Glen or Glenda (1953)
Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.
Glen doesn't dare tell his fiancée Barbara that he is a transvestite known as Glenda; in addition, Alan is undergoing medical treatment to become a woman named Anne; both stories are told by a psychiatrist.
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What critics compared Glen or Glenda to
Note an otherwise innocuous scene where Lugosi receives his pay for Glen or Glenda: the sound of money crumpling and exchanging comes from over your right shoulder.
Burton re-creates the shooting of such hilariously inept Wood classics as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space, duplicating the sets and staging with a loving exactitude that makes every tacky prop and zombie performance seem revelatory.
After a chance meeting with Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) gives him a bankable name, he obtains financing to make Glen or Glenda, the story of a transvestite struggling with his identity.
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.
Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and most famously Plan 9 from Outer Space, with their shaky cardboard sets, lead-balloon dialogue, wooden acting, and pie-plate flying saucers, remain the standards by which all grade-Z crapfilms are measured.
Linking it to Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953), with Eraserhead’s Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk) standing in for Bela Lugosi’s puppet master from the Wood film—not to mention Eraserhead‘s overall “retro” look—also makes as much sense to me as anything else.
Split is structured like a retro social-issue-exploitation picture (think Sybil, or Glen or Glenda), complete with an expert who pops in to tell us that all these shocks are psychologically real.
("Plan 9"'s only rival is Phil Tucker's "Robot Monster" and Ed's own "Glen or Glenda".
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Written by the late, not-great Edward D. Wood (director of two of the worst films ever made, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and "Glen or Glenda"), "I Woke Up Early the Day I Died" was one of his long-lost screenplays that was recovered years ago, but his widow, Kathleen Wood, would not agree for anyone to produce it until a director was found that would stay very close to the written page.