Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick

Several months ago (06-17-12) I wrote proposing my own list of top ten movies of all time. I won't list them here nor list the artists who produced them. I will mention those I've written about including most recently (number one on my list) Schindler's List producer, Steven Spielberg (he was robbed at the 2013 Academy Awards, but that's another matter). I've also written on Orson Wells (#2 on my list), David O. Selznick (#3), and D.W. Griffith (#8). Stanley Kubrick came in at number 9 on my list with his low-budget, 1963, satire Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). If nothing else, Kubrick's full film title, at thirteen words in length, undoubtedly wins the award for the longest in history. I could spend this entire blog writing about just this one film. (I may do just that someday with not just this one, but each film on my top ten list.)

 

Kubrick learned all there
was to know about film making
all in an effort to save a buck.

Stanley Kubrick was born in the Bronx in 1928 of Jewish parents, the older of two children. At the age of thirteen, Kubrick took up still photography, though in high school he barely made passing grades. After WWII Kubrick became an apprentice photographer for Look magazine and shortly thereafter joined the full-time staff. It was during this time he began unofficially studying film making at the Museum of Modern Art through their screenings of the work of directors Max Ophuls and Elia Kazan, both of whom were to influence his later directorial work. By 1951 Kubrick was directing March of Time newsreels. He made his first film the same year, the sixteen-minute-long Day of the Fight in which he was cameraman, director, editor, assistant editor, and sound effects man all rolled into one, all in the name of saving money. However, more important than the money he saved was the broad experience in film making he gained. The early 1950s found Kubrick making documentaries, one of which (on Abraham Lincoln) became a part of the Omnibus TV series.

 

Early Kubrick, early Douglas.

Kubrick reprised his one-man-band act in making his first feature film Fear and Desire (1953), a war film in which Kubrick and his wife comprised the entire crew. As in the case of most first films, it was not a success at the box-office and Kubrick was forever embarrassed by what he termed a "bumbling and boring" first effort. However the film demonstrated his interests in the conflict between rational and irrational elements in warfare planning that were to show up in later films, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket. By the mid-1950s, Kubrick was making low-budget feature films with a full crew and rising young actors like Sterling Heyden (the Killing) and Kirk Douglas (Paths of Glory), a WW I anti-war film where he demonstrated for the first time his trademark long tracking shot.

 

Kubrick found himself in the awkward position
of working for the star of his film. Kirk Douglas
owned the movie rights to Spartacus.

By 1960, Kubrick had hit the big time. Working with a cast of 10,000 and a million-dollar budget, Spartacus, also starring Kirk Douglas, was only his fourth feature film...and it showed. His low-budget one-man-band approach rankled the Hollywood pros, creating numerous conflicts on the set. Though the film was a critical and financial success, winning four Academy Awards, it was the first and last film Kubrick ever made not having complete financial and creative control of the project. His next film, Lolita, in 1962, was as far removed from the epic Spartacus as could be imagined. And even after having removed most of the eroticism of Vladimir Nabokov's steamy, pedophilic novel, the film was his most controversial. It was also his first time working with Peter Sellers.

 

Kubrick discovered Peter Sellers
and Sue Lyon. Lolita made them stars.

Lolita proved Kubrick's dark comedic talent. Dr. Strangelove and his genius in casting Sellers in all three major roles of the film proved his mastery of the genre. Despite his numerous other outstanding works, Strangelove I consider to be the cumulative epitome of Kubrick's career. His name in the hand drawn opening credits rolling up the screen occurred so often as to be embarrassing were it not for the fact Seller's name appeared almost as often (click the link below, right). The film was a satiric rewrite of the Peter George novel, Red Alert, controversial if for no other reason than Kubrick turned it into a black comedy at a time when the public found little amusing about nuclear warfare. Kubrick and Sellers changed all that. Even "mutually assured destruction" had its lighter side in contrast to the darker side of bumbling generals, statesmen, and policy wonks. Together with British screenwriter, Terry Southern, they penned such outrageous, "strangelovian" dialogue as: "You can't fight here, this is the war room."

