Читать книгу Room to Dream - Kristine McKenna - Страница 13

Spike

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 inspiring 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 Henry 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 Eraser-head. 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.

Doreen Small scoured flea markets and thrift stores for clothing and props, and Coulson and Nance emptied their own living room to furnish the lobby of Henry’s apartment. A particularly valuable resource was Coulson’s aunt, Margit Fellegi Laszlo, who lived in a seventeen-room house in Beverly Hills. A designer for bathing-suit company Cole of California, Laszlo had a basement full of stuff, and Coulson and Lynch often dug through it looking for props. “That’s where we found the humidifier for the baby,” Coulson recalled.³

The props list for Eraserhead included things considerably more offbeat than a humidifier. “David wanted a dog with a litter of nursing puppies, so I called vets to find people who had dogs with new litters, then called them and asked if they’d loan us their dogs,” Small recalled. “To get umbilical cords I lied to hospitals and told them the cords would just be in jars in the background in a movie scene. Those are real umbilical cords in the film, and we got five or six of them—Jack called them ‘billy cords.’ I had to find some unusual things.”

The baby in Eraserhead—christened “Spike” by Nance—is the most crucial prop in the film, and Lynch began working on it months before the shoot started; he’s never disclosed how he created the baby, nor have any of the cast and crew. The film also called for two large props—a planet and a baby head—which were fashioned out of various materials. The “giant baby head,” which is how they referred to it, was constructed in Lynch’s yard and took several months to complete. “It sat out there for quite a while, and the neighbors referred to it as ‘the big egg,’ ” Reavey recalled.

As part of pre-production, Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun for his cast and crew. The black-and-white photography in both films is particularly saturated and rich, and Small recalled that “he wanted us to understand his concept of the color black. He also encouraged us to go see this guy named James in some canyon and have our horoscopes read.”

Principal photography began on May 29th, 1972, and the first scene on the shooting schedule was Henry’s dinner with Mary’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. X. “I couldn’t believe how long everything took that first night,” recalled Charlotte Stewart, “and the reason it took so long was because David had to do everything himself—really, he did everything. The light fixtures had to be just so; he made the chickens for the dinner—he had to touch everything on the set. I remember thinking, Oh my God, this kid is never going to make it; he doesn’t understand that you can’t take this long in this business. I felt bad for him that he didn’t know this.”

The film progressed at a glacial pace, and a year into the shoot DP Herb Cardwell decided he needed a job that could pay him a living wage and left the film. This created an opening for cinematographer Fred Elmes. Born in East Orange, New Jersey, Elmes studied still photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, then enrolled in the film-studies program at New York University. When an instructor there told him about the AFI, he headed west.

Elmes began classes at the AFI in the fall of 1972 and recalled, “A few months after I arrived, Toni Vellani said, ‘We have a filmmaker here who needs a DP and you should meet him.’ I met David and he showed me a reel of scenes and I had no idea what to make of what I was seeing, but I was captivated. It was shot in this beautiful black and white and was so curious and beautifully designed, and the acting style was fascinating. Everything about it knocked me out and I couldn’t possibly say no.⁴

“One of the main challenges was how to light a black movie that you could see,” Elmes continued of the film, which was shot almost entirely at night. That’s what Eraserhead demanded in terms of mood, of course, but it was also the only time the AFI grounds were quiet enough for Lynch to work. “We’d shoot all night,” said Coulson, “then at a certain point Alan Splet would say, ‘Birds, I hear birds,’ and we knew it was time to stop working.”

And the film “couldn’t be dark enough,” said Elmes, who spent two weeks working with Cardwell to get up to speed prior to his departure. “David and I would look at dailies and say, ‘I see a detail in that black shadow that shouldn’t be there—let’s make it darker.’ David and I agreed that the mood you create is the most important thing. Yes, there’s the writing and the acting, but the mood and the feeling of the light is what makes a film take off. With Eraserhead, David told the story almost purely through mood and the way things look.”

For the film’s few daytime exterior shots, Coulson recalled, “We shot many of the exteriors, including the opening scene, beneath a bridge in downtown L.A. We worked fast when we shot on location because we never had permits, so it was kind of stressful but it was fun.”

“People love working for David,” said Reavey. “If you do something as minor as getting him a cup of coffee, he makes you feel like you’ve done the greatest thing in the world. It’s, like, fantastic! And I think that’s really how he feels. David likes to feel excited about stuff.”

“David is a charismatic, powerful person,” said Elmes, “and we all felt very involved. Certainly we were making David’s movie, but he was thankful for everyone’s work, and without thinking about it he kind of raised the bar on everything around him. He was constantly drawing, for instance, and seeing that was inspiring. It made us all want to work hard and try new things.”

Lynch had no time to spend in a painting studio while Eraserhead was in production, but he never stopped making visual art during those years. Any blank surface would do, and he completed several bodies of work, including series on matchbooks, diner napkins, and cheap notebook paper. The materials he used were humble, but the work can’t be dismissed as doodling. It’s too polished and thought out for that.

Intricate renderings executed on empty matchbooks, the works in the matchbook series are tiny universes that feel vast and expansive, despite their size. Another series revolves around obsessive patterning and operates differently: The nests of patterned lines are imploded and dense and feel slightly threatening. The napkin drawings are composed of odd shapes rendered in red, black, and yellow, floating in white fields; they almost look like something identifiable but are pure geometric abstraction. And there are drawings that are clearly preparatory studies for Eraserhead. There’s a portrait of Henry staring at a mound of dirt on a bedside table, and an image of the baby lying next to a volcano form with a lone branch protruding from the top. A sketch of the baby after its white swaddling has been cut open has a lyrical quality that the related scene in the film, which is quite gruesome, definitely does not have.

Lynch always knew what was right for Eraserhead, but he encouraged input from the cast and embraced a good idea when he saw one. Charlotte Stewart was given the task of styling Nance’s hair the evening shooting commenced, and she began back-combing it frenetically. Everyone in the room with her was laughing, but when Lynch walked in he took one look and declared, “That’s it.” Henry Spencer’s signature hairstyle was the result of happenstance.

Stewart’s take on her own character seemed intrinsically correct to Lynch, too. “I asked David if it would be all right for me to make my own dress, because Mary seems like a girl who sews her own clothes, but not very well, and nothing fits right—we wanted the top to be kind of ill-fitting so you could see her bra strap falling off her shoulder,” Stewart recalled. “Mary has no confidence, which is why she’s so stooped and closed in, and she has ear infections. Before we’d shoot, David always made a drippy ear infection in the outside of my right ear. It never showed, but we knew it was there.

“I have no idea why David thought I was right for the part. David casts people very strangely, and he doesn’t care what your background is and never makes actors read. He meets you and talks to you about wood or whatever and sees what he needs. And the way he worked with actors on Eraserhead is the same way he works with actors now,” said Stewart, who went on to appear in all three seasons of Twin Peaks. “He’s very private with actors and never gives you direction when other people are listening. He comes up to you very quietly and whispers in your ear. It’s real confidential direction.”

Lynch is big on rehearsal, and although Henry Spencer doesn’t seem to do much, it took considerable effort to achieve that effect; Lynch choreographed Henry’s movements so intricately that the slightest gesture is fraught with meaning. Reflecting on his working relationship with Lynch, Nance recalled that “we had these long, strange conversations, skull sessions, and things would reveal themselves a lot as we went along. And Henry was very easy. It was like putting on a comfortable suit to put on that character. I would put on the coat and tie and there was Henry.”⁵

The cast for Eraserhead was small, but the crew was even smaller and often came down to just Coulson. “I did everything from rolling paper to make it look like the elevator was moving to pushing the dolly,” said Coulson, who worked as a waitress at the time and often contributed tips and food to the production. “Fred was my mentor and he taught me how to shoot stills and be a camera assistant. I was also the courier to the lab that processed our film. We had to have it in by a certain time, and I’d get in the VW Bug and speed over to Seward Street in the middle of the night to get it to Mars Baumgarten, this great guy who worked there on the night shift. Because we worked long hours we had meals at the stables, and I cooked everything on a little hot plate with a frying pan. It was almost always the same food because David usually likes to eat only one thing, and it was grilled cheese or egg salad sandwiches then.”

Eraserhead was beginning to consume Lynch’s life, but throughout 1972 his ties to his family remained relatively sturdy. “We had a round oak table in the dining room, and for my birthday David and Jen got all this mud and piled it up into a peak on the table, and carved nooks and caves into it, and made clay figures and stuck them in there,” recalled Reavey. “I loved it. We had to eat in the living room with plates in our laps for quite a while because nobody wanted to dismantle the mound. It was on the table for several months.”

There were momentary diversions, but Eraserhead was the central concern in the Lynch household from the moment he began working on it. “Maybe this is a testament to my father’s brilliance as a director, but he convinced us that Eraserhead was the secret of happiness and he was just letting us in on it,” said Jennifer Lynch. “I was on that set a lot, and Eraserhead was just part of my childhood. I thought it was great and I didn’t realize there was anything different about my childhood until I was ten or eleven years old. I never felt like my father was a weirdo and I was always proud of him. Always.”

Lynch felt his cast and crew should be paid, so each of them received twenty-five dollars a week for the first two years of the shoot. (By the time the film wrapped, he’d been forced to cut salaries to $12.50.) It was a modest wage, but Lynch still went through the money the AFI had given him by spring 1973. He was told he could continue using school equipment but no additional funds would be forthcoming, and Eraserhead went on a forced hiatus that continued intermittently for almost a year.

“David was always trying to get money for the film, and I gave him some when I came back from doing Badlands,” said Fisk, who was the art director on Terrence Malick’s debut film of 1973. (Lynch and Splet introduced Fisk to Malick.) “I was used to making a hundred dollars a week and suddenly I was making a lot more, and it almost felt like free money. Over the years I probably gave David around four thousand dollars, and I’ve gotten all that back and more.”

Co-starring in Badlands was actress Sissy Spacek, who married Fisk a year after they met and was ushered into the world of Eraserhead. “When I met Jack on Badlands, he told me all about his best friend, David, and as soon as we got back to L.A. he took me to meet him,” Spacek recalled. “We went in the dead of night and everything was shrouded in intrigue and secrecy. David was living in the stables at the AFI, where he’d shoot all night and his crew would lock him in on the set during the day and he’d sleep. You had to knock a certain number of times and have the key, and it was like getting into Fort Knox.

“Jack was the first real artist I’d ever met,” Spacek continued, “and he introduced me to all these incredibly talented people, including David. I’ve always felt grateful that I met them at a time in my life and career when they were able to influence me. David and Jack are artists through and through—they throw themselves into every aspect of their work, they would never sell out, ever, and they love creating things.”⁶

After having returned to the East Coast, Fisk’s sister Mary was back in L.A. by 1973. She was in a brief marriage at the time and lived in Laurel Canyon for six months prior to separating from her husband and returning east. While in L.A., she’d worked for Nash Publishing and helped Reavey get a job there as a receptionist.

