Following a recent showing of Barbie, a fellow moviegoer ventured the opinion that what we had just watched was an "art film." I felt it necessary to point out that a major Hollywood studio, in this case Warner Bros., isn't likely to shell out a reported $145 million dollars on anything that's not an arguably guaranteed crowd-pleaser, and an art film is rarely that. Nevertheless, Barbie's plot, a good deal of which takes place in a land where dolls come to life, necessitated loads of abstract imagery which may have made the whole thing accidentally avant-garde. And I wonder if that could work in reverse. An ambitious--in terms of story--science-fiction saga with a lower-than-Death Valley budget, could in the end resemble an art film, albeit unintentionally. Which brings us to 1957's Plan 9 from Outer Space. Yes, there are those who say it's the worse movie ever made, but the film's slapdash, flea market dreamlike imagery has always held my attention, an 80-minute workout that prevents the eyeball muscles from atrophying. The above photo, culled from a movie memorabilia auction site, is a behind-the-scenes portrait of some of the characters, and we can all agree that they were characters, involved in the making of Plan 9. The good-looking, dapper young prole crouched in the foreground is not Johnny Depp, but the film's producer, director, and writer Edward D. Wood Jr. Moving clockwise from Wood we have Swedish professional wrestler-turned-actor Tor Johnson, who plays a zombie under the control of disdainful space aliens; local LA horror movie TV hostess and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark precursor Vampira (Maila Nurmi) as another zombie; the movie's narrator, the Amazing Criswell, a local LA television psychic; and just above Wood, cinematographer William C. Thompson, who had begun his career in 1914 and lived long enough to witness the advent of the drive-in movie. Conspicuously missing, mainly because for some reason he seems to have been cut out of the picture, is Bele Lugosi, who according to the photograph's ballpoint penned copy should be standing to the left of Wood. Plan 9 from Outer Space was Lugosi's last movie (in fact, he died in the middle of filming and was replaced by a younger, taller man holding a cape over his face!) Also missing, conspicuously so only because it seems rather odd that someone would have had it deliberately removed, is some nondescript prop, maybe a pile of nondescript props, situated between Vampira and Criswell. The imagination reels! I suppose there's some enterprising digital wizard out there who could make this photo once again complete, but I'd advise against it. Incompleteness was crucial to Ed Wood's art. It's what made him, however unintentional, avant-garde.
Nice try, Eddie, but it's not nearly as scary as the 118th Congress.