Despite the outstanding performance
of Peter Sellers in three roles, it was
this iconic image of Slim Pickins wildly 
riding an H-bomb to his death which
has become forever associate with
Dr. Strangelove.

 

The classic opening sequence to Dr. Strangelove.

 

If Dr. Strangelove changed forever the way we looked at the cold war, Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey forever changed the way we looked at the future and particularly space exploration. Kubrick took the science fiction genre from silly hubcap flying saucers on fishing line into what has proven to be the 21st century cinematography, though his timeline regarding space travel has proven to be ridiculously optimistic. However, his 1968 predictions as to computer development have tended to be quite accurate (below). And, though Kubrick's (and Arthur C. Clarke's) subtle, tripartite, screenplay proved to be too erudite for most movie goers at the time, needless to say, George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Kubrick for his ground breaking, mind-bending visuals which, even today, almost fifty years later, appear to be state-of-the-art.

Irony has always been Kubrick's stock
in trade and never more so than in
2001: a Space Odyssey in which the
stunning visuals and a computer
named HAL 9000 upstaged the actors. 

 

2001: A Space Odyssey

Kubrick's opening segment ape-shot--man's evolution begins.

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke,
two great minds, one great movie.

People often make a point of watching a film several times. James Cameron made his fortune with Titanic because teenage girls turned it into something of a cult classic even during it's first run in theaters. I've seen many movies multiple times inasmuch as I taught "Movies as an Art Form" for more than a quarter century. I'd be a contender for the record number of times anyone has seen Gone With the Wind, and Ben-Hur. Aside from teaching about them, some movies people watch repeatedly for the sheer enjoyment of the story, or the characterizations, perhaps the stars, or simply in observing again and agan great examples of cinematic art. One film, however, simply must be seen more than once...more than a few times, actually...in order to appreciate and understand its story, its characterizations, and its artistic and historical importance. It's another film I've taught occasionally. I've seen it at least half a dozen times--Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

The science was accurate, the concepts were close, the images
somewhat grandiose, but the timetable was decades off.

Even allowing for Dr. Stangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is arguably Kubrick's greatest masterpiece. However, Space Odyssey is not an easy film to watch, which is why it must be seen more than once. First of all it takes a strong bladder; it's 142 minutes long (161 minutes in its original cut). Thankfully, there is an intermission. But that's a minor factor. The second difficulty in seeing the film only once is its organization. It's really three (perhaps four)separate movies, the first segment set 400-million year ago and without a single word of dialogue or narration (the opening 20 minutes of the movie). From that point on, the dialogue, what there is of it, during the other two segments is, in fact, one of the most trying elements of the film. It's not only minimal, it's mostly rather bland, barely interesting, even boring at times, but all with a very distinct purpose. Although it does serve to convey the plot somewhat, mostly the minimalist dialogue is designed to encourage (even force) the viewer to search for the meaning of it all as the film progresses. The dialogue's banality also serves to make room for the film's greatest strength--its visual impact. The movie was nominated for four Academy Awards. It won only one, for its visual effects (above).

 

A trip to the moon via Pan Am. I'll have the Gerber special without the sauce.

The second segment is basically a "traditional" trip to the moon. The science is accurate; the cinematography, groundbreaking; the hardware is fascinating, the scenery--out of this world. It's Jules Verne on steroids. I'm not going to get into plot here any more than absolutely necessary, both because some readers may not have seen the film, and it's too deeply complex to even contemplate in this limited space. It's only during the film's third segment that the story really gets interesting. Two space travelers, played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, embark on an extended voyage to Jupiter (below) along with the most riveting character in the film, the spacecraft's on-board computer HAL 9000. If you should ever be asked what the film is about, say it's about the evolution of mankind and our ever-growing reliance upon the tools we've invented--HAL being the ultimate tool.

 



Jogging to Jupiter, artificial gravity and suspended animation.

Clarke and Kubrick re-wrote
the book on sci-fi.

