Nightmare of Ecstasy, a good book about a very bad director

There’s a lovely scene in the 1994 film Ed Wood – a romanticised biography of the legendary “bad movie” director Edward Wood Jr – where Wood meets his hero Orson Welles. The sequence is fictional but it has a poetic aptness. Here is a man who made a series of eye-poppingly terrible movies (including the one facilely called the Worst Film of All Time, Plan 9 from Outer Space) and here is one of cinema’s greatest artists, the director of some of the most influential movies ever made – and yet they are kindred spirits in some ways: they share a boyish passion for the form and its possibilities, and their personal visions are constantly being messed with by other people who lack that passion.

The differences are more revealing though. Welles once mused (perhaps in an attempt to cheer himself up) that the absence of limitations was the enemy of art; that good art usually came out of constraints, not from unlimited freedoms. In Wood’s case, the many constraints (though they never produced anything resembling art) are what gave his story a romantic sheen. If he had received big-studio funding for scripts early in his career, his incompetence would quickly have been exposed and he would probably have ended up a tiny footnote in Hollywood’s long list of has-beens and never-weres. Instead, he independently made a number of barely financed, barely written D-grade movies, and some of them developed cult followings. Unwatchable as most of them are, they remain a mighty testament to what can happen when incredible zeal meets an equally incredible lack of talent. (“I am the patron saint of the mediocrities!” cries the composer Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, painfully aware that despite his lifelong love for music he has none of Mozart’s talent. But compared to Ed Wood, even Shaffer’s Salieri was a genius.)

Last week a friend gifted me the book on which Ed Wood was based – Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D Wood Jr. It’s a remarkable biography, being entirely made up of reminiscences by people who knew Wood, and with no authorial intervention or commentary (apart from a short Introduction). These reminiscences are presented in the style of a book-length conversation – with each quote preceded by the interviewee’s name – and this patchwork structure seems to mimic the disjointedness of Wood’s films, which were full of individual scenes that had seemingly little to do with one another.

Reading the very first page, you dive headlong into his life and career: you’re exposed to a flurry of opinions by various people, some of whose identities are not obvious (an index at the end explains who all the interviewees are). But the chatty tone turns out to be very appropriate for this material. Consider this deadpan, hillbilly quote from Wood’s mother: “Junior was born October 10, 1924, at 115 Franklin Street, off the main highway. Yep.” I love the scrupulous inclusion of that “Yep” at the end.

Wood spent most of his life and career off the main highway too. A man of many fetishes – cinema and angora sweaters being just two of the major ones – he thought up outlandish scenarios involving zombies, alien invaders and cross-dressers and wrote laughably trite scripts for them (in his universe they might all be found in the same living room or cemetery, looking confusedly at each other). He shot on minuscule budgets, with discarded props and stock footage; little wonder that this book contains several matter-of-fact utterances like “The octopus had to be covered so that the broken tentacle wouldn’t show.”

The stories and perspectives vary wildly (“Ed Wood was a crazy genius, way ahead of his time,” says one interviewee. “Ed had poor taste and was undisciplined. [His movies were] dingy, third-rate, fringe-type films,” says another) and this gives the book the feel of a diabolical jigsaw puzzle that resists completion. As Grey writes in his Introduction: “Conflicting versions of biographical incident are often charged with meaning and moment. Discovering the objective ‘truth’ of an individual’s life may be impossible beyond a schematizing of life events.” I think Wood himself would have smiled approvingly at these words – not least because they might easily be from the promotional material for one of his favourite movies, Welles’ Citizen Kane, the story of a futile attempt to understand a single life.

P.S. An inside-page blurb for the book – by Phantom of the Movies – reads “The literary even of the year” instead of “The literary event of the year”. It was most disappointing to discover that this was merely a typo, not a deliberate attempt at copying the earnest ineptitude of a Wood movie!

[Did a version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]