some friends and we're about to eat.
Please! It would just take one second.
Come over and meet the backers.
There is a really nice dentist from Oxnard.
KARASZEWSKI: Vampira was showing on television
the kind of movies that Ed Wood liked to watch.
So Ed would watch these movies and call her up on the phone,
and he did pursue her for many, many years,
and she did think that she was much too big for Ed Wood.
I'm getting a bad feeling about this. Let's get out of here.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Thank you, folks, for comin' tonight, but we better go.
And then Dr. Vornoff falls into the pit
and his own octopus attacks and eats him.
- The end. - Whew!
KARASZEWSKI: That's Ron Howard's dad, by the way.
ALEXANDER: That's Rance Howard.
KARASZEWSKI: There's a lot of strange nepotism people in the movie.
You've got Ron Howard's dad, you've got Martin Landau's daughter.
- You've got John Cusack's brother. - ALEXANDER: John Cusack's brother.
BURTON: Yeah, Ron Howard's dad.
I remember seeing him when I used to play sports as a child in Burbank,
played against Ron Howard's team.
The Howard gang.
But I didn't really meet him until this.
I've actually worked with him a couple of times
and seen him in stuff.
He's got that great deadpan thing. He was like one of those scary guys.
Most people that have money seem to be scary.
And he had that good...
It's the kind of guy that has money, but you'd rather not ask him for it,
'cause there's gonna be trouble, and he captured that quite well.
Number two:
I got a son.
He's a little slow, but a good boy.
And somethin' tells me he'd make a helluva leadin' man.
ALEXANDER: That's a true story. KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
ALEXANDER: That's a true story, that old man McCoy had a son
who wanted to be an actor, named Tony McCoy,
and old man McCoy was a meat man with a bunch of meat money.
Maybe of anything in this movie, that scene is as verbatim
to the truth as you can get.
KARASZEWSKI: But the fact that this stuff...
And it comes back to when Scott and I introduce characters,
we introduce them as who they are.
So if the guy is a guy who owns meatpacking factories,
my God, you're gonna meet him in the meatpacking factory.
And you're gonna see big slabs of meat, and it's the same way.
We're introducing a Swedish wrestler, you're gonna meet him in the ring,
and he's a Swedish wrestler.
- If the guy's a psychic... Yeah. - ALEXANDER: It's a big cast.
So you want people to be able to keep track of all these characters.
KARASZEWSKI: So then you can say, "Yeah, that's
"the meat guy. That's the wrestler guy."
Whatever, that stuff is funny.
Why not take advantage of the goodies that real life is giving you?
I'm Loretta King. Oh, here, take the chair.
Oh, don't be silly. Let Harry finish.
You still need some more work.
No. I'm finished.
- All I needed was a touch-up. - Hmm. That mole still shows.
Uh, ladies! You both look fine.
Why don't we talk about the scene?
Okay, Janet Lawton has just discovered...
BURTON: I thought Sarah was great.
Here's, again, a character that's not a known character.
And when you really look at the overall Ed Wood biography,
if there is such a definitive thing, which I don't think there is,
I realized early on, which, again, was a freedom, it's like...
There's no way to really identify and really say
what is 100% accurate or not, and so I didn't...
We never really felt really, really bound by that.
And so I think it was more...
You needed one character to call it as it was at that point.
And she did do that,
while also serving her purpose in the Ed Wood mythology.
That little acting scene she does with Juliet Landau,
it was great, that little secretary scene.
KARASZEWSKI: And this movie really is all about tone.
It really captures an odd feeling of drama and comedy,
and I think Tim nailed it right off the bat.
We were so conscious of not making fun of Ed.
ALEXANDER: Not making fun of anybody.
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
So we really pushed the movie into a very loving look at these people.
And so that's what gives it this nice, warm feeling this whole movie has.
That's really quite strange when you think it's about
making horror movies, and transvestites,
but there's a real warmness to it all,
where there's an affection for these people.
And it's just because I think we really just did not want to make fun of them,
and they had been made fun of so much in the past,
that we went out of our way, whenever possible,
to give them human moments.
ALEXANDER: Try to give them some dignity.
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah.
There it is. Paul, go unhook it.
Right.
Fantastic.
It's beautiful.
You sure this is gonna work?
ALEXANDER: This is one of those scenes that when
we started studying real life stories,
everyone tells you the octopus story. "That great octopus story.
"When we broke into Republic Studios and stole an octopus."
At the end of the day, it's really not that much of a story,
but you hear it so many times that it seems important.
KARASZEWSKI: Right.
Actually, one of our friends, when he read the script for us,
he read it before anyone else, Dan Waters,
who's a screenwriter, wrote Batman Returns for Tim,
his comment to us was like,
"You guys act like these are great, classic stories.
"'That time we stole the octopus.'
"Nobody knows this. They don't care,
"but you guys are treating it like these are significant acts."
Lights!
TONY: (READING) "Now, Janet, I want you stayin' away..."
BURTON: One of my favorites to shoot was the octopus scene, yeah.
It was just something about being out in the location in Griffith Park,
somewhere, supposedly near where they did it, being at night
with that group, that weird family of people,
and I find it to be a very funny scene, a very haunting scene,
it's basically a death scene.
But most of Bela's scenes are death scenes. (CHUCKLING)
And very touching, with regret and humor and foreboding.
There's just something about the timing of it,
the way the actors were doing it all.
I enjoyed running up and down the hill
because, again, it was a scene that mirrored making the movie.
Run up to see Bela, run down to see if the lake was filling up,
running over to Stefan, "Are we ready to shoot?"
It was paralleling the scene
and that gave it an extra energy that was appealing.
Fantastic!
Paul, where's the octopus motor?