Though technically part of the third segments, the arrival at Jupiter actually constitutes a fourth segment of the film. The final fifteen minutes of the movie are visually stunning, a psychedelic light show of incredible film-making proportions never before seen when the film was released in 1968 (and seldom seen since). I must confess, as I sat in an uncrowded theater in Cincinnati watching Space Odyssey for the first time, toward the end, I had absolutely NO idea what I was seeing or what it meant in the context of the rest of the movie. It's probably the only movie I ever saw in which, even after seeing it, I didn't know how it ended. It was several years later that I saw the film again, and even then, I wasn't sure I understood. To say the least, it's ambiguous; though now, in hindsight, having seen the movie several more times, read about it, and taught it, I have a fair inkling of what Kubrick and his co-author, Arthur C. Clark, were trying to say. Their book, (left) written jointly as the movie was in production, is clearer in that regard.

 

Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea privately plot against HAL

If Space Odyssey's special effects, visual effects, and cinematography were its major strengths, not far behind was Frank Cordell's musical score. He flawlessly integrated classical pieces by Gustav Mahler, Johann Strauss, György Ligeti, and of course HAL's favorite song, Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two) by Harry Dacre. At times, the musical score literally takes over the film. One night, as I was previewing the movie on TV in writing a study guide for my students, the strange music sent our dog scurrying behind the couch where she stayed for the rest of the night. The dramatic opening strains from Richard Strauss' tone poem, sprach Zarathustra have become somewhat trite in the futuristic film genre.

 

The iconic 2001 face of awe...I was bug-eyed too toward the end.

Very few films from the past century have had the profound cinematic impact of Kubrick's space classic. Before Space Odyssey, hubcaps dangling on nylon fishing line served as special effects. Weightlessness had seldom been explored; and murder and mayhem came at the point of a ray gun rather than by computer. Kubrick spent 10.5-million 1968 dollars (some of it his own money) and, except for a little judicious pruning to reduce the film's running time, every penny can be seen on screen. Space Odyssey has grossed $109-million since its release, proving that well-done sci-fi could be a winner at the box office. Quite apart from the lessons Kubrick taught Steven Spielberg and George Lucas about style and content in making space "cowboy" epics, had it not been for Space Odyssey, Strange Encounters, E.T., Star Trek, and the Star Wars saga would have been seen as high-risk investments, and might never have been made.

 

The one thing HAL feared most--a screwdriver.

Several months ago I created a list of the Top Ten American Movies of All Time. Despite what I said above about Space Odyssey being Kubrick's greatest masterpiece, I chose to list Dr. Strangelove instead (number nine on the list). The seeming conflict in even my own opinion (critics have argued between the two films for years) is in comparing the content of Kubrick's filmography, one to another, as opposed to comparing Kubrick's films in general to every other American film ever made. Visually and thematically, Space Odyssey hovers head and shoulders over Kubrick's black-and-white, low-budget, cold-war farce. Even so, it's a tough call. However, I would deem Dr. Strangelove as the more "important" of the two, both in terms of its sociopolitical message and certainly, it's entertainment value. Moreover, Strangelove is fun to watch. Space Odyssey isn't.

The slender, monolithic thread that tied it all together.

 

Allen Jones

Objectifying women, 1969, Allen Jones.

Allen Jones, Self-portrait, 1957

There was a time about forty years ago when lots of people would have been upset with me for featuring the work of British sculptor, Allen Jones. During the late 1960s and 1970s, when the women's movement was in its infancy, Jones' fiberglass furniture utilizing scantily clad female fetish figures were an outrage (probably still considered by some to be so today). Allen Jones was the enemy, seen by irate feminists as a suitable candidate for castration. He had the unmitigated gall to depict women as art objects, reducing them to subservient pieces of furniture in contorted, highly sexualized poses. Ironically, in their blind anger and outrage, it's likely few of the justifiably indignant women at the time considered the fact that male artists had, almost from the beginning of art itself, been "objectifying women." Ever since a prehistoric sculptor carved the Venus of Willendorf from a lump of rock roughly 28,000 years ago, the female figure has been objectified as a fertility goddess, a symbol of eternal feminine perfection (as in Barbie), the virgin "mother of God," a source of erotic stimulation, and in sculpture, the personification of great physical beauty. How dare some impudent British misogynist "pig" turn women into pieces of furniture!

 

Allen Jones' work as seen by British cartoonist, Stanley Arthur Franklin, 1970.

