Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
THE 10TH DIMENSION: EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.
September 11 – September 18
“Director/writer Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1924-78) created his unique films in a roughly 20-year period (1951-72) in the Hollywood underground of low-budget, independent productions. His roots were 1930s and 40s movie serials, horror melodramas, and pulp magazines. Wood’s films were a cultural mutation. He took old formulas and clichés and transformed them into something new. In GLEN OR GLENDA (1953) he has Bela Lugosi as God. PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1956) has spaceman Eros (Dudley Manlove) contemplating the end of the universe: ‘Then one day it could all be gone…in one big puff of smoke and ball of fire…all that out there…the stars, the planets…all just an empty void.’ Wood once told actress Valda Hansen, ‘I’m in the 10th dimension.’ He wasn’t kidding.
Margalit Fox wrote in the NEW YORK TIMES that Wood made films ‘so awful they have a stupefying, apocalyptic beauty.’ Well, they can’t be awful then, can they?” –Rudolph Grey
This retrospective, likely the most comprehensive ever presented, has been organized in collaboration with Rudolph Grey, the preeminent expert on all things Ed Wood and the author of the definitive biography on the filmmaker, NIGHTMARE OF ECSTASY: THE LIFE AND ART OF EDWARD D. WOOD, JR., which (cue trumpets) will soon be reissued in a revised and significantly expanded edition!
Special thanks to Laura Bailey, Michael Bowen, Paige Davis, Jeff Joseph, Alex Kogan, Jim Markovic, Scott Mitchell, Dimitrios Otis, Michael Raso, Joseph Vasta, and Wade Williams.