CZAPSKY: I knew that for the night scene at Griffith Park,
that I needed the flashlights, I needed the headlights.
Plus, there was a financial battle. I knew I wanted to do it,
and production's resisting, they don't want to buy the batteries.
And I actually had some of the batteries, I just needed more.
They don't want to put the bigger shocks,
because they were actually going practical cars that were driven.
I had them made so you could actually drive the cars down the streets.
But they don't want to pay the money
to beef up the suspension on these old cars.
That's one of the major fights I had.
They're telling you that, "No. You can't do it that way.
"It's not worth it to us." And it finally came together.
They finally gave up, I got the batteries, I got the bulbs.
And it's worth fighting for, 'cause it came out this way.
But if you didn't have those lights in those cars up on top,
if you didn't have the flashlights, it wouldn't look this way.
It would look different. So it's interesting to me
that it actually... I don't know,
maybe that carries over into other things, painting and stuff,
where you use a certain watercolor, a certain pencil or this kind of stuff,
it comes out that way.
But this very much came out the way it did because of the instruments.
...so when you get in there and fight with him, shake his legs around.
Looks like he's killin' ya. Okay.
(SIGHS)
You know I turned down Frankenstein?
What?
BURTON: A little bit of Martin's confession about Frankenstein.
I thought that was very... Again, it's very economical,
but it shows you that aspect of his character.
And the regret that, perhaps, maybe...
I think that's the worst thing, when people,
when they have a sense of regret.
It sets you on a course of unhappiness, really.
Rather than going,
"Well, I let that one go away," and moving on,
some people get haunted by that sense of regret,
and then they never really recover from it.
KARASZEWSKI: As we were researching the movie,
we started compiling lists and lists
of just wacky characteristics and attributes of all the people.
And so we started calling these our fun fact sheets.
So you look at Criswell's fun fact sheet, and it would say,
"Bought a Cadillac from Mae West for $1."
ALEXANDER: And then we were just looking
for a little more content to the scene,
and we were going down our lists of fun facts,
and we saw that Lugosi had turned down the part of Frankenstein,
which ties into his whole rivalry with Boris Karloff,
who then subsequently took the part and became a bigger star.
KARASZEWSKI: Right, it was just a thing on our sheet.
We'd actually tried to work it in several times in the movie earlier.
But we just could never find a place.
ALEXANDER: We never intended to put it here.
And then suddenly, it just seemed like inspiration.
"Wait a minute, he's about to step his foot into this freezing cold water
"at 3:00 in the morning, and he says,
"'You know, I could have been Frankenstein.""
Basically saying, "My whole life could have been different.
"And I wouldn't be standing here right now
"with you clowns at 4:00 in the morning."
Which is the subtext.
It suddenly became one of our best scenes in the movie.
And it just came out of us saying, "All right, what can Lugosi talk about?
"Hey, wait a minute."
Bela,
I wanna thank you again for last night.
That's fine, Eddie. All in the line of duty.
No, no, I want you to know how much I appreciate all you've done for me.
A great man like yourself
shouldn't have to be wandering through the muck at 4:00 am.
KARASZEWSKI: The script is oddly laid out,
because you have this emotional bonding with Ed and Bela,
and then two-thirds of the way through the film, he dies.
But the film goes on.
But it goes on in his spirit, in his memory, and it's the whole...
That was always the interesting thing about the whole
Plan 9 from Outer Space, is that it went on well after he left us.
So that's part of the structure of the movie,
and of that part of the story.
All right, kids, let's knock 'em dead.
My dear Professor Strowski,
twenty years ago I was banned from my homeland.
I was classed as a madman, a charlatan.
KARASZEWSKI: Ed Wood was very, very proud
of that script, of that little speech.
He wrote it for Bela,
because Bela had experienced similar things
about wanting to return to his homeland.
ALEXANDER: He talks about wanting to go back to Hungary,
but being afraid they might throw him in the Gulag.
So Ed writes a speech for him about, "Home? I have no home."
KARASZEWSKI: And also, you can also look at it
as perhaps Lugosi talking about Hollywood, in a sense,
that he has no home, that he's got no place to exist.
He's not welcome really in the studios,
he doesn't really fit in with Ed and his gang either.
He is just a person who doesn't really belong anywhere.
He's a monster.
Hunted.
Despised.
Living like an animal.
The jungle is my home.
LANDAU: Lugosi thought of himself as a leading man.
He was, in Budapest, a member of the National Theater.
He would sit with Molnar, who wrote Liliom, which he played originally.
He played Hamlet, he saw himself as a romantic leading man.
Dracula, when it was first done in 1927 on Broadway,
was an enormous success, and he was considered a very romantic character.
The Dracula legend wasn't that well known.
Nosferatu had been made, a silent film,
but women were literally fainting
watching this man in that role.
I think they were orgasmic, literally.
So they went to the theater a lot in those days.
And he wasn't supposed to do the movie.
Lon Chaney was supposed to do the movie, and Lon Chaney died suddenly.
And I can hear the conversation,
"Hey, why don't we get the guy who did it in New York?" "Yeah."
He was born in Transylvania, so it was a perfect marriage.
After that, he didn't want to be relegated to that.
He was offered the Monster in Frankenstein,
as the picture indicates, and passed on it.
He thought it wasn't romantic.
And he saw himself really as a leading man.
And his accent got in his way.
The English in Hollywood at that time, it was a big British colony,
and you had Basil Rathbone, and Ronald Colman.
So Karloff was incredibly accepted, you know.
(IN A MOCK BRITISH ACCENT) After all, he spoke very well.
(IN A NORMAL VOICE) And his career usurped Lugosi's.
The accent relegated him to playing certain kinds of roles.
