If you live in L.A., there will be an exhibition of Tim Burton’s art at the MoMA from May 29 to October 31.
And on May 28, the museum has scheduled a screening of one of his greatest movies, Ed Wood, as well as screenings of the whole Burton filmography.
I have to admit I’m biased. I love low budget B movies, I have since I grew up watching them on TV as a kid, and I loved the fact that the life and work of Ed Wood was treated with respect, and with a lot of heart.
Ed Wood was the B movie Van Gogh in that he finally came to prominence after he died in 1978.
Then in 1980, The Golden Turkey Awards, sort of the Razzies before the Razzies, elected Ed worst director of all time, and his, ah, masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space, worst movie of all time.
With the VCR boom in the early eighties, more people saw his movies than ever, and suddenly Ed Wood became a household name.
Burton had great source material with Larry and Scott screenplay, and he stayed very close to it. He also took the film away from Sony because they wouldn’t let him make it in black and white, and made Ed Wood at Touchstone instead.
Although it wasn’t a hit, Ed Wood finally made biopics of weird, fringe people acceptable, and Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, the screenwriting team of Ed Wood, followed with The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, and they also co-produced Auto Focus.
“We feel like we’re the bastard godfathers of Behind the Music and the E! Hollywood True Story,” says Karaszewski.
Alexander adds, “We wrote the script for Ed Wood in 1992. Back then, if you wanted to make a biopic, you made Gandhi. Going for people who were in the cracks just wasn’t being done, and those were the people that fascinated us the most.”
