by David Lynch
One afternoon I found a used Bolex with a beautiful leather case for four hundred fifty dollars that I wanted to buy at Photorama, but they said, “David, we can’t put a hold on this camera. If someone comes in and wants it, we have to sell it. If you’re here tomorrow morning with the money and it’s still here, you can have it.” I panicked because I didn’t want anybody else to get this thing. I couldn’t wake up in the morning in those days, so Jack and his girlfriend, Wendy, and I took amphetamines and stayed up all night, and I was at the store when they opened. I got the camera.
I did some great drawings on amphetamines. In those days girls were going to doctors and getting diet pills, and it’s like they were giving out scoopfuls of these pills. They’d come home from the doctor with big bags of pills! I wasn’t anti-drug. Drugs just weren’t important to me. One time Jack and I were going to go up to Timothy Leary’s farm at Millbrook and drop acid and stay up there, but that turned out to be a pipe dream that lasted just a couple of days. We didn’t go to the concert at Woodstock, but we did go to Woodstock. It was in the winter and we went up there because we’d heard about this hermit who lived there, and I wanted to see this hermit. Nobody could ever see him. He built this kind of mound place out of earth and rocks and twigs with little streamers on them, and when we went there it was covered with snow. He lived in there, and I think he had places he could peek out to see if someone was coming near him, but you couldn’t see him. We didn’t see him, but we felt him being there.
I don’t know where the idea for The Grandmother came from. There’s a scene where Virginia Maitland and Bob Chadwick come up out of holes in the ground, and I can’t explain why I wanted them to come up out of the earth—it just had to be that way. It wasn’t supposed to look real but it had to be a certain way, and I dug these holes and they got in them. When the scene opens you just see leaves and bushes, then all of a sudden out come these people. Bob and Ginger did great. They weren’t really buried in there, and mostly they had to struggle out of leaves. Then Richard White comes out of his own hole and the two of them bark at him, and there are distorted close-ups of barking. I was doing some sort of stop motion, but I couldn’t tell you how I did it. It was poor man’s stuff but it worked for me. I always say that filmmaking is just common sense. Once you figure out how you want it to look, you kind of know how to do it. Peggy said things went my way when I was making those films, and that’s sort of true. I could just find stuff. I’d just get it.
When it came time to do the sound for The Grandmother, I went and knocked on the sound department door at Calvin de Frenes and Bob opens the door and he says, “David, we have so much work that I had to hire an assistant, and you’ll be working with my assistant, Alan Splet.” My heart kind of dropped and I look over and see this guy—pale, skinny as a rail, old shiny black suit—and Al comes up wearing Coke-bottle glasses and smiles and shakes my hand, and I feel the bones in his arm rattle. That’s Al. I tell him I need a bunch of sounds, so he played me some sound-effects records and said, “Something like this?” I said no. He plays another track and he says, “Maybe this?” I said no. This goes on for a while, then he said, “David, I think we’re going to have to make these sounds for you,” and we spent sixty-three days, nine hours a day, making sounds. Like, the grandmother whistles, right? They hardly had any equipment at Calvin de Frenes and they didn’t have a reverb unit. So Al got an air-conditioning duct that was thirty or forty feet long. We went to a place where I whistled into this duct and Al put a recorder at the other end. Because of the hollowness of the duct, that whistle was a little bit longer by the time it reached the other end. Then he’d play the recording through a speaker into the duct and record it again, and now the reverb is twice as long. We did that over and over until the reverb sounded right. We made every single sound and it was so much fun I cannot tell you. Then I mixed the thing at Calvin de Frenes, and Bob Column very seriously said, “David, number one, you can’t take the film out of here until you pay your bill. Number two, if they charge an hourly rate your bill is going to be staggering. If they charge a ten-minute reel rate, it’s going to be an incredibly good deal for you.” He talked to the people he worked for and I got the ten-minute reel rate.