KARASZEWSKI: This scene here features the organ work of Korla Pandit.
Korla was a contemporary of Ed's at the time.
He had his own television show,
sort of like an Indian Liberace.
And he was a bit of a Los Angeles celebrity at the time
and basically experienced a little bit of a resurgence
at the time we were shooting this movie.
There was a magazine called Cult Movies,
that would always have an article about Ed Wood or about Lugosi,
for some reason, also an article about Korla Pandit.
ALEXANDER: My friend Brian was friends with this guy, Joey Cheesy,
who was doing shows with Korla at Kelbo's Polynesian restaurant.
And so they had somebody who had his phone number.
And so we were able to track down Korla,
and it was a nice little bit of PR for him.
KARASZEWSKI: Right.
ALEXANDER: Now that's a disgusting shot.
KARASZEWSKI: Ed really did lose his pearlies in the war.
He was battling the Japanese
and someone put the butt of a rifle into his face.
Dolores!
ALEXANDER: Yeah, this is probably the only time
he's confronted about the quality of his work.
- She's not a bad lady. - KARASZEWSKI: I wouldn't say
it's the only place 'cause he says, "My next one will be better."
There's a lot of times where people throw it at him.
It's the only time where he seems to be affected by it a little bit.
He, in a sense, realizes that he's depressed now.
Strangely enough, there were a lot more moments like this
in the script where Ed had self-doubt
and questioned whether what he was doing was right.
I think Johnny and Tim grew to love Ed so much
that it made them feel uncomfortable to give Ed those moments.
ALEXANDER: Yeah, it almost made them feel like
they were hitting him below the belt.
I'd say a high percentage of the deleted scenes involve
Ed in low points.
If you sit down and you watch all the deleted scenes back to back,
you might get depressed.
KARASZEWSKI: The reasoning is, I think, probably, one, pacing,
but two, that I think they just fell in love with Ed
and they didn't wanna see Ed be down.
It's happened to us on a number of these biographies,
that the filmmakers or the actors just love the character so much
that the parts of their character that you want to turn away from,
they don't wanna embrace, they just wanna love this guy.
I would say that it's generally okay.
Where the movie gets hurt by it is that
there's a section in the film where it becomes just backers parties.
It's just Ed raising money.
And that was a problem with the script and with the film, was that
there's a section where there's a little too much fundraising going on.
And I think that we inserted a couple of scenes in there
where Ed was spinning out of control and they wound up being deleted.
KARASZEWSKI: It's basically based on a true story.
Ed went to Bela once and Bela wanted to commit suicide
and tried to talk him into doing it, basically doing a double suicide.
There was also, in print, the legend thing
where the Medveds had misinterpreted
a drug that Bela had been drinking
and actually printed that he drank formaldehyde.
And as it becomes one of those things that shows up in so many things,
that we wound up actually having Bela say he was drinking formaldehyde
even though I don't think the real Bela Lugosi ever did.
We used it as a way
of both guys pushing each other a little bit and Bela...
You can interpret it as Bela realizing that he is a dead man already.
And so he's saying, might as well embalm him right now.
LANDAU: He's a relic.
He's a bit of a dinosaur at that time.
The fact that he never drove was an interesting thing as well.
Here was a guy who lives in a town and barely can...
Particularly in those days, when there were big spaces between
Brentwood and Westwood and Beverly Hills.
Culver City was way the hell out there,
and Malibu was a million miles away.
And when he was wealthy, he could be driven.
And that's why, towards the end, the very end of his life,
he lived off of Hollywood Boulevard near a liquor store.
We don't have that in the movie, we have a little house.
If you see the movie, we duplicated a house,
in the sense that the doors are in a slightly different place.
You've seen the original film, where he picks the flower,
well, that was not his house, that was the wrestler's house.
But we made it his house.
There were a couple of licenses, you know.
As a matter of fact, I did visit all of...
Well, I'm not sure if they were all,
but what I expect to be true, all of the houses that Lugosi lived in.
And I saw the decline and I saw the sadness of that.
You look like that Dracula guy.
My name is Bela Lugosi
and I wish to commit myself.
KARASZEWSKI: Most people just think of Bela as Dracula.
They don't really know about his struggle with addiction.
And maybe they do now, because of this film.
Particularly at the time, they didn't.
But Bela is probably the first celebrity to use
going into rehab as a career press release situation
where he literally tried to get people to write stories about him,
because he was going through rehabilitation.
ALEXANDER: There are clippings. He treated it as a career move.
"Hey, I'm on the front page."
KARASZEWSKI: The following scene is that he invited all this press over to...
ALEXANDER: We loved this concept that he was the celebrity to invent rehab
and we had a line about that.
But it made Martin very uncomfortable.
The only time he ever tried changing anything we ever wrote was
he said the word "rehab" wasn't an expression in the '50s.
We were like, "What do you say?
"'First celebrity to ever check into rehabilitation?"
That doesn't sound like anything.
So we had this little jovial argument about it
and then at the end of the day,
he realized he had to say some version of the line, so he said,
"First celebrity to ever check into rehab..." (COUGHING)
And then he started coughing, so he wouldn't have to finish the word.
KARASZEWSKI: He added the cough instead of just using the slang.
What are you, an angora wholesaler?
No.
I'm in pictures.
ALEXANDER: If there's one beat that's just completely made up
and has no basis in anything,
it is this scene, where he meets Kathy,
where we just completely lied and just said that
she's got a father staying in the same hospital.
And she's knitting him booties
because my grandmother always used to knit us booties.
And it's just us taking a bunch of nonsense
and crafting a scene around it.
But it gave her a nice introduction and it gave her an empathy for Ed,
meeting him under the same circumstances.
