Interview: Will Sloan
"A lot of the best 'bad movies' are the ones with a certain amount of tension."
When I first watched Glen or Glenda (1953), as a deeply closeted teenager, I couldn’t really see it. I was primed by Ed Wood’s reputation as ‘the worst director of all time’, and an earlier over-Skype watch of Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957) to turn away from all that was interesting about it. Especially because so many of the things in Ed’s deeply personal story of his struggles with transgender identity (only lightly fictionised in the rush to get the film made), resonated with a part of me I wasn’t quite ready to see.
Soon enough I grew out of watching ‘bad movies’ just to sneer at them and started to figure out who I was, in the broad strokes at least. And eventually Glen or Glenda found its way back to me. This time, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t believe what I and the general consensus had willfully ignored. Even its more bizarre choices and most obvious technical limitations, the awkward dream sequences and the absurdly over-complicated nesting doll structure, only serve to make its pained portrayal of the confusion and terror of a burgeoning gender identity, if not more sharp, then more potent; the way that feelings, when felt most strongly, blur together into something unclear but undeniable.
But still I didn’t give much thought to the broader scope of Ed Wood’s work, even as I hurriedly showed Glen or Glenda to whoever I could. Even as a broader queer reclamation of the film was starting, later enshrined in an effusive passage from Canden Mark Gardner & Willow Catelyn Maclay’s Corpses, Fools & Monsters (2024), perhaps the first definitive study of the trans film image. A close friend screened it at the Prince Charles Cinema in 2023 and it felt like more and more were seeing the film as it is.
A couple of months later and an ocean away, Glen or Glenda was screened in Toronto by Will Sloan and Justin Decloux as part of a screening series linked to their Important Cinema Club podcast, where I’d heard a constant hum of support for Ed’s work, especially from Will. And it was only then that I started to appreciate the rest of Ed’s films, discovering their strange atmosphere and a continuing theme of queerness which, in part because it’s never quite as loud as in Glen or Glenda, echoes hauntingly on; a quiet suggestion of what might have been, if Ed had been able to express himself more fully in his art and his life.
And so, on a rainy and melancholic morning I spoke to Will over Zoom about his new book, Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, which is published by OR Books on October 10th and is available here. A light and pleasurable guide through the early golden years (insofar as there were any golden years) that comes to a new life when looking into the darkest and least appreciated corners of Ed’s life and work. There is an attempt to get people to see what they couldn’t before, or, more likely, what they haven’t seen before; few have dared to look into the huge piles of cheap paperbacks, pornographic shorts and incomplete projects left in the wake of Ed’s final, alcohol drenched years.
CYZ: In the acknowledgements you mention a comment that critic Adam Nayman made about the book, that in it you were trying to save Ed Wood from Tim Burton and his movie [Ed Wood, 1994]. But I think you do a good job of not getting caught up in the reputation and make a case for the work in-and-of itself. How did you approach that?
Will Sloan: The question of what I actually think about Ed Wood came to me relatively late. When I was pitching the book they asked me, “are you going to do a full reclamation of Ed Wood? Are you planning to say that he’s actually a good filmmaker?” And I realized I hadn’t quite answered that question myself. So my provisional answer was I don’t think he’s merely bad.
He was interviewed in the 1970s for a number of books about Bela Lugosi, there were a lot of books written about Lugosi at the time because of the baby boomers who grew up watching his movies on TV. And it was interesting to read about Ed Wood’s films in those books because he had a reputation in the 70s as merely a bad director. He wasn’t yet the worst director of all time. And I found that very interesting. I wanted to be in that space.
Another thing that made me want to write the book was watching Take It Out in Trade (1970), which is one of the many Ed Wood movies that has resurfaced in the last 15 or 20 years. Mostly it was his pornographic films that were lost or neglected. And seeing that movie, I think it’s kind of good, actually. It’s very funny, intentionally. He does some interesting things with form. It’s flawed in a lot of ways too, but there’s a lot about it that’s quite imaginative.
And I thought it added a real wrinkle to the idea that he was merely the worst director of all time. I wouldn’t say that I was necessarily out to transcend the idea that he was a bad director. I just wanted to poke at it.
Thinking about Ed’s work in terms of artistic success is a challenge because you have to evaluate what is an interesting choice and what is a happy accident. For example, Jailbait (1954), which has this bizarre musical score that doesn’t seem to fit but also transforms every image in this amazing way. Do you have any insights into how that specific choice came about?
