Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author, and editor (often performing many of these functions simultaneously). In the 1950s, Wood made a run of independently produced, extremely low-budget horror, science fiction, and cowboy films, now celebrated for their technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts, and outlandish plot elements, although his flair for showmanship gave his productions at least a modicum of commercial success.
Wood's popularity waned soon after his biggest "name" star, Béla Lugosi, died. He was able to salvage a saleable feature from Lugosi's last moments on film, but his career declined thereafter. Toward the end of his life, Wood made pornographic movies and wrote pulp crime, horror, and sex novels. His posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst Director of All Time.[1] The lack of conventional filmmaking ability in his work has earned Wood and his films a considerable cult following.
Following the publication of Rudolph Grey's biography Nightmare of Ecstasy, Wood's life and work have undergone a public rehabilitation, with new light shed on his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production, and Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood, earned two Academy Awards.
From the 1950s onward, Wood supplemented his directing and screenwriting income with hastily written pulp fiction, including innumerable pulp crime, horror, and sex novels and occasional non-fiction pieces. As he became increasingly unable to fund film projects, the novels seem to have become Wood's primary source of income.
Wood's novels frequently include transvestite or drag queen characters, or entire plots centering around transvestism (including his angora fetish), and tap into his love of crime fiction and the occult. Wood would often recycle plots of his films for novels, write novelizations of his own screenplays, or reuse elements from his novels in scripts. His first novel, Black Lace Drag was published in 1963 and reissued in 1965 as Killer in Drag. Among his other books are Orgy of The Dead (1965), Devil Girls (1967), Death of a Transvestite (1967), The Sexecutives (1968), and A Study of Fetishes and Fantasies (1973).
Descriptions of Wood's working methods in Nightmare of Ecstasy indicate he would work on a dozen projects at once, simultaneously watching television, eating, drinking, and carrying on conversations while typing. In his quasi-memoir, Hollywood Rat Race, Wood advises new writers to "just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
As Wood's most famous films of the 1950s are not explicitly sexual or violent, the outré content of his novels may shock the unprepared reader. Wood's dark side emerges in such sexual shockers as Raped in the Grass or The Perverts and in short stories such as Toni: Black Tigress, which exploit hot-button topics like violence, rape, racial issues, juvenile delinquency, and drug culture.
Some of Wood's books remained unpublished during his lifetime. Hollywood Rat Race, for example, was written in 1965 and finally released in 1998. The nonfiction book is part primer for young actors and filmmakers, and part memoir. In Rat Race, Wood recounts tales of dubious authenticity, such as how he and Lugosi entered the world of nightclub cabaret.