Life Class, 1968, Allen Jones, the
last step before merging the
woman with the furniture.

Perhaps there is a deeper irony in the work of Allen Jones. Though probably not obvious at the time, Jones' female tables, chairs, coat racks, and, yes, even refrigerators, may have, in fact, done the feminist movements a favor. At that point in time (1969), women were looked upon differently than they are today. They had very narrowly defined roles--wives, mothers, sexual partners, and homemakers. Outside the home, they were prostitutes, waitresses, secretaries, nurses, and (mostly elementary) school teachers. Objectifying women was so taken for granted that most men, and even many women, barely gave it any thought. Jones' female furniture, however, was so outrageously "over the top" it came to symbolize the very concept of female objectification, providing a mountaintop lightning rod at which women in England, and eventually the world over, could aim their bolts of righteous wrath. Jones and his female furniture became the very definition of female objectification.

 

Secretary, 1972, Allen Jones

I suppose, if you want to talk about irony, it's likely the ultimate irony in all of this is that the anger and outrage aimed a Allen Jones and his erotic furniture by the women who hated him so, were the same ones who, inadvertently, made the sculptor and his work world famous...not to mention quite wealthy. Three pieces of Jones' most iconic furniture recently brought $3,392,707 at Christies in London. Interestingly, at the height of his controversial career, Jones' work also became a symbol for the male sexual culture of the time. The U.S. film maker, Stanley Kubrick, is said to have called Jones in London and offered him the "opportunity" to design furniture and sets for his upcoming film, A Clockwork Orange, at no salary, simply for the free advertising such exposure would bring. Jones hung up on him. Kubrick, in response, paid his own set designer to imitate Jones work for his film. However, Jones was later paid to create a black latex waitress costume (below) for the movie, designed, shall we say, not to discomfort the ladies when they sat down. Strangely enough, the imitation Jones furnishings used in the film are often falsely credited to the artist. However, they were, in fact, far more sexually explicit than anything Jones ever designed.

 

Jones' waitress costume for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, 1971

Maitresse, Jones' 1976 movie design.

Born in Southampton in 1937, later trained (and expelled) from some of the best art schools London had to offer, Allen Jones was, in every way, as personally objectionable as his female detractors painted him. Moreover, just as the feminist movement worldwide grew, succeeded, matured, and moved on to more important issues of gender discrimination, so too did its public enemy number one. Kubrick (below) was "small potatoes." Jones went on to "design" an entire feature- length movie, Maitresse (left), a sado-masochistic French film, directed by Barbet Schroeder, that was so far ahead of the cultural curve at the time (1976) it was unable to obtain certification for public exhibition until 1981 and even then only after some five minutes of the most objectionable scenes were removed.

Stanley Kubrick's imitation Jones tables in A Clockwork Orange--verging on the obscene.

Eyes Front, 2009, Allen Jones

Think Pink, 2011, Allen Jones

Today, Jones' 1969 Chair (top) can be found in London's Tate Gallery. One of his sculptures, City Shadow I (below), stands on a street corner in Hong Kong (protected by heavy security). Though still highly sexualized, Jones' work is no longer met with the controversy seen forty years ago. In much of the world, contemporary culture has caught up with, often surpassed in fetish sexuality, even his most obnoxious efforts. His Eyes Front (above, left), from 2009, and Think Pink (above, right), from 2011, both seem pretty tame by today's standards. Actually, the same could be said about virtually all of Jones' work. In fact, for better or worse, his sculptures might well be said to have had an impact upon the sexual and artistic culture of the time, contributing to its evolution into the more tolerant, less judgmental one we know today.



City Shadow I, Allen Jones, Hong Kong.

 

Top Ten American Movies of All Time

Several months ago I went out on a limb and chose the top ten paintings of the last thousand years.  Well, inasmuch as the favorite topic at the moment among my friends seems to be movies, I'm going to crawl even further out on the proverbial limb and list the top ten movies of the last thousand years. I know, that sounds like a bit much, but since movies have only been around for a little over a hundred years, it's no great stretch. Speaking as one who has taught both film making and film history, I may not be the greatest expert in the world, but I do have some basis of judgment on the subject. Unfortunately, I am not conversant enough in foreign films to consider them in this list. Likewise, these are not necessarily my favorite movies; and the order of placement in the list may be arguable; but I feel firmly that these ten motion pictures are classics in every sense of the word and should be lodged in the film memory vault of every individual alive. 