Lynch did various odd jobs during the hiatus, and money that allowed the shoot to resume materialized in fits and starts; the irregular shooting schedule coupled with the painstaking craftsmanship Lynch brought to his work made patience an essential quality for his cast and crew. Lynch’s team had to be ready to jump back into action at a moment’s notice and committed enough to wait while he perfected things on set.

“We did lots of waiting, and that’s one reason Jack Nance was the ideal person to play Henry—Jack could sit quietly for a very long time,” said Stewart. “David was always busy fiddling with a prop or something, and Catherine was busy doing whatever David wanted her to do, and Jack and I sat around and waited and nobody got crabby. Everybody was going through domestic ins and outs and we all became friends.”

Approximately a year into the shoot, Doreen Small began living on the Eraserhead set. “It was a long commute from Topanga,” she recalled, “and I wound up having a personal relationship with David—it happened one day in the music room and it was an intense relationship. My dad died during the shoot and my mom moved to Santa Monica, and David would sometimes stay with us. We all became very close, and my mom would buy clothes and art supplies for David.”

Needless to say, Lynch’s home life was unraveling and he and Reavey were headed toward a separation. “In Philadelphia I’d been an integral part of everything David did, but in L.A. that changed,” said Reavey. “I wasn’t part of it anymore, and there were all these assistant-type girls around—there was no place for me. My sister came to L.A. and visited the set, and she came back and said, ‘You know they’re all in love with him,’ and I said, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ I was very naïve.”

This was a stressful period for Lynch. He was making a film he passionately believed in but money was a constant problem, and his personal life was becoming complicated. More significant, he felt unsettled on a profound level that went beyond money or love. Lynch’s parents moved to Riverside in 1973, so his sister, Martha Levacy, was in Southern California regularly, and she was about to play a central role in a transformative event that spoke to the deeper feelings he was experiencing.

This story began in 1972, when Levacy was in Sun Valley training to be a ski instructor. Early one morning she was scheduled to attend a teacher’s clinic on top of the mountain, “and I was riding up the chairlift next to a nice young man,” she recalled. “I mentioned how alert he seemed for such an early hour, and he told me about the deep rest that’s a benefit of Transcendental Meditation and talked to me about it the whole trip up the mountain. I learned to meditate and it became an important part of my life.”⁷

Shortly after Levacy began meditating, she was speaking to Lynch on the phone and he detected something different in her voice. He asked her what was going on and she told him about TM, then directed him to the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center. “That was the ideal place for David to take the next step,” Levacy said. “Not every center might’ve gotten him excited, but this was the perfect fit—he liked the feeling of it and on July 1st, 1973, he learned to meditate. David told me long before any of this happened that he’d been thinking about the bigger picture, and TM’s belief that there is enlightenment out there resonated with him.”

The Spiritual Regeneration Movement center was directed by Charlie Lutes, who was one of the first people in America to enroll in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation program, which revolves around a simple technique that allows practitioners to reach the deepest levels of consciousness and is rooted in ancient Vedic wisdom. After bringing TM to the United States in 1959, Maharishi opened hundreds of centers around the world in partnership with Lutes, including the first U.S. TM center, in Santa Monica, where Lutes’s weekly lectures drew large crowds during the 1970s. Lynch attended regularly. “Charlie was like a brother to Maharishi, and he was pivotal for David,” said Levacy. “He became very close to Charlie and his wife, Helen.”

Everyone who knew Lynch was struck by how meditation changed him. “David was a lot darker before he started meditating,” recalled Small. “It made him calmer, less frustrated, and it lightened him. It was as if a burden had been lifted from him.”

After devoting every waking moment to Eraserhead for nearly two years, Lynch made room in his life for meditation. “We all went to see Maharishi when he was on The Merv Griffin Show,” said Levacy. “Catherine came with David and he was wearing a nice blazer and a white shirt, and as they were walking in someone said, ‘You two! This way!’ They guided them down to the front row—I guess they liked the way they looked—so David landed right in front, lookin’ good, and it had to be a thrill.”

Lynch made several drawings during this period that are reflective of how he was changing. In Infusing the Being, a pair of images of dark, treelike forms are positioned side by side; there’s a prism of color at the base of the form on the left, while the form on the right has color at both the base and the crown. Images evocative of growth depict underground forms that are pushing to the surface, and there are untitled compositions that combine recognizable elements—trees, clouds—with abstract patterning and have the feeling of entryways into domed cathedrals.

“I was five when Dad started meditating, and I was definitely aware of a change in him when that happened,” recalled Jennifer Lynch. “I remember there was less yelling, but it was then that I also started feeling like he was around less.”

Meditation brought something into Lynch’s life that he needed, but it exacerbated the growing schism in his marriage. “David worshipped Charlie Lutes, who was a nice guy, but nothing he said was of any interest to me,” Reavey recalled. “David couldn’t understand why I wasn’t excited about meditation, because he really wanted spirituality at that point, but I wanted to go out and have fun.”

Mary Fisk had returned to the East Coast by this point and was working for Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge in Washington, D.C. “One night I was in the office, talking to Jack on the WATS line, and David got on the phone and started talking to me about meditation—that’s really when we began communicating,” said Fisk, who moved back to Los Angeles at the end of that year.

Lynch took her to the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center and she began attending regularly. “Charlie Lutes was a dynamic, handsome, perceptive man who could change the energy in a room,” Fisk recalled. “The Beatles called him Captain Kundalini—he was impressive.

