{"id":238667,"date":"2025-09-19T10:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T10:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/238667\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T10:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T10:18:10","slug":"canadian-critic-will-sloans-new-book-revisits-the-legacy-of-ed-wood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/238667\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian critic Will Sloan\u2019s new book revisits the legacy of Ed Wood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Once dismissed as junk, Wood\u2019s films now feel vital, stranger than ever and proof that even the ‘worst director of all time’ has a legacy worth taking seriously.Supplied<\/p>\n

Will Sloan was seven years old when he first saw Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood\u2019s infamous 1959 sci-fi oddity.<\/p>\n

Now a journalist and film critic, Sloan has been touring North American cinemas and video stores to promote his new book, Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA<\/a>, an empathetic, critical analysis of Wood\u2019s body of work. Last week, he introduced Glen or Glenda? \u2013 Wood\u2019s 1953 debut, a mix of mad-scientist schlock, docu-drama and personal confession about a cross-dresser\u2019s secret life \u2013 to a packed house at Toronto\u2019s Paradise Theatre.<\/p>\n

The evening marked the culmination of a relationship with Wood\u2019s films that began the day Sloan rented Plan 9 from his local library. Captivated by the cult filmmaker\u2019s reputation as \u201cthe worst director of all time,\u201d he laughed at the cheap effects and awful performances, but over time the novelty faded and something strange, even beautiful, emerged. \u201cWhat remained,\u201d Sloan writes in the book, \u201cwas its otherworldly oddness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of how we think about Wood comes not from the films themselves but from the mythology built around them. In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved\u2019s Golden Turkey Awards dubbed Plan 9 from Outer Space the \u201cWorst Movie Ever Made,\u201d a punchline that froze Wood as a symbol of cinematic failure (sometimes to absurd extremes \u2013 in 1983, the Toronto Star\u2019s Jeremy Ferguson dismissed David Cronenberg\u2019s Rabid by calling him \u201cthe Canadian Edward D. Wood, Jr.\u201d).<\/p>\n

Will Sloan: Nathan Fielder\u2019s The Rehearsal returns, with too much of a good thing<\/a><\/p>\n

Fourteen years after the Golden Turkey Awards, Tim Burton\u2019s biographical feature Ed Wood offered a more sympathetic lens, recasting him as a plucky dreamer played by Johnny Depp \u2013 hopeless in craft but heroic in his enthusiasm. The truth, as Sloan\u2019s book argues, is stranger and more interesting: He was an artist working through personal obsessions in ways Hollywood, then and now, wasn\u2019t quite ready to embrace.<\/p>\n

Once dismissed as fodder for ridicule, Glen or Glenda? has since been embraced \u2013 particularly by LGBTQ audiences \u2013 as a pioneering, if complicated, queer text. Wood made the film in 1953 after persuading producer George Weiss to let him direct an exploitation picture inspired by the headlines around Christine Jorgensen\u2019s gender-reassignment surgery. He convinced Weiss he was the right man for the job by offering up his own history with cross-dressing as the basis for the story \u2013 and by promising the involvement of horror legend Bela Lugosi.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeeing it with a modern audience has a very different vibe,\u201d Sloan says. \u201cYou feel the audience wanting to like it and are sympathetic to Ed and the feelings he was expressing.\u201d But it\u2019s a complicated movie, he notes. \u201cIt is progressive to a point, but it also comes up against the limits of what was sayable in 1953 \u2013 and, I think, what Ed was willing or able to say to himself and others.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Paradise screening was part of the Drag Me to the Movies series hosted by drag artist Weird Alice, and that conflict was palpable, with moments of laughter and applause tempered by long silences. Sloan describes the experience as a roller-coaster ride, the crowd\u2019s sympathy pulled up short by the film\u2019s contradictions. <\/p>\n

