I met Harry Medved at a thing I can’t tell you about. Wish I could. Suffice it to say that we were both there to speak expertly about Edward D. Wood Jr., who directed Plan 9 from Outer Space, which Harry and his brother, Michael, had declared the worst movie of all time. I had written a monograph on the film, but Harry had much greater fame: in the 1980s, he and Michael wrote a series of books about terrible movies, which became bibles for fans of low-quality cinema.
Like recognizes like, and Harry and I ended up whispering to each other for almost an hour while another interview went on in the foreground. After I explained my upcoming book project—Junk Film, a collection of critical essays about bad movies such as Plan 9 from Outer Space—he offered to blurb it for me. I said thanks, but it was possibly too late, as I’d already gathered three blurbs and was set to start using them for promotion the following week. “Who’d you get?” he asked.
