Charlton Heston: the star that Tim Burton called “the greatest bad actor of all time”
There’s a certain amount of winking and nodding in the work of Tim Burton. Growing up obsessed with freaks and oddities, Burton also had a taste for pastel walls and suburbia, thanks to the areas that he grew up in as a kid. This mix between high and low art, freakishness and normalcy, became one of Burton’s signature calling cards when he became one of the most famous directors on the planet.
It’s easy to see within his films: films like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Edward Scissorhands, and Frankenweenie all take odd figures and plop them right in the middle of the suburbs. Burton loves to find strangeness where it shouldn’t be, and that comes through loud and clear in one of his best films, Ed Wood.
Focused on the titular director who was infamously poor at his job, Ed Wood doesn’t make a mockery out of a man who is commonly thought of as the worst director of all time. Instead, Burton celebrates the naivety and sticktoitiveness of Wood. Whereas most viewers saw a hack who couldn’t make a movie to save his life, Burton saw a passionate storyteller whose ambitions exceeded his meagre abilities.
To that extent, Burton isn’t terribly concerned with auteur cinema. “I really wouldn’t know a good movie if it bit me in the face — up to a certain point,” Burton joked when he sat down with Rotten Tomatoes to talk about some of his favourite films. Burton’s list included some films that were acclaimed (the original Wicker Man from 1974), some famous bombs (Dracula A.D. 1972) and even a film that was obscure enough not to even register on the site’s Tomatometer (The War of the Gargantuas).
Burton saved his final pick for 1971’s The Omega Man, and he had some wonderfully backhanded praise for leading man Charleton Heston. “I was kind of obsessed by him, because he’s like the greatest bad actor of all time,” Burton claimed. “Between this and Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green and The Ten Commandments — I know that was a religious film but I always thought it was like the first zombie movie. He starts out like this real person and by the end he’s like this weird zombie.”
“Seeing Charlton Heston reciting lines from Woodstock and wearing jumpsuits that look like he’s out of Gilligan’s Island — there are lots of good things,” Burton added. “The thing I liked about this is that the vampire characters were played by real people. They had a really cool look to them — black robes, dark glasses. Not Charlton Heston with his shirt off.”
