Ep. 335: Will Sloan on Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA about the director of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week the writer and podcaster Will Sloan visits to discuss his new book, Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, a reconsideration of the filmmaker who notoriously symbolized the bottom of the barrel in movies. Sloan’s book avoids the usual so-bad-it’s-good look at Ed Wood and instead appreciates the strange dreamlike spaces opened up by the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space, the “accidental” experiments of his shoe-string-budget movies, and the poignant personal resonance of Glen or Glenda and other movies with Wood’s identity as a cross-dresser (as memorably chronicled in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood). Plus any number of tangents and comparisons that Wood’s work seems to invite through its very imperfections.

Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA is available now from OR Books (https://orbooks.com/catalog/ed-wood/).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass