Whisk the Fable: Larry Karaszewski Recalls “Ed Wood” at 30 | Interviews | Roger Ebert
Larry Karaszewski recalls it adore it used to be the day before today. He and his writing spouse, Scott Alexander, have been having lunch within the commissary at Common Studios, which had produced their scripts from “Problem Child” and its sequel. “We were being really typecast as people who write these junky kids’ movies,” Karaszewski recollects. “We actually took a meeting somewhere where we pitched an idea, a political idea, and someone said, ‘Oh my god, it’s a really good idea, but you guys are the guys who write ‘Problem Child’ movies.’” Consuming on the commissary that era, Karaszweski glanced up and noticed a poster for some of the worn “Ma & Pa Kettle” motion pictures at the wall. “And I was like, ‘Who are those dudes?’ and I pointed to the names of the guys who wrote the ‘Ma and Pa Kettle’ movie. Like, Is this our fate?”
Fortunately for all folks, that desperation led them to effort one thing totally other: a winkingly self-aware but character-driven biopic of Edward D. Plank Jr., repeatedly thought to be the worst movie director of all hour. They’d been fascinated about Plank since faculty, when the loose of books like The Yellowish Turkey Awards and movies like It Got here From Hollywood marked the mainstreaming of ironic bad-movie appreciation. They noticed a film in Plank’s tale, together with his courting with fallen horror icon Bela Lugosi as its backbone.
Thru their good friend Daniel Waters, they have been pleasant with director Michael Lehmann, who’d helmed Waters’s “Heathers” script however had simply suffered during the loose of the mega-flop “Hudson Hawk.” They idea he may well be a excellent are compatible for his or her potential screenplay. “The writers of ‘Problem Child’ and the director of ‘Hudson Hawk’ make a movie about the worst filmmaker of all time,” Karaszewski laughs. “It’s like they say, write what you know!”
The writers manufacture a shorten remedy, which Lehmann were given into the arms of Denise Di Novi, a manufacturer on “Heathers” who’d simply landed a gig working Tim Burton’s manufacturing corporate; all of them figured they may get Burton on board as an govt manufacturer or presenter. “Tim read the treatment and kind of flipped out,” Karaszewski recollects. “And he sort of misunderstood why he was reading it—he wanted to direct it.”
Burton used to be circling “Mary Reilly” (which Stephen Frears would therefore direct), so he and Lehmann made a do business in: If Burton sought after to create “Ed Wood,” Lehmann would step again and build it rather. If he didn’t love the script, Lehmann would step again in to direct.
Burton needed to decide to “Mary Reilly” inside six weeks, so Alexander and Karaszewski locked themselves in a room and wrote their first draft of “Ed Wood” in slightly below that hour. “We turned it in to Tim on a Friday,” Karaszewski says, “and on a Sunday, we got a phone call that was basically, ‘This is my next movie. I’m dropping out of ‘Mary Reilly.’ To be completely honest, I don’t have any notes. I just want to make this movie, and make it in the spirit that it was written in.”
They’d by no means written a biopic earlier than, nor used to be it a style they’d in particular aspired to. “Biopics were always three hours long, really boring, and kind of cradle-to-the-grave,” Karaszewski says. “We wanted to cover the least amount of time possible, and so we really framed it as the Ed and Bela love story, and we wanted to go out on some kind of high. And that was going to be the making of ‘Plan 9,’ the movie that he’s known for… but in our movie, we’re celebrating it, as opposed to making fun of it.”
That spirit of excellent cheer prolonged to all the screenplay. Sooner than their film, Karaszewski explains, “It was all about laughing at him. Oh, he’s the director who wore a dress when he was directing and it was all that kind of thing, he’s so bad. And after ‘Problem Child,’ Scott and I kind of came to the conclusion that no one sets out to make a bad movie. It’s actually kind of impossible to make a good movie. So look at Ed: He came out to Hollywood. He had dreams, he loved horror films and monster movies and science fiction movies. And he wound up making eight or nine of them! And he did it with his friends, and he had passion! What if we celebrate that? What if we celebrate him, rather than make fun of him?”
Burton absolutely understood and embraced that spirit and taken his personal concepts to the image’s aesthetic—in particular the selection to create “Ed Wood” feel and appear like an Ed Plank film. “That is Mr. Burton, a hundred percent,” Karaszewski says. It used to be a rolling line of changes, as is frequently the case in a collaborative image like this one. Alexander and Karaszewski had by no means conceived it as a black-and-white film, and Burton to begin with hadn’t meant it as one. It used to be a snap choice made all through makeup exams; Martin Landau simply didn’t rather glance proper, regardless of how a lot or minute of Rick Baker’s makeup they implemented, till cinematographer Stefan Czapsky switched off the colour at the observe. “In turning off the color, Martin popped,” Karaszewski recollects. “I was like, Oh my god.”
