The Making of "Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA"

I wrote a book. Please consider buying it?

My book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA is now available for pre-order from its publisher, OR Books. I hope you will consider purchasing it. If you are at all curious about the director of Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 from Outer Space, I hope to offer a lens through which to better appreciate him. If you are already well-versed in his classics, I am excited to introduce you to the full scope of his career. If you have already ventured into the murky waters of his deeper-cut directing and writing credits, I’m eager to compare notes. Beyond that, from a self-interested perspective, I’ve learned that preorder figures are important in convincing stores to carry a book. Wouldn’t it be nice to see my little book out there in the Film & Performing Arts section of your local bookstore, amidst those celebrity memoirs and David Thomson doorstops? If we work together, maybe we can convince book dealers that Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA is the second coming of The Da Vinci Code.

Please click here to pre-order it from OR Books. This is an especially good way to get the book if you are American or British.

If you’re in Canada, there are lots of fine independent retailers stocking this tome, including Book City, Flying Books, Another Story, and Queen Books.

Don’t just take my word for it – I am willing to give you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal, that the book is worth reading. Here are some kind words from people who have read it in advance:

“Sloan's monograph is an astonishing achievement, beautifully written, intelligently funny, packed with surprising facts on every page, and composed with a sensitive love for his subject that is neither cultishly worshipful nor patronizing for the sake of a laugh. Sloan sees Wood as a feeling, human mystery who made movies that are beautiful, strange, and hilarious places to inhabit. The writing is so clear and honest in the service of its inspired approach to Wood that it triggers the reader with jolts of psychological recognition and spasms of anguished emotion rarely encountered in other studies of this legendarily flabbergasting director.”
-Guy Maddin

"My friend, can your heart stand… the shocking facts about… Ed Wood? Will Sloan’s complex, deep-dive examination of this unique and eccentric filmmaker is now the definitive book on the often maligned Ed Wood. Along with Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Ed Wood, the 'worst director of all time,' was also one of the most fascinating directors of all time, and after you’ve read this superb treatise you’ll understand why."
- Drew Friedman

"Will Sloan’s treatment of Ed Wood is a commendable reckoning of a subject who has long been considered the poster child of bad filmmakers. He does away with easy distinctions of 'bad' and 'good' art and finds a much more useful category of criticism: 'fascination'. This is the book we have always needed on Ed Wood, tending to the seedier parts of his many artistic impulses, and his complex legacy as a queer-adjacent trailblazer in film. He casts Ed Wood as a dreamer, a hard-working filmmaker, an enigma, and an accidental auteur, whose many mysteries upend conventional notions associated with his dubious reputation as a bad filmmaker."
-Willow Catelyn Maclay, coauthor of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema

“Will Sloan's Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA is a welcome addition to the canon of Ed Wood Jr.-related books to have been recently published. It takes a fair and analytical view of Ed's body of work, both in the film and publishing worlds he inhabited during his 30+ years in Hollywood USA."
- Bob Blackburn, editor of Blood Splatters Quickly: The Collected Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. and heir of Kathleen O'Hara Wood

“It’s finally here: The ultimate completist take on the films and literature of Ed Wood. Sloan has cracked open the desires and symbols that lived inside one of America’s strangest multidisciplinary artists and we owe him a great debt as a nation (as Mr. Sloan is Canadian.)"
-Owen Kline, director of Funny Pages

I have authored several books before, but this represents my first solo byline, my first venture with a publisher, and the first time I’ve attempted a sustained, book-length argument, as opposed to a collection of essays. I have my podcast compatriot Luke Savage to thank for connecting me with his publisher, so I’m delighted to say that I now share a publisher with him, Slavoj Žižek, Barney Rosset, Norman Finkelstein, Refaat Alareer, Yoko Ono, and Ed Wood himself (OR published a groundbreaking collection of his short fiction, Blood Splatters Quickly). Thanks to Colin Robinson and Jamie Stern-Weiner from OR Books for saying yes to this project, and for putting my name in such big letters on the cover.

And now, to mark this auspicious occasion, I’d like to take a moment to reflect a bit on the book-writing process, and collect in one convenient place where I have been and what I have learned.

