Word: glen
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Like Wilson Phillips' first album, Shadows and Light was produced and co- written by Glen Ballard, who has showcased the vocals with even more elaborate and satisfying arrangements this time. There are horns aplenty on this album, and a full complement of strings that gives sophistication, for example, to the already much played single You Won't See Me Cry. Another standout is Fueled for Houston, a frolicking, hard-driving rock tune with a brassy edge that evokes the rawness...
Deficient? The word does no justice to Wood's work -- to Bela Lugosi's mad monologues in Glen or Glenda ("Bevare of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep!" he intones between stock shots of atom-bomb blasts and buffalo herds. "He eats little boys! Puppy-dog tails! Big fat snails!"); to Bride of the Monster's rubber octopus with a broken tentacle, which Wood stole from Republic Studios; to Lugosi's double in Plan 9, who is a head taller than the star (who died during the filming) and must cover his face with a cape...
...alcoholic and a dreamer. As a Marine during World War II, he made beach landings wearing bra and panties under his uniform. Demobbed, he played a half man-half woman in a carnival before arriving in Hollywood to satisfy his twin obsessions: filmmaking and angora sweaters. The confessional Glen or Glenda, in which he played the title roles, was the apex of Wood's career. Later he was reduced to writing trash novels (Night Time Lez, Hell Chicks, Purple Thighs) and shooting porno shorts. In 1978, at 54, he died of a heart attack -- spent...
...movie revisionists discovered Ed Wood. For the 1980 Golden Turkey Awards, Wood was voted "The Worst Director of All Time," and Plan 9 "The Worst Film of All Time." Critic J. Hoberman, in the book Midnight Movies, proclaimed Wood "the ultimate cult director, the terminal manifestation of 'expressive esoterica.' " Glen or Glenda showed up on the late-night circuit, and soon much of the auteur's awful oeuvre was available on videocassette. Now Wood, anonymous in life, is notorious in death. He wrote but did not direct Orgy of the Dead; yet the video box ballyhoos it as "Ed Wood...
...ever made,' it is one that is boring -- a sin Ed Wood Jr. is rarely guilty of." But there is a more melancholy irony to be found in Grey's interviews with the director's colleagues. Unlike most trashmeisters, Wood had radical messages for his audience: about sexual tolerance (Glen or Glenda), nuclear madness (Plan 9), parental smugness (The Sinister Urge). He was as dedicated to filmmaking as Welles or Kurosawa. He just wasn't any good at it. Not by any standards: the old solemn ones of craft and glamour or the new giggly ones of condescension and camp...