Johnnie Oddball pays homage to his movie-making hero – winner of the Golden Turkey Life Achievement Award for Worst Director of All Time, the legendary Ed Wood.

Article first published: Spring 2003

In 1994, Tim Burton directed the offbeat true-life story of Hollywood’s worst ever director, Ed Wood. Johnnie Depp portrays the eccentric filmmaker who refuses to let botched scenes and horrible reviews dash his hopes of making it in the film industry. Along with his cast, which includes a TV horror queen, a Swedish wrestling giant and down-on-his-luck Hollywood legend Bela Lugosi, Ed takes the art of bad movie-making to a different level. When you first see the cover of the movie, you might miss what a gem this film is to the guerrilla filmmaker out there.

I first encountered the film when a friend told me about this black-and-white biopic by Tim Burton. I sat down with the movie, not knowing what to expect, but I loved it so much I rewound it and watched it again with Tim’s commentary. It was amazing. The movie is me (apart from the Angora sweater!). Ed Wood gave me back the meaning of guerrilla filmmaking. Nothing was going to stop him making his movies. From the moment you start to watch the film you feel for the legendary director, and all the nightmares he encountered will strike a chord with any guerrilla filmmaker – certainly they did with me when I made my feature Dark Hunter. I had a crap script, no budget, no locations. All I had was a wonderful cast and crew who, like me, just wanted to make a movie. We had enough money for tape stock and petrol, and that was the budget gone. But we still made a 90-minute feature film on miniDV.

Watching Burton’s take on Ed Wood was like watching myself. Like Ed, I went to people for funding, only to be turned away. But Ed Wood is a real inspiration. It should make any guerrilla filmmaker worth their salt feel like just getting a camera and going and making a film. One of the most inspirational scenes is where Ed writes his script overnight to give to his producer in the morning. That was me. I sat down and wrote the whole Dark Hunter script just to get the thing out of my head. Admittedly, it was crap, but I wrote non-stop for nine hours, and it worked. We then made a shooting script from the crap script, and started shooting the movie a week later in my local church, because it only cost five quid to hire for five hours.

As in Ed Wood, nightmares happen. Burton’s movie has some real great moments, particularly the octopus scene, where the crew steal a giant octopus prop and go out late at night to shoot Bela Lugosi wrestling with it in a large puddle. Only, of course, they forgot to steal the octopus motor. So Martin Landau, who plays the Hollywood legend Bela Lugosi in an Oscar-winning performance (which he richly deserves), has to double his efforts at fighting the creature to make it look as if the octopus is moving. It’s a wonderful piece of filmmaking.

Ed Wood, and the Tim Burton homage he inspired, really make you want to get off your arse and make a movie. He was a real inspiration to us when we were making Dark Hunter, as whatever part we had in making the movie, we were all fellow filmmakers in the same boat and we were all helping each other.

When I started the 48-Hour Filmmakers Challenge, which gets filmmakers together to do whatever it takes to make a movie, I realised that all they’re doing is what Ed Wood was doing 50 years ago. He did whatever it took to make the films he loved. Even if he did supposedly make the worst films of all time, nothing can be as bad as Meet Joe Black, despite its huge budget. The person considered by the Hollywood establishment to be the worst director ever should be a legend among guerrilla filmmakers everywhere.

Johnnie Oddball Johnnie Oddball has spent over 10 years in the film industry, learning filmmaking firsthand, rather than “going to film school and learning how other people make films”. He created and ran the 48-Hour Challenge in 2002 and in 2003 expanded it to the National 48-Hour Challenge, which attracted 4500 entrants, and also ran the Trailer Challenge. Later this year he will organise the International 48-Hour Challenge. He has just produced the full-length DV feature, Dark Hunter.