I remember joking with Kathy, she's like,
"Where did you read that? I wasn't in a hospital,
"I wasn't knitting booties, I don't even know how to knit."
I was like, "Sorry, Kathy."
KARASZEWSKI: Basically, it came at a low moment for Ed
where he's taking care of his friend Bela
and then this woman comes in.
And they're very, very soft scenes, they're the softest scenes in the movie.
Where it's just really gentle and they're just talking about things.
And it allows her entrance to be one of just mellow understanding.
And so when she knits something for Bela,
you can tell in Ed's eyes that,
"Oh, my God, this is the woman for me.
"This is the woman who has kindness in her soul."
Eddie, why did you chase them?
LANDAU: Lugosi was the first one who publicly
went into a rehabilitation place
and publicly announced it.
There's a shot that I used as a guide for that.
And if you look at that picture, he's in a hospital
and the press is crowded around him
and he looks shriveled and small.
And I did that.
I looked teeny.
I wanted to look as if all the juice had oozed out of him.
He didn't live too long after that.
He became clean,
but sometimes that happens
when you've become dependent on something
and your body gets used to it.
I think sometimes
alcoholics who stop drinking sometimes have heart attacks.
People who stop smoking quickly sometimes get sick.
No, I'm fine. How's your father?
ALEXANDER: We shot a lot of this movie in real Ed Wood locations,
the same places where he would've hung out
and a lot of the movie was right off of Hollywood Boulevard.
And so one day, we're shooting the sequence on Hollywood Boulevard
where Ed runs into Musso and Frank's,
and they're prepping the scene,
and suddenly this PA comes running up to me saying,
"Hey, Scott, there's this lady over there who said she's married to Ed Wood."
I was like, "What?"
"And then she just walked away." "What?"
So I ran after her, I chased her down,
"Kathy! Kathy! Wait!"
I grabbed her, I'm like, "Come here, come to the set."
She's like, "I don't wanna bother anyone, that's okay."
I'm like, "Come, Kathy. For God's sake. Here, let me carry your stuff."
So, I walk her to the set and she says,
"I would love to meet Johnny Depp. Is Johnny Depp here today?"
I'm like, "Yeah, of course you can meet him. Come on, come on."
"What are you doing?" "We're shooting this scene."
She's like, "I'm so excited. What is he doing here?"
And then I suddenly realize, "Oh, my God."
Then I remembered that we're about to shoot the scene
where he runs into Musso and Frank's
and he's coming off the set of Plan 9 in drag,
but his makeup's wiped all over, his lipstick is smudged on his cheeks,
his wig is askew.
He looks like a drag queen who's been beat up in a back alley.
And she's on her toes,
hopping up and down outside the trailer,
"When is Johnny coming out? When is Johnny coming out?"
And I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, this is gonna be a disaster.
"This is her introduction to our movie, seeing this image."
And finally, she's like, "Okay, okay."
And the door opens and Johnny steps out.
He couldn't have looked worse at this moment.
And she looks up into his eyes and says,
"He looks just like my Eddie."
LANDAU: "Just like Ed." That put everyone at ease.
And she gave Johnny Ed Wood's wallet.
And in it was a little skinny address book
with a lot of the names who were in this movie.
It has Lugosi's name, number, you know.
The old numbers with H-O, Hollywood something, something,
before it became all numerical.
Kathy...
BURTON: The thing that I got from meeting
Kathy Wood and hearing her voice
was almost a sweetness, a painful, sad sweetness.
And somebody who really did seem like she supported him.
And that's a tough thing to do and I thought that
Patricia did a very good job.
It's a quick moment, but one of my favorite moments is
when they get stranded in the spook house.
And he tells his story and then she just takes a beat
and then just says okay.
And there's a quality in her voice which almost makes me cry every time.
And that, to me, was the essence of what she did,
just being very simple and sweet and accepting.
And that's something that I find is very difficult to do
and I really thought that she nailed that part of it.
Okay.
Okay?
Okay.
- (ELECTRICITY BUZZES) - (SCREAMING CONTINUES)
You see, we thought that Mr. Lugosi was insured through his union.
LANDAU: I got together with Colleen to discuss the costumes.
And one of the things I said was, "This takes place in the '50s,
"but he wasn't doing very well.
"And therefore, he couldn't update his wardrobe.
"When he had money, it was in the '30s and '40s.
"And these clothes should look like that. He should look out of date."
ATWOOD: It was all about the one suit and the little cape and the hat,
and it was very simple,
and once you got it right, it was a good thing to stick to.
He was pretty much in the same thing the whole movie,
as a lot of old people are.
They don't tend to change clothes
as much as people do nowadays.
And, uh, the tests came back fine.
Come on, let's get up.
ATWOOD: He was in a state of poverty, but he had a lot of dignity.
So, the combination was
to go with a European gentleman dignity side
of who that man was.
And not have him be like a bum or something like that.
That didn't make sense and it certainly was something that...
It's a cliché to make him too much of a bum when he's...
Just because he doesn't have money and stuff,
he still has his style and his class that he always had.
This is so exciting. (CHUCKLES)
Another production.
Isn't it?
So, Eddie, shouldn't we have a sound crew?
ALEXANDER: This sequence is a real example of us
moving things around
in real life chronology to make a dramatic point.
In real life, Ed was always shooting pieces of film
and trying to raise money off them.
And in real life, he went and shot some promo footage of Lugosi
and then was trying to hustle people with it.
And we thought it would be more touching
to have Ed shooting this piece of film just to make Lugosi happy,
just for Bela to have the experience of starring in one more movie,
even though if you look around, there's no crew, there is no movie.
It's just Ed and a roll of film.
