Alas that Edward D. Wood Jr. couldn’t be with us to see it, but one of filmmaking’s most singular figures would’ve been 100 today. Along with Andy Milligan, Wood is the ultimate problematic test case for the auteur theory, insofar as the latter posits that being an auteur also serves as a kind of guarantee of high quality. You’re more than just a mere metteur en scène, you’re a great artist; you can, of course, be a perfectly commercial artist (and auteurism was nothing if not a way for the French critics who pioneered it in the 1950s to justify liking their favourite Hollywood filmmakers), but the force of your personality is what really drives your work rather than the dictates of studios, etc. Wood absolutely complicates this by frankly not being a great artist in this sense. But his films are, undeniably, his films, they’re an expression of his personality. Again, this is also fairly true of Andy Milligan, although I don’t think you can talk about his films being charming in the way you can with Wood; cos there is a charm to Plan 9 From Outer Space and a sort of passion to it that means I can’t really condemn it as a bad film, and FUCK the Medved brothers for the whole “worst film of all time” thing. Anyone who genuinely believes that about Plan 9 needs to see more actually bad films (such as the oeuvre of the aforementioned Andy Milligan, perhaps). Ed embodies what I said in my last post about bad cinema; there’s different levels of it and one is where a film is mostly let down by a lack of resources and/or skills. He was on that level, I think, but passion and enthusiasm got him through… and I always liked Tim Burton’s biopic of him for communicating that. So happy 100, Glenda.
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