In attendance was film historian Willow Maclay, co-author of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, who noted the joyous reaction to the film\u2019s climax, when Glen\u2019s partner, Barbara, accepts his gender fluidity and hands him her angora sweater: \u201cI\u2019ve always thought that was a very beautiful moment, and it was very nice seeing the crowd reaffirm that through their own reaction and applause.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Weird Alice, the point of screening a film like Glen or Glenda? is to create an environment where a messy, \u201cof its time\u201d artifact can be embraced in a space \u201cwhere it\u2019s potentially easier to stomach a more difficult subject matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notions of gender identity run through much of Wood\u2019s work, from Glen or Glenda? onward. Sloan notes that Wood was fascinated by gender as performance: his male characters often cartoonishly masculine, his female characters sometimes bearing the name Shirley \u2013 Wood\u2019s own drag persona. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s striking, Sloan argues, is how Wood himself seems to grow more at ease on screen. Glen or Glenda? is riddled with anxiety, a nervous plea for understanding. But by the late 1960s, in films such as Take It Out in Trade, long considered a lost film, where Wood appears as \u201cAlicia,\u201d he looks far more comfortable \u2013 even playful \u2013 inhabiting that side of himself.<\/p>\n

Part of Glen or Glenda\u2019s enduring fascination lies in its inconsistency. Because the film was long dismissed as disposable, what circulates today are incomplete prints \u2013 \u201csome more censored than others, some more battered and beaten up by the projector and the winds of time than others,\u201d Sloan explains. Each screening reveals a slightly different version, a scene appearing here, missing there. \u201cGlen or Glenda? is a Hollywood dreamscape, a recurring dream that\u2019s never quite the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although best known for his fifties-era films Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space, Wood kept working until his death in 1978, directing, writing screenplays and paperback novels under various pseudonyms, even appearing in a number of films. Of his later work in the burgeoning pornography industry \u2013 films like The Only House in Town and The Young Marrieds \u2013 there are still flashes of something rawer and more personal. Much of the work was unavailable for decades and has recently been restored by home video companies American Genre Film Archive and Severin Films. As Sloan argues, if you\u2019re willing to accept Wood as an artist \u2013 not necessarily a great one, but an artist all the same \u2013 the later work only enriches the whole picture.<\/p>\n

Sloan\u2019s path with Wood traces how culture has shifted \u2013 from mocking his failures to searching out what\u2019s personal, even moving, in his work. Once dismissed as junk, Wood\u2019s films now feel vital, stranger than ever and proof that even the \u201cworst director of all time\u201d has a legacy worth taking seriously.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe opportunity to show Glenn or Glenda? with the book is wonderful because really it is all about Ed. You know, I\u2019m happy to bask in his reflected glory.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Once dismissed as junk, Wood\u2019s films now feel vital, stranger than ever and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":238668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2148,2138,671,1022,104,2132,692,2147,2131,2143,2144,2140,2133,2130,79,407,171,746,2142,2137,2159,2134,2135,454,2139,1165,728,2149,108,2154,2155,2157,2152,2156,2150,2153,2136,85,2146,80,2145,2151,1458,158,1164,2141,67,132,68,1154,107,2158],"class_list":{"0":"post-238667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-breaking-news","13":"tag-breaking-news-video","14":"tag-british-columbia","15":"tag-canada","16":"tag-canada-news","17":"tag-canada-sports","18":"tag-canada-sports-news","19":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","20":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","21":"tag-canadian-news","22":"tag-economy","23":"tag-education","24":"tag-entertainment","25":"tag-environment","26":"tag-federal-government","27":"tag-foreign-news","28":"tag-globe-and-mail","29":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","30":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","31":"tag-government","32":"tag-life-news","33":"tag-lifestyle","34":"tag-local-news","35":"tag-manitoba","36":"tag-national-news","37":"tag-new-brunswick","38":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","39":"tag-northwest-territories","40":"tag-nova-scotia","41":"tag-nunavut","42":"tag-ontario","43":"tag-pei","44":"tag-photos","45":"tag-political-news","46":"tag-political-opinion","47":"tag-politics","48":"tag-politics-news","49":"tag-quebec","50":"tag-sports-news","51":"tag-technology","52":"tag-travel","53":"tag-trudeau","54":"tag-united-states","55":"tag-unitedstates","56":"tag-us","57":"tag-us-news","58":"tag-world-news","59":"tag-yukon"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}