Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Around that time I was also trying to get Dream of the Bovine going. Dream of the Bovine is sort of in the same realm as One Saliva Bubble in that they’re both about misunderstanding and stupidity, but One Saliva Bubble is more normal and is kind of a feel-good movie. Dream of the Bovine is an absurd comedy. The script needs a lot of work, but there are things in it that I really like. Harry Dean and I went up to talk to Marlon Brando about the two of them doing it together, but Brando hated it. He looked me in the eye and said, “It’s pretentious bullshit,” and he started telling us about these cookies made out of grass that grows in salt water that he wanted to promote. Then he told us about a car he wanted to build that had this bladder underneath that would cook this grass and make fuel, like the car would digest the grass. You could never tell if Marlon was putting you on or he was serious.

  The thing about Marlon was, he just didn’t give a shit about anything. Every business has bad behavior going on, but there’s something about this business, with all the egos and lies and backstabbing, that makes you want to do something else rather than be in it. For sure, if anybody had that feeling it was Brando. He played the game for a while, then he couldn’t do it anymore because it made him sick, and he’d reached a point where he just wanted to have fun. In a weird way I think he was having fun, too, and it was fun talking to him. This was around the time he went on The Larry King Show and kissed Larry King.

  He came here to the house a couple of times. One time he came up here by himself—I guess he’d driven himself—and he came in big, you know, just being Brando in this house. It made me a little nervous because I didn’t know why he was here or what we were going to do. I figured I’d make him a coffee, but right after he got here he says, “So, you got anything to eat?” I thought, Oh my God, but I said, “Marlon, I don’t know, let’s go look.” There was one tomato and one banana in the kitchen and he said, “Okay, that will do,” so I got him a plate and a knife and fork and we sat down and started talking. Then he says, “You got any salt?” So he was salting the tomato and cutting it up and eating it while we were talking. Then Mary came over with Riley, and Brando says, “Mary, give me your hand, I want to give you a gift,” so she put her hand out. He’d made a little ring out of the Del Monte sticker that had been on the tomato and he slipped it onto her finger.

  Marlon was dressing in drag now and then during that period, and the thing Marlon really wanted to do was dress up as a woman and have Harry Dean dress up as a woman, and the two of them would have tea together and ad-lib while they were drinking tea. Think about that. It would’ve been fucking incredible! All I’d have to do is turn the camera on, but Marlon chickened out. It would drive me nuts. He should’ve done it!

  * * *

  —

  One of the ways Lost Highway started was with the idea of videotapes being dropped off outside the house of a married couple. Another beginning idea was based on something that happened to me. The doorbell at my house was hooked to the phone, and one day it rang and somebody said, “Dick Laurent is dead.” I went running to the window to see who it was, but there was nobody there. I think whoever it was just went to the wrong house, but I never asked my neighbors if they knew a Dick Laurent, because I guess I didn’t really want to know. So I had these ideas and they married up with some ideas I got from Barry Gifford’s book Night People, so I called Barry, then I flew up to Berkeley and met with him. I told him my idea and he didn’t like it, then he told me his idea and I didn’t like it, so we sat there and looked at each other for a little bit. Then I think I told him the idea of being at a party and meeting someone who tells you that they’re at your house at the same time that they’re talking to you, and Barry said, “I like that idea.” Somewhere along the line we started riffing and Lost Highway came out.

  It’s not a funny film, because it’s not a good highway these people are going down. I don’t believe all highways are lost, but there are plenty of places to get lost, and there’s some kind of pleasure in getting lost—like Chet Baker said, let’s get lost. And look what happened to him. He fell out of a window. Everybody’s searching for somebody, and when things get crazy you have a desire to get lost and do something, but lots of things you do get you in trouble. Taking drugs is a way of getting lost. There are so many good things about drugs that it’s a hard sell telling people not to take them, but you pay a price for taking them that’s worse than the good feeling they give you.

