Hollywood Rat Race
-Edward D Wood Jr
My favourite movie is ‘Ed Wood’ so imagine my surprise when I’m in a used book store and I happen across ‘Hollywood Rat Race’ a book written by Ed Wood himself! The back of the book says that it’s part how-to manual, part memoir but it’s not exactly that. Which was disappointing, but it’s interesting none the less.
Written around 1964-65 and only published in 1998 what it is is a guide for young actors of how to make it in Hollywood. A lot of it is pretty sound advice too, do as much as you can before moving to Hollywood , learn as many talents as you can and be wary of any “producer” whose offer seems too good to be true. They’ll take money for shooting a screen test he says, but not bother putting any film in the camera. He also advises you to be a character actor instead of a star. Stars fade but a good actor will always get work.
Where the book really comes alive though is when he goes on a tangent or starts talking about his own life. He really genuinely loved movies and Hollywood, he even devotes a chapter to the fact that some people hate the industry but he doesn’t understand how they can (he thinks communists are involved though). He says he loves all of it and writing of every kind too. Not long before writing this book he wrote a documentary for the military and ended up finding it really interesting. He also talks about some of his friends and the people he admires and how much he loves doing stuff for them, writing movies just so they have a part or organising a public appearance of Bela Lugosi because so many people thought he was dead. He tells a story about how he once rented a house right across the street from the Warner Brothers lot just because of where it was and because it had a nice pool. The apartment itself was tiny (according to Wood you could only enter the bathroom sideways) and cost loads but as long as nobody came inside he could have loads of Hollywood people over and it made him look good.
There’s a real element of sadness that hangs over the whole thing though. Asides from the fact that he’s a passionate filmmaker who’s now famous for being among the worst is knowing how he spent his final years. This was written at a time when the future of Hollywood was uncertain, business was going down, television was being seen as significant competition, and fads like 3D weren’t working. It would be a few years until the likes of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘Easy Rider’ ended up revitalising Hollywood so when he wrote this the only thing that seemed to be working for Hollywood according to him were ‘nudie pictures’ which Wood looked down on. But this was at the point in Wood’s career when it was all going downhill for him. He was drinking more, his suffered from depression and was so poor he ended up having to make the soft core porn films he looked down on so much as well as writing pornographic novels. Maybe his talk of how much he loves every part of writing was him steeling himself for this new stage in his career and maybe all his talk about sleazy producers and who hard it is to make it in Hollywood comes from bitterness about how he ended up. He was proud enough of his work that he says “Orgy of the Dead” (a movie he wrote based on his own novel and which was released right before this book was written) might end up being remembered as a ‘classic of it’s kind’. All it’s remembered now though is as being the bridge between the horror and sci-fi stuff he made before it and the porn he made after.
Thirteen years after he wrote this, evicted from his apartment and staying in a friends place he spent the whole weekend drinking and after going to lie down he died of a heart attack. Two years after his death the Golden Turkey awards called his the worst director of all time and his cult following started.
It was interesting read but you’d probably have to have some affection for Wood. It would have been a lot more interesting if it was a guide for filmmakers instead of actors. There is a lot of bitterness but there’s some sweetness in there once he starts talking about the people he likes which I found really endearing. He also mentions angora sweaters 13 time. I counted.
