Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Valiant Pictures, from Wikimedia Commons

October 10, 1924– Ed Wood:

“No, I’m all man. I even fought in WW II. Of course, I was wearing women’s undergarments under my uniform.”

Ed Wood is only really referenced by hardcore film fans, and even that group has probably only seen one of his films. Creepy Conservative Republican Michael Medved’s book The Golden Turkey Awards declared Wood The Worst Director of All Time, and his film Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) the Worst Film Ever Made. People seemed to grab hold of those titles and they still get repeated.

The Golden Turkey Awards was published after Medved’s The 50 Worst Films Of All Time, a book in which Wood’s name, nor any of his films are even mentioned. Before Golden Turkey, no one had heard of Ed Wood. Wood’s films weren’t screened all that often, not even at revival houses, but they were sometimes shown on late night television horror programs. The royalties wear cheap because Wood never had them copyrighted.

But since a certain Tim Burton biopic, Wood has become a camp and geek favorite. Yet, Wood’s legacy is filled with myths and misinformation. He did not use pie tins as UFOs in Plan 9 From Outer Space, but hobby shop plastic models. Near the end of his life, Bela Lugosi may have had a morphine addiction, but he was never shooting-up formaldehyde. Lesser directors, if forced to make films under the conditions Wood faced, would just have given up.

I find Burton’s Ed Wood (1994) starring Johnny Depp, with the late, great Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, and featuring Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, and Bill Murray, is a sweet love letter to Wood, low-budget filmmaking, Hollywood sleaze, and dreamers of all stripes.

Ed Wood (1994), Touchstone Pictures, via YouTube

Ed Wood, the film, not the man, was in development at Columbia Pictures, but the studio passed when Burton insisted on shooting it in black-and-white. Ed Wood was picked up, ironically, by Disney Studios. The film was released to critical acclaim, but was a box-office bomb, making only $6 million against an $18 million budget. But, it won two Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actor for Landau and Best Makeup for Rick Baker.

It really is a fabulous, funny film, with outstanding cinematography (something missing in Wood’s movies). But, it still plays on the idea that Wood was the Worst Director of All Time and Plan 9 From Outer Space is the Worst Film.

Woods was no James Ivory, David Lean or even Ken Russell, for sure, but let’s be honest, Jerry Bruckheimer’s, Michael Bay’s, Roland Emmerich’s stuff is not nearly as entertaining, fascinating, even thought-provoking as any of Wood’s.

As a child, Wood loved films and it shows. He was born Edward Davis Wood, Jr. in Poughkeepsie. Legend has it that his mother always wanted a girl and until Wood was 12-years-old she dressed him in girls’ clothing. Young Ed got a job as a movie theatre usher. He also played musical instruments and formed a band called Eddie Wood’s Little Splinters. Wood received his first film camera as a gift on his 17^th birthday and his first “film” was of the crash of an airplane. When he was 18-years-old, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Wood joined the Marines.

After WW II, Wood chased his embrace of all things bizarre by joining a freak show with a traveling carnival. He played the role of the bearded lady and created his own prosthetic breasts.

During the 1950s, he wrote, produced, and acted in a series of extremely low-budget Science Fiction, Horror, and Western films. Today, these movies are loved and derided in equal measure for their many obvious flubs, cheap special effects, odd dialogue, miscasting, and insane plots. Wood struggled to make ends meet and was often forced to turn out screenplays in a single night to keep on schedule.

In 1952, Wood was introduced to actor Bela Lugosi by writer-producer Alex Gordon, Wood’s roommate at the time, who went on to help start American International Pictures, producer of low-budget fare aimed at teens. Lugosi’s son, Bela Lugosi Jr., claimed Wood exploited his father’s fame, taking advantage of the fading actor when he could not refuse any work. But others who knew them say that Wood and Lugosi were genuine friends and that Wood helped Lugosi through the worst days of his depression and addiction.

Wood worked as an actor in his own films under different pseudonyms, including Ann Gora and Akdov Telmig (The backwards form of his favorite drink, the vodka gimlet).

He made 10 films in less than a decade. My favorite, of course, is 1953’s Glen Or Glenda (originally titled I Changed My Sex!) which starred Wood, billed as “Daniel Davis”, his girlfriend Dolores Fuller and Lugosi as the narrator. The film was loosely based on pioneering transwoman Christine Jorgensen. While panned by critics then and now, considered as one of Wood’s worst films, it is plenty camp, but also notable for its groundbreaking empathetic look at LGBTQ issues at a time when no one else dared.

Wood really was a cross-dresser, who found comfort rather than excitement from Angora fabric. The only time he directed a film while in drag was during Glen Or Glenda, when he was directing himself in the Glenda scenes. Wood was not shy about going out in public dressed as Shirley, his female alter ego. Shirley also appeared in many of his screenplays and stories.

Glen And Glenda, Screen Classics, via YouTube

When his film career ran out of steam, mostly because of no funding, Wood turned his prolific creative energy to churning out sex novels, pulp fiction, and horror stories. The lack of money took its toll and Wood struggled with his health because of alcohol addiction. Eventually he and his wife were kicked out of their apartment and had to move in with a friend in North Hollywood where he drank more and wore women’s clothes less. It was there that Wood was taken by a heart attack on December 10, 1978. He was just 54-years-old. When his wife found him, she writes:

“I still remember when I went into that room that afternoon and he was dead, his eyes and mouth were wide open. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. He clutched at the sheets. It looked like he’d seen hell.”

Wood’s legacy continues. In 1998, Wood’s previously unproduced script I Woke Up Early The Day I Died was finally filmed, starring Christina Ricci, Tippi Hedren, Bud Cort, Sandra Bernhard, and Karen Black. Of course, it did not receive a commercial release. Wood can’t even catch a break in death.

The Film Department at USC holds an annual Ed Wood Film Festival where students write, film, and act in an Ed Wood-esque short film based on a predetermined theme. His bizarre transvestite-themed sex novels have been republished.

People can laugh about Wood’s pictures, but after all the super hero reboots, mutant origin stories, and Alien sequels are forgotten in a generation, fans will still be watching Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen And Glenda and they’ll still be having fun.

The post #BornThisDay: Filmmaker, Ed Wood appeared first on The WOW Report.

Photograph from PBS American Masters via YouTube

October 12, 1918– Jerome Robbins:

“Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it’s over, it’s done.”

There is this famous anecdote about Jerome Robbins. I first heard it when I was a high school drama nerd. Robbins was known for dressing down his actors in rehearsal. He was not kind. It seems that he had a tantrum while directing West Side Story (1957) in previews in Washington DC. In a pique, while ranting, Robbins backed up and fell into the orchestra pit leaving the cast with great big smiles on their faces.

Robbins was both a great choreographer of classical ballet and a Broadway innovator. From 1944-1997, he choreographed 66 ballets and choreographed and/or directed 15 Broadway musicals. During his extraordinarily prolific career he not only excelled in two different fields, but he also worked with uncommon versatility.

But, Robbins was so afraid that he might be outed as gay, that he “named names” during a meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Many major figures in the arts never could forgive him.

Dance and Theatre critic Clive Barnes:

“Jerome Robbins was an extremely demanding man, not always popular with his dancers, although always respected. He was a perfectionist who sometimes, very quietly, reached perfection.”

Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in NYC, not far from where West SideStory was filmed, he changed his last name to Robbins to hide his Jewishness. He accompanied his sister to dance classes, and at 19-years-old, he made his professional debut at the Yiddish Art Theater. In the summers, Robbins choreographed and performed at a Jewish resort in the Poconos during the day while dancing in Broadway musicals in the evenings. In 1940, he joined Ballet Theatre (later to become American Ballet Theatre) where he danced as a soloist.

For Ballet Theatre, Robbins choreographed and performed in Fancy Free (1944), a new ballet about sailors on shore leave in NYC, with sets designed by gay Oliver Smith and a score by gay composer Leonard Bernstein. Robbins Smith, and Bernstein were all just 25-years-old when their collaboration became a phenomenal success. In 1945, the same team put together On The Town, a musical inspired by Fancy Free, launching their Broadway careers. In 1947, Robbins created the dances for the musical High Button Shoes, celebrated for his crazy Keystone Kops Ballet, bringing his first Tony Award for Best Choreography.

Robbins directed and choreographed Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam (1950) with a score by Irving Berlin. He created the dance sequences for Rodgers And Hammerstein’s The King and I ( 1951), famous for his March Of The Siamese Children, the ballet The Small House OfUncle Thomas and the Shall We Dance polka.

Throughout his career, Robbins was discreetly noted as a “show doctor”, offering uncredited help for troubled stage musicals, including Bernstein’s Wonderful Town (1953), The Pajama Game (1954) and the Mary Martin version of PeterPan (1955). All the while, Robbins officially directed and choreographed Bells Are Ringing (1956) with Judy Holliday, Gypsy (1959) with Merman, and Fiddler On The Roof (1964) with Zero Mostel.