“Meditation changed David and he got conservative—he stopped eating meat and smoking,” Fisk continued. “He told me there were months when he went around with a five-foot cigarette in his head—he couldn’t stop thinking about it—but he managed to stop smoking. He also started dressing differently, and the two ties and the moth-eaten hats vanished. He dressed nicely when he went to the center.”

During this period Lynch’s marriage deteriorated further. “One day I came home from work for lunch and David was there,” Reavey recalled, “and I said, ‘I wonder if we should think about separating.’ He said, ‘You don’t love me as much as you used to, do you?’ meaning that he didn’t love me as much, either, and I said, ‘I guess not.’ I’d reached a point where I wasn’t as fascinated with how his mind worked as I’d once been and I wanted some time to myself. It’s claustrophobic to live inside somebody else’s head. Plus, what are you going to do? Fight to keep a marriage? I wouldn’t be competing with some neighborhood girl. It would’ve been me versus loads of women, plus Hollywood.”

During those years Lynch lived a completely nocturnal life, and shortly after splitting up with Reavey he took a job delivering The Wall Street Journal for $48.50 a week. Levacy once accompanied him on his midnight route and recalled it as “a great experience. He got it all organized, with the papers piled up in the passenger seat, and I sat in the back seat of his VW Bug because he needed both windows free. He knew the route like the back of his hand and made an art out of whisking the papers out the windows. He liked hitting certain windows a certain way because a light would come on in the house.”

Shooting on Eraserhead resumed in May 1974 and continued sporadically for the next year. At approximately the same time, Splet left L.A. to spend several months at Findhorn, a utopian community in northern Scotland whose founders, Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean, claimed to have direct contact with the spirits of the natural world. Not long after Splet left, Doreen Small moved to Santa Barbara and things got harder for Lynch. George Stevens, Jr., made arrangements with Sid Solow, director of Consolidated Film Industries laboratory, to process Lynch’s film for free, but the AFI began retrieving pieces of equipment and, as usual, there was no money. “At one point David said, ‘I think we have to stop,’ ” Elmes recalled. “Catherine, Jack, and I looked at each other and said, ‘David, we can’t stop—it’s not done. We’ll figure it out.’ ”

So they kept at it. One day Lynch was sitting in the food room sketching, and a figure that came to be known as the Lady in the Radiator took shape on his drawing pad. Lynch recognized the character as the element needed to bring Henry’s story to a close, and to his delight, he discovered that the radiator that happened to be part of the set was designed in such a way that it could accommodate his vision of how the character would function in the story. Played by vocalist Laurel Near, the Lady in the Radiator lives in a place of protection and warmth and represents unity and hope; her arrival marks a shift in the narrative trajectory and allows the film to conclude on a note of optimism and possibility. A wide-eyed blonde with grotesquely exaggerated cheeks, the Lady in the Radiator required a great deal of makeup, which Lynch spent hours applying, and he wrote lyrics to a song for her to sing, called “In Heaven.” His friend Peter Ivers put the lyrics to music and sang the song for the soundtrack; it’s Ivers’s voice you hear in the film.

Eraserhead’s frequent periods of downtime left Lynch free to search for funding—certainly one of the most odious parts of being a filmmaker—but occasionally he had some fun. In 1974, executives at the AFI were trying to decide whether to use Ampex or Sony videotape for school directing projects and asked Elmes to shoot a comparison test of the two. Lynch got wind of this and asked Elmes to let him write a scene for the test; he quickly wrote a script for a short called The Amputee, and Coulson agreed to star in it. “David plays a doctor who’s bandaging an amputee’s stumps, and he wrote a monologue for the amputee, who I play, to do in voice-over,” Coulson recalled. “We shot it twice using the different tape stocks, in one of the many deserted rooms in the Greystone Mansion, then Fred took it to a gorgeous screening room at the AFI to show these executives. When the film ended I remember somebody yelling, ‘Lynch! Lynch had something to do with this!’ ”

By late 1974 Lynch’s marriage had officially ended. “I went to legal aid and paid fifty dollars for the forms I needed, then a girlfriend went with me to court, where I filed them,” Reavey recalled of her remarkably amicable divorce from Lynch. “My parents adored David and they were upset when we split up. I loved David’s parents, and although they made an effort to maintain the connection between us, it was still a real loss for me when we divorced.” As for Jennifer Lynch, she said, “It was excruciating for me when my parents divorced. I hated it.”

Lynch was living on the Eraserhead set when his divorce was finalized but was ordered to vacate the AFI stables at the end of 1974 and moved into a bungalow on Rosewood Avenue in West Hollywood. “It had a tiny fenced-in yard with a picket fence, and a big orange tree in the yard that parrots loved—there were always lots of parrots out there,” said Mary Fisk of the house, which rented for eighty-five dollars a month. “David put skylights in the house and built a shelf you could cook on in the kitchen, which didn’t have a sink; when you only eat tuna fish sandwiches you don’t need much of a kitchen. I remember Jen spending weekends there with David. He had very little money and wasn’t able to take good care of himself, much less a child.”

“When I stayed with Dad he didn’t ‘take care of me’ in conventional ways,” Jennifer Lynch recalled. “We did adult things. We delivered papers and walked around oil pits; we’d talk about ideas and dig in dumpsters and pull stuff out, and we’d eat at Bob’s. It was great. I remember when Eraserhead was playing at the Nuart, we’d go to Bob’s, and you know those little plastic stands that hold pieces of cardboard listing the day’s specials? We’d take those out and flip them so the blank side was out, and we’d write, “Go see Eraserhead” on them and put them back in the plastic stand. When he was living on Rosewood he was really into stuff like bee pollen and soybeans and ginseng, and I’d watch him take his vitamins and get a little dose. He was hugely into that stuff.