WS: I had many motivations for writing this book, and one of them was to get people to appreciate movies like Jailbait more. Jailbait, The Sinister Urge (1960) and Night of the Ghouls (1959). The second tier films where the reputation of “the worst director of all time” can be an obstacle to appreciating them. A lot of people have watched Jailbait over the years, hoping that it will deliver on the level of tombstones falling over and flying saucers on strings, but it’s more strange than that. The score just coats it in this strange vibe. It’s a bit like, not to draw an equivalence, but the zither score in The Third Man (1949) which acts as this odd counterpoint to the action and undercuts it in a provocative way.
Now, I think it’s entirely possible that that’s just the score that Ed Wood had. You can hear the same score in Ron Ormond’s film Mesa of Lost Women (1953), and Ormond was a colleague of Wood’s, so it might just happen to have been around.
Ed Wood was interviewed in his life, but it was mostly about Lugosi; there were very few people who were interested in just him. So there is very little direct testimony about a lot of these artistic decisions,
which, in the case of a movie like Glen or Glenda especially, makes it more powerful in a way. The fact that he’s not here to talk about what exactly he was thinking when he put Bela Lugosi [as a strange god-like figure, reigning unrelatedly over the main story of transgender self-discovery] saying “pull the strings!”, or how he justified telling the movie from the perspective of a psychiatrist and a cop… it’s frustrating, but it also makes the films more fascinating if you’re willing to view them through a lens other than that they are just bad decisions.
Glen or Glenda is really the point from which Ed Wood reclamation has started in my circles, and what makes it so fascinating, from a trans perspective, is that it comes from someone who doesn’t have a full conception of their own identity who is just spilling it all out. That fact that it is “bad” or unsuccessful or confused in some ways is what makes it ring so true.
WS: I completely agree. Speaking from a cisgender, heterosexual perspective, I think it’s a very beautiful film. And the fact that he doesn’t have the language, the fact that he doesn’t quite know exactly what he’s saying, the fact that he’s grasping for something he can’t reach, there is something deeply human in that. For me, it makes the movie more emotionally resonant than many much more well-mannered, more considered examinations of the topic.
And it speaks very specifically to the trans experience, because so much of it is about having these feelings and not knowing what they even are. Would you say there are other major points in his work that deal with this? From what I’ve seen, none go quite so in-depth, there are mostly little fragments and suggestions here and there.
WS: Well, a lot of it happens in his novels and in his short stories. He wrote hundreds of articles and short stories, dozens of novels, many of them with drag or cross-dressing themes. I wish Ed was here to say how he identified or how he would identify in a modern context. I feel a little presumptuous speaking for him. But having read a lot of his writing, in particular, an anthology book called When the Topic is Sex (2021), which is a collection of some of his non-fiction writings, there is an article called An Interview with a Crossdresser, which is Ed interviewing Shirley. So, of course, that’s him interviewing himself, and everything that Shirley says squares with his life experience. That was the skeleton key of, at least, how he identified circa 1960.
But what also came across was that being a cisgender heterosexual male was important to him. He identified as that and drew a distinction between himself and people who were transgender. However, it’s also true that he had a drag persona named Shirely and when he was Shirley, he was Shirley. People who knew him in the 50s would say that he never dressed in drag on the set—this was a very compartmentalized part of his life—but by the 70s he was apparently wearing high heels and angora sweaters at the offices of [pulp publisher] Pendulum Press.
There’s a lot in books like Killer in Drag (1963), Death of a Transvestite (1967), and, one of his last books, Diary of a Transvestite Hooker (1973) where, because he’s writing them off the cuff and very quickly, so much of his life experience comes into them. They’re much more personal than they’re often given credit for. And, to some extent, I think one can also read between the lines. People say, and I think it happens to be true, that if there’s a character named Shirley in one of his books or movies, that’s his surrogate. I do think he identifies with, or wants to be, many of his female characters.
The last thing I’lll say is that while there’s no other films that’s quite as exhaustive as Glen or Glenda, Take It Out In Trade is very interesting. It’s set in the gutters of Los Angeles and it’s an oftentimes affectionate picture of gutter life: it’s non-judgemental and upbeat in its depictions of sex work, there’s a transgender couples that the film treats very matter of factly, and Ed himself is playing a character named Alicia – and he’s delightful!
I feel like his prose are pretty unexplored, and, at least in terms of content, it seems like there’s a lot more freedom there. So do you think that’s the place that people need to go to find more from Ed? Is it a really important part of his overall work?
WS: I think so. For many years it’s been dismissed. The Tim Burton movie—which I love, by the way—has that text at the end that says “after a slow descent into alcoholism and monster nudie films, he died”. There’s been a general consensus that it goes up to about The Sinister Urge and then the rest of it was hack work, the rest of it was stuff he did to pay the bills. Now, I’m sure he would have rather been making big budget horror films in the 1970s, but he apparently did take pride in his work. He had a whole shelf of his books and they were stamped with “from the personal library of Edward D. Wood Jr.”, and he would give them to friends.
