Ed Wood
Movies don’t save lives, but they do relitigate memory and imagination. The beloved suddenly reappears in frame, reanimated through some alchemical bargain of light and motion. Isn’t he dead? Yes, in 1978, at the age of 54, Edward D. Wood Jr. died—where else?—in Hollywood. But then, there he is, up on the screen in Ed Wood (1994).
Beetlejuice
Even after the financial success of Tim Burton’s 1985 feature debut, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Warner Bros. rejected his vision for Batman and he was left in search of a follow-up. With a background in animation and an affinity for gothic horror, Burton was perhaps the only director who could know what to do with a strange entity like Beetlejuice.