Word: wood
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Outside, the building is still New England Puritan brick. Inside, it's North African Muslim. Bronze railings frame an angular staircase. Under the vaulted wood ceilings in the upstairs room, faux Bronze Age pottery graces the windowsills and exotic music twists around the tables...
Fifties director Edward Wood was so awful he was awesome...
...just at this time, 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...
Grey calls those who treat Wood with benign contempt "jackals of bourgeois sensibility." And he's right. As critic Jim Morton notes, "If there is a 'worst film 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...
...hail to the man whose films were too bad to be bad. He has finally inspired a work worthy of his ambitions. Delirious and horrifying -- and All True! -- Nightmare of Ecstasy is better than any Ed Wood film. No, the book deserves a higher compliment: it's worse...