“I didn’t realize we were poor until I was around nine,” she continued. “I brought a friend over for the weekend when Dad was living on Rosewood, and Mary Fisk took us to Disneyland, and we built a dollhouse with David, and we went bowling. It was a great weekend, right? I got sick on Sunday night and missed school Monday, and when I got to school Tuesday morning, people said to me, ‘Sherry says you live in a garage.’ No one got invited over again for a long time.”

Lynch is a creature of habit, and around this time he established a ritual that was to remain part of his life for the next eight years: Every day at two-thirty he went to Bob’s Big Boy and consumed several cups of coffee and a chocolate milkshake. If someone had a meeting with Lynch during those years, it probably took place at Bob’s. (He was open to other coffee shops, too, however, and also frequented Du-par’s, in the San Fernando Valley; Ben Frank’s, on Sunset Boulevard; and Nibblers, on Wilshire Boulevard.)

A few months after Lynch’s move, Splet returned from Scotland, and they transformed the double garage adjoining the Rosewood bungalow into a post-production facility where Splet took up residence. From summer 1975 until early 1976, Lynch cut picture while Splet cut sound, and it was during these eight months of intensive work that Eraserhead became the masterpiece that it is. There’s an almost unbearable tension in the soundtrack to Eraserhead, and the layers of sound—the menacing barking of a dog, the whistle of a distant train, the hiss of churning machinery, the hollow room tone that’s the very embodiment of loneliness—are so complex and rich it’s as if you could close your eyes and experience the film simply by listening to it. “David and Alan harnessed the power of industrial sounds and really made them work in terms of controlling the mood and the feeling of the movie,” said Elmes. “The way they built that soundtrack is brilliant.”

Mary Fisk had taken an apartment a few blocks from Lynch’s bungalow during this phase of post-production, and the two had begun dating. “David and Alan agreed that neither of them would date until they finished the film,” said Fisk, “but David would meet me for lunch every day and not tell Alan. At the time David was also dating Martha Bonner, a friend of ours from the center, and he went back and forth between us for two years. David didn’t try to hide it from me that he was attracted to Martha, but she knew he was seeing me and that he was trouble, so things never went anywhere with her.”

Regardless of the status of their relationship, Fisk was a firm believer in Eraserhead, and she persuaded family friend Chuck Hamel to invest ten thousand dollars in the film. These indispensable funds allowed Lynch to focus on the completion of Eraserhead, and once he and Splet finalized the sound, he had a finished cut of the film. At that point he asked the principal cast and crew to meet him at Hamburger Hamlet, a now-defunct restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and to everyone’s surprise told them they were among fourteen beneficiaries who would be receiving a percentage of any future profits the film made. He wrote the terms of the agreement on napkins, and “a few years later we all got checks in the mail,” said Coulson. “It’s pretty amazing that he did that.” All the beneficiaries continue to receive annual checks.

Eraserhead had its unofficial premiere in a cast-and-crew screening at the AFI. “When David first showed us the film, it seemed like an eternity,” recalled Stewart of the screening, which ran for an hour and fifty minutes. “He called me afterward and asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘David, it was like a toothache—it hurt so bad.’ It was grueling to sit through.” Lynch listened to what his inner circle had to say but wasn’t yet ready to edit anything out of the film.

Representatives from the Cannes Film Festival were visiting the AFI when Lynch happened to be there mixing the film, and they expressed enthusiasm over the footage they saw; at that point he set himself the goal of getting Eraserhead into Cannes. This proved to be a fruitless ordeal, and Eraserhead was then rejected by the New York Film Festival, too. This was not a good period for Lynch. “I remember meeting him for lunch at Bob’s after we divorced, and he said, ‘I’m ready to be in the inner circle—I’m tired of being outside,’ ” said Reavey. “Yes, his sensibility is underground and dark, but once he got involved in Hollywood he didn’t want to be this weirdo, and he wanted to operate in the field where the real stuff was happening—and that’s the way it should be. I’d hate to live in a world where somebody like David doesn’t get to do his thing.”

When the Los Angeles International Film Exposition—Filmex—began reviewing movies for its 1976 program, Lynch was too demoralized to consider submitting Eraserhead. Fisk insisted that he submit it, though, and it was accepted and screened for a public audience for the first time at the festival. It got a nasty review in Variety, and watching the movie with an audience was an enlightening experience for Lynch. He realized the film would be better with a tighter edit, so he cut a composite print and discarded twenty minutes of footage containing at least four substantial scenes, including Henry kicking a piece of furniture in the lobby of his apartment; and Coulson and her friend V. Phipps-Wilson bound to beds with battery cables, being threatened by a man holding an electrical device. Lynch loved the scenes but knew they were dragging the film down and had to go.

Word of Eraserhead made its way to Ben Barenholtz, in New York, and he requested a print. A producer and distributor who’s been a hero in the world of independent film for decades, Barenholtz was the originator of the midnight movie programming that’s served as a lifeline for iconoclastic filmmakers who couldn’t get their work seen any other way. His innovation allowed films like John Waters’s Pink Flamingos to find their audiences, and his support was crucial to Eraserhead. Barenholtz’s company, Libra Films, agreed to distribute the film, and he sent his colleague, Fred Baker, to L.A. to seal the deal with Lynch. The official handshake took place at Schwab’s Pharmacy, which is the setting for a scene in Sunset Boulevard and thus had particular meaning for Lynch.

