While the entertainment bio-film may not possess as voluminous a body of completed productions as other immediately recognizable genres, it nevertheless is firmly established. The reflexive impulse, to construct works of entertainment about entertainers themselves, seems to be as strong as it ever was … and is likely to persist. – Robert Milton Miller (1983: 361)
From the earliest flickering black-and-white images on a wall, to modern-day blockbusters, Hollywood as a dream factory (not necessarily a geographic space) has fascinated audiences. Filmmakers have responded to this by producing films about their own industry. It is a business that on the surface is all glitz and glamour – but what lies beneath is something much darker. The more successful films about ‘Hollywood’ tend to explore and explode the myth of the ‘dream factory’. The stars chosen for bio-pics are often ones who have become tarnished by gossip, or have suffered at the hands of the industry itself.
These films offer us a glimpse of what lies behind the cameras, how this powerful industry works, and how they have re-told their own past. The three case studies here focus on the film career of Ed Wood, hailed as the worst film director ever; film and aviation mogul Howard Hughes; and the little-known (outside the US) 1960s TV star Bob Crane. Through their striking visual style, narrative structure and performances, these films offer insights into the lives of these troubled men.
Director: Tim Burton
Screenwriters: Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander
Starring: Johnny Depp (Ed Wood) and Martin Landau (Bela Lugosi)
Subject: American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author and film editor Ed Wood (Edward Davis “Ed” Wood Jr, 1924 – 1978)
Bio-pics about Hollywood stars are fairly common, those about the creative forces behind the screen less so. It is therefore surprising that one of the first and most significant in the mid-1990s renaissance was not one of the great directors from the canon, but one whose reputation rests on having directed what is often considered to be one of the worst films of all time Plan 9 From Outer Space (1956).
Screenwriters Karaszewski and Alexander’s source material for the screenplay was Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr (1992). This led to Wood’s films being shown on late night television in the US, which brought about a renewed interest in this minor-league film director in the early 1990s. For his book Grey interviewed the surviving members of Wood’s troupe and recorded all the conflicting accounts of the man, the films and the filmmaking process. Karaszewski says, ‘What we were attracted to about Ed was the incredible, charismatic optimism he seemed to have. It almost didn’t matter whether the movies were any good; he just wanted to make movies so badly and wanted to have all his friends in them’ (quoted in Warren 1994: 34).
Karaszewski and Alexander had achieved commercial success with Problem Child (1990) and Problem Child 2 (1991), yet wanted to work on something that would have a greater critical resonance. They returned to an idea Alexander had had in 1983, an Ed Wood bio-pic then entitled The Man in the Angora Sweater, and began work on a speculative script. They approached director Michael Lehmann, who in turn went to producer Denise Di Novi who was then working with Burton. It transpired that Burton, noting parallels between his and Wood’s passion for film, wanted to direct it. Lehmann stepped aside.
Burton said, ‘I hate most biopics. I find they are really stodgy and boring, because people take a much too reverential approach, and it’s fake. What’s great about
Ed Wood is that it’s rough; it’s not like a completely hardcore, realistic biopic. I’m only taking the spirit of what I think some of this stuff is and trying to project a certain kind of feeling’ (quoted in Salisbury 1994). Given Burton’s empathy for Wood, the film does not mock, but celebrates Wood as a determined filmmaker – one that so loves movies, particularly his own, that he fails to see how bad they are.
The film focuses on a few years in Wood’s life, using a linear narrative structure. The setting is Hollywood in the 1950s (and the film is shot in black and white to mirror this period). Wood is a wannabe director/star/ writer making a series of (really) low-budget movies with no scripts, sets, costumes or functioning actors. Scenes from his films, Glen and Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955) and Plan 9 From Outer Space are all lovingly restaged. Wood remains incredibly optimistic, unfazed by disasters, financial problems, interfering producers. For some, he secured funding from his local Baptist Church, who insisted the entire cast be baptised.
Yet the film is more than one horror movie fan paying homage to another. It also examines Wood’s relationship with the women in his life and, centrally, his relationship with the ageing Lugosi. Burton says, ‘People think it’s funny that I did this movie. It’s like because I’ve been successful, why would I want to make a movie about somebody who’s not successful? But the way I feel about that and him and me is that any of the movies could go either way, they really could, and that line between success and failure is a very thin one’ (ibid.).