This book has been brewing for a long time. I first had the idea in around 2018, when it occurred to me that, since I could easily provide a spontaneous uninterrupted running-commentary on any Ed Wood film, I might have enough to say about him to fill the pages of a modest book. Wood felt like a ripe subject: his semi-autobiographical Glen or Glenda? was being rediscovered as a flawed but pioneering piece of LGBTQ+ cinema, while several newly uncovered “lost” films from his later years (including Nympho Cycler, The Only House in Town, The Young Marrieds, and Take it Out in Trade) complicated and enriched an artistic personality I thought I knew. Delving further into the pornographic novels and short stories that Wood wrote in his later years, I found a real consistency of vision, and many resonances with the known facts of his life. I felt that Wood deserved an up-to-date critical study, offering a comprehensive analysis of his career in a tone/style that would hopefully be pleasurable to read. My creative touchstones included Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Adam Nayman’s It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, and Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear.

Sounds doable, right? The process started well enough, and then for a long time I was frankly paralyzed at the thought of accumulating the sufficient number of words. There were great big sections of the book that I didn’t know immediately how to fill, and I worried I couldn’t meet the challenge. Then there was also the matter of both my parents dying, which, as you might imagine, distracted me from any large-scale writing projects for a good two years. Beyond all that, I frankly think I just needed a few more years to become a better writer. That said, I don’t think that being “not good enough” is any excuse to not commit to a creative project. Write your damn book. One only gets better by doing. Anxieties like these never stopped Ed Wood.

A big lesson I’ve learned about book-writing is that books don’t write themselves. Again, I’m grateful to Luke for helping revive this project, because signing a contract is a great motivator to get something done. With a deadline looming, I put myself on a schedule of watching virtually every movie that Wood had ever written and/or directed, no matter how many times I had seen it or how well I thought I knew it. You’re not going to catch any fish unless you get out in the boat, bait the hook, cast off, and wait for nibbles. Not every single screening yielded new insights, but most of them did, and viewing everything in close proximity revealed connections I didn’t anticipate. I found Wood in the ‘60s and ‘70s still tugging at threads that began in the ‘50s, and work I had long dismissed as “lesser” became newly exciting.

Writing a book is a bit like living in a house: you’re going to spend a lot of time in it, and so you’ll quickly become aware of any leaks, drafty spots, and foundation issues. I once briefly tossed around the idea of writing a book called The Films of Gerard Damiano, because I felt he was worthy of consideration and, more importantly, nobody had ever written a book about him. Within about five minutes I realized it would be unfeasible because, well… imagine watching that much porn. Doing a comprehensive study means covering everything, and I just don’t know if I have it in me to spend several days analyzing Splendor in the Ass (1989). Somebody should write the Gerard Damiano book, but it can’t be me.

What were the leaks and drafty areas in the Ed Wood house? In fact, they are the exact things that drew me to Wood in the first place. I think this is probably the case with most nonfiction books - the eccentricities in your subject that you love so much are also the things that sometimes drive you crazy. First and foremost is the issue of Wood being a “bad” artist. Now believe me, I know that “bad” is complex word, which is why I put it in quotes and wrote a whole book about Ed Wood. However, I think it’s unavoidable that much of the reason to discuss Jail Bait lies in its failure to rise to the level of a conventionally movie, which I believe is what Wood intended to make. Wood’s minimalist horror films like Final Curtain and Night of the Ghouls call to mind the low-budget atmospherics of Jacques Tourneur, but the comparison to such a master craftsman does them no favours. Taking Wood seriously means running up, again and again, against his limitations.

So, I’m not quite here to reposition Ed Wood as an Actually Good™, but I do hope to poke around at and destabilize the idea of “good,” and to also demonstrate that an “untalented” artist (again, quote-unquote) can still have interesting things to say. That Wood is not entirely reclaimable makes him interesting. His work is deeply flawed, and thus deeply human. One of my motivations for writing the book was to get to know that human better, because another challenge was the relative lack of direct testimony from Wood himself. We have the autobiographical passages of his showbiz “how-to” manual Hollywood Rat Race, as well as certain of his nonfiction essays collected in the essential anthology When the Topic is Sex, but few people cared enough to interview him during his lifetime, and those who did mostly focused on his working relationship with Bela Lugosi. So this was a challenge, but also an opportunity, because it meant paying closer attention to the work to find the author. I found that, while we have little of Wood speaking directly about his sexuality, politics, and aesthetic strategies, his thoughts on these matters are there to find.

The key to understanding and appreciating Wood as more than just Bad is to take seriously his entire body of work. Many casual fans (as well as Tim Burton, god bless him) prefer to ignore the many pornographic books and films Wood produced after 1960. To them, this vast trove of creativity is merely the work he did for money while waiting for a chance to direct another Bride of the Monster. As it turns out, I felt Wood’s personality at all stages of his career, and taken together, his oeuvre paints an extraordinary picture of a life on the fringes of Hollywood. He may have been a “bad” artist, but he was an artist, and after this experience I like and respect him more than ever.