_Ed Wood_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs "Perfect!!'' As writer-producer-director-with-a-bullhorn Ed Wood in Tim Burton's new film, Johnny Depp seems to yank this word from his gut, repeatedly and with increasing enthusiasm. No matter how bad the completed shot might look to any outsider, for Ed the moment is always nirvana: he's making movies. It's what he was meant to do. And whenever Ed/Depp said it, his dentured grin stiff and strange, his eyebrows raised in giddy delight, leaping to his feet on the way to the next set-up, he was maniacal, endearing, and hilarious. Sure, one actor bumped into a wall on the set, another one stuck his foot under the fake grass rug, and the strings on the flying saucers are visible. It's still perfect. I was lucky enough to attend a special midnight preview: its cult film status is clearly pre-approved. The viewers who lined up for over an hour to see it included a boy with his guitar and original mumbly lyrics, and two girls in platform shoes who wobbled past the ticket-holders' line with hand-made signs announcing, "Need t-shirts! Will pay money!'' (they had arrived too late for the advertised giveaways to "the first 100'' attendees; as far as I could tell, no one gave up their precious loot, even for money). It was an event. And once we got inside, it was like the film couldn't miss a beat. In fact, there's much to be enthusiastic about. From the opening sequence (with _Plan 9_-inspired tombstones bearing the actors' credits, a miniature haunted house complete with thunder and lightning, and flying saucers hovering on strings above a flimsy model of the HOLLYWOOD sign), to the impeccable black and white imagery, to Martin Landau's grand performance as Bela Lugosi, this is a movie about loving movies. It's not about moral decrees or cynical asides; it's about flat-out adoring the process and the culture. Eddy, as his friends called him, is so devastatingly upbeat and unselfish that he's seductive, at least during the period translated here, when he made _Glen or Glenda_, _Bride of the Monster_, and _Plan 9 from Outer Space_. It's the Ed Wood story, improved and delightful: we don't see his descent into alcoholism and despair in later life - he died in 1978 at age 54 - though the final list of "what happened to everyone'' reminds us that he remained under-appreciated during his lifetime. In its own consummately peculiar way, this is also a movie about fifties-style illusions and disillusionment, a theme which isn't so different, you might notice, from that of _Quiz Show_. Of course, _Ed Wood_ is exponentially weirder and messier in its examination of media and corruption, and much smarter than the Redford movie. It doesn't really indict the big bad Corporate Structure so much as it just assumes it and moves on, offering a portrait of inspired (if loopy) resistance and survival: its central character is both oblivious and complicit, a product of this desperate and cynical structure, but also its hopeful antithesis. Making connections between the industry's self- delusions and Wood's renowned idiosyncrasies, the film is carried along by an overwhelming faith in fictions. The opposition between Eddy and the commercial world that rejected him is subtly drawn: he never seems to notice that what he's doing is out of synch. He was committed to "telling stories'' on screen, thrilled by the chance to put the has-been Lugosi, some twenty years into his morphine addicton, back on the big screen. As he emulated hard-act-to-follow Orson Welles (appearing here briefly in the form of Vincent D'Onofrio, who bears an uncanny resemblance to him, leaning back, deep in the shadows of bar-booth), Ed Wood was a kind of dynamo, energized by the freaky vision that has since earned him a reputation as "The Worst Filmmaker of All Time.'' Unlike Redford's movie, which worries over a specific past moment of disenchantment, this one reaches back in time to find a redemption. In recovering Wood, Burton's film makes an end run around history to come up with something resembling, for lack of a better word, magic. This sounds corny, and it is. No conventional value judgments here. Such measures are irrelevant to this universe. Wood's happy assembly of tinseltown outcasts is incredibly out of touch, and that's what makes them irresistibly wonderful. He recruited a slew of bad actors for his bad movies, including horror-camp goddess Vampira (Lisa Marie), lunatic future- predictor and _Tonight Show_ favorite Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), ex-wrestler Tor Johnson (George "The Animal'' Steele), flaming transvestite Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray), ingenue- without-a-clue Loretta King (Juliet Landau), and those dazzlingly goofball cops from _Plan 9_ (Mike Starr and Max Casella). Of course, Wood's the-outside-is-really-inside worldview has something to do with his transvestism, which, back then, didn't have quite the popular, even-Wesley-Snipes-is-doing-it cache that it holds today. The film makes lovely sense of Wood's affection for angora sweaters (they're so soft and comforting) and high heels. When - before we've even seen him in drag - his first girlfriend Dolores (Sarah Jessica Parker) notices that one of her sweaters is missing, Ed, lying in bed in the foreground, turns away from her to the camera - uh oh - and the audience is with him, applauding his independence and audacity, eagerly anticipating the delicious image of Depp in a dress. (And we're not disappointed: he looks great.) Later, after Dolores has left him, he tells his new girlfriend and wife-to-be Kathy (Patricia Arquette) about his secret. They're caught on a Spookhouse ride, the electricity off, the car stalled and lights off. She pauses. His smile freezes. Tension mounts. "Okay,'' she says. It's a touching moment, about tolerance and love, yes, but also about how screwy the world is. By this point in the film, his crossdressing is so *normal*. How could anyone have a problem with it? Kathy's pretty swell, but the the film's most intimate relationship is between Wood and Lugosi: theirs is a queer love, indeed. It begins in an instant of perversely good luck: rejected by yet another studio suit, Ed happens upon the best Dracula ever outside a funeral home, where he's just been fitted for a coffin. Their personal liaison becomes increasingly complex and tender. The ailing Bela repeatedly calls him in the middle of the night ("Help me Eddy!'') and Wood never fails to drive on over to his tract house, filled with memorabilia and yappy little dogs, where he cleans up the needles and helps him into bed. Lugosi, in turn, devotedly revs himself up for the crazy scenes Ed concocts for him, like wrestling with a big old floppy- armed dummy-octopus in a local stream in the dead of night. When he powers through the _Bride of the Monster_ speech that Wood has written especially for him - "Home! I have no home!'' - he does so with passion, madness, and an almost unbelievable grace. It's stunningly theatrical but also too true. And in this gentle, generous, very funny movie about alienation and desperation, it's an excessiveness that is pretty perfect. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer studies project at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.