Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Maybe a week later I found out no one was in the screening room and he was screening to an empty house. I felt pretty bad about that. Then I submitted it to the New York Film Festival and it got rejected there, too. I wasn’t even going to submit it to Filmex, but Mary Fisk said, “I’m driving you down there and you’re going to submit it,” so I loaded up the film and drove over there with a big chip on my shoulder. I set the thing down and said, “Rejected from Cannes, rejected from the New York Film Festival—you’ll probably reject it, too, but here it is.” The guy said, “Hold on there, buddy. We’re our own people. We don’t care where it’s been rejected,” and it played at midnight at Filmex.

  I thought the film was done when it got into Filmex, but it needed to be cut, and it was the Filmex screening that made me do it. The film screened in this giant room and they said, “David, sit here in this back seat. Feel this little button underneath the seat? Every time you push the button it raises the sound one dB.” So I’m sitting there and the film starts and it’s real low, so I hit the button like three times. It’s still too low so I hit it again, and it’s still too low. I might’ve hit it a couple more times. I had it up so loud that when Henry sets his knife down on his plate at Mary’s house, the sound just about severed the heads of the people in the front row. I left the theater and was outside pacing in the lobby for the rest of the film. Fred drove me that night, and on the way home I said, “Fred, I’m fuckin’ cutting the film,” and he said, “David, don’t.” I said, “I know exactly what to cut and I’m gonna cut it,” and I stayed up all night working on it. I didn’t cut the film willy-nilly—I thought about it—but I made the mistake of cutting a composite print. It wasn’t exactly a mistake—I knew I was cutting a composite print—and it was stupid that I did, but that’s the way I did it. So it was twenty minutes longer at Filmex—it was one hour and fifty minutes. Now it’s one hour and thirty minutes.

  This young guy who was into distributing films saw Eraserhead and thankfully realized Ben Barenholtz was the right guy for it, and he contacted Ben and Ben asked to see it. Ben is a real character. He’s kind of serious and he’s a business guy, but he’s really an artist business guy, and he’s the grandfather of the midnight movie screenings. He said to me, “I’m not going to advertise much, but I guarantee you within two months there will be lines around the block.” And it came true.

  * * *

  —

  After Peggy and I got divorced, Mary came out and stayed with Jack and Sissy, when they lived in Topanga. Apparently they weren’t paying much attention to Mary and she wasn’t happy, and we started up a thing and one thing led to another. I got married again because I loved Mary.

  Right after we got married, Mary and I went to New York to finish the film. Mary was there for a week—she got tired of it fast—but I spent the summer living in Ben’s apartment, working with this place called Precision Lab. Maybe there are labs around that are kind of like artistes? These guys were more like truck drivers. It was a blue-collar lab, and they couldn’t believe I wanted the film as dark as I wanted it and they wouldn’t print it that dark. They said, “No, you can’t print it that dark.” I’d say darker, and they’d make it a tiny bit darker, and I’d say, no, darker. They ran the negative through every time they made a print and it took two months to get the print as dark as I wanted it. Many fuckin’ prints were made and it was horrible. I finally got a print I loved and the film opened at Cinema Village. I didn’t go to the premiere, but they had launch-party screenings on Thursday and Friday with mostly legal people and friends of theirs, then it opened on Saturday. I heard there were twenty-six people there on opening night and twenty-four people the next night.

  I still didn’t have any money after the film opened, so when I got back to L.A. I went to Riverside and worked with my father on a house. I didn’t feel demoralized, though. No way! I was so thankful because the film was finished and it was being distributed. I wouldn’t exactly call it a success, but everything’s relative. If you’re talking about money, Jaws is a success. If you’re talking about feeling good about getting the job done and having a place for people to see it—that was a success to me. So I worked with my dad every day and we’d come home at night and my mom would have dinner ready for us. We’d eat dinner together, then I’d excuse myself and go to my room, and I’d get in bed and write ten pages of Ronnie Rocket, or the Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence. I couldn’t go to sleep until I wrote ten pages, because I had it all in my head. In those days if you took the train from D.C. to New York you’d pass through Ronnie Rocket territory. It was before graffiti and there were old factories that weren’t completely run-down yet, and factory neighborhoods, and it was so beautiful. And then it just went. The world I saw from the train disappeared. I didn’t make any money on Eraserhead, but I loved that world I’d seen, and I was thinking about making Ronnie Rocket.

  Lynch was indeed finding an audience for his work, but his next screenplay, Ronnie Rocket, proved to be a tough sell. The opening image—a raging wall of fire shooting two hundred feet high on a theater stage—set the tone for all that follows. There are so many surreal elements in the story that it would’ve been all but impossible to film in the late 1970s, when computer-generated imagery was still in its infancy: A bird with a broken neck does backward somersaults; electrical wires move like hissing snakes; romantic love triggers explosions in the sky and streamers raining down; a talking pig walks on his hind legs.

