Lost Ed Wood Film Unearthed

BayBlade writes "It seems a lost Ed Wood film, Necromania was recovered recently, and can now be ordered on DVD. Reuters goes into more depth."

Comments

From Wikipedia - his legacy . . a turkey

[Nomihn0]

"Evicted from his Hollywood apartment, Wood and his wife moved into the bungalow of an actor friend. Only days after the move, Ed died of a heart attack, aged 53. Posthumously, his extensive portfolio of terrible motion pictures earned him the Golden Turkey Award for being the worst director of all time."

Is that Ed Wood's equivalent of a last "hurrah"?

How is this possible?

[phozz bare]

The movie has an entry on IMDB, with comments dating as far back as 1999.

How did these people see the movie?

phozz

Re:How is this possible?

[vert2712]

Because it was never lost. The film has always been available in one form or another.

Maybe this new 'lost' version has different/more hardcore material but the film was never really that hard to see. Necromania was originally a softcore feature, with hardcore inserts shot by cinematographer Ted Gorley to spice up Wood's softcore effort and make it more marketable, a very common practice in those days (Wood never actually liked to film actual hardcore scenes). As with most films of this kind, I'm sure there are tons of different edits/versions floating around, but that doesn't mean it was a "lost" film.

And anyway an hardcore version (credited to director "Don Miller") has been has been available from Alpha Blue archives for years (they sell it on VHS paired with another similar short titled Daughter of Satan). Something Weird Video also used to sell it.

The guys who announced this are trying to get mileage from to the recent DVD release of Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" -- and it looks like it worked: you think CNN and Reuters would have picked up this story otherwise?

Nothing to see, move along...

Quotes

[FiReaNGeL]

It's actually a sad story... the guy had to turn to pr0n industry at some point, because nobody wanted to fund him anymore (I'm sure you can guess why). Here's some quotes from the Reuters article :

"Struggling to find backers for more mainstream work, Wood turned to smut in the 1960s, making a string of films and "loops" -- short porn flicks shown in coin-operated booths -- up until his death in 1978."

"This is an old film. It's in the '70s, they're hairy, they don't look the way we are used to now,"

"He says "Necromania" displays Wood's wit and style and he points to a scene where the main character Danny is struggling to untangle a pair of red pajama bottoms to put them on."

You KNOW you want to see it! :) There's a trend developing here in Quebec (since about 2 years) where dumb (absurd and bad) humor = good humor... Is it the same way everywhere else? Let's hope it won't spread to movies...

The movie also include for fans of Ed :
That film shows the making of Wood's most famous film -- "Plan 9 From Outer Space" from 1956 -- in which actors screw up their lines and "special effects" include pie tins for flying saucers.

And Now

[Ossadagowah]

We must summon Best Brains and reform the MST3K crewe for one final mission ... after they finish with Battlefield Earth.

Worst movie maker of all time? Not hardly.

[rumblin'rabbit]

The measure of a movie maker is not the quality of the final product, but the quality divided by the budget. Did the producer get the the money up on the screen? By this standard, Ed Wood was one of the best movie makers of all time.

Many modern producers couldn't have breakfast for less than $7,000. The man was a genius.

Undead Wood

[Doc Ruby]

Who owns the copyright on this movie? Wood died 26 years ago. These movies were discovered rotting in an LA warehouse. Largely ignored in his lifetime, Wood's audience has created much of the "value" of these films by perpetuating a subculture around them. There's no mention of any copyright holders in the story, even in the story of the people who discovered these copies that are being copied and distributed on DVD - all people who never even knew Wood, or participated in the "life" of these movies until after they were left for dead. If I get a $20 DVD, can't I just set it up on an MPG stream for anyone who wants to pay bandwidth costs like me?