“Weird genius”: the filmmaker Roger Ebert called the worst director of all time
Having the desire, passion, and funds to become a filmmaker is hardly a guarantee of talent, something Roger Ebert was happy to point out when he settled upon the director who could justifiably be called the worst to ever wield a megaphone.
It isn’t Uwe Boll, but the notoriously terrible purveyor of video game-orientated schlock makes for a pertinent example along similar lines. He has no skill, no style, and no aptitude for the art of cinema, but because the overwhelming majority of his productions are self-funded, he continues churning out utter shite on a semi-regular basis.
His films aren’t even of the ‘so bad they’re good’ variety; they’re just shite. However, Ebert’s pick for the name that scraped the very bottom of the directorial barrel became a cult icon specifically because their work was so irredeemably terrible on every imaginable level that it carried an endearing quality.
Ed Wood’s combination of unintentional camp, basic technical errors, shoddy special effects, randomly assembled casts, bizarre dialogue, and nonsensical stories quickly became his trademarks, even if it wasn’t until after his death in 1954 that he became the poster child for bad cinema.
Sexploitation story Glen or Glenda, the noirish Jail Bait, and creature feature Bride of the Monster were among his most notable works, but it was the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space that secured his posthumous legend. Easily one of the worst films ever made, people love it because it’s one of the worst films ever made, with Wood becoming such an underground favourite that he even got his own biopic.
Martin Landau won a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ trophy at the Academy Award for playing regular collaborator Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, with Johnny Depp in the lead role. When offering his critical insight into the biographical drama, Ebert even ended up doubling down on his opinion when casting his eye over a completely different and unrelated movie.
Sharing his thoughts on Ed Wood, Ebert reflected on how the subject “never directed a shot he didn’t like.” Admitting that “it takes a special weird genius to be voted the worst director of all time,” the critic conceded it was “a title Wood has earned by acclimation.” Offering a backhanded compliment of sorts, he even remarked that the artistry of his filmography was so dire that “it achieved a kind of grandeur” in its own way.
Just weeks after Ed Wood was released, Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi Stargate hit cinemas, and the biopic must have still been fresh in Ebert’s mind. “The movie Ed Wood, about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for Stargate,” he offered, hinting that a movie about an unwittingly bad filmmaker whetted the appetite for one hailing from a director who may have inadvertently placed themselves on the same pedestal.
