In 1978, Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss, published The Fifty Worst Movies of all Time, an error-ridden affair that has long been credited with starting the whole so-bad-it’s-good nonsense that seemed to pop up everywhere in the wake of a second book on the subject, The Golden Turkey Awards, this time credited to Medved and his brother Michael, which came along in 1980. Among the very dubious “honours” handed out by the Brothers Medved were imaginary gongs for “worst film” and “worst director”, the latter going to Edward D. Wood Jr, the former to his magnum opus Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958). The hitherto little-remembered Wood was suddenly elevated onto a pedestal where the hip and the sneering took snarky pot-shots at him, smugly denouncing his work though one suspects that outside of Plan 9 (a hugely endearing and entertaining film and very far from the worst ever made) few had actually bothered to sit through any of his idiosyncratic and often highly personal work.

But if it was the Medved’s aim to commit character assassination on Wood, their plan backfired. Interest in his work and life grew to the point where, in 1992, Rudolph Grey was able to publish an oral history titled Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr., which interviewed many of Wood’s surviving friends and colleagues. Two years later, it formed the basis of Ed Wood, a charming if not exactly historically accurate love letter to the supposed worst film director of all time made by Tim Burton, at that time one of the most successful, riding high after successes like Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Batman Returns (1992).

The most devoted of Wood fans might have cause to complain about the liberties taken with the real story but for the majority of its audience, Ed Wood comes across as a very affectionate love letter to a Hollywood outsider, something that Burton, despite his enormous recent successes, would have identified with. One never gets the impression that Burton or his scriptwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are looking down on Wood and the gang of misfits and marginals that congregated around him as the Medveds did. They resist the temptation to sneer at Wood, poke fun or judge, simply embracing him and loves him and all his eccentricities.

It’s not at all historically accurate but that only seems add to its off-kilter charms. It begins in 1952 with Wood (a marvellous turn by Johnny Depp) trying to break into the film industry after his play, The Casual Company, based on his time in the United States Marine Corps, was savaged by critics. The film glosses over the many scripts that Wood had written and failed to sell and homes in an announcement in Variety magazine that producer George Weiss (Mike Starr) is trying to make a film based on the life of Christine Jorgensen, in the headlines at the time as one of the first high profile trans woman. Wood initially fails to impress Weiss but when he meets his idol, horror film star Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau, another outstanding performance), he tells Weiss that Lugosi will appear in the film but only if Wood can direct it. Wood changes the title from I Changed My Sex to Glen or Glenda and rewrites it as the tale of a transvestite (Wood himself liked to dress in women’s clothing) instead of a transexual.  The film is a critical and commercial disaster and on the advice of his actress girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), Wood decides to finance his next film, also with Lugosi in the lead and then titled Bride of the Atom, independently. He begins to amass his coterie of eccentrics, including television psychic The Amazing Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), Loretta King (Juliet Landau) who he mistakenly thinks is a wealthy heiress, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson (George “The Animal” Steele), horror host Vampira (Lisa Marie) and fellow transvestite Bunny Breckenridge (Bill Murray).

Bride of the Atom, retitled Bride of the Monster, is another flop, but undaunted, Wood presses on with the making of his magnum opus, Grave Robbers from Outer Space and takes a new lover, Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette), after Dolores finally has enough and packs her bags. But there are still problems along the way – Lugosi has become hopelessly dependent on morphine and attempts suicide (he dies before Grave Robbers can even start shooting) and funding for the new film has come from his landlord’s church who object to the title of the film – on their advice he changes it to Plan 9 from Outer Space and immortality of a sort, awaits…

Ed Wood is as much about the friendship between the director and Lugosi as it is about the low-budget world of 50s Hollywood, though Lugosi fans had as much to complain about when it came to the film’s representation of their hero as Wood fans did. But it isn’t really a biography in the traditional sense, it’s another of Burton’s fairy tales, more akin to his earlier Edward Scissorhands (another story of a misunderstood outsider trying to find his place in the world) than it is to traditional biopics. Thanks to the terrific performances of Depp and Landau (who took home the best supporting actor Oscar for his efforts) both Wood and Lugosi actually come out of the story quite well, complex but likable characters haunted by their own demons but full of enthusiasm for their work and genuine affection for each other.

The recreations of Wood’s films are a lot of fun and there’s certainly a frisson when you see familiar scenes from the three films through different eyes. Howard Shore’s score joins in the fun, at times quoting from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake whenever Lugosi is around, referencing the use of the Act II at the start of the Lugosi starring Dracula (1931), and there are, of course, many Theremin pieces peppering the action. It may veer far from the truth, but the film goes a long way to capturing the essences of Wood, his films and the milieu in which they were made. Talking to Film Comment in late 1994, Burton told Gavin Smith that “still there is a sincerity to them [Wood and his entourage] that is very unusual, and I always found that somewhat touching; it gives them a surreal, weirdly heartfelt feeling.”

If you’re looking for the real Wood, or at least as good a portrait as it’s probably possible to get, then Grey’s book should be your first port of call. If you’re looking for a charming, very funny and affectionate look at the struggles of overcoming a lack of time, resources and, yes, let’s be honest, talent, in the murky world of 50s exploitation film-making, then Ed Wood can’t really be bettered. It treats Wood as a proper artist, an outsider one to be sure, but a man whose passion for film and desire just to make them oozes from every frame. In its own strange little way, it’s a rather uplifting tale of over-coming adversity and just being who you want to be. One can’t help but feel that Wood might just have approved.