Questions about ED WOOD

It's been a long time since I saw it, but I did see it at least once, probably twice.


And the only thing I can think to say is?


I always felt the movie was a semi surreal vision of how "Ed Wood" would have imagined his own life story.


In other words, it's not meant to be a 'factual account', so to speak. It's a strange movie about a strange man who surrounded himself with strange people.

It was filmed in the cheesy black and white Wood himself have used. That's a big clue. Depp's portrayal is extremely exaggerated and 'cartoonish'.


Which is not to say it isn't based on a real man, who really did some of those things.


It's a parody, or maybe even a parody within a parody, trying to get at 'who really was Ed Wood?'


It's not meant as 'the literal truth'. 

Because it's a movie

You don't know what a movie is?

Wood and his entourage arrive very late for the premiere, so the movie audience gets so angry and rowdy waiting for them that they start throwing things, threatening the theater owner, etc. This wasn't an uncommon thing for theater and movie audiences decades ago; vaudeville audiences, for example, would deliberately bring rotten fruit to the theater just to throw at acts they didn't like. In this case, they weren't going wild over the movie itself, but over the fact that they were kept waiting. When Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game first premiered in France in 1939, movie audiences were so
angered by it that fights and riots broke out in theaters where it was shown. So Wood had something in common with his fellow filmmaker Renoir.

Vampira may not have liked those people, but she wasn't going to pass up a movie premiere; it was probably the closest she would ever get to something that passed for Hollywood glamour. I'm sure there were plenty of people who loathed Harvey Weinstein, too, but they still fawned over him at Hollywood events. That's why they're called showbiz phonies.

Thanks, Fox in the Snow

It may not be a 'fantasy movie', per se, but Burton was more interested in trying to 'get inside Edward Wood's head', as opposed to doing a conventional 'biopic'. Quite frankly, I'm glad there are responses to this thread, because it inspired me to 'look into it'. What I found out was? And I honestly never 'knew' this? What I described in my first post is exactly what Burton was trying portray.

Here's a quote from Burton which is included in the films Wikipedia page:
....and this from Johnnie Depp:
Where I missed, though, not entirely, is in the 'parody' word. This is no parody.

Just a poor choice of a word. There is a decidedly a 'movie within a movie' thing going on with "Ed Wood".

More accurately, the story is told from the 'blindly optimistic' POV Burton feels Ed Wood himself would have used to tell his autobiography, the autobiography in his head.

Also, if one were to ask, "if so blindly optimistic, why is there tragedy in the tale?"

That's the 'surreal' element I mentioned. The film "Ed Wood" gives us both 'sunny optimism' inherent in the way he approached film making, and the reality being, he wasn't very good at it, at least in terms of major success.

Wood's life can indeed be viewed as a tragedy.

So? From right out of Burtons mouth, the film is not meant 'literal'.

Burton was interested in telling this story because, he saw in Wood, a failed version of himself. While I didn't find any 'thoughts' like this ascribed to Burton, my hunch is?

Burton probably believes if a break or two in his own life had gone differently, he could have just as easily had the career of "Ed Wood".