A Universal executive, upon meeting him, told him, gently, to go back to the Midwest, immediately. Not that he wasn’t warned repeatedly: Gordon once said a friend told him he had no business writing screenplays.
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We only hear Wood’s side of the conversation: “Really? Worst movie you ever saw? Well, my next one will be better!” Gordon, like Wood, made movies because he had to. There’s a scene in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” when the director of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” (played by Johnny Depp) is on the phone with a Hollywood executive. It’s a quality shared by the very finest filmmakers of memorable junk: They were unrelenting and doe-eyed. I don’t note this to be snarky or cruel, but to remind you persistence doesn’t always make room for good sense. He was forever of a generation that still constructed its fantasies by hand, using tangible materials. Though the book was published only 13 years ago, long into our contemporary age of computer-generated special effects, Gordon wrote that if “Beginning of the End” was made these days: “The live grasshoppers would be ‘filmed’ against a blue or green screen backing, and then, in the computer, combined with the actors’ live-action scenes.” In his memoir, Gordon remembers his giant grasshoppers looking pretty scary and convincing as they scaled Chicago. Indeed, though Gordon’s legacy may well be generations of knowingly cheesy flicks like “Sharknado,” the real deal generally comes with sincerity and pride.
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Wells adaptation, doesn’t offer a single outward opinion, just simply describes the plot, pausing only to insert dialogue such as: “When you’re a rat and you suddenly weigh 150 pounds, you have got to learn all over again how to swim!”Īs Ebert wrote of another deliriously memorable B-flick (not made by Gordon): When they no longer make movies like this, a little light will go out of the world. His review of “The Food of the Gods,” Gordon’s loose H.G. Roger Ebert once found a perfect way to write about Gordon. Now and then Gordon would get a review that admired his imagination and spunk, but he rarely received the serious-minded consideration that directors received. By the time I was a kid, he was a UHF channel god and familiar credit on weekend marathons with names like Creature Double Feature. His movies tended to lose money, but for a period in the late ‘50s through the early ‘60s, he was a minor box office draw, synonymous with drive-ins. (Forrest Ackerman, founder of the monthly mag Famous Monsters of Filmland, inspired by Gordon’s initials, gave him a nickname: “Mr. He gave us giant chickens, giant rats, giant spiders, giant wasps, giant cows, giant produce, giant teenagers and a giant named Glenn. They were also constructed of ‘50s atomic nightmares and a fear of science run amok. They were marked by beach parties and enormous barking canine heads and pale desert expanses and scientists brooding. Gordon’s movies were as stone-faced and indelible as a bad dream.
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