Ed Wood Review

I saw this movie recently and was really awe-struck at how beautiful a script can be made when enough homework and hard work are behind it. I always had an aversion towards black and white movies. Only after recently seeing "Sin City" did I realize that you need to make them even in the twenty first century. This movie reveals the untold story of a film director Edward D Wood Jr. Released in 1994, this movie stands up in my mind as one of the best plays I have seen. Johnny Depp plays the part of the director Ed Wood. This movie travails through the ups and downs of the man who never lost his self belief through all the turmoils he had to face.

The movie starts out with a small narration that promises to tell us the truth behind Ed Wood and to judge the character based on those facts alone.The movie introduces Ed Wood acting in a small play in a theater. When the review in the papers next day call it a total fall-off, Ed is prompt in pointing out, that the same review claims the costumes of the soldiers close-to-perfection. That is Ed Wood for you.

When a production company puts out a story about a person, who is a man but who wants to turn a woman, Ed calls them and fixes an appointment. Seeing the producer, Ed explains that he is the best director in town for that sort of a story. Going on to explain that he indeed had been such a person, he says that he had always fancied wearing women's clothes and that he had been wearing his girl friend's dress unknown to her for long. This fact clinches the role for him. His girl friend on hearing this truth is aghast. Just before he begins to shoot, he meets an actor Bela Lugosi, well past his prime and believed dead in the current film industry. He befriends the man and makes him play a part for him in the movie. After the shooting the movie fails to hit the premier show in his city.

Unperturbed by this he embarks on another attempt and embarks on a science fiction this time. The movie travels through all the troubles he has to endure financially to get this film made. He even is foxed into giving the lead role to a girl who fools him that she will finance the movie. Axing his girl friend from the lead role increases the rift between them. This movie is an even bigger flop and his girl friend leaves him. But these failures just get him more closer to the aging legend Bela.

Bela now under drugs is slowly falling apart and dies soon after. A small footage that Ed had made of him becomes the inspiration of his next movie. He sells it off as Bella's last movie and gets a look alike of Bela to play the role(face covered). In the mean while he meets a new girl and gets married at the end of it.

The story ends here by pointing out that Ed Wood had been voted the worst director of all times. The story of a failure cannot be told more successfully than this one. Through his travails he gets to meet the great Orsen Welles himself(director of Citizen Kane). When Ed meets him he is all but given up having to make the movies as the producers want it rather than how he would like it. The great director says "Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?" That sums up the movie. As the movie ends we realize that failures are not failures at all if you are ready to look at them in the face. Hats off Johnny Depp. A must watch.