Wood's most famous films are "Plan 9 from Outer Space" (during which his star, Bela Lugosi, died and was replaced by a double with a cloak pulled over his face), and "Glen or Glenda," in which Wood himself played the transvestite title roles. It was widely known even at the time that Wood himself was an enthusiastic transvestite, and when Tim Burton, director of the "Batman" movies, announced a project named "Ed Wood," I assumed it would be some kind of a camp sendup, maybe a cross between "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Sunset Boulevard." I assumed wrong. What Burton has made is a film which celebrates Wood more than it mocks him, and which celebrates, too, the zany spirit of 1950s exploitation films - in which a great title, a has-been star and a lurid ad campaign were enough to get bookings for some of the oddest films ever made. It was a decade when there were still lots of drive-in movie theaters, cut-price fleapits and small-town bijous that thrived on grade Z double features.

The people who made many of those films may have been hucksters and conmen, but they were not devoid of a sense of humor, and often their movies had more life and energy than their betters. America's theaters hadn't been centralized and computerized, and you couldn't book 2,000 screens with a single keystroke, and Ed Woods could thrive.

Burton's career has always shown a fondness for touching outsiders, like "Beetlejuice" and "Edward Scissorhands", "Batman" and Jack Skellington (the lonely star of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas"). In "Ed Wood," he gives us a hero who is not merely an outsider, but one who attracts even more desperate cases to himself. Played with warmth and enthusiasm by Johnny Depp, Wood is a guy who simply must make movies - and who is so bedazzled by Hollywood legend that he mistakes poor Bela Lugosi, long past his prime and mired in drug addiction, as a star.

There are others who fall into his orbit: Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray), a camp queen who would have stood out like a sore thumb in anyone else's pictures, but fit right into Wood's. And the amazing Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), amazing primarily for being able to find employment for no apparent talent. And Tor Johnson (George "The Animal" Steele), physically inept but gifted in Wood's eyes. And Vampira (Lisa Marie), the midnight movie hostess whose cleavage always looked clammy. And then Lugosi (a brilliant performance by Martin Landau), as a man who was half Wood's headliner, half his patient. When Wood assembled his casts, they looked like a cartoon portrait from Mad magazine.