GLEN OR GLENDA

In 1953, a 29-year-old aspiring writer/director named Edward D. Wood, Jr. landed a job directing an exploitation movie. The assignment: create something – anything! – to cash in on the case of Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known person to undergo sex reassignment surgery.

Wood, at the time a closeted cross-dresser, channeled his life into his art, casting himself in the genderfluid title roles. Blurring reality and fiction further, Wood also cast his real-life girlfriend, Dolores Fuller, as Glen’s unknowing fiancée. Mixing this naked autobiography with a mountain of stock footage and a slumming Bela Lugosi, Wood created a cinematic dreamscape that can totally baffle grindhouse audiences into delirium.

“A hallucinatory semi-autobiographical, ambivalently-queer polemic that can’t stop contradicting itself. The only burlesque/exploitation/horror/educational/experimental/ surrealist film. There’s nothing else like it, and it gets more interesting every year. When cinema goes to sleep, this is what it dreams.” - Will Sloan

“I will forever contend that the dream sequence is every bit as on the same level as Fireworks, strangely metatextual distributor-mandated lesbian bondage inserts and all. The rest is just as compelling, containing some of Wood's most pulp-addled roundabout writing and no fewer than four layers of storytelling and clashing genres.” - Liz Purchell

“Every movie ever made about trans people should have a roaring clash of thunder and lightning and an eccentric actor speaking in code about gender roles.” - Willow Maclay