However it wasn’t only a topic of taking pictures in black-and-white; all over “Ed Wood,” Burton painstakingly recreates the unusual lights, stiff compositions, and all-or-nothing efficiency types of Plank’s best-known motion pictures. The screenwriter recalls how manufacturing dressmaker Tom Duffield “got his big break to do a Tim Burton movie, so he was drawing these things that were pretty amazing—that were Tim Burton things. And Tim didn’t want that.” The chintzier-the-better philosophy prolonged to all areas. “The location scout had come back with a cool location, and Tim would say no, and then he came back with just, like, a shitty brick building in a parking lot. And he’d be like ‘Yes!’”
“Ed Wood” wasn’t to begin with a business luck, however critics cherished it, and Landau took house an Oscar for Best possible Supporting Actor. Greater than that, it eager Alexander and Karaszewski on their correct occupation trail. Sizzling on its heels, they offered Columbia Photos on a film about Larry Flynt, and learned, as Karaszewski put it, “Maybe this is a genre we could live in and really kick its ass. What if you made movies about the weirdos that we like, the pop culture fringe people?”
They felt some uncertainty to start with, on the other hand. “At one point early on, we had a meeting with Jim Brooks,” Karaszewski says. “I think they talked to him about directing ‘Larry Flynt,’ and he said, ‘Well, what are you guys planning on doing next?’ And Scott was like, “Well, we’re not sure, maybe we won’t do another of these biopics. We don’t want to be too typecast.’ And Jim Brooks literally said, ‘You dummy. People spend their entire careers trying to define themselves,’ trying to find a brand, for lack of a better word. ‘You guys have done this, so go for it.’ That was a good piece of advice.”
In fact, at the moment, biopics have turn out to be an business unto themselves—the status image identical of the superhero film, a reputedly secure guess for risk-adverse studios in search of, necessarily, recognizable IP for Boomers and Gen-Xers. And there’s any other heavy explanation why for his or her ubiquity, Karaszewski says: “Actors tend to win awards for these things. Martin won every award possible, every single performer in ‘O.J.’ [‘The People Vs. O.J. Simpson’] won multiple awards, Amy Adams won Best Actress at the Golden Globes [for their reunion with Burton, ‘Big Eyes’], Jim Carrey did too [for ‘Man on the Moon’], so there’s this thing where actors want to play these parts because they’re juicy… So that’s how they get made—because you get an actor attached.”
Many of those biopics don’t seem to be extraordinarily excellent, hoary and formulaic, stuffed with clumsy exposition and on-the-nose discussion, and time Karaszewski is detest to name somebody out (“I’m not going to tell them how to make the movies better, I’ll be out of a job!”), there are some things he and Alexander have discovered about writing a excellent, memorable, out-of-the-box biopic.
At first: each time imaginable, steer clear of the cradle-to-grave layout. “A lot of biopics end with someone dying. You know, ‘Jerry Maguire’ doesn’t end with Jerry Maguire dying. Like, regular movies, they tell the story, and then they get out of it. Also—I don’t know why I’m picking on ‘Jerry Maguire’—but ‘Jerry Maguire’ doesn’t open with Jerry Maguire being born, or Jerry Maguire growing up, he’s ten years old and boy he loves sports or whatever.” (Additionally, “one of the things we really hated about biopics is old age makeup, ‘You sit down, dumb reporter! I’m gonna tell you my story,’ that kinda thing. We were just so sick of this shit.”)
In lieu, for those writers, it boils right down to a few key questions. “Why do we want to make a movie about this person?” he asks. “Well, we want to make a movie about Ed Wood because he had this really fascinating relationship with Bela Lugosi, this aging horror star. And why is Ed Wood remembered? He made the worst movie of all time. Well, just answering that question, that’s the structure of our movie. You know? Page 10, he meets Bela Lugosi! The third act, he makes ‘Plan 9.’”
In fact, if it have been that easy, somebody may just do it; Alexander and Karaszewski do it ultimate, with their distinctive mix of wit, pathos, irony, and affection for the business’s outliers, and so they’ve been doing it for 3 a long time now. “We went through our old pictures, and there were pictures of get-togethers and premieres of ‘Ed Wood,’ and Ed Wood’s widow and Conrad Brooks and Paul Marco were all there,” Karaszewski chuckles. “And we thought they were the oldest people on the planet Earth. And we looked at this picture, like, ‘We’re older now than Ed Wood’s widow was at the time.’ That was terrifying.”