You had to submit a budget to the AFI to get a grant, and I wrote that my film would cost $7,119, and it ended up costing $7,200. I don’t know how I did that, but I did. The original grant was for $5,000 but I needed $2,200 more to get the film out of Calvin, so Toni Vellani took the train from Washington, D.C. I picked him up at the train station and showed him the film and he said, “You got your money.” While I was driving him back to the train station he said, “David, I think you should come to the Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, California.” That’s like telling somebody, You have just won five hundred trillion dollars! Or even greater than that! It’s like telling somebody, You’re going to live forever!
When Lynch left Philadelphia to attend the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1970, it was like stepping out of a dark closet into shimmering sunshine. At the time the AFI was housed in Greystone Mansion, a lavish fifty-five-room Tudor Revival–style residence situated on eighteen acres of land, which was built in 1928 by oil baron Edward Doheny. Acquired by the city of Beverly Hills in 1965 to prevent it from being demolished, Greystone Mansion was leased to the AFI from 1969 through 1981 for one dollar a year in the hopes that the school would restore and maintain the property. Founded by George Stevens, Jr., the American Film Institute was directed by Toni Vellani from 1968 through 1977; it was these two who recognized Lynch’s talent and brought him to the school.
John Lynch graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, shortly before his brother moved west, so he drove to Philadelphia, helped him pack his belongings into a yellow Hertz truck, and left his car in the backyard of a friend of David’s so he could accompany him on the drive to Los Angeles. “At the last minute Jack Fisk decided to come along with his dog, so it was three guys and a dog, and we had a good time,” recalled John Lynch.
Vellani and Stevens had been so impressed by Alan Splet’s work on The Grandmother that they’d made him head of the AFI’s sound department. Splet moved to L.A. in July and was already settled in when Lynch arrived in late August to stay with him. After spending two weeks sorting out living arrangements, Lynch and his brother headed to Berkeley to visit their parents—who lived there for a brief period—and collect Peggy and Jennifer.
“David’s father gave us two hundred fifty dollars a month for two years, which was how long it was supposed to take to graduate from the AFI, and the rent on our house was two twenty a month,” Reavey recalls. “Our place wasn’t big but it had lots of little rooms, and our part of the rent was eighty dollars because we had all these people living with us.” The Lynch house was flanked by three-story apartment buildings—“one of them blasted the Jackson 5’s ‘I’ll Be There’ for hours at a time,” said Reavey—“and we found an old washing machine that we installed on the back porch. We didn’t have a dryer, so there was usually wash hanging out back.”
Fisk’s sister Mary was in and out of the picture in L.A. during the early 1970s, too. She wanted to live near her brother, who’d relocated to L.A. shortly after Lynch settled there, so after training to be an airline stewardess for Pan American Airways, she moved to L.A. and rented the place next door to the Lynches.
Lynch began classes on September 25th, joining the members of the AFI’s first graduating class, which included filmmakers Terrence Malick, Caleb Deschanel, Tim Hunter, and Paul Schrader. At that point the school curriculum largely revolved around watching films and discussing them, and of particular importance to the thirty students in Lynch’s class were studies in film analysis taught by Czechoslovakian filmmaker Frank Daniel. Daniel came to the United States in 1968 under the agency of George Stevens, Jr., who sent plane tickets to him and his family when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and he’s cited by many AFI alumni as an inspiri
ng presence. It was Daniel who devised what’s known as the sequencing paradigm for screenwriting, which advocates devising seventy elements relating to specific scenes, writing each of them on a note card, then organizing the note cards in a coherent sequence. Do this and you’ll have a screenplay. It’s a simple idea that proved useful to Lynch.
The AFI was a loose, freewheeling place, but being a fellow was not without pressure; students were expected to find their own way, and Lynch spent much of his first year struggling to find a direction. “He’d been working on the script for Gardenback, which was a film about infidelity inspired by a painting he made in Philadelphia, but that wasn’t what he was feeling in his heart,” said Reavey, “so he couldn’t get anywhere with it.”
