Ed Wood, Jr.

:For the biopic film, see Ed Wood (film)

Wood pulp: Wood as author

While he is famed for his work as a film maker, Wood also penned innumerable novels and occasional non-fiction pieces. In his later years, he was unable to produce films on a regular basis due to lack of money and an alcohol addiction, so he dedicated himself to writing. He would write screenplays for other directors (most famously, Bride and the Beast for Adrian Weiss) and his own novels for six years after his filmmaking career had drawn to a close.

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Most of Wood's novels derived from his own transvestite fantasies as well as tapping into his love of crime and the occult. Wood?s careers of novelist and filmmaker would often intersect in that his books would often be novelisations of his own screenplays or that the stories from his novels would give way to the writing of a screenplay. Most notably, the character ?Glen/Glenda? from the movie Glen or Glenda would appear in two of his novels.

Related Topics:
Fantasies - Novelisation

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His stories typically careen off into different and unforeseen directions halfway through, as though no planning had taken place at all, and that Wood had sat down at the typewriter and simply made the story up as he went along. In his quasi-memoir, Hollywood Rat Race, Wood advises new writers to "just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."

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As Ed Wood is generally seen to be a naïve and friendly individual with high hopes but an easy-going attitude -- an image perhaps deriving from Johnny Depp's and Tim Burton's portrayal of him in the 1994 biopic -- some of his novels may be shocking to the average film/literature historian. Wood's dark side emerges in such sexual shockers as Raped in the Grass or The Perverts and stories which prey on racist fears, such as Toni: Black Tigress. One might argue that Wood was writing for a specific market and that the content of these books are not personal opinion, but it is nonetheless true that most of his books did derive from Wood's own vices.

Related Topics:
1994 - Biopic - Racist

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Many of Ed's books did not make it into publication. Hollywood Rat Race, for example, was only released in 1998, perhaps as a result of modern interest in Ed Wood resulting from Tim Burton's 1994 biopic. The book is non-fiction: part primer for young actors and writers wanting to take on the motion picture industry and part memoir, revealing such stories as how he and Lugosi entered into the world of night club cabaret.

Related Topics:
1998 - 1994 - Cabaret

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