“It Came from Planet Plothole”: What I Learned about Writing from Ed Wood, Jr.

I am a gigantic bad movie fan.  Battlefield Earth, Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Shadow, The Beast, Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York; classics all.  I’ve watched hours of Mystery Science Theater 3000, allowing Joel and/or Mike and the Bots to subject me to piles of dreck: Escape 2000, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Thing that Couldn’t Die, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell.  I’ve listened to “The Flophouse” and “How Did This Get Made?” as they marvel at The Room, Birdemic, Foodfight!, and Gymkata (“The skill of gymnastics.  The KILL of karate!”).  I love the listless acting and the scenery-chewing; I love the cardboard props and forced-perspective monsters; I love the motivations of characters the audience isn’t privileged enough to know; and I love the hard crack my suspension of disbelief makes when it finally snaps.  

You might think that slogging through hours of mediocre “art” and “entertainment” would amount to little more than An Amazing Colossal Waste of Time for me, but hear me out; I promise I’m going somewhere with this.

I’ll turn for a moment to a very good movie.  Ed Wood is a humorous and surprisingly loving tribute to Edward Davis Wood, Jr., the most famous Bad Director this side of Uwe Boll. The auteur behind such cinematic tire fires as Bride of the Monster, The Sinister Urge, and Glen or Glenda, so beloved is Wood that a snarky Southerner founded the Church of Ed Wood.  The biopic features wonderful performances by Martin Landau, Johnny Depp, and a buffet of fine Hollywood character actors.  In fact, just go ahead and put Ed Wood in your Netflix queue.  I’ll wait. 

Towards the end of the film, Wood films his opus Plan 9 from Outer Space (just go ahead and watch Plan 9 too.  It is a delight).  As he closes a scene, he argues with his financial backers, who notice his shoddy sets and inconsistent script.  Wood, agitated, snaps: “Filmmaking is not about the tiny details!”

I want to wake up every morning to that line.  I want to paint it on a Soviet war poster and have it hanging above me every time I sit/lie down to write.  Because the thing is, Ed Wood was partially right; people aren’t interested in little details.  Right up until the details aren’t there.

Watch the opening scenes of Plan 9; take a look at the cockpit, immediately before the pilots spot the flying saucer on fishing line.  Did you pay attention to the saga of the arrival at Burbank, or to the shower curtain covering the cockpit?  Perhaps you instead wondered why two pilots will attempt to land a commercial aircraft with no equipment save a clipboard and a candlestick phone shoved down the co-pilot’s uniform.

And another thing: in the history of film, has there ever been an even halfway-decent movie narrated by an anonymous, disembodied voice?

You might be saying, at this point, that audiences are certainly not interested in every last detail in a given universe, whether in film or in a novel.  You have a point there; the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, did not plunge down the rabbit hole of every minor plot and character detail in his films.  Both The Lady Vanishes and The Man Who Knew Too Much (ed. note to film completionists: I have seen only the James Stewart/Doris Day version, so that is what I refer to here) involve international espionage, kidnapping, and assassination attempts.  In neither do we ever learn the full conspiracy, the specific reasons for the attempted coups, or even which countries are embroiled in the conflict.  And I dare you to find anyone who, after seeing the film, could possibly have cared.

These background details become MacGuffins—significant plot devices uninteresting in and of themselves—over the course of the two films.  Instead, Hitchcock directs his efforts towards details that twist the audience in knots.

Extravagant attention to details have saved movies that might have otherwise seemed rote. None of the themes in The Matrix were excessively original; but deep into two hours of meticulously curated shots, that didn’t matter.

“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—and everyone will forget all about Johnny Mnemonic.”

Now Plan 9, as with all of Wood’s films, is a no-budget, no-time, no-know-how picture: the lowest of low-hanging fruit.  It’s a little unfair to pit it against the work of award-winning directors, I’ll admit.  The road from hilarious mediocrity to heartbreaking virtuosity might be winding, difficult, and nigh-impassable; but somewhere along the way, that road is paved with a pathological obsession with details.    

It’s an elementary part of writing, as it is with filmmaking (Ed. Disclaimer: I can only assume; I’ve never made a film), but it can’t ever be neglected.

The line of demarcation between the filmmaker and the writer is the medium; a filmmaker traffics in image and sound, and the writer traffics in words.  Just as the director orients every frame and adjusts each line for a purpose, the writer must employ each word to a specific end.  In writing, as in film, take nothing for granted.  No plot device, no character’s reply, no bloodstain on the gangster’s overcoat, not one miserable word—nothing gets added or omitted just for the hell of it.  It might feel like a thankless job most of the time; like a morning Red Line train to the Loop, the audience reacts only when something isn’t there.

Every word must be an act of labor.  Every sentence must sound like it is not only the last sentence you’ll ever write, but the only one anyone will ever remember from now until the sun explodes.  Even when all you’re trying to do is get a guy to pick up the phone. 

Sebastian Junger*, back me up:

“Don’t dump lazy sentences on your readers. If you do, they’ll walk away and turn on the TV.”

*I try to be OCD about citing my sources, but the only source I can find for this quote is the Advice to Writers twitter account.  If there's a better source, lemme know and I'll fix it.