Frank Daniel and Caleb Deschanel were fans of Gardenback, and Deschanel took the script to a producer friend at Twentieth Century Fox who offered Lynch fifty thousand dollars to expand the forty-page treatment into a full-length feature. Lynch participated in a series of writing sessions with Daniel, Vellani, and writer Gill Dennis, but by the time he’d arrived at a feature-length script he’d lost interest in the project, and he abandoned it in late spring of 1971.
Then, over the summer months, Eraserhead began to crystallize in his mind. Lynch has commented that “I felt Eraserhead, I didn’t think it,” and anyone who fully surrenders to the film understands what he means. Much has been made of the queasy humor of Eraserhead, but to focus on its comical aspects is to give a superficial reading of a multi-layered work. A magisterial film that operates without filters of any sort, Eraserhead is pure id. The narrative of the movie is simple. Living in a dismal, post-industrial dystopia, a young man named Henry Spencer meets a girl named Mary, who becomes pregnant. Henry is gripped with anxiety at the arrival of their deformed infant and longs for release from the horror he feels. He experiences the mystery of the erotic, then the death of the child, and, finally, the divine intercedes and his torment ends. In a sense, it’s a story about grace.
Lynch’s screenwriting style is direct and clear, and the Eraserhead script has the rigor and exactitude of a Beckett play. Just twenty-one pages long, it has a minimum of stage direction and mostly focuses on evocative description; it’s apparent that the film’s mood—palpable and slightly sinister—was of primary importance to Lynch. The first half of the movie we’ve come to know matches the script pretty much word for word; however, the narrative in the second half of the film differs significantly from the script. In Lynch’s original vision, the film concluded with Henry being devoured by the demonic baby. This doesn’t occur in the film; rather, a new character is introduced in the third act and she transforms the conclusion of the story. Lynch experienced a spiritual awakening over the five years Eraserhead was in production, and it makes sense that the film changed along the way.
“Eraserhead is about karma,” said Jack Fisk, who plays a character called the Man in the Planet. “I didn’t realize it when we were working on it, but the Man in the Planet is pulling levers that symbolize karma. There are so many spiritual things in Eraserhead, and David made it before he started meditating. David’s always been that way, and he’s gotten more spiritual over time.”
Lynch himself has said that “Eraserhead is my most spiritual film, but no one has ever gotten that from it. The way it happened was I had these feelings, but I didn’t know what it really was about for me. So I get out the Bible and start reading, and I’m reading along, reading along, and I come to this sentence and I say, ‘That’s exactly it.’ I can’t say which sentence it is, though.”
When Lynch returned to the AFI in September of 1971, he found that he’d been assigned to classes with first-year students and was furious at the school. He was preparing to quit altogether when he received an enthusiastic go-ahead to make Eraserhead, so he decided to stick around. His film needed funding, but the financial politics at the AFI were at a weird juncture at that point. The previous year the school had given a substantial sum to student Stanton Kaye to complete In Pursuit of Treasure, which was to be the first feature produced by the AFI. A lot of money was spent on Kaye’s film, which was never finished and was deemed a complete failure, and the prospect of financing another student feature was anathema to the AFI for quite a while afterward. This wasn’t a problem for Lynch, whose minimal script for Eraserhead appeared to be for a short, so the school committed ten thousand dollars to the film, which went into pre-production as 1971 wound to a close.
Nestled below the main mansion at the AFI was a complex of abandoned servants’ quarters, garages, a greenhouse, stables, and a hayloft; Lynch planted his flag among these crumbling brick buildings and created a modest studio he was to occupy for the next four years. There was a camera room, a bathroom, a food room, an editing area, a green room, and a vast loft where the sets were housed. There was privacy, too; the school gave Lynch access to its equipment and left him in peace to make his movie.