Robbins had ratted out Mostel to The House Un-American Activities Committee the decade before. Mostel and the great Jack Gilford (whose wife Robbins had also been named to HUAC) had already worked with Robbins when he unofficially staged the opening Comedy Tonight number for Stephen Sondheim’s AFunny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962). Sondheim pitched Robbins to producer Harold Prince as the savior of Forum which was floundering in its out-of-town tryouts. Prince phoned Mostel to ask whether he might be prepared to work with Robbins.

Mostel: “Are you asking me to eat with him?”

Prince: “I’m just asking you to work with him.”

Mostel: “Of course I’ll work with him. We of the Left do not blacklist.”

When Robbins showed up at his first rehearsal, Mostel greeted him with: “Hiya, Loose Lips!”

Unlike other directors of musicals, Robbins demanded that his actors dance as well as sing. His high expectations of the cast of West Side Story created what we now know as the “triple-threat performer”: actor/singer/dancer.

The extraordinary West Side Story was the product of a seven member creative team of gay geniuses: Robbins, book writer Arthur Laurents, Bernstein, Sondheim, set designer Smith, lighting designer Jean Rosenthal, and costume designer Irene Sharaff, plus to the original actor to play the male lead Tony, Larry Kert was also gay.

Robbins was a driving force with West Side Story, coming up with the original idea of a modern, urban retelling of Romeo And Juliet. Bernstein and Laurents brought in the idea of rival street gangs in a turf war to serve as Shakespeare‘s Montagues and Capulets. The gangs were divided into Puerto Ricans against Anglos. The story served as an allegory of love surviving the violence of a society built on prejudice.

Making the whole process of collaborating on West Side Story particularly interesting, both Bernstein and Laurents had been blacklisted, during the McCarthy era. Robbins had cooperated with the House Un-American Committee by naming names, mostly out of fear of being discovered as being a gay. Somehow, being a dancer and choreographer was not thought to be a tip-off in those days. It says something about Robbins singular talent that creative people continued to work with him for the rest of his career even after nearly ruining their lives, if not actually forgiving him. He was a self-proclaimed:

“Jewish ex-commie fag who had to go into a mental hospital.”

The creative flexibility, plus the artistic give-and-take among the young, gay Jewish West Side Story team was extraordinary. Each member brought out the best in the others, each one an absolute genius.

Laurents:

“I think the difficulty was having death, rape and murder in a musical. The subject matter: bigotry, violence and prejudice, might have precluded people from paying money to see that sort of thing with dancing and an orchestra.”

Actor, Carol Lawrence, West Side Story’s original Maria at just 19- years-old:

“The opening night in 1957 in Washington, DC, when the curtain went up for our curtain calls (after Tony’s lifeless body had been taken away and the strains of Somewhere played under the tolling of a single bell, it still breaks me up) we ran to our places and faced the audience holding hands. As the curtain went up, and we looked at the audience, they just looked at us, and we at them, and I thought, ‘Oh, dear Lord, it’s a bomb!’ and then, as if Robbins had choreographed it, they all jumped to their feet. I never saw people stamping and yelling, and by that time, Bernstein had worked his way backstage, and he came at the final curtain and walked to me, put his arms around me, and we wept.”

The West Side Story Broadway production team (1957), left to right: Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Hal Prince and Robert Griffith (seated), Bernstein and Robbins (on ladder). Photo by Friedman-Abeles, New York Public Library Performing Arts Archives

West Side Story, a groundbreaking landmark musical, lost the Tony Award for Best Musical to The Music Man, but Robbins won Best Choreographer. The film version won the Academy Award for Best Picture with Robbins winning for Best Director, along with eight other Oscars, the most ever for a movie musical.

With Robert Wise (R) directing the film version of West Side Story (1961), United Artists

Robbins suffered a massive stroke and took that final curtain call at his home in NYC in 1998. On the evening of his passing, the lights of Broadway were dimmed for a moment in tribute. Among his many lovers were actor Montgomery Clift, Broadway dancer Buzz Miller, photographer Jesse Gerstein and filmmaker Warren Sonbert.

Robbins:

“I told you to sell it, not give it away.”

The late, great Beatrice Arthur, who was directed by Robbins in Fiddler On The Roof:

“Talk about a gift from God! But he really wasn’t a very nice person. Actually, he was the only director who ever made me cry. He was a really dreadful human being. Everybody hated him. I was friends with a dancer called Sven who raised Yorkshire terriers who would do dog tricks. Whenever Sven had a party, he always left the door open. At some point in the evening, he’d go to the doorway and look out and say, ‘Oh my God, here comes Jerry Robbins!’ and the little dogs would fling themselves against the door and slam it shut.”

Check out PBS’sGreat Masters, Jerome Robbins: Something To Dance About available on PBS archives and the biography Dance With Demons: The Life Of JeromeRobbins (2001) by Greg Lawrence.

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