Edward D. Wood Jr.

Writer-producer-director-actor Edward D. Wood, Jr. strove for decades to achieve success in Hollywood, only to gain a posthumous notoriety as the creator of the "worst film ever made" with his Z-movie classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space" (1959). A man of undeniable ambition and peculiar personal traits, his first and most personal film "Glen or Glenda" (1953) was intended as plea for tolerance in its depiction of a man (Wood) obsessed with wearing women's clothing. The film also marked his first collaboration with personal movie idol, Bela Lugosi, who was by then out of work, in poor health and suffering from drug addiction. Lugosi went on to appear in "Bride of the Monster" (1955) and "Plan 9" - films that constituted the "highlights" of Wood's bizarre oeuvre. Atrociously bad dialogue, terrible acting, shoddy special effects, rampant technical errors and liberal use of wildly out of place stock footage all became the hallmarks of an Ed Wood, Jr. production. Endearingly optimistic and long fascinated by the occult and other taboo subject matter, for Wood it was all about the doing, not the details of filmmaking. Over the years he assembled an eclectic stock company of actors - Lugosi, Tor Johnson, the psychic Criswell, and Vampira among them - for several of the most spectacularly unsuccessful movies in the history of cinema. Although plagued by failure during his lifetime, Wood's legacy lived on through Tim Burton's cinematic homage "Ed Wood" (1994) as the creator of several of the greatest guilty pleasures ever put on film.