Ed Wood

For generations, Ed Wood has been known as "the worst director of all time." This sympathetic critical study repositions the director of Plan 9 from Outer Space as a maverick independent whose work challenges the boundary between "bad" and "good."

In 1978, Edward D. Wood, Jr. died of a heart attack at age 54, several days after being evicted from his home. Two years later, he was rescued from obscurity when he was voted "Worst Director of All Time." By the time Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood was released in 1994, Wood's low-budget films, including Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda?, and Bride of the Monster, had become entrenched as "so bad they're good" anti-classics. That was then. In the years since, the rediscovery of lost and neglected films has enriched and complicated Wood's legacy, while new generations of viewers have grown more sympathetic to his eccentric style and offbeat take on gender and sexuality.

Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA is a critical study that takes Wood seriously, positioning him as a true independent whose work complicates the barrier between "bad" and "good." The book will follow Wood's career on the margins of Hollywood, from his cult films with Bela Lugosi to his eventual fate in pornography, locating the artistic personality that unites his subterranean oeuvre. It will situate Wood's films in their context, showing how he infused old styles and genres with his contemporary concerns; how his freewheeling approach to film grammar blurred the line between the grindhouse and the avant-garde; how his bringing together of faded stars, novelty celebrities, and showbiz amateurs created evocative Hollywood dreamscapes; and how his art explored cross-dressing and gender fluidity decades before these concepts were mainstream. It will also chart Wood's place in the "bad movie" cult, from The Golden Turkey Awards to Mystery Science Theater 3000 and beyond, putting him in conversation with contemporary outsider artists like Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen.

While Wood has been the subject of an oral-history biography (Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy), no critic has attempted a study that encompasses the full scope of his work, including his many novels, short stories, and long-lost pornographic films. To mark the centennial of Wood's birth, the time is right for a take on his work that considers how radical ideas have often grown on the fringes, and interrogates the ideologies that shape our perspective of "bad art." Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA aims to be a timely intervention in the politics of taste, and a fond salute to an independent spirit whose "badness" tells us so much about our world.