10.  West Side Story--winner of ten Academy Awards; classic Shakespearean plot updated; still as relevant today as in 1961; young people who later became screen legends; the film boasts music and choreography as good as Broadway or Hollywood ever gets.

9.  Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)--Dating from 1963, not all the great ones win Academy Awards or strut their stuff in glorious color. Stanley Kubrick's chilling little cold war farce (which he wrote, produced, and directed) just before 2001: A Space Odyssey (tough call between these two) showcases George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn (son of Ed Wynn), and the late, great Peter Sellers in three different leading roles. (I know, that sounds impossible.) James Earl Jones and Slim Pickins also put in appearances. You know a movie has made an impact when it becomes an adjective--strangelovian.

8.  Birth of a Nation--Dating from the early silent era (1915), D. W.  Griffith taught Hollywood how to make movies. His four-hour epic is loaded with the blatant racism of its time, but the daring scope of its content, and its cinematography rise above that to achievements unknown in its day. Even today it remains a virtual "how to" book on basic film making as well as propaganda. It's American history (albeit from a Southern point of view) as well as film history of the highest caliber (best taken in small doses or with one finger on "fast forward").

7.  "Casablanca--Even 1943 "B" movies sometimes achieve greatness. This is a sentimental favorite with probably more unforgettable lines than any movie ever made. Like Strangelove, it demonstrates you can make great movies without great budgets. Bogart and Bergman--film chemistry just doesn't get any better than this.

6.  Titanic--Which just goes to show, you can also make great movies in spite of great budgets. Eleven Academy Awards and a zillion dollars in box office loot can't all be wrong. And to give credit where it's due, sharp directing, editing, cutting edge special effects, another Romeo and Juliet plot rip-off, and a great score don't hurt either.

5.  The Godfather (Part II)--The Mob never looked so good...or so human. Coppola's dark, mafia masterpieces are not among my favorites but I have to respect his work. Like so many great films, this 1974 sequel, is a blockbuster which could easily have gone terribly wrong, but didn't.

4.  Ben-Hur (1959)--The first motion picture to ever win eleven Academy Awards, with two or three of the most memorable sequences ever put on film. Easily the best film of the 1950s, it's a biblical saga with a powerful spiritual message, which yet manages to avoid becoming a Sunday school lesson.

3.  Gone With the Wind--What can I say about this 1939 epic that hasn't already been said a hundred times over? It's not a perfect movie. Selznick's pedantic paraphrasing of Margaret Mitchell's dialogue would not give Shakespeare cause for alarm; yet if movies are about greatness--pictures, music, drama, and great stories about great events told with great feeling--then this one holds up quite well now seventy-two years after it was made.

2.  Citizen Kane--Considered by many to actually be the "perfect movie," it's amazing how many films on this list were virtual one-man-shows. Maybe a single individual dominating every facet of the work is one of the most important prerequisites for greatness. Whether his name is D.W. Griffith, David Selznick, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, or James Cameron, in so many cases a single artist made the movie great despite sometimes incredible odds. This 1940 masterpiece wrote the sequel to Birth of a Nation insofar as cinematography is concerned.

1.  Schindler's List--I'm not ashamed to admit it. Spielberg made me cry.

Visual effects before CGI

The Ten Commandments, 1956, Cecil B. DeMille

If you are a lover of classic cinema such as I, you've probably wondered at one time or another how Hollywood filmmakers managed to create some of the astounding visual effects way back before computers generated imagery (CGI). As a child, one of the earliest movies I can remember was Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments. His immortal scene of the parting of the Red Sea (above) was so realistic I often wondered it God himself didn't have a hand in it. The truth is, DeMille filmed two large "dump tanks" being flooded with water, then ran the film in reverse. The two frothing walls of water were created by water dumped constantly into catch basins. The churning water images were then flipped sideways to make the walls of water. A gelatin substance was also added to the water in the tanks to give it more of a seawater consistency. Incidentally, the catch basis still exists today on the Paramount lot. It can still when the need arises to film floods on a biblical scale. Otherwise it's an extension of a parking lot.
 