  Ronnie Rocket is set in a land where “black clouds race over a dark, soot-covered city,” and we’re reminded of Philadelphia as well as Eraserhead. The approach to storytelling in Ronnie Rocket differs significantly from the narrative minimalism of Eraserhead, however, in that it interweaves two complex story lines. One of them follows a detective who travels into a forbidden zone known as the inner city in pursuit of a villain who’s hijacked all the electricity and reversed it so that it produces darkness rather than light. The second story line tracks the sorry adventures of a sixteen-year-old boy who’s a kind of Frankenstein monster, subject to fits generated by electricity. Lynch has described the film as having a lot to do with the birth of rock ’n’ roll, and Ronnie Rocket becomes a rock star who is exploited for financial gain but remains uncorrupted. The central metaphor in the screenplay is electricity, and it erupts everywhere—it snaps and pops from electrical wiring, shoots from fingertips, arcs and dances on train cables that stretch above the town. Woven throughout the script are elements that recur in Lynch’s work, including peculiar sexual encounters, a dysfunctional family, and extravagant flourishes of violence.

  These disparate elements come together to create a parable for the spiritual beliefs that had become central to Lynch’s life. The detective in the story is counseled by a wise man on the importance of maintaining consciousness; in this story, to lose this is to die, and love and pain are the energies that allow people to remain conscious. The recurring motif of the circle—the detective visits a nightspot called the Circle Club and is told that “things keep going round and round” and “life is a donut”—alludes to the wheel of karma and rebirth. The film closes on an image of a figure with four arms dancing on a lily pad, reaching for a golden egg. The sacred Hindu texts, the Vedas, tell us that the material universe, which emerged from the mind of Brahma, is a golden egg that floats like a dream in the waters of divine consciousness.

  Lynch has described Ronnie Rocket as being about coal, oil, and electricity, but it’s also a strange tale of enlightenment cloaked in dark humor, and it’s surprising that it did generate a bit of interest. In the months following Eraserhead’s release, Lynch got a call from Marty Michelson, an agent with the William Morris Agency, who was interested in representing Lynch, and he tried to secure financing for Ronnie Rocket but was unable to get anything going.

  At that point Stuart Cornfeld, who helped lead Lynch to his next film, The Elephant Man, stepped in. Born in Los Angeles, Cornfeld wa
s a student in the AFI’s producer’s program, where he focused his energies on its directing workshop for women. Actress Anne Bancroft was a student there at the time, and Cornfeld produced a half-hour short for her. After working with Cornfeld on a second short, Fatso, Bancroft made him the producer when she expanded it into her feature directorial debut.

  Cornfeld’s graduating class of 1976 included director Martin Brest, who encouraged Cornfeld to see Eraserhead at the Nuart. “I absolutely loved it,” Cornfeld recalled. “David kind of broke the code on how to do a dark movie, because he’s able to go really dark but still hit a transcendent beat at the end. He creates a frightening hole you fall through, and under normal circumstances you’d be freaked out by the fall, but there’s a certain peace underlying his work. I was totally blown away by Eraserhead.”

  Cornfeld continued, “I knew David had gone to the AFI, so I got his number from the school and called him and said, ‘Your movie is amazing; what are you doing now?’ So we met at a coffee shop called Nibblers and started hanging out. He was poor at the time and was living on Rosewood, and I remember going to his place shortly after we met. He had one Voice of the Theatre speaker, and he played ‘96 Tears’ on his record player for me. We started having lunch once a week, and he was always fun and had the right kind of sense of humor. I like dark humanists.

  “He gave me the script for Ronnie Rocket, which I thought was incredible, and I took it around but couldn’t get anywhere with it. David had already experienced a negative reaction to Eraserhead from mainstream Hollywood, and I told him, ‘The main thing is you’ve just gotta get another movie going.’ ”1 It was then that Lynch began considering directing something written by another screenwriter.

  Anne Bancroft introduced Cornfeld to her husband, Mel Brooks, who hired Cornfeld to be his assistant during the making of his hit film of 1977, High Anxiety; the first AD on the film was a young novice named Jonathan Sanger. Born in New York, Sanger moved to Los Angeles in 1976 and his friend, filmmaker Barry Levinson, introduced him to Brooks, who hired him for High Anxiety; Cornfeld and Sanger became friends on the set.

  The saga of The Elephant Man began in earnest when Sanger’s babysitter, Kathleen Prilliman, asked him to read a script that her boyfriend, Chris De Vore, had written with his friend Eric Bergren while they were film students in Northern California. Both began their careers wanting to be actors but turned to screenwriting after they happened across a book called Very Special People, which included a chapter on the Elephant Man.

  Born in Leicester, England, in 1862, and afflicted with maladies that left him severely deformed, the Elephant Man—whose given name was Joseph Merrick—survived a brutal period of work as a sideshow freak then became a ward of London Hospital, where he was nursed and protected by Sir Frederick Treves until he died at the age of twenty-seven. (Treves mistakenly listed Merrick’s name as John rather than Joseph in his 1923 book, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences.)

  “I was entranced by the script,” Sanger recalled. “I optioned it for a thousand dollars for a year, and they sold it to me with the condition that they got to remain part of the project as the writers.”2 Cornfeld was excited by the script, too, and after reading it he immediately called Sanger and told him, “I know the guy to direct this.” He then called Lynch and said, “You’ve got to read this script.”