As Eraserhead began making its way safely into port, Lynch’s personal life continued to be messy. “One day not long after Ben agreed to take Eraserhead, David told me he wanted to be with Martha Bonner,” said Fisk. “David and I had moved in together by that point, and I said, ‘Fine, I’m moving back to Virginia,’ and I left. Three days after I left, David called and asked me to marry him. My mother was against it because he had no money, and my brother didn’t think I should marry him, either. He sat me down and said, ‘David is different, Mary, the marriage won’t last,’ but I didn’t care. David has this incredible love inside of him, and when you’re with him you feel like you’re the most important person in the world. Just the tone of his voice and the amount of caring he gives people is extraordinary.”

On June 21st, 1977, Lynch and Fisk married in a small ceremony at the church his parents attended in Riverside. “We were married on a Tuesday and David’s father had arranged to have the flowers from the Sunday service saved for us, so we had flowers, and he also hired an organist,” said Fisk. “We had a traditional wedding, then went on a honeymoon of one night in Big Bear.”

Sixteen days later Lynch registered a treatment with the Writers Guild for what he hoped would be his next film, Ronnie Rocket, then he and Fisk headed to New York City. Lynch lived in Barenholtz’s apartment there for three months while he worked with a lab, attempting to get a satisfactory release print of Eraserhead. Barenholtz paid to clear the rights to the Fats Waller music that plays an integral role in setting the mood of the film, and it was good to go. It premiered at Cinema Village in Manhattan that fall, with a birth announcement serving as the invitation to its official opening.

Getting a distributor for Eraserhead did nothing to solve Lynch’s money problems, and after returning from New York he spent the next few months living in Riverside, where he worked with his father remodeling a house they planned to flip. While Lynch was in Riverside, Fisk worked in the property-management division of Coldwell Banker and visited him on weekends. “We lived with David’s parents on and off for a while after we got married,” said Fisk. “He and his dad would come home from working on that house and his mother would rush to the door with her arms open and hug David and his dad. They’re a very loving family. The profit on the renovated house was seven thousand dollars, and David’s parents gave it all to him. They worried about him because they didn’t see the dreams he saw for himself—and yet they helped fund The Grandmother. It’s extraordinary that they would look at a son making work they could never grasp and support it anyway.”

At the end of 1977 Lynch was still in a black hole financially, so he converted his post-production facility into a workshop and began what he’s referred to as his “shed-building” phase, which means exactly that—he was building sheds and picking up odd carpentry jobs. Discouraging though this may sound, Lynch’s hopes were undimmed. “He was excited,” said Mary Fisk. “He’d finished the film, it had been at Filmex, and there was a buzz. I’d wake up to David and he’d have this big smile, ready for the day. He was ready for the next thing.

“Our social life revolved around spending time with the meditation community at the center,” she continued. “We were there every Friday night, and the people there became our closest friends. We’d meet up with them and go to movies—I saw lots of movies with David—but we weren’t caught up in the movie business at all.”

Meanwhile, Eraserhead was quietly becoming a word-of-mouth sensation on the midnight movie circuit and was in the early days of what turned out to be a four-year run at Los Angeles theater the Nuart. Eraserhead came along at an opportune time in that precisely the sort of hip audience capable of appreciating it was coalescing in Los Angeles then. Radical performance art was in its heyday, punk rock was gathering steam, and outré publications like Wet magazine, Slash, and the L.A. Reader, which celebrated all things experimental and underground, were flourishing. People from these factions of the city filled the seats at the Nuart and embraced Lynch as one of their own. John Waters encouraged his fans to see Eraserhead, Stanley Kubrick loved the film, and Lynch’s name started to get around.

He was still an outsider, but Lynch’s life had been transformed. He had a spiritual practice that anchored him, he had a new wife, and he’d made a film that was exactly what he set out to make. “I stayed real true to my original idea with Eraserhead,” Lynch has said, “to the point that there are scenes in the movie that feel like they’re more inside my head than they are on the screen.” And, finally, he had a handful of industry insiders and thousands of moviegoers who understood what he’d achieved with the film.

“David connects with a lot more people than you’d expect, and there’s something about his vision that people identify with,” concluded Jack Fisk. “The first time I saw Eraserhead was at a midnight screening at the Nuart, and the audience was riveted and knew all the dialogue. I thought, Oh my God! He’s found an audience for his stuff!”

JACK, JACK’S DOG Five, and my brother, John, drove cross country from Philly with me, and the drive west was beautiful. I remember one point when we were driving down into this gigantic valley and the sky was so big that when you came up over the ridge you could see four different kinds of weather at the same time. There was sunshine in one part of the sky and a violent storm in another part. We drove thirty hours straight to Oklahoma City, where we stayed with my aunt and uncle, then the second day we drove a long way and pulled off the road at night in New Mexico. It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and we saw a horse tied to one of the bushes. When we woke up the next morning there were Indians in pickup trucks driving in circles around us. We were on an Indian reservation and they probably wondered why the hell we were on their property, and I don’t blame them. We didn’t know we were on a reservation.

We got into L.A. after midnight on the third day. We drove down Sunset Boulevard, then turned at the Whisky a Go Go and went to Al Splet’s place, where we spent the night. The next morning I woke up and that’s when I discovered L.A. light. I almost got run over, because I was standing in the middle of San Vicente Boulevard—I couldn’t believe how beautiful the light was! I loved Los Angeles right off the bat. Who wouldn’t? So I’m standing out there looking at the light and I look over and there’s 950 San Vicente with a for rent sign. Within a couple of hours I rented that house for two hundred twenty dollars a month.