  Around that time I had an office on Santa Monica Boulevard and I wanted to talk to some police detectives, so this man, Commander White, came to the office. Beautiful suit, kind of gray-white hair, movie-star good looks—Commander White comes into a conference area where a few of us had gathered and he talked to us. Afterward he invited me to visit the LAPD robbery/homicide division, so I go down to his office and he’s sitting in there with Detective Williams and Detective John St. John. I got to ask them a bunch of questions, and one thing I asked them was whether they’d ever met a criminal they were afraid of. They said never. Never! It’s like they were almost offended that I’d think they could be afraid of these scumbags—“dirtbags” is what they called them. You get the feeling that you have to be a certain way to do that job. These fucks don’t bother them—they just get ’em.

  After the meeting, John St. John took charge of me and he put me in a room with stacks and stacks of photos and left me alone to look at them. One murder victim after another, the real deal. I met with him two or three times and he would tell me stories, and the stories were interesting, but they didn’t ever conjure anything for me. They were mostly kind of sad stories. He told me about these homeless guys that somehow got the money to get a forty—a forty-ounce bottle of beer. It was one of their birthdays, so they go into an abandoned house with this beer and start drinking, and then they start fighting. The bottle of beer gets broken and one of them grabs the neck of the bottle, which now has a super-jagged edge, and jams it into the chest area of the other guy. This guy bleeds out in the front yard of this abandoned house on his birthday.

  John St. John was the second detective on the Black Dahlia murder, which is a story that gets people going all over the world, and he knew I was interested in that story. So one day he calls me—and this is like getting a call from Clark Gable—and he says, “Let me take you to dinner at Musso & Frank’s.” This is a real honor, I’m not kidding. So I’m sitting in a booth at Musso & Frank’s with John St. John and we have dinner, and after dinner he looks at me and sort of smiles. Then he turns away and goes to his briefcase, pops it open, and takes out a beautiful, glossy black-and-white photo that he lays on the table in front of me. It’s a picture of the Black Dahlia lying in the grass, and it’s in mint condition. The focus and the detail were perfect. He says, “What do you see?” I’m looking at this thing, just marveling, and I study every single detail and I’m thinking and thinking. He let me look at it for a long time, and I knew there was something he wanted me to see, but after a while I finally had to say to him, “I don’t see it,” and he smiled and took the photo away. He would’ve been proud of me if I’d seen what he was trying to show me, and that would’ve been worth a lot, and I fuckin’ failed. So I kept thinking of this thing like a burning anvil in my head, then suddenly I knew what it was. That picture was taken at night with a flash, and that opens up a whole realm of possibilities regarding that case.

  * * *

  —

  I’d always wanted a recording studio, and when I signed with Francis Bouygues I got a good advance and that’s maybe when I felt the richest I’d felt in my life. So I got a third house so I could build a studio and use it for Lost Highway. The Madison house is sort of based on the Pink House, but it had to be reconfigured in certain ways for the film; the house needed to have windows that make it impossible to see who’s at the front door, and it needed a long hallway that leads into darkness. We shot at the house for only ten days, then Alfredo [Ponce] and the team started tea
ring it apart. Then it took two years to put everything back together and build the studio. This acoustic architect named Peter Grueneisen, who was one of the founders of Studio Bau:ton, designed my studio, and it was as big as I could get it. The studio is huge and it’s beautifully put together. There are two sets of foot-thick walls with neoprene rubber in between, three floors and three ceilings, and there’s so much money in concrete and steel in the thing it’s unreal. I’m glad I built it, but nowadays you don’t really need all this, and people mix great stuff in their garage. Dean Hurley runs the studio, and Dean is solid gold.