Parallels between Burton and Wood are numerous. Ed Wood employed one of his horror heroes Bela Lugosi in his films, and Lugosi’s last screen appearance was in a Wood production. As a filmmaker just starting out, Burton managed to get his idol Vincent Price to narrate one of his early short films, Vincent (1982) and Price’s last on-screen appearance was as the inventor in Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990).
The film shows a genuine friendship between Lugosi (Martin Landau), a morphine addicted has-been, and Wood (Johnny Depp) who is both exploiting the star while also giving his last years meaning. Lugosi had been a major star of the Universal horror films in the 1930s, but by the 1950s he had been abandoned. Despite being in terrible pain and using morphine and alcohol as props, he always turned up for work and gave his all, until the end. He died during the shooting Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Bela Lugosi Jr, a Los Angeles lawyer, was unhappy with the portrayal of his father and said, ‘I read enough of the script to decide that he wasn’t portrayed either accurately or respectfully, and so I stopped reading’ (quoted in Clark 1994: 91).
The film ends on a high-point with a premiere of Plan 9 of Outer Space in 1959: an occurrence that eluded the original film. By ending here, the film does not follow the real Wood’s descent into pornography.
The film’s original title, The Man in the Angora Sweater, drew attention to Wood’s transvestism. By changing it to Ed Wood, the film is now aligned more closely to biography where instant recognition of the subject is placed above the poetic. The publicity material for the film featured images of Depp in a combination of male and female clothing, lounging in a director’s chair, megaphone in hand, offering a quick summary of his personal and professional world’s in a shared space. The film starts during the production of his début feature film Glen and Glenda. Wood himself played the film’s central crossdressing character as a way of ‘coming out’ to his girlfriend Delores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) about his transvestisism. She was unable to accept this side of him, and broke up. Wood’s next girlfriend, who he would later marry, Kathy (Patricia Arquette) was comfortable with this side of the man. The two women met for the first time on the set for Ed Wood. Johnny Depp confidently recreates this ambiguity of a virile good looking heterosexual man complete with Clark Gable moustache striding around the studio in knee length pencil skirts, high-heel shoes and tight-fitting angora sweaters.
The film is peopled with genuine characters and incidents, as well as fabricating others that could have happened, including the scene where Wood, dejected by production problems, bumps into Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio) who gives him a pep-talk ending with the wise words, ‘visions are worth fighting for’. Burton comments:
I liked these people, I enjoyed the idea of them. I liked that they were all completely out of it and everybody thought they were doing the greatest things, and they weren’t. There’s just something very appealing about people who go out on a limb, who are perceived by society to be something else, so therefore in some ways that loosens them up to just be themselves. (Quoted in Salisbury 1994)
The film opened to enthusiastic reviews, but failed to recoup its $18 million budget at the box office.
Johnny Depp as Ed Wood and Mike Starr as producer Georgie Weiss in Ed Wood (1994)
Burton’s biopic of the man often described as the world’s worst filmmaker may offer a somewhat favourably distorted account of the man and his films – it ends before his slide into porn, penury and alcoholism and, while recreating certain scenes from Wood’s work with astonishing accuracy, manages to avoid showing his most tiresomely nonsensical sequences – but it certainly succeeds as a funny, touching tribute to tenacity, energy, ambition and friendship. Affection shines through warm and bright, aided no end by Stefan Czapsky’s evocative b/w camerawork, and by a host of spot-on lookalike performances. (Andrew 2006a)
Dennis Bingham in Whose Lives Are They Anyway? dedicates a chapter to Ed Wood. Under the chapter heading ‘The Biopic of Someone Undeserving’ he states:
Ed Wood presents a comic paradox: a biopic hero who has everything – enthusiasm, optimism, compassion in his befriending of faded star Bela Lugosi … loyalty to his friends and co-workers, tenacity, and something he wanted to say in films. He has everything, that is, expect talent. … In casting an affectionate look at a passionate failure, the film parodies the biopic genre, not by imitating the genre in order to ridicule it, but by inverting the values on which it is based. (2010: 147)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter: John Logan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio (Howard Hughes), Cate Blanchett (Katharine Hepburn), Kate Beckinsale (Ava Gardner), Jude Law (Errol Flynn) and Gwen Stefani (Jean Harlow)
Subject: American Mogul, filmmaker, inventor, pilot, playboy and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes (Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. 1905 – 1976)
John Logan drew inspiration for his screenplay from Charles Higham’s popular biography Howard Hughes (1993). Michael Mann was originally on board as director, but the experience of Ali had left him unwilling to commit to another bio-pic at this time. He stayed on as producer when Martin Scorsese took over as director. The film’s budget was $110 million and shooting took place over five months, predominantly in Canada.
