Here is a fun fact about the worst movie ever made: it was declared the worst movie ever made by people who hadn’t seen it. In 1980, the Medved brothers published The Golden Turkey Awards, a book crowning Plan 9 from Outer Space as cinema’s all-time nadir — a designation selected, in part, by a 16-year-old. The book was a hit. The label stuck. And for decades, that’s how Ed Wood got remembered: not as someone who made movies, but as a cautionary tale about making them badly.The thing is, when you actually sit down and watch Plan 9 — with its styrofoam UFOs, its shower-curtain cockpit, its graveyard that looks like a particularly ambitious mini golf course, and its dialogue (“Well he’s been murdered, and somebody’s responsible”) — something unexpected happens. You have a great time. You laugh. You get chills. You start asking questions. Which is, arguably, more than most movies manage.Mandy watched Plan 9 from Outer Space for the first time, then immediately watched Tim Burton’s 1994 love letter Ed Wood back to back, and showed up to this conversation practically sparking. Her guides are Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas of the Movie Friends podcast, and together they trace the whole improbable arc: from Ed Wood’s shoestring productions (shot in single takes, cast with whoever was around, funded by a landlord who did not make his money back) to the Medved book, to Tim Burton using his post-Batman cultural cachet to make one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films of the nineties.Michelle derails the episode in the best possible way with a one-minute TED talk on Vampira — real name Maila Nurmi, Emmy nominee, friend of James Dean, and practitioner of a papaya-based waist-shrinking technique that Mandy immediately wants to try. Seth, who has been an Ed Wood evangelist since his teenage years working in a magic store, makes the argument that Ed Wood’s films aren’t bad so much as alive — confounding, curious, and genuinely impossible to ignore. Seventy-five years later, he’s right.Guest SpotlightMichelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas are the hosts of Movie Friends, a podcast built on the idea that film discussion doesn’t have to be gatekeepy or exhausting — it can just be two people who genuinely love movies talking about them like friends. Together they’ve developed a three-tier rating system — schmoovie, movie, or film — that tells you everything you need to know about their sensibility. Find them anywhere you get your podcasts.Links & Notes

Referenced in This Episode

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957, dir. Ed Wood)
Ed Wood (1994, dir. Tim Burton)
Glen or Glenda (1953, dir. Ed Wood)
The Golden Turkey Awards by the Medved brothers (1980)
Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992, Ed Wood biography)
Vampira / Maila Nurmi
Criswell
Bela Lugosi
Martin Landau (Best Supporting Actor, Ed Wood)
The Bride! with Mandy Kaplan (Mandy’s guest episode on Movie Friends)
Spaceballs (1987, dir. Mel Brooks)
The Godfather
Yuri on Ice with Zehra Fazal (Make Me A Nerd)
You Must Remember This (podcast)
Christine Jorgensen

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