Silent film lives, Dolores Fuller dies, Mosfilm online, Clive James on David Thomson

Posted on May 15, 2011
Filed Under Ed Wood, miscellany, silent films

This is the trailer for The Artist (2011), a silent film about the world of silent film.

The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius and starring Jean Dujardin, was purchased by The Weinstein Company and was the first film sold at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Hazanavicius is the director and Dujardin the star of the OSS 117 espionage spoofs. The cast includes John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller and John Cromwell. The production of a silent film in 2011 says to me that the medium is at last attracting the modern attention it deserves; I expect to see more film like this in the years to come. I recommend the discussion at Nitrateville. Read more

The Plan 9 remake is shooting in Virginia. Oh my.

Posted on April 1, 2011
Filed Under contemporary, Ed Wood, exploitation

Plan 9 Teaser Trailer from Darkstone Entertainment on Vimeo.

This is the teaser trailer for John Johnson’s low-budget remake of Ed Wood’s legendary lowest-budget Plan 9 From Outer Space, which commenced principal photography last Friday in Roanoke, Virginia. The trailer has been online for more than a year, but I only learned of the project when the Roanoke Times story appeared last week. io9 has been on the story from the beginning. Johnson is a true Woodian. The trailer is dedicated to “Ed and his Crew,” and–see the picture below–Johnson directed the first day of shooting in a pink sweater. (Purists will cavil that the sweater doesn’t appear to be angora, but you can’t have everything.) Read more

Bride of the Monster (1955)

Posted on January 30, 2011
Filed Under Ed Wood, films

Ed Wood’s might-have-been movie.

Bride of the Monster is tantalizingly close to being unremarkably bad, like Bert Gordon’s Beginning of the End (1957), Vic Savage’s The Creeping Terror (1964) or Wood’s own Jail Bait (1951).  For Ed Wood in 1955 the difference between “unremarkably bad”  and “paralyzingly bad” was professional life or death. An unremarkably bad horror picture would’ve moved Wood up a notch on the industry ladder, perhaps fostered further collaborations with competent pros, maybe generated some TV work. In the event a paralyzingly bad horror picture led directly to Plan 9 From Outer Space. Bride of the Monster was Wood’s last best shot. It dies before our eyes in the uncaring arms of an inanimate prop octopus. Read more

Killer In Drag (1965)

Posted on October 3, 2010
Filed Under books, Ed Wood, exploitation

The front matter in this nice paperback edition from Four Walls Eight Windows tells us Killer in Drag was originally published by Star News Co. in 1965, the year Ed Wood turned 41. His mainstream film career had ended five years before, with the release of The Sinister Urge (1960), the porno-racket melodrama that IMDb users deem the worst of his legit pictures. Exiled from film and falling into a bottle, in the 1960s Wood made his living writing porn pictures, and exploitation novels like this one.
Read more

Death of A Transvestite (1967)

Posted on April 25, 2010
Filed Under books, Ed Wood, exploitation

When I last saw young Glen Marker, he was both of the troubled title characters in Glen or Glenda (1952), Edward D. Wood Jr.’s fascinating and bizarre autobiographical film about cross-dressing. In those days, Glen was despised by his family, teetering on the brink of personal catastrophe, trying desperately to square the circle of his love for the beautiful Dolores and his obsession with angora. Now I’ve met Glen again, in the pages of Death of A Transvestite, Wood’s 1967 novel, and discovered that Glen finally abandoned the square world and went to work for the Syndicate as a transvestite hitman. That story is told in Killer in Drag, which I’ve not read. Death of a Transvestite completes the trilogy.

Death of a Transvestite opens in Glen’s cell in the death-house, three hours before his scheduled execution for murder. Read more

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