When we ordered the scenes,
we put the scene right after they check out of the hospital
just so it would have an impact.
I was calling to see if you'd like to attend
the world premiere of my new movie, Bride Of The Monster.
Didn't you just make one called Bride Of The Atom?
Yes, it's the same film.
But the distributor wanted a punchier title.
Come on, it's gonna be a big event,
Bela, Tor and Cris are coming. You'll have fun!
TOR: Uhh! I can't see.
These contact lenses are hurting.
My eyes are killin' me.
Don't worry. We're almost there.
(NERVOUS CHUCKLE)
(NERVOUS CHUCKLE) Hi.
KARASZEWSKI: We did try to stay as close to the truth as possible.
At one point, we looked at each other and we said,
"Wouldn't it be a better third act
"if Glen or Glenda is the third act of the movie
"as opposed to Plan 9 from Outer Space?"
We just said, as an emotional growth,
if it's about this guy who makes these two monster movies
and they don't really work out,
and then he makes a decision, "I've got to tell my own story.
"I've got to tell the story from my heart."
And he goes off and makes this personal vision.
We thought that would make probably a better dramatic arc for the film,
but we felt we couldn't play with the facts that much
and so we decided to keep
Glen or Glenda as the first film that he made.
ALEXANDER: We really obsessed over trying to
stick to the facts as much as possible.
Yeah, some things got omitted and some people got omitted,
but in terms of what you see onscreen, we really tried to be truthful.
Also trying to play it for laughs whenever possible.
Again, then the dilemma became,
"Well, if Ed Wood's almost most genre-bound movie,
"Plan 9 from Outer Space is the third act,
"how do you make it emotionally satisfying?"
We had this whole idea
of him trying to continue his life and his work without Lugosi.
And then him having this epiphany
that this'll be the movie he's remembered for
and you get this ridiculous, absurd ending
where he has transcended, and he knows he's made his mark.
The post-modern joke is
he doesn't know he's made it for the wrong reason.
(RATTLING)
Hey, come on! Let's split!
- Taxi! - (TIRES SCREECH)
Stop!
CRISWELL: Get in! Come on! Go on, get in!
Now, that was a premiere.
CZAPSKY: What's interesting about that is,
I call it the limo, I got a track on the ground.
It's not a Steadicam shot, it's actually a dolly shot.
I got a track and I bent the track. It's a really wide one
and I made it welded together
so the actors don't have to walk on a track,
but I actually had the track bent on a curve.
I had a really talented grip, Barry Lopez, who measured it out.
He sent it to a pipe-bending place.
So it had this curve where it ends up
into this theatrical thing with the proscenium.
And the reason I did that was
I didn't want it to feel like a Steadicam shot.
I wanted it to be more like a classic thing.
Technically, I had never seen that done before. I did it with the grips,
'cause they had these two pieces of pipe,
and usually when they lay them down,
they usually have some cross members that hold them.
But these two pipes floated and they just changed their shape
on a sync-dialogue scene, they floated. At first, the guy got there,
there was a little bit of a problem. It started to squeak. (CHUCKLES)
But they got them to keep quiet by spraying them.
"The jungle is my home."
BURTON: Bela's final speech. We wanted
to do a little bit of a dramatic move.
It's obviously a move that Ed Wood wouldn't have done.
But I remember talking with Stefan, the cameraman,
and we would just try to find the right balance of it.
So it wasn't too...
If we moved the camera, we didn't wanna make it too showy
because that would have just brought it ahead to something
and made it another comment that it didn't need to make.
So I probably moved the camera a little bit less,
but still making it a movie and doing a little bit of it.
But it was always a weird balance of it.
Again, nothing so overly jolting and modern and dramatic,
just more of an emotional underpinning
as opposed to anything too quick and strong.
Wood Productions.
BURTON: We've been seeing Bela die so many times that it just...
We start him in a coffin and we end him in a coffin.
So we felt like it wasn't over sentimental,
it wasn't over dramatized, it's like real death.
When somebody's ill or something,
they're still there and then, just one day, they're gone.
And that, to me, was more real.
We're not sitting there watching Bela die or Ed's not there,
which he wasn't, so we just felt like it was both realistic in that sense,
which didn't make it over sentimental.
But I felt the funeral had the right sentimental quality to it.
To see him in his...
Seeing Dracula being buried one final time,
I thought, was very powerful.
And picking that kind of location,
Baldwin Hills, with the oil tanker,
just had a weird, real quality to it
that was important in not making it over sentimental as well.
ALEXANDER: The movie is called Ed Wood,
but it almost works as a biopic of Lugosi, too,
because he is up there with Bogart and Monroe as icons.
But he probably only starred in two or three major studio movies.
His career hit the skids so fast after Dracula, it's really bizarre.
Where he ended up making movies
for these low-budget companies like Monogram and PRC
and just as low-end as they could come.
And for some reason,
Universal just didn't wanna exploit him in the role of Dracula.
He only played Dracula twice in his life onscreen.
He played it in Dracula and he played it
in Abbott, Costello Meet Frankenstein, oddly enough.
And other than that, he was really slumming
in third and fourth-billed supporting parts
or working for skid row studios.
And so we felt that it was such a great story
how someone so famous and talented can just be thrown away
and then he's just this old man wondering what the hell happened.
Also, on the Lugosi front,
when we started working on this treatment,
and then we had this idea that Tim Burton might wanna direct it,
we really started to focus on this relationship between the two men
because it reminded us a lot of Tim's relationship with Vincent Price.
And in terms of you make movies about what you know,
Tim had been obsessed with Vincent Price as a little boy
and gotten to meet him real late in the actor's life,
and gotten to work with him and it was such a thrill for Tim.