The Aviator covers two decades of Howard Hughes’s life from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. Its focus is on Hughes’s achievements in the fields of aviation and movies, and on his descent into paranoia and obsessive– compulsive behaviour. It skips the traditional opening credits, or familiar opening at a moment of glory to show a brief scene of a young boy, aged nine, being bathed by his mother. Suddenly we are in the middle of the airfield, with planes flying overhead. It is now 1927 and Hughes (aged 22) in movie-mogul mode is making an impact on the Hollywood landscape with his World War I flying epic, Hell’s Angels. It ends shortly after the successful flight of the Hercules in 1947.
Hell’s Angels was to be his masterpiece of the silent cinema. At a cost of $4m, it took three years to make. When The Jazz Singer (1927) was released he remade it as a sound film at even more expense and it was finally released in 1930. The film lost $1.5 million but was well received. His biggest hit was Scarface (1932), a portrayal of gangster Al Capone that brought such a level of violence and glamour to the screen that it was instrumental in the introduction of the notorious Hays Production Code that dominated Hollywood for the next three decades.
Restless and rich he moves on to his own flying projects – breaking records, designing and building aircraft and establishing his own airline, TWA, as well as wooing the
crème de le crème of the Hollywood A-list including Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. In these early sequences Hughes is sleek, charming and alive.
Leonard DiCaprio as Howard Hughes on the set of Hell’s Angels in The Aviator (2004)
The pivotal event that brings about his steady descent into madness is his 1946 near-fatal plane crash into the rooftops of a Beverly Hills suburb. Although he did not physically crash and burn, this incident was the catalyst for a thirty-year decline. Although the film’s narrative ends a year later in 1947, his final diminished years are hinted at here, as he starts his downward trajectory into madness and reclusiveness.
There are further brief flashbacks to his childhood which serves as an explanation for his increasingly destructive behaviour in his relationships with women and hygiene. These sequences were added by screenwriter Logan and are not in Higham’s biography, although his mother’s fear that he could contract typhus and her obsession with quarantining him, refusing to let him play with other children fearing they would pass on diseases, is well-documented.
The film treats his paranoia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with sympathy and pathos. His OCD manifested in extreme obsession with cleanliness, and washing his hands is shown through extreme close-ups of a bathroom doorknob looming large, with Hughes waiting for someone else to come in to prevent him from having to touch it.
He locks himself away to hide from his increasing deafness (caused by the accident). A scene where a naked Hughes sits on his germ-free seat watching his old movies reflected onto his naked torso encapsulates all his obsessions (both positive and negative) in one haunting image. This is the birth of the babbling demented recluse that was to define him, a variation on which is depicted in
Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme, 1980).
Scorsese uses film stock, shooting and editing styles appropriate to the historical period and Hughes’s mental decline. The film’s pre-1935 scenes are shown in shades of red and cyan blue with green objects appearing blue. This was done to emulate the look of early colour films shot using the ‘multicolor’ process (which Hughes owned). For the remainder of the film, post-1935, they appear saturated, mirroring those of the three-strip Technicolor process of the period. Towards the end of the film, when Hughes locks himself away, the mise-en-scène becomes darker, as he sits alone in the shadows.
Scorsese stated:
It kept reminding me of Greek mythology and the curse of the family and how they deal with it. I was thinking about the Minotaur and the labyrinth. Basically through his whole life Hughes is trying to escape the labyrinth, but he’s the labyrinth. … Howard Hughes at this point in his life, his flaw, the curse so to speak, is the curse for all of us in terms of a nation, a country that acquires wealth like empires. I love studying ancient history and seeing how empires rise and fall. They sow the seeds of their own destruction and I think that’s what fascinated me. Ultimately the story asks, is that the wave of the future for everyone? (Film4 2004a)
Scorsese would return to the pioneers of film history in Hugo (2011) which features Ben Kingsley as the pioneering special effects film director Georges Méliès.
