The Ghost with the Most is back — and so is his creator, his handler, his bedfellow in crooked imagination, Tim Burton. Topping the box office for a third consecutive weekend, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has quickly become the director’s biggest hit in nearly 15 years. Whether it also qualifies as a return to form for Hollywood’s most gothically inclined fabulist is another matter. While any amount of macabre (and practically achieved) mischief appears to be cause for celebration in the minds of some loyal and lapsed Burton fans, this very belated legacy sequel plays less like a glorious resurrection of the original’s spirit than a dispiriting desecration of its grave. It stinks worse than a corpse left to molder in the attic.
Still, you can feel (as this writer does) that the director has hit a new creative low, and still acknowledge that his latest suffers most by unflattering comparison — not just to its 1988 predecessor, but to the entire magic run of Burton’s early years (the films against which nearly all of his 21st-century output has been inevitably, if perhaps unfairly, judged). In fact, this week marks the 30th anniversary of one of his best movies, a showbiz biopic whose luminous celluloid imagery and soulful sincerity puts it in a whole different universe than the one Beetlejuice Beetlejuice inhabits.
Ed Wood has always been an outlier in Burton’s body of baroquely stylized work, even as it’s poignantly aligned with his lifelong, career-spanning obsessions. The film certainly felt like a change of pace in 1994, and not just because it lacked the operatic strains of a Danny Elfman score: After a line of dazzling popcorn daydreams, Burton delved into the more adult (if still awfully unreal) world of 1950s Hollywood, where an indefatigable young go-getter chased his dreams and, for his trouble, earned himself the reputation of Worst Director of All Time.
As if to mirror the means of his subject, Burton worked in a slightly more stripped-down, guerilla style, with fewer elaborate sets and special effects (though the makeup work would win Rick Baker and his team an Oscar). Ed Wood was made for a fraction of the cost of his previous film, the budget-busting Batman Returns — a trade-off for creative control, including the privilege to shoot the movie entirely in black-and-white. On a smaller scale, Burton’s sensibilities deepened and matured; the humanity nipping at the edges of his extravagant fables suddenly took center stage. So, too, did his playful ease with actors.
The childlike wonder of Burton’s most beloved work is still there in Ed Wood. It’s a defining trait of Johnny Depp’s hilariously earnest, career-best performance as Wood. Having ushered Depp into movie stardom with their previous collaboration, the Frankenstein-in-the-burbs snow globe Edward Scissorhands, Burton once more cast the actor as an innocent navigating a cynical modern world. Wood, as Depp plays him, is unabashedly himself, down to his complete lack of shame or self-consciousness about cross-dressing (an element this 1990s movie handles rather matter-of-factly). Wood believed in himself against all sense and reason, and that — as the movie touchingly argues — is what made him a real artist.
Winking at Wood’s dark-and-stormy-night style without succumbing to his artlessness, Ed Wood has the look of sumptuous kitsch. But it’s more of a sly comedy about the difficulty of making movies under the best circumstances, never mind when your passionate drive to create is fully eclipsed by your dearth of qualifications. The film chronicles the assembly of the director’s troupe of has-beens and never-weres, the pro wrestlers and TV personalities and novelty acts that filled out his cast lists. Burton also takes us through the chaos-on-the-set foibles of the director’s most (in)famous pictures, like Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and the all-time heckle fest Plan 9 From Outer Space.
On the matter of authorship, the movie belongs plenty to its screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, then both angling to escape the Woodian indignity of a career exclusively spent writing kiddie crap like Problem Child. It worked: After Ed Wood, the two became go-to guys for so-called “anti-biopics,” giving dramatic shape to the life stories of Larry Flynt, Andy Kaufman, Margaret Keane, and Rudy Ray Moore. Their script is a symphony of first-rate zingers and priceless anecdotes, piecing together a satirical portrait of mid-century Tinseltown through the hustle of its most marginalized, disreputable auteur.
But Ed Wood is also quintessentially Burton: another celebration of beautiful, sympathetic misfits. It might be presumptuous to assume that a movie about moviemaking is the director’s most personal project; most of his films play in some respect like labors of love, telegraphing his taste in dark duds, twisting architecture, and slinky women. But the agony and ecstasy of filmmaking pulses through nearly every frame of Ed Wood. One need not be a hater nor an amateur psychologist to assume that he sees some of himself in Wood, regardless of the chasm separating their respective levels of opportunity and expertise.
Certainly, Burton found something personal in the movie’s most moving relationship, the friendship and creative bond that develops between Wood and the man who was once Dracula, the washed-up Golden Age star Bela Lugosi. Beautifully played by Martin Landau, who won an Oscar for this tender depiction of addiction and twilight-years desperation, Lugosi is at once a fading specter of the Hollywood magic that inspired Wood in the first place and a cautionary tale about how the industry might eat him alive, too. The dynamic between the two — a bittersweet buddy comedy for two castaways of movie land — brings to mind how Burton handed an ailing Vincent Price one of his final roles in Edward Scissorhands a few years earlier.
Burton is, by his own admission, a Wood fan. And judging from Ed Wood, he believes in the gumption of a guy who refused to let something as inconsequential as ineptitude get in the way of his silver-screen ambitions. At the same time, he never tries to reclaim Wood as a misunderstood genius, instead offering plenty of funny evidence to the contrary. Nor does he totally deny the tragic trajectory of the man’s life and career; the film-closing “what happened next” titles lay out the stark truth of his later years spent making pornography and his death of alcoholism at the young age of 54. Ed Wood walks a tricky tightrope. It looks at its subject with neither glib, mean-spirited condescension nor distorting, hagiographic sentimentality.
The film’s best joke is that Wood had almost everything we value and look for in great directors: vision, determination, self-confidence, enthusiasm, resourcefulness, even a savvy commercial instinct. All he lacked was anything remotely resembling talent. There’s a great scene where one of his actors, the monosyllabic wrestler Tor, flubs his exit and staggers into a door frame, shaking the whole set. Rather than ask for another take, Ed moves on. “It’s real,” he insists. “You know, in actuality, Lobo would have to struggle with that problem every day.” Even when making a boneheaded decision, Wood had his idiosyncratic reasons. That, the movie says, is the soul of creation. It’s a rewarding lens through which to watch a movie, even one as bad as Plan 9 From Outer Space or Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Ed Wood is available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