I’d sold the Ford Falcon back in Philly and I needed a car, so Jack, John, and I walked down to Santa Monica Boulevard and stuck our thumbs out. We got a ride with this actress and she said, “All the used-car lots are on Santa Monica Boulevard down in Santa Monica and I’m going that way, so I’ll take you right there.” We went in and out of a few places, then my brother spotted a 1959 Volkswagen with faded gray paint. My brother knows about cars, so he looked it over and said, “This is a good car.” I’d just won second prize in the Bellevue Film Festival for The Grandmother and the prize was two hundred and fifty dollars, so I used that money to buy the car, which cost maybe two hundred. I needed insurance and right across the street is State Farm, so I walk up these wooden steps to this nice guy on the second floor and he took care of the insurance. In a day I had a car with insurance and a house. It was unreal. Lots of people lived with us in that house on and off—Herb Cardwell was there, and Al Splet, and my brother, and Jack was with us for a while, too. It didn’t bother me having all those people living with us, but it would really bother me now.

The day Jack and my brother and I walked up to the AFI and I saw this mansion for the first time, I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy to be there. When I arrived in L.A. I wanted to make Gardenback and I’d finished a forty-page script; then I met Caleb Deschanel and he liked the script. He thought it was a horror film, sort of, and he took it to this producer he knew who made low-budget horror films. This guy says, “I want to make this and I’m going to give you fifty thousand dollars, but you gotta make the script a hundred or a hundred and twenty pages.” That really depressed me. The whole story was there but I still spent the next whole fuckin’ school year meeting with Frank Daniel and this student named Gill Dennis, who was kind of Frank’s sidekick, padding this thing with mundane dialogue I hated. In the back of my mind I was thinking, Do I really want to make this? Because I’d started getting ideas for Eraserhead.

One day during my first year at the AFI, Toni Vellani told me, “I want you to come and meet Roberto Rossellini.” So I walked over to Toni’s office and there was Roberto. We shook hands and sat down and talked and we just clicked. He told Toni, “I’d like David to be an exchange student and come to Rome and attend my film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.” They wrote it up in Variety that I was going there, but the next thing I know Rossellini’s school goes belly-up. It’s fate. I wasn’t supposed to go there. Still, it was nice meeting him.

I needed money, so Toni said, “You can intern with this guy Ed Parone who’s doing Major Barbara at the Mark Taper Forum,” so I interned there. What I was doing as an intern was getting coffees for Ed Parone. The play starred David Birney and Blythe Danner, and it was the debut of Richard Dreyfuss, who stole the show. I hated the play and didn’t like the director. He wasn’t very nice to me. Maybe I wasn’t getting good coffees for him, I don’t know. I had a bad attitude and had zero interest in theater. Blythe Danner was nice, though.

Toni knew I built things so he then got me a job in Utah, building props for Stanton Kaye’s film In Pursuit of Treasure. Before I got there I heard stories about Stanton Kaye, like they had to push him up the hill to go direct, he wasn’t on time, he didn’t give a shit or whatever—he was acting weird. I went to Utah and started building the treasure for In Pursuit of Treasure. I was making Aztec gods and gold bricks, just making stuff up, and it was just me in a basement with this guy named Happy, who worked at a circus and was a carny. “Happ,” I called him. I was only supposed to be there for a week, and after two weeks of this I wanted to go home, so I said, “My buddy Jack can do this stuff.” So Jack came and met a lot of people who saw that he was great, and it opened doors for him. I think that was a kind of a turning point for Jack.

The first day of my second year I go up to the AFI and I’ve been put in first-year classes, like I’d flunked. Plus, I’d wasted the last fucking year, and anger came up in me like unreal. I stormed down the hall, and Gill saw me and saw the look on my face and he said, “David, stop! Stop!” He chased me but I went right up to Frank’s office, past Mierka, his assistant, and walked in and said, “I quit!” I stormed out and went to see Alan and he said, “I quit, too!” So the two of us went to Hamburger Hamlet and griped and bitched and had coffee. A few hours later I went home and when Peggy saw me she said, “What’s going on? The school’s calling and they’re really upset that you left.” So I went up there and Frank said, “David, when you want to quit, we’re doing something wrong. What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to do Eraserhead,” and he said, “Then you’ll do Eraserhead.”

Once I started working on Eraserhead I stopped going to classes, but I’d go up from time to time to see a film. The projectionist in the big room at the AFI was a film buff beyond the beyond and when he’d say, “David, you’ve got to see this film,” I knew it would be something special. One thing he showed me was Blood of the Beasts, this French film that intercuts between two lovers walking through these streets in a little French town and a big old-style slaughterhouse. Cobblestone courtyard, big chains, and steel things. They bring a horse out and there’s steam coming out of the nostrils; they put this thing on the horse’s forehead and boom! Down the horse would go. Chains around his hooves hoist him up and they had him skinned in no time, blood going in the grate; then cut to this couple walking. It was something.

I was looking for actors for Eraserhead and there was a theater director named David Lindeman who I remember as a student at the AFI. I described the character of Henry to him and asked if he knew any actors who could play that, and he gave me two names. One of them was Jack Nance, so I decided to meet Jack. With Eraserhead, the first person I met was the person I cast, every single one. It’s not like I would take just anybody, but they were all perfect.

