Outspoken & Freckled

Edward D. Wood, Jr. was born in 1924 to a blue-collar family in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.  They say his mother, Lillian, dressed him up like a girl throughout his early childhood until people started making comments about it.  Wood grew up during the Golden Age of film.  Talking pictures had just been perfected and his childhood was filled with films that have since come to be recognized as timeless, horror classics – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, etc.  As he grew up, however, his favorite genre was the Western.  He and his friends would recreate scenes in those movies in the dark of night.  His friends grew out of these fantasies but Ed Wood never did.  Some think he never grew up at all.

On his 11^th birthday Ed received his most precious gift, his first movie camera.  His film teachers were the images that played across the…