The film won great critical acclaim and was rewarded with box office and awards success. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, and won five.
The Aviator ends brilliantly on an image that’s tragic, moving and kind of brave; Hughes, gripped by another panic attack and accompanying Tourette’s-like verbal spasm, repeats “the way of the future” relentlessly into a coldly unresponsive washroom mirror. It’s 1947 and Howard Hughes is just 42. We know, as we watch the trauma in the washroom, that the way of the future for him was a long, dreadful contraction into a nightmarish isolation. The fact that you really, genuinely care is probably
The Aviator’s strongest recommendation of all. (Maconie 2005: 114)
Auto Focus (2002)
Director: Paul Schrader
Screenwriter: Michael Gerbosi
Starring: Greg Kinnear (Bob Crane), Rita Wilson (Anne Crane) and Willem Dafoe (John Henry Carpenter)
Subject: American actor and disc jockey Bob Crane (Robert Edward ‘Bob’ Crane, 1928–1978)
Auto Focus was co-produced by screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander. They have found success specialising in bio-pics of minor players, offering private views of these public personas: cult movie director Ed Wood, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt (Woody Harrelson) in The People vs Larry Flynt (1996) and TV star Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey) in Man on the Moon (1999). These are what Alexander describes as, ‘anti-biopics … biopics about people who don’t deserve one … They’re attractive because they’re so impassioned and they’re fighting a big wave that’s about to crash down on them. It makes for colourful characters and that’s more fun than a noble character’ (2002).
Screenwriter Michael Gerbosi and producer Todd Rosken used the true-crime cop procedural The Murder of Bob Crane: Who Killed the Star of Hogan’s Heroes? (1993) by Robert Graysmith as their starting point. Graysmith had been one of the reporters working at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969 when the Zodiac killings took place. His first-hand account of this was used as the basis of Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007). In 1996, with the rights to the book procured, Gerbosi and Rosken began turning Graysmith’s book into a screenplay. In 1998, they met with Karaszewski and Alexander who advised throwing out the book’s police procedural structure, which only saw Crane’s life in flashback, and to focus instead on Crane himself. According to Gerbosi, Karaszewski and Alexander said ‘they focused on the few years of a person’s life that mattered. These cradle-to-grave biopics are too broad and don’t really get underneath the surface. So I picked the years that I thought mattered, a handful where events started to overwhelm Bob, and began him on the spiral to where he wound up (quoted in Ferreyra 2003).
In 1999, with the script finished, and Karaszewski and Alexander now on board as producing partners, the search began for financing for a project with seemingly little commercial appeal. Gerbosi has noted how, ‘… many of the independents – the place the three [of us] thought would go gung-ho for a project like this – passed one after the other. In the end, though, Sony liked the project enough to put
Auto Focus into production’ (Ferreyra 2003).
With Greg Kinnear secured as star and Paul Schrader directing, filming began in 2001. It now focused on Bob Crane who, at the film’s start, seemingly has it all: he is the star of the hit TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971), married to his childhood sweetheart, with three children. Behind the façade is a man addicted to sex, pornography and later recording his sex acts using the latest video recording technology. The film follows this downward spiral from churchgoing family man in 1965, through his divorce and second marriage, increasing reliance on sex and alcohol, to his murder in 1978 (which remains unsolved).
The film opens in the mid-1960s and Crane’s voice-over tells us ‘I’m a likeable guy’ and so it appears. In this bright, sunny Los Angeles Crane is shown hosting a light-hearted morning radio show, wearing pastel patterned jumpers; and keen to exploit his ‘Jack Lemmon’ likeability in films. Anxious to break into acting he accepts the title role of Colonel Robert Hogan in Hogan’s Heroes, set in a Nazi POW camp. Its success makes him a TV star, and draws attraction from a bevy of female fans. Through a co-star he meets John ‘Carpy’ Carpenter who introduces him to the early portable video cameras. Hogan’s sex addiction starts off with the soft-core magazines and progresses to the point that Hogan is starring in his own sex movies. When Hogan’s Heroes is axed, he finds increasing solace in this world.
