Another movie I love, Ed Wood (1994), directed by Tim Burton. That Martin Landau won the Academy Award that year for as best actor, portraying Bela Lugosi.
Bela Lugosi in the mid-1950's Hollywood era portrayed, meets struggling and out of work director Ed Wood (portrayed by Johnny Depp). Bela Lugosi at this point in the 1950's is a has-been out-of work actor at the end of his career. So Lugosi agrees to appear in several of Ed Wood's low-budget films, and they hang out and become friends. Ed Wood first meets Bela Lugosi while walking past a funeral home. An aging Bela Lugosi knows he is dying, and Wood observes him inside irritably laying in coffins and snapping at the funeral home's salesman, as he tries out multiple coffins in the process of selecting one. It's hilarious, the actor famous for playing Dracula, laying in coffins, to select one to buy.
I just love the whole movie, a director who loves storytelling, who is enduringly optimistic despite being down on his luck and struggling to get work. And even questionably talented at all in his chosen profession. But still in love with storytelling, and savoring every moment and scripted line of his work, often standing backstage, lip-synching the words of his scripts as his actors say them onstage.
I love the atmosphere created throughout, the visuals and eerie music, such as during the opening credits, the camera panning in across a mist filled cemetary, with the names of the film's actors introduced on gravestones, then zooming in to enter a mansion, where Jeffrey Jones rises out of his coffin, to ominously warn viewers of the horrific story to follow, about the life of Edward D. Wood Jr.
It's again a case where I'm at a loss to understand why this movie was produced on an $18 million budget, and bombed in theatres, earning only $13.8 million. I thought for sure after Martin Landau won an Academy Award for his performance (and the film also won a second Academy Award for best make-up) , that people would seek it out at that point and it would become a box office success. But no, it remained a box office flop, despite how good it is.
Director Ed Wood's best-known movie Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957) is in my opening post. As stated before, the copyright has lapsed, and is now in public domain, for your viewing pleasure.
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