And I can't over stress the parallels,
but Ed had loved Dracula as a little boy
and then he got to meet Lugosi at the end of his life
and got to give him work when nobody else would give him work,
and it meant so much to Ed,
and Tim's relationship with Vincent Price meant so much to him.
So we knew that Tim would appreciate this
and use it as a good emotional core for the movie.
KARASZEWSKI: Right, I think if there is a universal element to this movie,
if you take the Hollywood stuff out of it,
I think it is a movie about what happens when you meet your hero,
what happens when you meet that guy
that you worshiped when you were a kid
and then, all of a sudden, you become friends with your hero.
I think that's what this movie winds up being about.
BURTON: In my dealings with Vincent,
I never heard him say anything bad about anybody,
which was amazing to me.
I think that's part of the reason why I liked him so much
and he was such a positive influence on me is that
here, you've met somebody who's been through all this stuff,
and he's still interested in things, still positive,
still seems like he loves it, enjoys it,
whether he's doing a play, a movie,
or a Shrunken Head Apple Kit commercial.
And I found that very amazing and it's something I hope to retain.
It's something I actually have more of a problem with,
even at my stage,
to keep that kind of positive thing.
So he was actually more like Ed Wood than he was Bela,
in that way, probably.
I think it's like a survival technique.
I think you either become a complete jerk,
or you maintain a certain joy of what you're doing
and acceptance of what you're doing. It's a mixture of acceptance
because with that, you have the, "Everything is interesting."
And so I always felt like,
"Wow, that's a really great way to be, if you can be that way."
This is the ultimate Ed Wood movie. No compromises.
Oh, my.
- Eddie, look at this. - Hmm?
What?
Poor girl's out of a job.
I brought the script. You'll be portraying the ghoul's wife.
BURTON: I met Vampira, and then I know Lisa had lunch with her.
And I think she showed her
her underwear collection or things like that, I don't know.
It sounded like an interesting lunch.
I met her and got some information,
but I realized that the best way to deal with all of the people was...
Because, again, everybody, as time has gone on,
has dug in to their perspective of the way things were.
And, since, again, that's not really what the film was about,
because then you'd have to just do the Vampira story,
or you'd have to do the Paul Marco story,
or you'd have to do the Conrad Brooks story,
because each one would tell it in a completely different way.
So, again,
Rashomon revisited. We couldn't do...
So I realized it was more important to just get a vibe of it
and then leave it because I just felt like,
overall, I was trying to be respectful of all the people, 'cause I liked them all.
There's not a character in there
that I don't feel for, on some level, and feel close to, to some degree.
So I always felt like we were trying to be,
if not necessarily 100% accurate, at least close-ish, in a way,
in terms of the feel of it.
Cover your face with this.
Oh. Now I can see it.
I want to suck your blood.
I want to suck your blood!
Let's hear you call Boris Karloff a cocksucker.
- (SNICKERS) - Shh!
We want these Baptists to like us. Please.
Alleluia
Brothers and sisters,
we reach now in the service a joyous point
because we are going to bear witness to the baptism of our new members.
(WHISPERING) Why couldn't we do this in the church?
BURTON: Well, that's the great thing,
to see this group, which you basically think of at night, dark clothing, black.
It was great to be out in the day
in Southern California, poolside, white-on-white,
and then Bill Murray with his white skin,
all these white-skinned characters,
they look like weird angels, like Ed's angels.
One of my favorite shots was when you're going up in the pews
and then you come up on them
and then outside, especially Bill,
he's got that glowing quality that's so amazing. (CHUCKLING)
But that was supposedly true,
that whole baptism thing in the pool and all of that,
so that seems to have a pretty good consensus
that some form or another happened. Anything to get money.
How do you do it? How do you get all your friends to get baptized
just so you can make a monster movie?
It's not a monster movie.
- It's a supernatural thriller. - Come to Jesus, brother!
(SIGHS)
I can't believe this.
BURTON: (CHUCKLING) In this world of lack of success,
she was more successful
than any of them, so seemed to resist it,
and you got the sense that she was resisting it.
But being an outcast herself, the outcast club,
you do find each other, whether you want to or not.
There is a reason that all of these people
in some form or another, were linked to each other.
And I do believe that.
Whether they like it or not,
there's something there that is real and meaningful
and karmic and fate, to some degree.
And you knew it from watching Plan 9. You'd see this group of people
and they were linked somehow. You didn't know... It was great casting,
but on a different level.
All right. And, action!
(CAMERA WHIRRING)
KARASZEWSKI: What's funny about Paul and Connie
is that, in this one film,
they're both police officers.
And they both have made a lifetime obsession
talking to fan magazines and being a part of the Ed Wood entourage.
But the way I understand it, is that in my opinion,
I'm not sure the two of them actually get along that well.
So they're rarely
even at the same sci-fi conventions or anything like this.
But in terms of the script, we just made them Paul and Connie,
these two guys who always follow Ed around.
And so one of the funny things about the movie,
is that it cemented these guys as partners
even though they were never partners
and I don't think they have a great deal of fondness for each other.
Show a little taste!
ED: See? No talking. Isn't he good?
- Cue Dr. Tom. - Now?
Yes, now. Lurk him.
Be sure and keep your face covered.
KARASZEWSKI: A lot of this crewing on a low-budget movie stuff
was based upon experiences I had
working on low-budget slasher movies in the early '80s.
And when I got my job,
I was so excited to be working on a 35mm film
and I was getting $15 a day for a 16-hour day and it was great.
And when you work on these kinds of movies,
everyone is there because they wanna be there,
because they're excited about the experience,
and for a lot of them, it's their first time,
and it really is the joy of moviemaking.