How it all began--The Enchanted Drawing--Stuart Blackton

It all started with beheadings in an 1895 Edison Film when Alfred Clark recreated the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. He had all the actors hold completely still, with the exception of the actress playing Mary, while he paused the camera. Then he replaced her with a dummy before filming started again and the dummy lost its head. Clark's effect may seem minor, but it was not only the birth of motion picture special effects, but also stop-motion videos and animations. It's been said that some audience members thought a woman had actually sacrificed her life for the picture. A few years, later in 1902, a Frenchman shot for the moon with an entire movie titled Straight to the Moon based upon Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. The visual effects were...let's call them fantastic...with the emphasis on fantasy. Melies brought together the effects from films he'd made earlier into one work of art, including double exposure, split screens, dissolves, and fades. As for animation, you may want to see The Enchanted Drawing (above). In the film, the cartoonist for the New York Evening World, Stuart Blackton, draws a cartoon character and then adds things like a top hat, a bottle of wine and an empty glass. He then pulls those items out of the picture, causing the picture's expression to change as art and artist interact together. It's safe to say, the film inspired the entire future of animation.

The Lost World, 1925, special effects by Willis O'Brien

One of the most famous early examples of model usage was 1925's The Lost World (above). This ground-breaking film featured actors interacting with giant monsters. Willis O'Brien, who was later involved with King Kong (below), used small puppets that were filmed one frame at a time on mini-sets. The actors were then added by putting two negatives together on split screens. If that sounds complicated, it was, especially in the beginning. When The Lost World portrayed humans running away from stop-motion animated monsters, they actually had to film things with an optical printer. This required blacking out all but the actors on the top film, then blocking out where the actors would appear on the stop-motion film and printing them onto a third roll of film. This all became a lot simpler with the advent of "blue screening." The first film to use a blue screen behind the actors (which made it easier to print only them on the film) came in 1940 with The Thief of Bagdad. Using this method, the film would be developed with a number of color filters to ensure that the blue background would disappear, while the actors and intended background would show up. Now days, a green background is more commonly used in that blue is a more likely color for clothing.

King Kong, 1939, stop-motion photography artist Willis O'Brien

Kong, the giant gorilla, was actually not so "giant." He was a mere 18 inches, a poseable model, covered with rabbit hair. The scene with actress Fay Wray at the top of the Empire State Building was filmed one frame at a time using stop-motion photography by visual effects artist Willis O'Brien and his crew. The producers filmed Kong and Fay Wray, separately. They then projected the two films together to create the effect of Fay Wray in the grip of Kong.
 

The skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts, 1963, Ray Harryhausen.

Stop-action photography was also the key in making the four-minute skeleton fight (above), which was orchestrated by visual effects genius Ray Harryhausen. It took almost five months to shoot via stop-motion animation. Harryhausen also rear-projected footage of the actual actors (who, when filming, were basically battling air behind the animation) and then combined the shots to make a realistically scary skeleton-Argonaut battle.




Fantastic Voyage, 1966

By 1966, the art and science of visual effects had come a long way (above). The science-fiction classic, Fantastic Voyage (Raquel Welch never looked so good) won that year's Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. The story revolves around miniaturized human beings voyaging into the bloodstream of a human body (if you buy that premise, you might be interested in a bridge or two). It was created using a full-size high-tech navy submarine that was supposedly shrunk to microbial dimensions on film. The interior of the body was created by using large, highly-detailed sets of various body parts (i.e., the brain, the heart). Actors were suspended on wires to journey through the body. Only Fantastic Voyage's fantastic visual effects could make such a fantastic plot believable.

The spaceship Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, Stanley Kubrick

The visual effects of Stanley Kubrick's futuristic masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey included a 30-ton rotating "Ferris wheel" set (above) built by a British aircraft company. Kubrick laid out $750,000 in creating the apparent use of centrifugal force to mimic the effects of zero gravity. The set rotated at a speed of three miles per hour. The actors would stand at the bottom and walk in place, while the set rotated around them. Chairs, desks, and control panels were all firmly bolted to the inside surface.

