..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Ed Wood:
Special Edition
Directed by Tim Burton

After a couple false starts, one of which reportedly made it all the way to the shelves of some mass market retailers, Touchstone Home Entertainment has finally released Tim Burton's 1994 look at the backwaters of filmmaking, Ed Wood, as a Special Edition program (29572, $30). Johnny Depp stars as the title character, the legendary inept film director responsible for Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Martin Landau won an Oscar for his portrayal of Wood's cohort, Bela Lugosi. The film has a natural comedic milieu and Depp's performance embraces it. He strides through the movie with the same kind of distracted archness he uses in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it sets the tone for the delightfully absurd silliness of his adventures, which would be impossible to believe if they weren't actually true. Landau, however, is wonderfully real, and with the movie's humor providing an ideal counterbalance, his touching performance as the broken, drug addicted Lugosi enriches the film tremendously, and legitimizes it. For anyone who is a fan of Wood's films, Burton's restaging of their creation, and of the wacky ensemble Wood gathered around himself, will provide many pleasures. For viewers less familiar with Wood's oeuvre, the film will seem quirky and silly, but will perhaps inspire further investigation.

The black-and-white picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The image quality is terrific, with crisp contrasts and intense details. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound has an enjoyable dimensionality and clear tones. The 127-minute program has optional English and Spanish subtitles. Because the film runs 127 minutes, some marvelous little sequences had to be excised, and they have been collected as 9 minutes of deleted scenes (beware-one of them is accessed from a 'hidden' menu option and is not part of the 'Play All' option; just keep going right). There are 60 minutes of retrospective documentaries, too, covering many different aspects of the film's production. Along with a trailer, there is an esoteric music video set to Howard Shore's score.

A commentary track is presented, combining separately recorded reflections by Burton, Landau, screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, cinematographer Stefan Czapsky and costume designer Colleen Atwood. Landau speaks at length of what he learned about Lugosi, Czapsky discusses the challenges the black-and-white format presented and Atwood explains where she got all the clothing from. The others talk about Wood, about staging the film and about the various choices that were made in its creation, as well as sharing some amusing anecdotes. "[Tor Johnson] is such a strange, strange piece of casting that you couldn't just go to the CAA and say, 'Bring in five Tor Johnsons,' so literally Tim opened up the casting and said, 'Anybody from around the country who wants to play Tor Johnson, please send me a tape,' and we had this whole stack of terrifying tapes, big fat bald guys basically going, 'Grrrr, grrrr.' There was one that was particularly scary, because it was a man, like a bald headed guy, carrying his daughter. He picks her up and carries her into the basement [and you think] he's going to murder her." As for Burton, he admits that he can identify with Wood's foibles. "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, 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 kind of cut that off and you kind of 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, you know, and you kind of, 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."

After you have steeped yourself in the Ed Wood DVD and its supplements, you are of course left wanting more. You can turn to Wood's films, but if you wish to know more about their background, do not hesitate in obtaining the outstanding Corinth Films Image Entertainment release, The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (ID1551CODVD, $25). The 1996 documentary provides a complete profile of Wood's life and career, but it also branches out into extended profiles of many of Wood's associates. The director, Brett Thompson, managed not only to track down many of the surviving members of Wood's coterie, but he nudged them into opening up, telling the stories of their experiences, resentments and joys while working with Wood. Running 112 minutes, the film could have been streamlined and some of the digressions removed, but that would have weakened the central premise, which is not only that Wood was in his own way a significant filmmaker, but that his charisma attracted and held this never say die band of collaborators. The film is also clearly a response to the poetic licenses taken by Burton's film, but it dovetails the supplements of that DVD beautifully, expanding one's familiarity with the characters, the atmosphere, and Wood's own psyche.

The full screen picture has speckles, even during the interviews shot for the film, and the clips are rather soft, but the presentation is adequate, and there is a viable stereophonic musical score. There is no captioning. Thompson provides an excellent commentary, in the company of several others, describing how the film came to be made, how he kept adding to it as more people stepped forward at the last moment to volunteer their memories, and how the movie serves as a starting point for examining Wood's accomplishments. He doesn't quite put it like this, but Wood was a natural, subconscious Surrealist, and Thompson's praise of Wood's films comes from an appreciation of that absurd quality that is in them-Wood was undeniably a sloppy filmmaker, but somewhere inside of him was an understanding that the disparate pieces of film he was shooting could create their own unity so long as his attitude toward his work remained consistent. Thompson also recognizes that Wood's entrepreneurial and motivational drive was artistry in its own right. "I really am always moved when I see this section at the end, because you really see how this guy really affected these people, and then you start to realize that this is a human story we're telling, where human beings actually collided with each other in Hollywood, and you have all their dreams of stardom, all their dreams of making movies."

The wealth of supplements does not end there, nor does it end with a treat if you let the film play out, as it segues to a brief clip of a young woman in a Vampira-style costume, delivering what has to be the greatest scream ever recorded on a DVD-turn it up and your neighbors will be calling the police in no time. Anyway, Thompson was inspired to begin the film when he was brought in to organize footage from a western that Wood, in his first filmmaking experience, had shot and then abandoned in 1948. The film, Crossroads of Laredo, running 23 minutes, is included on the DVD, and if you have the time, it is worth watching before you begin the documentary, since a knowledge of the completed effort will better help you understand the documentary's coverage of the topic. The sepia-tinted black-and-white silent film is accompanied by a narration that explains the story-a girl marries a bad guy who gets killed by a good guy who almost gets hanged until the girl steps up to reprieve him. The best moment-one cowboy is threatening another with a gun, but, unintentionally, the other cowboy's horse keeps stepping between them. The cinematography is rough hewn, washy and often out of focus, but somewhere in the costumes and the horses and the guns and especially the bar maids, you can see Wood's excitement for the artform take hold. It's as good as anybody's first student film, and most promising in the spirit of collaboration that manifests itself during the crowd scenes. Wood's skill at keeping those around him enthused about the project at hand is evident in shot after shot. The restorers also roped in the son of Elvis Presley to sing a couple of original songs for the soundtrack, which is enough notoriety in itself to make the movie worthwhile (although he doesn't sound half bad). Thompson supplies another commentary track, too, with his collaborators, explaining how the footage was rescued, what they had to go through to piece it together and pointing out things like the propane tank in the background of a shot.

Presented in the supplement as well, a fascinating collection of 23 minutes of outtakes from the documentary shows how the interviews were shot and kind of pulls back the curtain, maybe for the first time anywhere, to reveal how such documentaries are made, as the interviewees practice their responses to questions and discuss approaches to those responses with the director. Also featured is 18 minutes of footage from premiere screenings of the film, showing many of the surviving members of Wood's group socializing and reflecting upon the past. Except for the footage accessed through a 'hidden' menu option, the segments are accompanied by another commentary, in which the various people appearing on the screen are identified and anecdotes about the screenings are shared. A 4-minute news report about one of the premieres is included, too. Captioned still photos are presented in montages that run a total of 23 minutes. Finally, there is a 12-minute clip of raw interview footage from an A&E Biography program about Tim Burton, in which Thompson recalls being classmates with Burton at film school and discusses some of Burton's odd behavioral ticks.

November 9, 2004

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- by Douglas Pratt

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