  The first record we produced in the studio was this thing called Lux Vivens: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen, which I did with Jocelyn Montgomery in 1998. Hildegard von Bingen composed elaborate music that’s mostly built on a single note, and Jocelyn could take off from that single note and go into all this beauty. I wanted the music to feel like it was made in nature, so there’s all this other stuff going on, too, like sound effects of rain, and her voice floating, and drones. This record happened because of Monty Montgomery. I don’t know how Monty met Jocelyn, but I was in New York at Excalibur Studios working on a song with Angelo, and Monty calls and says, “David, I know this girl, and would you mind if she came by and sang for you?” Artie Polhemus ran that studio, and his wife, Estelle, had been a lyricist in the sixties and she was really good. She didn’t come to the studio much, but whenever she did, Artie would just sit her on the couch and she’d stay there. She was there that time, and she and I were working on this song together called “And Still.” I’d write one line of lyrics and give it to Estelle, then she’d write the next line and give it back to me, and we’d go back and forth. So Monty calls, then Jocelyn comes over and we ask how would you like to sing this thing, and she says, “Fine.” She brought her fiddle along—she’s also a fiddler—and she plays fiddle on the song, too. Her fiddle playing and her voice are beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  Francis Bouygues died in 1993, but the deal with Ciby stayed together until Lost Highway. Then somebody—probably one of those men sitting next to Francis at that meeting I told you about—got ahold of the whole thing and they just stopped making films. Those were the people I ended up suing, but that didn’t happen until a couple of years later.

  When it was time to cast Lost Highway, I thought of Bill Pullman to play Fred Madison because I’d seen him in lots of films always playing sort of second fiddle, but there was something in his eyes that made me think this guy could play somebody strange and tough and different. Fred Madison is a sax player but he’s possibly a little bit deranged, so he plays a certain way, especially when he’s really getting into it. So we’re recording Fred’s sax solo with this musician named Bob Sheppard in the recording studio at Capitol Records, and Bob does a take and I tell him, “I can barely hear you. It sounds like church music.” So he’d play a little harder and I’d say, “It’s a mosquito; there’s no feeling there at all; you’re not wild at all.” I had to push him, but he finally got into this place, and once he got there he killed it. The same thing happened with Robert Loggia in the tailgating scene. I told him, “You’re whispering, Robert. What are you doing? There’s no power there at all.” He said, “David, I’m yelling!” I said, “No, you’re not! Come on! This is a man who is obsessed!” And finally he got there and did it just great.

  The way Robert Loggia came to be in Lost Highway went back to Blue Velvet. One day when I was casting that film, I was working on a scene with two actors, and Robert Loggia was waiting to test for Frank Booth. I was so long working with these two actors that we ran out of time, so somebody went and told Robert Loggia, “You’re not needed,” and he hit the fucking roof. He came in screaming at me, like so mad—it was scary. But I remembered that and that’s how he wound up playing Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway. See, one thing leads to another, and when we worked together on Lost Highway we got along like Ike and Mike. We had so much fun.

  This is how Robert Blake became the Mystery Man. I once saw Robert Blake on The Tonight Show being interviewed by Johnny Carson, and I remember thinking, Here’s a guy who doesn’t give a shit about this so-called industry. He just tells it like it is and is his own guy, and I really liked that. So I had that in the back of my mind, and when I was casting Lost Highway he came up and met with me at the Pink House and we had a great talk. I don’t know if they dated, but he was close with Natalie Wood, and he told me she never would’ve gotten in a boat, ever, because she was so afraid of water. Robert Blake was a child actor and was in the second generation of the Our Gang comedies, which I loved. His parents put him on the stage when he was three years old and he hated his parents, his mom in particular. I remember him saying, “I hated being in her womb.” I don’t know what they did to him, but the poor guy was just filled with hate for his parents. Robert was good to me, though. He called me Captain Ahab and said he didn’t understand shit about the script but that he still liked doing it—and he’s really good in it. The makeup for his character was my idea, but it was his idea to shave off his eyebrows. Richard Pryor is someone else I saw on a talk show and kind of fell in love with. He’d been through a lot in his life but he had a wisdom that was really beautiful, and there was greatness in him that just came through. So when there was a spot for him in Lost Highway I really hoped he’d do it, and it was great having him in the film.