The UFO landing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977, Steven Spielberg.

And finally, we come to the unchallenged master of visual effects, Steven Spielberg. His 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind used a 400 lb. fiber-glass model that was four feet high and five feet wide to create the famous landing scene. (It probably would have been cheaper to build the real thing then turn it into a theme park ride afterwards.) The UFO model was wired and lighted by fiber optics, incandescent bulbs, and neon tubes. Not only that, but they all had to be coordinated to the musical tones used by the aliens to communicate. I guess that was better than hubcaps dangling from nylon fishing lines as seen in the 1959 classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space (below).
 

Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959.
The attack of the hubcaps. You
can hardly see the fishing lines.

Edward D. Wood Jr.

Some of the worst films ever made--most written, directed, and produced by Ed Wood.
He even took on a starring role in one of them.

As a public school art instructor I considered the cinematic arts to be on a par with painting, drawing, art history, sculpture, and other creative art forms. Of course costs made it impossible to give students hands-on moviemaking experience, but like a course in literature, we studied the classics as appropriate to the ages of the students involved. Those included Gone With The Wind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ben-Hur, Bridge on the River Kwai, Fantasia, and a number of others too numerous to mention. Over the years, using this format, I've tended to concentrate on some of the greatest names in the film industry such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Wells, Walt Disney, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, David O. Selznick, Martin Scorsese, and again, a number of others too numerous to mention. Though quite varied in their talents and approaches to filmmaking, they were the best Hollywood has had to offer. Today, as a change of pace, let me highlight a man considered by virtually everyone in the business as the worst filmmaker in cinematic history--Ed Wood.

 



The resemblance is uncanny, but that's about all the two men ever shared in common.



If you've never heard of Ed Wood until now, believe me, you ain't missed much. And even if you are familiar with the work of Edward D. Wood, it's likely due to Tim Burton's sympathetic 1994 biopic starring a very close lookalike, Johnny Depp. The film received two Academy Awards. Ed Wood was an American filmmaker, actor, and author. In the 1950s, Wood directed several low-budget science fiction, crime and horror films, notably Glen or Glenda, Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Night of the Ghouls and The Sinister Urge. In the 1960s and 1970s, he transitioned towards sexploitation and pornographic films, while also writing over eighty pulp crime, horror, and sex novels. Notable for their campy aesthetics, technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, ill-fitting stock footage, eccentric casts, idiosyncratic stories and non sequitur dialogue, Wood's films remained largely obscure until he was posthumously awarded a Golden Turkey Award for Worst Director of All Time in 1980, renewing public interest in his life and work.

 



Wood proved to be no better as
an actor than as a writer,
producer, or director.

Edward D. Wood Jr. might be termed the Will Rogers of filmmaking: He never directed a shot he didn't like. It takes a special weird genius to be voted the Worst Director of All Time, a title that Wood has earned by acclamation. He was so in love with every frame of every scene of every film he shot that he was blind to hilarious blunders, stumbling ineptitude, and acting so bad that it achieved a kind of grandeur. But badness alone would not have been enough to make him a legend; it was his love of film, sneaking through, that pushes him over the top. Wood's most famous films are Plan 9 from Outer Space (during which his star, Bela Lugosi, died and was replaced by a double with a cloak pulled over his face), and "Glen or Glenda" (left), in which Wood himself played the transvestite title roles. It was widely known even at the time that Wood himself was an enthusiastic transvestite,

 

Hacks are nothing new in Hollywood. Since the beginning of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century, thousands of untalented people have come to Los Angeles from all over America and abroad to try to make it big (as writers, producers, directors, actors, talent agents, singers, composers, musicians, artists, etc.) but who end up using, scamming and exploiting other people for money as well as using their creative ability (either self-taught or professional training), leading to the production of dull, bland, mediocre, unimaginative, inferior, trite work in the forlorn hope of attaining commercial success.