I’ve been a bit haunted by the book Diary of a Transvestite Hooker, which is narrated from the perspective of the title characters and it opens with him- I’m calling him ‘him’ by the way, even though I realize that’s a little problematic.
[Laughs] That’s okay.
WS: But it opens with him talking about being fresh off the bus in Hollywood. He came from the East and was very excited to join the film industry but he didn’t get any work and now here he is a sex worker. This story recurs over and over again in Ed’s work, it’s in The Sinister Urge and a number of other books, he talks about it a lot in Hollywood Rat Race, this kind of memoir / how-to manual. Obviously that was, on some level, what he felt was his experience. And a lot of the books are him wrestling with having ended up in the gutter, and he’s doing that through gutter press.
In the book you write quite a bit about the ending of the Tim Burton movie, which lets it all go down easy. But when you look past the first section of Ed’s work, even if you see that it’s full of really beautiful movies, you’re left with the challenge of this huge, fragmented mess of porn and novels and all the other stuff.
WS: I think the solution, or the answer to the challenge is to take him seriously as an artist. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a skilled practitioner, although he had a certain talent as a writer. But he produced a lot of stuff in a very short period of time and was one of the most dependable writers at Pendulum Press. If you lock into certain themes and into his perspective from early on, I think you can still see that in what he was doing in the 70s. If people don’t want to watch 30 Swedish erotica loops [short pornographic films shot on 8mm without sound], I totally understand that because, frankly, it’s not as fun as Bride of the Monster (1955). But if you come to love his perspective and not just the obvious technical deficiencies, I think there’s much that will reward you in the later work.
But when you look at the overall body of work, do you see it as compromised? Not in terms of the artistic limitations, but in terms of his struggle to get anything made; does what could have been, the projects that were never quite finished, linger in your mind?
WS: Oh, definitely. Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), the biography by Rudolph Gray, has an appendix listing many of his unrealized projects and there’s definitely stuff in there I would have loved to have seen. He wanted to make a biopic about the gangster Mickey Cohen with Paul Marco, like, God, what would that have looked like?
That said, I don’t necessarily think there’s a lot of evidence that more money would have made the movies more interesting. I love Bride of the Monster, I think it’s super fun, but I don’t love it more than Night of the Ghouls, which, because it’s so cheap, has an added dreamlike quality that Bride of the Monster lacks.
I think the ultimate example of that is Final Curtain (1957), which is, at the same time, the most pure and most compromised movie he ever made.
WS: Final Curtain is amazing because it is just Duke Moore in a room and some narration saying that this room is very scary. I love the chutzpah of that movie. Unfortunately, I don’t think it makes a great case for Ed Wood as a technical director to see him doing something like what Val Lewton [the producer of Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), amongst other minimalistic horror movies] did. It really underlines how well Val Lewton and [frequent collaborator] Jacques Tourneur were able to use the camera and edit to evoke mood from nothing. Ed Wood can’t really do that, but I admire the attempt.
He can’t leave well enough alone, he can’t let anything sit. There must be narration explaining how the handle on the stairwell feels! Every little detail gets rung out and insisted upon in a carny kind of way.
WS: It’s funny, I was just in Seattle where we showed Night of the Ghouls, and then, as an extra, Final Curtain after. And I can’t quite describe the current that went through the crowd when they saw Duke Moore go up those stairs again [much of the footage in Final Curtain, a failed TV pilot, was recycled into Night of the Ghouls], because it’s already so desperate when he uses it the first time, and then to see it all over again…
But, Nightmare of Ecstasy has some excerpts of an interview Ed Wood gave, I think to Robert Cremer, who was a Lugosi biographer, where’s he’s talking about the famous scene in Plan 9 From Outer Space —famous to me at least—where Lugosi walks away from his house and then gets him by a car just off-screen. And it’s incredibly unconvincing, the editing is really bad. And Ed Wood says something like “oh yeah, Lugosi’s death, that was so cheap.” That caught me off guard when I read it for the first time because, maybe he was delusional in certain ways, but he at least knew when he had cut a corner that severely.
It’s a shame that Ed missed the wave that came from the Tim Burton movie. I wonder what it would have been like for him to have that reputation to work off of.
WS: I wonder. I read a story from about a year before Ed died: a Lugosi biographer named Richard Bojarski called him and told him that a theatre in New York was having an Ed Wood night. He got all excited, saying “Oh, isn’t that great? They remember my films”, but then he paused and realised “They’re not laughing at them, are they?” Bojarski had to tell him “no, of course not…” I think being named ‘the worst director of all time’ would have been hard for Ed Wood, but I think he would have found a way to cope. He was looking for recognition of some kind and he would have tried to find a way.