And this movie was so low-budget that we couldn't afford a boom mic,
so we just had a regular microphone taped to a hockey stick
and I would stand on a garbage pail and I'm looking around me, thinking,
"I'm in the big-time now." And it was that joy and that passion
that we were trying to communicate in these scenes
showing Ed and his gang making a movie,
because it's real. It's real for them.
And cut! Print. We're moving on.
- That was perfect. - Perfect? Mr. Wood,
do you know anything about the art of film production?
Well, I like to think so.
That cardboard headstone tipped over.
This graveyard is obviously phony.
Nobody will ever notice that.
Film making is not about the tiny details. It's about the big picture.
BURTON: It had such a delusional quality to it.
You understand that when you make a film
because you get very passionate about it, very excited about it.
And you think you're making the best movie in the world.
You get into that weird energy
and you could see how he deluded himself
in his writings, in his letters and all,
and I find that quite beautiful and realistic, somehow.
It's something that, I think,
anybody who makes films can somewhat understand.
That kind of delusional quality does help you through the film industry
because it's pretty harsh,
and so you try to watch what's real, what's delusional,
but it's very difficult, and it is somewhat of a protective mechanism
especially since his life seemed to be pretty intense.
So there did seem to be a pretty big gap between those things,
but that's what I thought was really amazing about it, too.
I completely relate to the delusional aspects of it.
All right, everybody. Let's get set up for scene 112.
Move the crypt stage left, and let's get Tor's make-up effect ready.
Mr. Wood!
BURTON: What I felt good about the book
was it was so contradictory.
And I thought it was a very interesting way that it was
a snippet from this person, and a snippet from that person,
and about similar events and it pieced it together in a...
And, again, what I thought was the most realistic...
'Cause memory, I find, is a very odd thing.
The further away it gets, the more redefined it gets,
the more romanticized it gets.
Time has a way of changing,
especially when there is heavy drinking involved,
it seems to change even more.
So we just felt that it was in the spirit
to give the little bits of information,
but not treat it in the same...
Most biographies, it's like straight biographies,
"This happened here, and then this happened,
"and that happened, and in 1954, Ed did this..."
We just felt like it coming through more
in weird asides even, sometimes,
was better and more appropriate
to the overall feeling of the true nature of memory
and how people remember something, or how people tell something, even.
- Excuse me, sir? - Yes?
ALEXANDER: This is the one scene in the movie
that's basically complete baloney from start to finish.
We knew that Ed was a fan of Orson Welles,
and I've always been a huge Welles fan myself.
It was so fascinating that at this point in the mid-'50s,
the two were basically in the same career slump.
And so we thought it would be so wonderful
if the worst director of all time and the best director of all time
met in a bar, had a drink and commiserated.
And so we just made it up and we slipped it into the script,
and we hoped nobody would notice.
To be fair to the Heston fans,
we have a misstatement in the movie,
where Welles makes a crack
to the effect that, "Universal's forcing me
"to have Charlton Heston play a Mexican."
It's a good laugh. It's a cheap laugh.
In truth, let's be fair here,
Charlton Heston is the one who got Orson Welles the job.
So, okay, we won't get sued now.
Ah, Mr. Welles. Is it all worth it?
BURTON: I think in this material,
you can't really be too accurate,
because, again, you're not dealing with a biography of somebody
who's so well known that everybody knows.
These are not films that everybody has seen,
or everybody knows.
It's just more of a rarefied group of people
and, again, I think I always felt, for me,
the delusional aspects of it were always the savior
to it having to be any one way or another.
(CHUCKLING) And that's perhaps my own delusional viewpoints
put upon that as well.
- But it's our money. - And you're gonna make a bundle
but only if you shut up and let me do things my way.
All right, gang.
BURTON: I love this shot of his enthusiasm,
cutting around to the crew barely moving. (CHUCKLING)
So we did the juxtaposition of Andy Hardy,
and a little bit of reality as well.
Action.
BURTON: The recreations are hard because, again,
you're actually doing something that is iconic,
and I think that's quite difficult to do, but it was fun to do,
and when it captured it,
it was beautiful to see Tor crawling out of the grave.
Those were really accurate.
And then, Bill...
Some things were a little different then, I think,
but Bill got just his scene with the Plan 9.
All of that was very much fun to do, that was part of the energy of it.
- What plan will you follow now? - Plan 9.
Plan 9? Ah, yes.
Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead.
Long-distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary glands
of the recent dead.
You know, maybe you guys were right. "Plan 9" is a good title.
BURTON: And also, there is a little bit of mystique
with the whole Ed Wood mythology.
And I like keeping it weirdly from his point of view,
and his point of view all the way up until the end was that of being positive.
So that it was like a twisted Andy Hardy movie
was something that I enjoyed about it,
because that did seem to be some aspect of his personality.
And because the focus,
or part focus, was his relationship with Bela,
we just decided, "Well, obviously, Bela dies early,"
not early, he doesn't die at the end of the film, but he lives on,
so we felt like this was an interesting juncture to end it at,
because it was his most famous film,
and to keep the whole weirdly positive nature to it,
from his point of view.
And this felt like that was right.
It didn't make it a hardcore, real biography,
where you see every...
Beginning, middle and death.
It seemed in the spirit of the book, it seemed in the spirit of his character,
and, like I said, the weird, delusional, but positive nature to him.
Greetings, my friend.
We are all interested in the future
for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.
And remember, my friend,
future events such as these will affect you in the future.
(EXPLOSIONS)
ALEXANDER: I think with both Larry Flynt and Ed Wood,
we showed people that you can...
There are lots of stories
and interesting ideas behind people who are struggling in the margins.
And so that allowed Behind the Music to realize
they can get a full hour out
of Thin Lizzy or Bad Company or whatever. (LAUGHING)
It isn't just those 10 great bands that have a story.