  The Elephant Man is a darkly romantic story and exactly the sort of thing to get Lynch dreaming, and when Sanger and Lynch met at Bob’s a week later, Lynch told him he loved the script and asked if they’d settled on a director. “David talked about how he envisioned the film,” said Sanger, “and having seen Eraserhead I thought he could do it.” After seeing Eraserhead, De Vore and Bergren felt the same way. “We thought, Wow, this guy could really do it,” said De Vore. “When we met David at the Bob’s in Century City, we were convinced that he had the kind of wild mind we wanted for the piece.”3

  With Lynch in mind as director, Cornfeld and Sanger shopped the script to six studios but didn’t have the clout to get it to anyone with the power to green-light a film. At that point Brooks intervened. “I gave the script to Mel’s secretary, Randy Auerbach, and she gave it to Mel, who read it over a weekend,” said Sanger. “He called me Monday morning because my name was on the script and said, ‘This script is fascinating. Let’s talk.’ The next day I met with Mel and his lawyer at the Beverly Hills Hotel and he said, ‘Let’s do this.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

  Brooks was in the process of forming a production company called Brooksfilms, where he planned to do movies other than comedies, which were the exclusive focus of his existing company, Crossbow Productions. “I’ve always been a secret intellectual who loves Nikolai Gogol and Thomas Hardy, but I was nailed down as a clown very early, and I knew my place,” said Brooks. “That didn’t stop me from producing serious films, though, and I found that I could do it as long as I kept the name Mel Brooks away from them.”4

  Brooks thought The Elephant Man would be a great vehicle for director Alan Parker, but Cornfeld told him, “No, it’s got to be David Lynch—he’s the guy,” and Brooks agreed to meet Lynch. “David came to my office on the Twentieth Century Fox lot dressed like Jimmy Stewart about to star in a film about Charles Lindbergh,” Brooks recalled. “He had on a leather bomber jacket and a white shirt buttoned up at the top, and his hair was cut in a kind of provincial manner. He was very straightforward and had a kind of crazy Midwestern accent. We talked about the script, and he said, ‘I think this is a heartwarming story,’ and that got me. We talked for a long time about this and that, then he left and I said, ‘That’s the guy. I don’t have to meet anybody else.’ ”

  Cornfeld told Brooks he should probably see Eraserhead before officially giving Lynch the job. Accompanied by Sanger, Brooks had a private screening of the film in the Darryl F. Zanuck Theater in a basement on the Twentieth Century Fox lot while Lynch and Cornfeld waited outside. At the conclusion of the screening, Brooks gave Lynch the job.

  Brooks said he loved Eraserhead “because it’s all symbols, but it’s real,” and told Sanger and Cornfeld where he planned to pitch the project. Cornfeld told him they’d already approached those people and they’d passed. “Mel said, ‘They passed to you,’ ” Cornfeld recalled. “ ‘Nobody wants to say no to me, and somebody is going to call back and say they like the project’—and he was right, of course. The script went out with David attached as director, and Paramount and Columbia called back.”

  Michael Eisner and Jeff Katzenberg were running Paramount at the time, and Brooks gave the script to Eisner. “I said, ‘Read it, please,’ ” Brooks recalled, “and Michael called back quickly and said, ‘I love it and want to make it.’ ” (Film critic Pauline Kael was reviewing material for Paramount at the time and encouraged Eisner to make the film, then sent a note to De Vore and Bergren, telling them that their screenplay neglected Merrick’s sexuality.)

  Although Lynch has been quick to point out that the original script for The Elephant Man was very good, it nonetheless went through extensive revisions. Bergren and De Vore’s original draft was two hundred pages long, so the first order of business was to streamline the story.

  Cornfeld, who was executive producer of the film, recalled that “David and Mel were the driving forces on the rewrite, and Mel had a lot of input on the script.” Sanger concurred: “Mel made important contributions to the script and he made the story more dramatic. It differs in the film from the way it actually happened, but Mel said, ‘It doesn’t matter what really took place; our concern is how this operates emotionally as a movie.’ ”

  Assigned an office across from Brooks’s on the Fox lot, Lynch, De Vore, and Bergren met with him at the end of each week during the two months they worked on the script. “They’d read what they’d written out loud and Mel would make observations,” said Sanger, who produced the film. “Mel would throw anything against the wall, because that’s how he
worked in comedy, and sometimes his observations didn’t work and sometimes they were right on—Mel’s a very smart guy.”

  Casting the character of the Elephant Man became a top priority the moment that seed money for the film was secured, and various names were bounced around. A major star would help line up additional financing—Dustin Hoffman was considered, among others—but a major star would have a harder time disappearing into the character. “We heard about John Hurt’s performance in The Naked Civil Servant, so Mel and I watched it and were impressed,” said Sanger. “David was pushing for Jack Nance to play Merrick, but Mel thought David needed to work with an actor who would take him out of his comfort zone, which Jack wouldn’t do, so we started pushing John Hurt for the part.”