When Edward Wood Jr. first stepped into the director's chair, pop culture was forever changed. The most famous of the hacks; the man who thought to save money by riding stock footage hard; the brains behind not one, not two, but three of the most infamous yet influential flops ever, Wood was all optimism and no budget. He was destined for both the cutting room floor and the heights of notoriety.
And he, uh, snuck a penis into one of his most famous films.
Wood was one of Hollywood's bottom feeders throughout a career that spanned from the early '50s to the late '70s. His movies were shot on the cheap using cheap props, cheaper sets, and cheap labor. He dabbled in Westerns, crime films, and pornography, but his mark on film history was made with two sci-fi films, 1955's Bride of the Monster and 1957's Plan 9 From Outer Space, and one exposé of transvestitism (drawn from his own experiences, in fact), 1953's Glen or Glenda.
There's a penis in that last one, but not where you'd think.
None of these movies are any good. Plan 9 has become somewhat of a legend for cheap sets (a card table in front of a curtain is an alien spaceship) and paper plate-looking UFOs (they were actually toy spaceships purchased at a local hobby shop). Bride of the Monster features an ailing Bela Lugosi wrestling with a lackluster giant octopus (because the monster's motor wasn't available). Glen or Glenda acts as a filing cabinet for endless minutes of stock footage, a personal exploration of sexuality interrupted by scenes of military maneuvers, African dancers, and buffalo charging across the plains.
And Wood didn't pay too much attention to the footage he used, because there's a penis in some of it.
Glen or Glenda is, by some measures, a triumph for Wood. He parlays his own love of women's clothing into a heartfelt plea for understanding of queer life in a time when that was something that was absolutely not shown on movie screens. He emphasizes the humanity of all his film subjects and seeks to depict them as people with quirks rather than as deviants. But the construction of Glen or Glenda pops the tires before the car leaves the garage.
Desperate to use his friend Bela Lugosi in a film, the aged horror actor acts as narrator and monologues throughout the film, but rarely comments on what's happening on screen. Mostly he speaks to the human condition over grainy footage that Wood got for cheap because it was being tossed by the studio (see Tim Burton's excellent biopic Ed Wood for the whole story). When Wood wants to show the conflict within a character's soul, he spins the piece into a dream ballet, with tantalizing strippers and…the devil.
But he also shows a penis. Probably unintentionally.
For the story of the gender reassignment surgery, which is tacked on after the main emotional climax of the film, Wood tells the tale of "Alan/Ann," a "transsexual" played by "Tommy" Haynes. The rumor is that Wood would have preferred to end the film with the bold scene of the gorgeous Dolores Fuller handing an angora sweater to Wood's Glen character, thus accepting his lifestyle. Instead, the gender reassignment angle was tacked on to please a distributor who really wanted to release a shocking sex change picture. Ann's story mirrors Wood's to a degree; while in the army, presenting as male, Ann was wearing women's undergarments, even in combat.
Wood goes overboard in showing the "even in combat." We're treated to a montage of completely unrelated clips of soldiers in combat, soldiers at rest, soldiers marching, planes flying overhead, and bombs going off that ends any momentum the story had left at this point. None of these clips were shot by Wood, and it's fair to say that Glen or Glenda probably cost less to make than one of the guns carried by the stock footage soldiers. It's in the storming the beach scene where we get a nice shot of someone naked standing on the shoreline, his own personal rifle clearly visible.
Don't make me zoom in. OK, fine, I will. Oh, the guy next to him is nude too.
Obviously, this was not filmed in any combat situation, and certainly not during D-Day, which I think was what Wood was trying to imply. A group of soldiers is storming a beach that's crowded with soldiers milling about, some straight-up nude. It's a pretty sedate scene up past the waterline. I don't have any inside information about this, but it could have been a scene staged for the cameras, or some sort of training for "getting off the boat safely while carrying all your gear (while naked dudes watch you)".
Wood eventually ended up creating porno features and shorts towards the end of his career, but even those were duds. The porn parody of Plan 9 From Outer Space currently has a higher rating on IMDB.com than the original film itself. None of his feature films achieves a 5-star rating. But his ambition, his determination, his absolute uncompromising weirdness done with a completely straight face have lived on and only continued to inspire since his passing. Good on ya, Eddie.
And good on ya for sneaking that penis in there.