There's a lot of bands out there that aren't as successful
but have a completely fascinating history.
All of these guys are great Americana stories,
'cause as Americans, we are a country of people
who can pull themselves up by their bootstraps
and start out poor and become rich.
Whatever you wanna make of your life, you can do it in this place.
That's what these movies are about.
They're just about guys who did it in really freaky ways.
What's great with these anti-great-man biopics
is they're full of conflict, and as a screenwriter,
you wanna have as much conflict with your lead character as possible.
And the conflict is that these characters are wrong.
They're wrong for the entire movie,
but they've got a burning will to prove themselves right.
And so they're in conflict with all the rational people in society.
Who's gonna pick a fight with Gandhi? He's right.
Whatever, he's fucking Gandhi.
KARASZEWSKI: Well, it isn't so much that because
there were a lot of people who picked fights with Gandhi.
ALEXANDER: All right, bad example.
KARASZEWSKI: It's that those movies let the audience off the hook.
ALEXANDER: Who's gonna pick a fight with Alexander Graham Bell?
KARASZEWSKI: That when you're watching great-man movies,
you know how history has treated them,
and so, of course you're on the side of Gandhi.
You're always gonna be on the side of Gandhi.
But you're not necessarily gonna be on the side of Ed Wood.
You're not necessarily gonna be on the side of Larry Flynt.
You're not gonna be on the side of Andy Kaufman.
ALEXANDER: It's fun if you can manipulate the audience enough
that by the end of the film,
they're rooting for Ed Wood to make a bad movie.
KARASZEWSKI: Right.
Which is really the work of this film. That was what our job was.
It's that by the end of the movie, you should be totally rooting for Ed
to not have his exterior shots match.
When those Baptists say, "Hey, it's daytime, " "No, it's nighttime."
It's like, "Leave Ed alone."
ALEXANDER: Tim compared Ed's work a bit to folk art,
just saying it's primitivism.
No one is saying it's necessarily good, but isn't it just as valid
as somebody with the talent of Van Gogh?
Why not?
NARRATOR: The grief of his wife's death
became greater and greater agony.
KARASZEWSKI: What's interesting is when you watch our movie
and then watch the Ed Wood films,
our movie really affects the Ed Wood films themselves,
where if you really know all the different stories behind it,
and you know all the people,
it's much harder to laugh at the Ed Wood films
after seeing this movie,
because this movie... Particularly Glen or Glenda,
which really now, once you know the true stories, really affects you.
It really feels like a piece of personal film making,
where you really just feel that this guy is putting his soul onto film.
NARRATOR: ...the old man left that home...
BURTON: I think most people have some delusion in their life.
I think you have it more when you're making a film,
because you have to be.
Because in a weird way, at least I find it painful.
So, unless I'm delusional, I probably wouldn't do it,
because it's just too painful
and you know too much of the problems you're going to have.
So, you cut that off and get this Ed Wood-like enthusiasm
to get you up to doing the project,
and then through the project and then at the end of the project.
And as a filmmaker, you have to feel like
you're making the best movie in the world,
because if you're not,
then you're not giving it the passion it deserves and needs.
But that can be a problem
because you may not be making the greatest movie,
and you do get caught up in a drug-like enthusiasm,
and it is kind of a natural drug, making something, making a movie.
It's kind of a natural high that you do get caught up in,
and that's a great thing about it.
But it can also be a delusional thing, it can be not accurate.
(THUNDERCLAP)
KARASZEWSKI: Those codas were not initially part of the film.
They were not in the original script.
It wasn't until actually, I think, Tim showed the movie to some people.
And what happens whenever you do these true life stories,
when the movie ends, the first thing people do
when they come up to you, they say,
"Wow, did those people really exist? What happened to them?"
ALEXANDER: "Is Lugosi a real person?"
KARASZEWSKI: And so basically we were instructed
by Tim towards the last minute.
ALEXANDER: Wasn't it after that one test screening?
KARASZEWSKI: Yeah, I think it was after one test screening.
ALEXANDER: It was just thrown together.
We had, like, a day to do it.
KARASZEWSKI: "Can you tell us what happened to these people?"
'Cause initially the movie ended on Jeffrey Jones.
We wrote a coda to the first scene where he talks about Ed Wood
in terms of those horror terms and he goes back into the casket.
- The shot is still in there. - ALEXANDER: And he says,
"A man, a life, can you prove it didn't happen?"
Then he goes back in the coffin and if you watch the movie carefully,
he is talking, but you don't hear what he's saying.
(SLOW DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
I love the way that the music swells
and the emotions swell at the very end where...
Actually, Howard Shore had to go back in
and redo the closing cue to extend it for those closing credits.
And there's this real majesty to it as they drive away
and the camera goes up and everything swells
so beautifully, and then it goes into the "whatever happened to" stuff.
- It's really nice. - KARASZEWSKI: It's more emotional,
as opposed to giving a tip of the hat to the Ed Wood style of film making.
It recognizes that you've grown to really care about these characters.
And also, a lot of their stories are funny.
These people continue having odd lives
20 years after they worked with Ed.
BURTON: We all agreed on, that it was nice to...
Since we wanted to end it on this weird positive note,
again, stemming from our take on how he felt about himself
and, again, the denial or the hope or whatever,
is to put that on there,
just as a slight back-to-reality.
But even with that, I still wanted to keep it positive.
So, musically and all, it had a bittersweet quality.
But to me, it just brought it around to the full package,
where you get still the positive side of it,
the uplifting side of it,
but tempered with a little bit of the reality.
And they wrote it with enough humor
that it brought it back around to the full picture, to me, somehow.