The other thing is, towards the end of his life there was some indication that the next generation might have thrown him a bone. He’s not high level, but Fred Olen Ray—who made Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988) and is still working today making Hallmark Christmas movies—met Ed Wood and they started working on a script together. Unfortunately Ed Wood died before it could be finished. He’s also an uncredited director on the film Meat Cleaver Massacre (1977). Someone involved with the production was a fan of old horror movies and hired Ed to be a still photographer and he ended up taking over the production when the original director wasn’t competent enough.
Those are two examples of things he got in the last year of his life, so maybe there would have been nostalgic fans who would have given him more work. Or maybe there would have been a Lloyd Kaufman [of Troma fame] type who would have been like “The worst director of all time? We can make some money from this. Ed, here’s $50,000, go make a bad movie!” Or maybe he would have just hit the convention circuit and been very successful on it.
Yeah, there’s where a whole swath of his collaborators ended up; making something of it, if not much.
WS: I love all those people. Conrad Brooks was a great one. He was an even more minor cop in Plan 9 from Outer Space [than Paul Marco, who tried to make a career of being ‘Kelton the Cop’ in Plan 9, Bride of the Monster & Night of the Ghouls] who spent the 90s directing and staring in these camcord films like Jan-Gel, the Beast from the East (1999), which he would sell at conventions.
But Ed Wood was certainly restlessly creative. He would have continued creating. I hope that being named the worst director of all time wouldn’t have paralyzed him in the way it did for Tommy Wisseau or James Nguyen of Birdemic (2010). If you watch Birdemic 2 (2013) or 3 (2022) they’re paralyzed by this, well, self-awareness might be the wrong word because they’re not exactly in on the joke. But they knew there’s a joke.
Later in the book, you look for people who are in the lineage of Ed Wood. And on the one hand it feels like there’s no way for there to be another Ed—there was such a specific intersection of time, circumstance, a bizarre personality and all these other outcasts and weirdos—but also because filmmaking has become fragmented and democratised, there are Ed Woods everywhere.
WS: Every week there are 30 movies that get released on Tubi that are worse than anything Ed Wood ever made. One of the things that still separates Ed Wood is that he was working in a system that hadn’t been democratised: he was still working with 35mm films, he was aiming for conventional theatrical distribution, his movies had to meet a certain minimum standard of quality even if they just barely got there. There’s a tension there, between him and that minimum standard that doesn’t necessarily exist in all of the Tubi-schlock.
It’s a similar kind of tension, although to different ends, as in The Room (2003), or anything that looks kind of like a “normal movie” but is not.
WS: Yeah. I think a lot of the best “bad movies” are the ones with a certain amount of tension. The Room is a prime example because the crew are basically Hollywood professionals. Low-level Hollywood professionals, the cinematographer shot Boa (2001) with Bean Kaine, but he’s not Tommy Wisseau. He’s trying to light these scenes as well as possible. And that’s why none of Tommy Wisseau’s subsequent projects are anywhere near as interesting, because they don’t have that tension anymore.
As someone who has been aware of you and your work for a long time, this book feels like a nexus point of so many of your interests: Jerry Lewis, Motern Media, the bad movie industrial complex. Which, to me, seem united by this theme of failure, whether that’s in their career, artistically or otherwise, while still finding a kind of success outside of the systems built for them. What about these figures/careers speaks to you?
WS: Well, first of all, I’m grateful that you’ve identified that as a recurring theme in my work or have identified any recurring themes in my work.
[Will takes some time to think]
I’m just going to try to put it as simply as possible: I think we live in a very corrupt society, I think the rules of the game are generally very unfair, and I think that to to succeed in a very corrupt society on the terms dictated by that society does not necessarily strike me as success. So I am interested in artists who envision something different.
I think Ed Wood is such a great example of that because he’s so burdened by the context of what is considered bad. If you can show someone Ed Wood and they can say “I see something in this, I see beyond that”, that feels like a great point to reach.
WS: Yeah, Ed Wood’s an interesting case study for this because I do think he wanted to succeed in Hollywood. He wanted to make successful, critically admired Hollywood films that met traditional standards of quality and he failed. But in failing he created something very interesting.
I think the fact that the kind of earnest expression of Glen or Glenda was considered by society to be bad for so long is an indictment of society. It’s not an indictment of Ed Wood. I feel the same way about Diary of a Transvestite Hooker, frankly. Look, it’s not James Joyce, it’s flawed in lots of ways, but it has a lot of heart and a lot of soul. In the traditional telling of Ed Wood’s story, the fact that it was written in a state of poverty and for a pornographic book publisher are marks against it. And I would humbly submit that they are not.