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Well, it's been more than a week since I've been able to update the blog, and there's a good reason for that.
I've also been absorbed in the first season of Dexter, though not while at the urinal.
But more important than even that is that I've been struggling to decide which of two movies to put at number 2.
I know what you're thinking here. Wasn't I supposed to figure that out before I started doing this? Well, uh... yes. I guess you're right about that. But what happened is, uh.... Well. You know.
I fucked up.
Sorry.
Here's what happened: when I came up with the idea for this series, the first thing I did was make a list of every movie dealing with the movie business that I had seen. This numbered about 20 or so titles. I got rid of the ones I didn't like, of course, and then over the course of a few days began to whittle it down to the ones that were actually pretty good. This list numbered about eight or so, and then the hard part began.
I knew right away which one would be at the top of the list. But figuring out two through five took a while. I would rearrange and change the list every time I looked at it. And eventually what happened was that I accidentally made two different movies number two.
So I've spent the last week trying to figure out which one of those two would make the list and which one wouldn't. And, well, here's my pick.
Not making the cut: The Player.
The (mostly true) story of a massively untalented director, Ed Wood is nonetheless a great movie directed by the far more talented (but massively emo) director Tim Burton.
Starring Johnny Depp as the eponymous Wood in probably the best performance of his I've seen, Ed Wood is the story of a director who had a lot more ambition, determination and optimism than he had little things like, you know, ability.
The movie starts during the filming of the (in)famous Glen or Glenda, a totally unsubtle movie about transvestites that starred Wood himself (who, as you probably can guess, was a transvestite). Despite the movie being shot for the cost of a Happy Meal, Wood is elated to be shooting it, printing every take no matter what happens (short of feces being thrown at the camera, though probably not even that).
Glen or Glenda was also the first collaboration between Wood and Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau). By the 1950's (when the movie takes place), Lugosi was long past his glory days of playing Dracula and was deep in a heroin-induced fog.
But at their bottom was where Wood met people, and as the movie goes along it becomes a story about the relationship between the upbeat, talentless Wood and the bitter, foul-mouthed Lugosi (Landau deservedly won an Oscar for his hilarious portrayal).
Awesome.
Like Boogie Nights, Ed Wood shows how the movie business creates its own fucked up families. When Lugosi goes into rehab for drug addiction, for example, Wood watches out for him, stays with him. Lugosi, in turn, encourages Wood, relies on him, and gives his name to Wood's string of terrible movies.
Surrounding those two is an equally oddball cast of characters. There's John "Bunny" Breckenridge (played by Bill Murray), a flamboyant queen who wants a sex change but is too scared to go through with it, Criswell the Amazing, a worse-than-average psychic who dressed up in crazy costumes and predicted totally bizarre futures, Vampira, an unemployed TV host who agrees to be in the movies as long as she doesn't have to talk, and Tor Johnson, a huge Swedish wrestler whose English is unintelligible.
These people make their own dysfunctional family, held together by the notion, sure -- Wood's movies are terrible -- but without them, they wouldn't be working at all.
The second half of the movie deals with the story of the making of Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie so legendarily bad it is generally considered, you know, the worst movie ever made (this is really saying something).
First, Wood shoots some footage of Lugosi outside his home. An old man in a cape, he reaches down, plucks a flower, smells it and looks up at the sky. Suddenly distraught, he crushes the flower in his hand and begins to cry.
Shortly after shooting this scene and a few others for a completely different project, Lugosi died. Wood had him buried in his Dracula cape (that's not made up. The real Lugosi was actually buried in a Dracula cape. Peter Lorre, who attended the funeral, is said to have wondered whether they "should drive a wooden stake through his heart, just in case").
With this small roll of film in hand, Wood spins an entire (and it must be said, ludicrous) movie out of it, dealing with an alien plan (number 9 in their little alien takeover manual) to raise people from the dead and make an army out of them. In the movie (which I've seen), this process is apparently done by shining lights at the ground in cemeteries.
Wood got the funding to make the movie after coming in contact with a preacher who wanted to make a series of religious movies. After hearing this, Wood convinces him that if he makes a monster movie, they'll have enough money for all the religious movies he wants to make.
The preacher agrees, as long as:
1) Wood changes the name of the movie from Grave Robbers from Outer Space to Plan 9 from Outer Space (grave robbing is sacrilegious, after all).
2) Wood and his crew get baptized.
Wood quickly agrees, takes the money, gets he and his friends to get baptized in a pool in Hollywood, and proceeds to make a tremendous piece of shit. With Lugosi dead, Wood casts his wife's chiropractor, Dr. Tom Mason, who, besides being bald, taller, thinner and younger than Lugosi, looks exactly like him (except not at all).
Woods solution for this? Mason covers his face with a cape.
Seriously.
Once the movie's finished, Wood actually gets to premiere it at a low rent theater in Los Angeles. Watching it, he says, "this is my masterpiece. This is the one I want them to remember me by."
Once the movie is finished, the angry audience hates it so much they tear up the theater and chase Wood and his friends out of the building.
But Wood has made his movie, and he's happy with it. And that's part of why he's so endearing. At least he got to do it. And as shitty as Plan 9 is: it's more than any of us have done. And though people remember Wood for being talentless and inept, at least they remember him.
As optimistic as he was, Wood probably would have been just fine with that.
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