A Marine pinned down in the Pacific was terrified not of enemy fire but of a medic cutting away his uniform and exposing the pink women's undergarments beneath. This episode looks past the worst director of all time label at Edward Davis Wood Jr., born in Poughkeepsie in 1924, dressed as a girl by a mother who wanted a daughter, salvaging discarded lobby cards behind the local theater, and filming the Hindenburg with his first camera hours before it burned.

We separate his mythologized combat stories from the clerical and body-recovery duties and filariasis of his real service, then follow his 1947 arrival in Hollywood, his friendship with a declining Bela Lugosi, the bait-and-switch that turned exploitation money into the personal film Glen or Glenda, the chiropractor stand-in hiding behind a cape in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Night of the G ...