Double Feature: 100 Jahre Ed Wood + Überraschungsfilm

Double Feature

Greetings my friends. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable... that is why you are here. And you are spot on! Edward Davis Wood Jr. (Ed Wood for short) would have been one hundred years old on 10 October, while Tim Burton's famous homage to him celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Two good reasons for a double feature as a tragicomic declaration of love to cinema.

Ed Wood's (Johnny Depp) greatest role model is Orson Welles. But while Welles made film history as a 26-year-old youngster with CITIZEN KANE, Wood tried his hand as a moderately successful theatre director in Hollywood. Until he reads about a low-budget film project in Variety that doesn't yet have a director under contract and seems tailor-made for him: a ‘sex-change film’ about a man who wants to become a woman. Wood reveals a secret to the producer of the project that he hasn't even told his girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker): That he has also enjoyed wearing women's clothes since childhood.

In his biopic, Tim Burton accompanies the over-ambitious director with a lack of talent during the filming of three of his B-movies. Beginning with GLEN OR GLENDA and ending with the later iconic PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. In between, a unique friendship develops between him and the old, addicted Bela Lugosi (outstanding: Martin Landau). In the 1950s, he is already considered dead by everyone, but it is he who enables the director to get a (low) budget film in the first place.

ED WOOD is a declaration of love to Hollywood and cinema, but above all to those who have been dropped, ridiculed and neglected by the system. Contrary to the tragic life story of the real director, who remained financially unsuccessful, later wrote dime novels and made sexploitation films before finally dying of alcoholism in 1978, Burton takes the cinematic liberty of painting a more optimistic picture of the artist and his career.

We are showing Tim Burton's ED WOOD together in a double feature with the probably best-known film of the actual Edward D. Wood Jr. from an analogue 35mm print. ‘This is the one they'll remember me for’, he said about his crazy, unintentionally funny and incredibly entertaining sci-fi horror film. He was proved right, and not just because it was the last film with Bela Lugosi, who died during filming.