  The music in Lost Highway came along in different ways. I somehow got involved with Trent Reznor and went down to see him in New Orleans, where he had a recording studio in a funeral home. On that trip he introduced me to Marilyn Manson, who was there doing his first album with Trent. Trent’s a hell of a musician and a hell of a drummer, and he did these great drum things for Lost Highway and gave me lots of tones and sounds. He had a wall twenty feet high and thirty feet long lined with synthesizers that could do different things. Lou Reed’s version of “This Magic Moment” is in the film, too, and it’s the all-time best version of that song. I love the drums in that song and I love the way Lou sings it and it’s perfect for that scene. And Bowie’s song “I’m Deranged” was perfect for the opening; the lyrics are just right. I met David Bowie on Twin Peaks and then I saw him two more times. I saw him at the Masonic Lodge on Highland Avenue when we were both there to see Portishead. We were in the back, smoking. I love Portishead, but this room had so much echo that the music was just mush.

  Around that time I was making a lot of furniture, too. I look at furniture and everything’s subjective, but I just don’t see a lot of furniture that thrills my soul, and it drives me to think, What kind of furniture would I love? I like furniture from the 1930s and 1940s, and I like atomic furniture because it floats, and the legs are thin, and you can see under it—a lot of furniture blocks views. I like Vladimir Kagan, and Charles Eames, too—Charles Eames is the guy. I love his stuff. I had lunch with him once when he visited the AFI while I was a student there, and he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He was filled with enthusiasm like a bright star, and you could feel that he loved what he was doing.

  Furniture and sculpture obey a lot of the same rules, but you don’t have to be able to sit comfortably on a sculpture. Furniture has to be somewhat practical, but I like furniture that borders on sculpture, and you need a pure room for furniture to be in, too. Most rooms, if you put something in them, it gets lost because they’re so cluttered, so the more pure the room, the more the people and the furniture can come forth.

  Lost Highway was in post-production for almost a year, which is, like Mary said, something you could never get away with now. We had a real dirt problem with that film, and the negative was just filthy. We were at CFI but they couldn’t clean it, so we went someplace else and they couldn’t clean it, then we went to a specialty place and they couldn’t clean it, either. Then Dan Muscarella at CFI said, “All my relatives are over at FotoKem. Take it over there and I think they can clean it.” They put it in the hottest bath,
super slow, and massaged it with their hands, and the emulsion swells up and releases these little dust things, and they got it super clean, but it took a long time.

  We’d finished shooting in February of 1996, but the film was still in post-production in December, which was when Jack Nance died. Some people think Jack was murdered, but Jack wasn’t murdered. I’ll tell you what happened to Jack. Jack had started drinking again by the time we shot Lost Highway, but he always came to work sober, and we had a great time working together on that film. Before that he’d been clean and sober for nine years, then one day he said to me, “Lynch, one morning I woke up and I just said fuck it,” and he started to drink again. When Jack drank hard liquor he’d get surly and mean, and although he never got that way around me, I could see that he had this mean streak in him. He and Catherine were a perfect couple in a way. She took care of Jack and she was a kind of Dorothy Vallens.

  So I know what happened to Jack, even though I wasn’t there. He goes into this donut shop at about five in the morning, and he’s not really drunk but he’s been drinking and he may’ve been on a binge. He’s still got a lot of darkness in him. So he’s in there probably having coffee and there are two Hispanic guys in the place, and Jack might’ve looked at them funny and said, “What are you fuckin’ looking at, beaners,” or something like that. These guys left but they waited for him outside, and when he left the donut shop they popped Jack hard, I don’t know how many times. Then he just went home. Jack had these two neighbors who sort of looked after him—they’d do his laundry and stuff like that—and they see him later that day and Jack tells them he has the worst headache of his life. When you get hit hard in the head they can do things to alleviate the pressure from the swelling if you get to a hospital in time, but these neighbors didn’t know what was happening in Jack’s brain, and when they went to his place the next day the front door was open and they found him dead in the bathroom.