In assembling his cast and crew, Lynch looked first to trusted friends and asked Splet, Fisk, and Herb Cardwell, a director of photography who’d worked at Calvin de Frenes, to participate. A significant member of the crew fell into place when Doreen Small took the job of production manager. Born and raised in New York, Small visited friends in Topanga Canyon in 1971, then rented a place in Laurel Canyon. Shortly after she’d moved in, her landlord, James Newport, mentioned that he was assisting Jack Fisk on the blaxploitation film Cool Breeze and they needed assistants. “I ran around getting props and costumes,” Small recalled, “then Jack said, ‘I have a friend at the AFI who needs help. Would you go and meet David?’
“So I went to the stables and met David,” she continued. “He was wearing three neckties, a panama hat, a blue oxford shirt with no elbows, baggy khaki pants, and work boots. He was very pretty and it was immediately clear he was a unique individual—everybody who met David saw that spark. He told me that what he really needed was a production manager, and asked, ‘Can you do that?’ and I said ‘Sure.’ Then he said, ‘I need a script supervisor, too; can you do that?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and he bought me a stopwatch so I could do continuity.”1
Shortly after meeting Lynch, Small was at a party in Topanga and was introduced to Charlotte Stewart, who was a prominent young television actress at the time. The two decided to rent a place together and were roommates for the next two years. “Doreen knew David needed an actress for his film, so she invited him to dinner in Topanga, which was a pretty rural area back then,” Stewart recalled. “I open the door and here stands this guy and Peggy, and he’s this eager young man. He had a sack of wheat seeds in his hand, which he handed to me, and I thanked him, but I’m thinking, What the hell? I guess he figured, Hey, they live in the country—maybe they’d like to plant some wheat.
“At dinner he seemed like a nice person, and he seemed very young,” she continued. “He brought the script for Eraserhead, and I thumbed through it and didn’t understand a word of it—as far as I could tell it was something about a young couple and a baby who wasn’t really a baby. There wasn’t much dialogue, and I thought, Fine, I can do this in a few weeks.”2
Lynch was looking for his leading man when he met Catherine Coulson and Jack Nance. Coulson and her family moved to California from Illinois when her father was hired to run a radio station in Riverside, and she made her radio debut there at the age of four on a local broadcast called Breakfast with the Coulsons. She was an art history major at Scripps College in Claremont, and by the time Coulson enrolled in graduate school at San Francisco State, the focus of her life had shifted to theater. In 1967, members of the Dallas Theater Center were artists in residence at San Francisco State, and among the company was actor Jack Nance. Coulson and Nance became a couple, and after marrying in La Jolla, California, in 1968, they became members of David Lindeman’s Interplayers Circus, a theater company founded by Lindeman, who briefly attended the AFI in 1971. Lindeman mentioned to Lynch that Nance might be good for the part of Henr
y Spencer, and Lynch agreed Nance was perfect.
A few actors with small parts in Eraserhead came through Coulson, and several other cast members—including Judith Roberts (Beautiful Girl Across the Hall), Allen Joseph (Mr. X), and Jeanne Bates (Mrs. X)—were members of the repertory company Theater West. Bates was a seasoned veteran of movies and television and was well into her fifties when she was cast in Eraserhead. Lynch was nonetheless worried that she was too pretty for the role, so he fashioned a mole sprouting a single hair for her face. Like most people who met Lynch, Bates was enchanted by him. “I remember Jeanne sitting there patiently while he applied this ugly mole to her face,” Small said. “David was working with very experienced actors, and from the start they thought he was a genius and trusted him.”
The cast for the film fell into place fairly quickly; creating the realm where Eraserhead takes place demanded a good deal more, and this is where Lynch’s genius really became evident. Largely built out of scavenged materials, Henry’s world is some kind of miracle in that Lynch did so much with so little. Everything was repurposed and repeatedly reused to create meticulously built sets that included an apartment, a lobby, a theater stage, a pencil factory, a suburban home, an office, and a front porch. Lynch and Splet soundproofed the sets with blankets and fiberglass insulation in burlap bags, and Lynch rented the equipment he needed for special sequences. Eraserhead includes several complex effects shots, and answers to technical questions often involved cold calls to effects people at local studios. Lynch is a practical person who enjoys problem-solving, and he learned through trial and error.