 

The climactic scene from Plan 9 from Outer Space.
The big man in the middle is Tor Johnson whom Wood used often in his films

Ed Wood as Glenda

Wood was an exceedingly complex person. He was born in 1924, in Poughkeepsie, NY, where he lived most of his childhood. He joined the US Marine Corps in 1943 at the height of World War II and was, by all accounts, an exemplary soldier, wounded in ferocious combat in the Pacific theater. He was habitually optimistic, even in the face of the bleak realities that would later consume him. His personality bonded him with a small clique of outcasts who eked out life on the far edges of the Hollywood fringe. After settling in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Wood attempted to break into the film industry, initially without success, but in 1952 he landed the chance to direct a film based on the real-life Christine Jorgensen sex-change story, then a hot topic. The result, Glen or Glenda (above, right), gave a fascinating insight into Wood's own personality and shed light on his transvestism (an almost unthinkable subject for an early 1950s mainstream feature). Although devoutly heterosexual, Wood was an enthusiastic cross-dresser, with a particular fond-ness for angora. Moreover the film revealed the almost complete lack of talent that would mar all his subsequent films, his tendency to resort to stock footage of lightning during dramatic moments, laughable set design, and a near-incomprehensible performance by Bela Lugosi as a mad doctor whose presence is never adequately explained. The film deservedly flopped miserably but Wood, always upbeat, pressed ahead.


Some might consider Wood's sci-fi epic as being so bad it's good. It rates as a cult classic right up (down there with the 1960s smashed hit, The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

Wood's 1955 film starring Bella Lugosi, Bride of the Monster (below), unbelievably, somehow managed to earn a small profit during its original release, undoubtedly more of a testament to how cheaply it was produced than its value as entertainment), and Wood only shot a few seconds of silent footage of Lugosi (doped and dazed, wandering around the front yard of his house) for "Plan 9" just days before the actor died in August 1956. What few reviews the film received were brutal. Typically undaunted, Wood soldiered on despite incoherent material and a microscopic budget, peopling it with his regular band of mostly inept actors. Given the level of dialog, budget and Wood's dismal directorial abilities, it's unlikely that better actors would have made much of a difference (lead actor Gregory Walcott made his debut in this film and went on to have a very respectable career as a character actor, but he was always embarrassed by his participation in this film)--in fact, it's the film's semi-official status as arguably the Worst Film Ever Made that gives it its substantial cult following. The film, financed by a local Baptist congregation led by Wood's landlord, reaches a plateau of ineptitude that tends to leave viewers open-mouthed, wondering what is it they just saw. "Plan 9" became, whether Wood realized it or not, his singular enduring legacy. Ironically, the rights to the film were retained by the church and it is unlikely that Wood ever received a dime from it. His epic bombed upon release in 1959 and remained largely forgotten for years to come.

The poster was far better than the movie.

Wood's main problem was that he saw himself as a producer-writer-director, when in fact he was spectacularly incompetent in all three capacities. Friends who knew Wood have described him as an eccentric, oddball hack who was far more interested in the work required in cobbling a film project together than in ever learning the craft of film making itself or in any type of realism. In an alternate universe, Wood might have been a competent producer if he had better industry connections and an even remotely competent director. Wood, however, likened himself to his idol, Orson Welles, and became a triple threat: bad producer, poor screenwriter, and God-awful director. All of his films exhibit illogical continuity, bizarre narratives, and give the distinct impression that a director's job was simply to expose the least amount of film possible due to crushing budget constraints. His 1959 magnum opus, Plan 9 from Outer Space features visible wires connected to pie-pan UFOs, actors knocking over cardboard "headstones", cars changing models and years during chase sequences, scenes exhibiting a disturbing lack of handgun safety and the ingenious use of shower curtains in airplane cockpits that have virtually no equipment are just a few of the trademarks of that Edward D. Wood Jr. production (as seen in the video clip at the bottom). When criticized for their innumerable flaws, Wood would cheerfully explain his interpretation of the suspension of disbelief. It's not so much that he made movies so badly without regard to realism--the amazing part is that he managed to get them made at all.



Check out the full-length movie It Came from Hollywood on YouTube for more of the worst Hollywood has had to offer.