Coming Soon
ED WOOD: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD USA W/ WILL SLOAN
1959/1970
Director
Ed Wood
Starring
Ed Wood
Tor Johnson
Criswell
Paul Marco
Duke Moore
Nona Carver
Runtime
150 minutes
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Select Showtimes
A DOUBLE FEATURE SCREENING OF REVENGE OF THE DEAD AND TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE!
Is a bad artist still an artist?
Famously declared the “Worst Director of All Time,” Edward D. Wood Jr. is nobody’s idea of a good artist. But here at the Beacon we don’t want art to be good. We want it to be interesting. We want it to be weird, singular and shaped by obsession. We want art that has exploded out of its creator because they simply had no choice but to make it no matter what technical, professional or cosmic limitations stood in their way.
In this sense, Ed Wood is indeed an artist. Maybe even a great one. The filmmaker behind such oft-derided works as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space was driven by his obsessions—obsessions like mad scientists, space invaders and transvestitism—and a fanatical need to create. The author of over fifty adult novels who ended his career making compellingly personal pornographic schlock and dying forgotten in poverty, Wood spent a lifetime pouring his heart and soul out from behind his beloved angora sweaters and onto page and screen. Though his films are generally riddled with technical errors, amateur acting, low-budget special effects and absurd story lines, they disregard beauty, value, and taste for something more compelling: passion.
Join Will Sloan, author of the essential new critical study ED WOOD: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD USA, at the Beacon on Friday, July 25 for a special double feature screening of two of Wood’s most unforgettable outrages, Revenge of the Dead (1959) and Take It Out In Trade (1970). Sloan will act as our tour guide as we travel from Wood’s humble beginnings to his humble end, helping us properly acclimate so we can fully appreciate the many glorious sights left littered along the sordid highway of Wood’s life and career. This is the ultimate Ed Wood experience.
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ED WOOD: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD USA is a critical reappraisal that takes Wood seriously, positioning him as a true independent who blurs the lines between high and low art. Will Sloan traces his marginal career—from Bela Lugosi collaborations to pornographic films—and explores how Wood’s chaotic sets, fading stars, and taboo subjects created something singular. Placing his films in their cultural context, Sloan reveals how Wood fused grindhouse with avant-garde, nostalgia with innovation, and failure with vision. Marking the centennial of Wood’s birth, this engaging take is both a timely investigation into the politics of taste and a loving tribute to a defiant outsider artist.
“Sloan's monograph is an astonishing achievement, beautifully written, intelligently funny, packed with surprising facts on every page, and composed with a sensitive love for his subject that is neither cultishly worshipful nor patronizing for the sake of a laugh. Sloan sees Wood as a feeling, human mystery who made movies that are beautiful, strange, and hilarious places to inhabit. The writing is so clear and honest in the service of its inspired approach to Wood that it triggers the reader with jolts of psychological recognition and spasms of anguished emotion rarely encountered in other studies of this legendarily flabbergasting director.”—Guy Maddin
"Will Sloan’s treatment of Ed Wood is a commendable reckoning of a subject who has long been considered the poster child of bad filmmakers. He does away with easy distinctions of 'bad' and 'good' art and finds a much more useful category of criticism: 'fascination'. This is the book we have always needed on Ed Wood, tending to the seedier parts of his many artistic impulses, and his complex legacy as a queer-adjacent trailblazer in film. He casts Ed Wood as a dreamer, a hard-working filmmaker, an enigma, and an accidental auteur, whose many mysteries upend conventional notions associated with his dubious reputation as a bad filmmaker."—Willow Catelyn Maclay
Is a bad artist still an artist?
Famously declared the “Worst Director of All Time,” Edward D. Wood Jr. is nobody’s idea of a good artist. But here at the Beacon we don’t want art to be good. We want it to be interesting. We want it to be weird, singular and shaped by obsession. We want art that has exploded out of its creator because they simply had no choice but to make it no matter what technical, professional or cosmic limitations stood in their way.
In this sense, Ed Wood is indeed an artist. Maybe even a great one. The filmmaker behind such oft-derided works as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space was driven by his obsessions—obsessions like mad scientists, space invaders and transvestitism—and a fanatical need to create. The author of over fifty adult novels who ended his career making compellingly personal pornographic schlock and dying forgotten in poverty, Wood spent a lifetime pouring his heart and soul out from behind his beloved angora sweaters and onto page and screen. Though his films are generally riddled with technical errors, amateur acting, low-budget special effects and absurd story lines, they disregard beauty, value, and taste for something more compelling: passion.
Join Will Sloan, author of the essential new critical study ED WOOD: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD USA, at the Beacon on Friday, July 25 for a special double feature screening of two of Wood’s most unforgettable outrages, Revenge of the Dead (1959) and Take It Out In Trade (1970). Sloan will act as our tour guide as we travel from Wood’s humble beginnings to his humble end, helping us properly acclimate so we can fully appreciate the many glorious sights left littered along the sordid highway of Wood’s life and career. This is the ultimate Ed Wood experience.
───────────────
ED WOOD: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD USA is a critical reappraisal that takes Wood seriously, positioning him as a true independent who blurs the lines between high and low art. Will Sloan traces his marginal career—from Bela Lugosi collaborations to pornographic films—and explores how Wood’s chaotic sets, fading stars, and taboo subjects created something singular. Placing his films in their cultural context, Sloan reveals how Wood fused grindhouse with avant-garde, nostalgia with innovation, and failure with vision. Marking the centennial of Wood’s birth, this engaging take is both a timely investigation into the politics of taste and a loving tribute to a defiant outsider artist.
“Sloan's monograph is an astonishing achievement, beautifully written, intelligently funny, packed with surprising facts on every page, and composed with a sensitive love for his subject that is neither cultishly worshipful nor patronizing for the sake of a laugh. Sloan sees Wood as a feeling, human mystery who made movies that are beautiful, strange, and hilarious places to inhabit. The writing is so clear and honest in the service of its inspired approach to Wood that it triggers the reader with jolts of psychological recognition and spasms of anguished emotion rarely encountered in other studies of this legendarily flabbergasting director.”—Guy Maddin
"Will Sloan’s treatment of Ed Wood is a commendable reckoning of a subject who has long been considered the poster child of bad filmmakers. He does away with easy distinctions of 'bad' and 'good' art and finds a much more useful category of criticism: 'fascination'. This is the book we have always needed on Ed Wood, tending to the seedier parts of his many artistic impulses, and his complex legacy as a queer-adjacent trailblazer in film. He casts Ed Wood as a dreamer, a hard-working filmmaker, an enigma, and an accidental auteur, whose many mysteries upend conventional notions associated with his dubious reputation as a bad filmmaker."—Willow Catelyn Maclay