I Woke Up Early the Day I Died Review
by Shane Burridge (sburridge AT hotmail DOT com)December 15th, 2007
I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998) 90m
What would legendary 1950s Z-grade film-maker Edward Wood Jr
have made of a postmodern world in which his films were lauded by
fans and unfinished projects were restored and reworked decades
after his death? Becoming a cause celebre after the 1970s "rediscovery"
of his impoverished, inept PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, Wood garnered recognition from a new type of film audience: aficionados of schlock
cinema. During the next twenty years the Wood well was drawn dry,
with every scrap of celluloid and writing brought to the screen with more élan than even Orson Welles archivists could muster. It's fun to imagine Wood being resurrected, as were so many of his screen characters, and brought into a cinema in 1998 to witness this film of his last unproduced script. It wouldn't have escaped his attention that the budgets of his own efforts would have been splurged within the first minute of DIED's title credits.
It's gimmicky enough to give an unpublished Wood screenplay comparatively slick production values 40 years after the fact (although the film itself appears to be set in the 50s) without also having to turn it into a silent movie, albeit one with music, sound effects, a faux-roadshow medical voice-over, and a few unintelligible exclamations from the cast. With the loss of not only the terrible dialogue but also the desperate production values that made Wood's films enjoyable, DIED seems to miss the point before it even begins. It works somewhat as a swan song to the man with such trademarks as cemeteries, transvestism, tabloid newspaper headlines and montages of stock footage,
all treated as in-jokes. Two of the slyest occur when a car crash is shown offscreen even though it's clear the budget would have allowed for it to be shown (cf PLAN 9), and when a stripper performs for an obviously empty
room with stock footage of an audience spliced in (cf JAIL BAIT: even more amusingly, the audience appears to be made up of teenagers watching something like a basketball game). It's also funny when the film shows black-and-white flashbacks presented in the type of cheap sets that Wood himself would have had to improvise back in his film-making days.
The plot, for what it is, follows a cheap crook played by Billy Zane as he takes it on the lam, steals some money, loses it, and then tries to track it down. Zane is vulnerable to loud noises (although it doesn't stop him firing a gun a few times), a condition that conveniently provides an excuse for
him not to speak aloud without tipping off that Wood may have intended
his script for a silent film because it would have been cheaper that way. At a running time longer than Wood's own efforts (PLAN 9 peaked at 79 minutes), it's unlikely that the screenplay was originally intended to run over the 70 minute mark, and any novelty value DIED might have had is well worn through before long. Playing spot-the-cameo may help keep your interest, and DIED has a collection of cult performers that would make John Waters envious - at the tip of the iceberg you'll find Eartha Kitt, Ron Perlman, Tippi Hendren, Christina Ricci, Sandra Bernhard, Bud Cort, Karen Black and Wood regular Vampira. The producers realized that a modern-day silent film would play better as a comedy than a drama, but DIED is well short of screen comics - in fact most of the cast are serious actors, which works better anyway, as seeing straight players showing up on set for a day's work reminds us that the whole thing is meant to be taken as a bit of a lark. I WOKE UP EARLY THE DAY I DIED is watchable once; its soundtrack of diverse tunes isl listenable twice. You can't escape the irony that if Wood had been alive in 1998 this script would have never gotten on to a producer's desk.
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