Ed Wood is a 1994 film about the eponymous d-grade film director from the 1950s, directed by Tim Burton. In a key scene, Wood (Johnny Depp) walks into Musso & Frank’s Grill in L.A., depressed about his movie studio taking control of his latest masterpiece, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).
He spots his hero, Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio) and introduces himself. Together they kvetch about losing control of movie projects to their respective studios.
“And they’re always trying to get their buddies,” Wood says. “It doesn’t matter if they’re right for the part.”
“Tell me about it,” Welles replies. “I’m supposed to do a thriller at Universal. But they want Charlton Heston to play a Mexican.”
Nice, fantastical scene between two auteurs from opposite ends of the talent spectrum. RKO had given Welles complete control of Citizen Kane (1941), but the movie was banned from advertising in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, and it lost money. It would take another couple of decades before Kane was acknowledged as perhaps the best movie ever made. Welles would never again have such control over his film projects.
This fictional encounter with Wood had something of a political subtext. Welles was a well-known liberal, having made his reputation by age 22 directing The Cradle Will Rock on Broadway with an all-Black cast for FDR’s Federal Theater Project in 1937.
Heston’s biggest role before he starred as a Mexican federal drug enforcement agent in Touch of Evil (1957) was as Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956).
Though Burton made his movie some four years before Heston became president of the NRA, where he later said at its convention that gun-control advocates would have to pry his guns from his “cold, dead hands,” Heston was well-known as a rare Hollywood conservative and friend and supporter of President Ronald Reagan by the time Welles died in 1985.
It’s something audiences of Ed Wood might catch circa 1994, even if there was no such political dichotomy obvious to movie fans in 1957.
But the reality is that Welles and Heston were friends. It was Heston who agreed to star in Touch of Evil only if Universal hired Welles as director. It would be Welles’ last studio film.
In 1975, as chairman of the American Film Institute, Heston convinced the organization to give Welles its third-ever lifetime achievement award. See? We can all get along.
We launched in September 2020 to bring left and right together in calm, civil discussion. No echo-chambers. No promoting other media outlets and groups from “your side” pushing extreme political points-of-view that promote conspiracy theories.
So far, we have a small, loyal group of readers. Substack is a useful outlet, but we hope you’ll spend a bit more time each weekday with our website https://thehustings.news.
Read our home page debates and agree or disagree with the left or right columnists. Read our take on the political news of the day in News & Notes and let us know what you think. Write to us at editors@thehustings.news. Please keep it civil and tell us whether you think your comments belong in the left or the right column.
Today, however, we are off in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Our e-mailbox always is open. News & Notes returns Tuesday.
—Todd Lassa