As Crane’s life deteriorates so does the look of the film, mirroring both his mood but also the transition from all-American family guy and the high values of a network TV show to the grainy underbelly of 1970s video quality and the sleazy nightclubs he and Carpenter haunt. From careful and straightforward sitcom cinematography to the jitteriness associated with hand-held, this visual deterioration echoes his mental transformation from wholesome family man to washed-out paranoiac. This is a film that travels from the glamour to the gutter, visually and narratively.
The neat compartmentalisation of Crane’s two lives collides in a fantasy sequence mid-way through the film, signalling the change in him and the visual and aural tone for the film’s second half. Hungover, Crane is on set and his mind wanders as he imagines that the set is now a real prison. His co-star Patricia Olson (Maria Bello) with whom he is having an affair (and would later marry) appears in her usual costume, but strips down to reveal provocative lingerie and begins to seduce him and the other Nazi officers. His wife Anne (Rita Wilson) appears looking demure and vulgarly gives him permission to stray. His children beg him to stay. He is snapped back to reality by the director calling out.
Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane in a dream sequence from Auto Focus (2002)
Fred Murphy’s cinematography (use of film stocks, camera movements/angles and lighting), is enhanced by Christina Boden’s increasingly agitated editing, and composer’s Angelo Badalamenti creepy score. These visual and aural signposts aid the audience’s reading of Crane. Crane himself remains an enigma, curiously dispassionate, his voice-over narrative adding no insights into the psyche; it is a bland soundtrack to a man who seemingly has no emotional engagement with the world in which he has become embroiled. There is plenty of nudity, but this is not a sexy film. The sex is joyless, and his and Carpenter’s re-viewing of their exploits does not seem anything more than a technical experience as though the mechanics of the technology is of greater importance than the act it is recoding. All this provides ‘a deep portrait of a shallow man, lonely and empty, going through the motions of having a good time’ (Ebert 2002).
Despite being well-received critically it did little business at the box office, largely due to the fact that neither Bob Crane nor Greg Kinnear had high-profiles outside of the US at this time and the film’s subject matter was a tough one.
Paul Schrader does biopics like no other director, choosing the most lurid and disastrous subjects … [This] is a splendidly taut example of the genre [which is] at first like a singular meditation on a very individual man’s unique obsession with the recording of sex, but it is also an exemplary Schrader work, a painfully funny and misanthropic treatise on American masculinity and its sexualised image. (Williams 2003: 36)
Paul Schrader’s initially toothsome, finally sobering biopic casts Crane as another of its director’s doomed narcissists – a man whose inability to focus on anything but himself sucks him into a fetid whirlpool of sleaze and alienation. Greg Kinnear is frighteningly plausible in the role. (Robey 2003)
Crane’s family had issues with aspects of his portrayal. Scotty, Crane’s son with his second wife, and Hogan’s Heroes co-star Sigrid Valdis, wrote, ‘Auto Focus is a monument to everything rotten in so-called “biopics” today; it’s based on nothing but rumour and innuendo and is not the true story of Bob Crane’s life. Period. Not even close’ (Crane 2002). He goes on to refute many of the film’s claims: Crane was not a regular churchgoer; he had been photographing his sex acts from 1956 (and always with their consent); he did not engage in S&M; he did not have a penile implant or a vasectomy and he only met John Carpenter in 1975. He does, however, confirm that his mother knew about the extra marital relationships and the filming (ibid.).
Further viewing
The Audrey Hepburn Story (Steve Robmar, 2000); Jennifer Love Hewitt (Audrey Hepburn)
The Girl (Julian Jarrold, 2012); Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones)
Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon, 1998); James Whale (Ian McKellen)
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005); Edward R. Morrow (David Strathairn)
Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi, 2012); Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins)
Hollywoodland (Allen Coulter, 2006); George Reeves (Ben Affleck)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011); Ben Kingsley (Georges Méliès)
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Stephen Hopkins, 2004); Peter Sellers (Geoffrey Rush)
Lovelace (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2013); Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried)
My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011); Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh)
The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary Harron, 2006); Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol)
Saving Mr Banks (John Lee Hancock, 2013); Tom Hanks (Walt Disney)
