Orson Welles once said, "It's only the bad things that [audiences] are aware of, isn't it? Whatever they're aware of is your failure as a director."

The Medved brothers call Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space "the worst movie ever made," in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, and the BBC's website on the film calls it a "'What Not To Do' film-making handbook."

It's just too easy to poke fun at Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space, to take potshots at the cheesy effects, the corny dialog, the outlandish plot. And people do, unfairly, I think, because they're looking only at the end product and not the ingenious process by which Ed Wood made the film.

Yes, I call it a film. I give it the dignity a finished piece of work deserves.

Ed Wood's whole adult life was centered on being a filmmaker. Actor John Crawford Thomas said of him, "Ed didn't have any footing in Hollywood. . . . He was just a down-to-earth individual with hopes and dreams like so many others." Filmmaking was his passion, but the Hollywood insiders, the studio executives kept him at arm's length from the means to deliver a state of the art movie. In fact, Producer George Weiss said of them, "they stole all Ed's brain and froze him out."

One factor against Ed Wood was budget. Cecil B. DeMille filmed The Ten Commandments on a $13 million tab. Ben-Hur cost over $15 million. Adjusted for inflation to today's dollars, we're talking $151 million. The Day the Earth Stood Still cost a paltry $995,000.

Plan 9 was finished for $60,000. Imagine Robert Wise filming The Day the Earth Stood Still on that budget. Gort would have had stovepipes for legs and a welding mask for his face.

Forbidden Planet cost just under $2 million, $125,000 of it spent to build Robby the Robot. With that kind of budget, Ed Wood might have enlisted the likes of Ray Harryhausen to animate his flying saucers instead of using Cadillac hubcaps dangling from fishing line.

Another factor was casting. Unlike the big studios, Wood didn't have a stable of contract players available, so he used his friends, his chiropractor, and anyone else he could find. Bela Lugosi, Plan 9's star died in the middle of production. Wood needed Lugosi's name on the marquee to sell the picture, so he filmed around the situation, replacing Lugosi with a questionable lookalike who ran around the set with his cape over his face.

But what would Robert Wise have done if Michael Rennie had died halfway through filming The Day the Earth Stood Still? Have Rennie's replacement wear Klaatu's space suit and helmet for the rest of the film? That would have likely caused the studio to use as much of Rennie's footage as possible, as Ed Wood did with Lugosi, and use a double.

Malia Nurmi aka Vampira was a recognizable character, as was Tor Johnson; they essentially played themselves in Plan 9. Established character actor Lyle Talbot (watch for him in about every third episode of tv's The Lone Ranger) was having a bad patch and was glad to work in the role of the General.

To those who criticize these folks for participating in Plan 9, I offer the comment of my friend, author, film aficianado, and amateur filmmaker David C. Smith (producer of The Whisperer in Darkness): "Hey, they were working."

The use of stock footage is another complaint, but if you watch closely, you'll see the studios sneak in footage from earlier films to shave costs in their low-budget movies. Recalling that the Army refused to participate in the filming of The Day the Earth Stood Still, we can understand why Wood lifted scenes of military mobilization from stock footage rather than spend time and money on new film.

Sets? Without a Ben-Hur budget Ed Wood substituted ingenuity for money. Bend a piece of Masonite into an arch, hang a shower curtain behind it, put a pair of lawn chairs in in the shot, and voila, an airplane cockpit.

Library music, much of it public domain, was another money-saving tactic (as in 1942's The Corpse Vanishes, using parts of Swan Lake in the soundtrack). With a Ben-Hur sized budget, Wood could have hired Elmer Bernstein to score his opus, but on a shoestring, he had to rely on royalty-free music.

Johnny Depp, playing Ed Wood in the eponymous biopic crying out, "It's beautiful! Perfect! Next scene!" after one take may be a bit of an exaggeration, but Wood was shooting on the unexposed tag ends of film cans he picked up cheap and had to conserve as much as possible.

Orson Welles is also famous for saying, " A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had." Ed Wood would agree, but the big boys never him let play with it. Like a poor kid who uses a stick instead of a cap gun to play cowboys and Indians or a garbage can lid and a paint paddle to play gladiator, Ed Wood refused to quit. He made his vision come alive with the resources at hand, and he finished what he began, creating a unique product of human ingenuity, what film critic Nicholas Barber describes as, "not some cynical hackjob, but a truly eccentric labour of love."

Critic Rob Craig writes, "That Wood made [Plan 9] with minimal financial resources underscores one of the qualities of his work: his ideas tended to be too expensive to film, yet he tried to film them anyway,"

Makeup artist Harry Thomas said of him, "Had he had the money or the time, today Ed Wood would have been amongst the famous."

Maybe he was just born too soon.

Given the current state of technology, computers, digital video cameras, and editing software, if Ed Wood were alive today, there is no reason he couldn't make a Blair Witch Project, or an Evil Dead, and succeed as many contemporary independent filmmakers have. But despite all travails and limitations, Ed Wood soldiered on, and finished what has become one of the most watched cult films of all time. It has become such a staple of modern culture that not one but two Seinfeld episodes, "The Chinese Restaurant" and "The Postponement" revolve around Jerry's plan to spend an evening watching Plan 9.

The Ten Commandments runs once a year on tv at Easter. Any given weekend, Plan 9 from Outer Space is playing somewhere. And I never heard Seinfeld say he wants to go to the movies to see Ben-Hur.

You tell me who the real filmmaker was.