The Doheny mansion was built on a hill and it had a ground floor, a second floor, and underneath the ground floor was a basement with rooms that had been turned into offices. There was also a bowling alley there and a laundry room where the Dohenys had their wash done. Because sunlight is good for cleaning clothes, they had this pit that you couldn’t see from the street or from any angle. It had, like, sixteen-foot walls and was just an open pit where they hung their laundry. Beautiful pit. Concrete walls and real nice steps going up and out. That’s where I built the stage the Lady in the Radiator performs on. It sat there for a while because it took a long time to build it, probably because I didn’t have any money.

Anyhow, Jack Nance and I met in one of those basement offices. He came in and he was in a grumpy mood, like, What the fuck is this student-film bullshit. We sat and talked but it was real stilted and didn’t go well. When we finished talking, I said, “I’ll walk you out,” and we walked down this hall, not saying anything, and out some doors to a parking lot. We got out there and Jack looked at this car we passed and said, “That’s a cool roof rack.” I said, “Thanks,” and he said, “Is that yours? Oh my God!” Suddenly he was a completely different person. We started talking about Henry right then, and I said, “Henry’s got a confused look,” so Jack did a confused look. I said, “No, no, that’s not it. Let’s say Henry looks lost.” Jack did a lost look and I said, “No, that’s not it, either. Maybe it’s like he’s wondering,” and he put a wondering face on. I said no again, then finally I took him by the shoulders and I said, “Just be a total blank.” And he went blank and I said, “Jack, that’s it!” After that Jack went around saying, “Henry is a total blank.” I took him home and showed him to Peggy and she gave him a thumbs-up behind his back, then I took him back to the AFI. Jack was absolutely perfect in every way. I’ve thought about who else could’ve played Henry, everybody in the whole world I’ve seen since then, and there’s nobody. It was fate. Jack was perfect and, like Charlotte said, Jack didn’t mind waiting. He’d sit around thinking so many things in his head, and he doesn’t care what’s going on around him.

When I met Jack he had this kind of afro. We didn’t want his hair to look freshly cut for the film, so about a week before we began shooting I got a barber to come to the stables and he took Jack into the hayloft and cut his hair. I wanted it short on the sides, long on the top—that’s the look and it was very important. For some reason that’s just a thing I liked from the get-go in life. Jack’s haircut was very important, but it wasn’t until the first night of shooting when Charlotte ratted his hair that it really got there. It stood up way taller than I probably would’ve gone for, so she played a major role in the creation of Henry.

There was this incredible studio way down on the eastern end of Sunset Boulevard that was closing up shop, so I rented a thirty-five-foot flatbed truck and Jack and I went over there on a cloudy day and they were selling everything. We left there with this truck piled twelve feet high with flats, kegs of nails, wire, a thirty-by-forty-foot black backdrop, the radiator that’s in Henry’s room—different things. We said, “How much,” and the guy said, “Hundred bucks.” I built every set for the film out of those flats. There was a rug place on that same stretch of Sunset that looked like an old gas station or car-repair place. It was stucco and had a faded sign, and it was real dark and dusty as hell, and there were huge stacks of rugs piled up on a dirt floor. You’d look through these piles, lifting them up as you go, and when you found one you liked, these guys would come out of the darkness and roll back the pile and pull it out for you. If you didn’t like it they’d throw it back on top and the dust would fly. I got all the rugs in the film there, and we got all the sound stock we needed out of bins at Warner Bros. The bins were filled with beautiful rolls of mag that had been thrown away. Al and I had taken the back seat out of the Volkswagen and we got away with hundreds of rolls of used sound stock. You can reuse sound stock if you put it in a degausser, and Al would do this. I didn’t want to go near this thing, because it’s a huge magnet, and you feed the stock into the degausser and you have to turn it a certain way, and you’re rearranging the molecules, and then you bring it out a certain way and it’s clean.

Nobody was using the stables at the AFI, so I set up there and had a pretty-good-size studio for four years. Some people from the school came down the first night of shooting and they never came down again. I was so lucky—it was like I’d died and gone to heaven. During that first year the only people there were the actors, Doreen Small, Catherine Coulson, Herb Cardwell, then Fred when he took over from Herb, and me. Al was there when we shot location sound, but other than that nobody else was there. Ever. Over a four-year period there were a few weekends when extra people showed up to help, but day in and day out that was the crew. Right there. That’s it.

Doreen Small was integral to Eraserhead and she did great work. I never made anybody go have their chart done, though. People say things like, “David made me learn TM,” but you can’t force people to do things like that. It’s got to come from their desire to do it.

Alan Splet is the one who told me about this guy James Farrell, who lived in a little house in Silver Lake where you’d park on a patch of dirt. So I go see James and he’s an astrologer but he’s also a psychic, and this guy was something else. He was a very special psychic and gave magical readings. You’d get there and say hello to his wife, then she’d leave and he’d give a reading. I had no money, but I was able to see him many times because he was very reasonable—in those days everything was reasonable.

Many years later, sometime during Dune, I wanted to talk to him and now he’s living in an apartment building in Century City. He opens the door and he looks different, he’s almost floating, and he says, “David, I’ve gone totally gay!” He was so happy being gay, just no problem, and I say fine, and then he gave me a reading. I asked him about these girls that I was seeing and he said, “David, they all know each other.” Meaning that girls, they’ve got the surface, but there’s part of them that knows much more, and it made sense to me the way he said it. Girls are more advanced in many ways because they’re mothers, and this mothering thing is so important. Maharishi said the mother is ten times more important than the father for children. If women ran the world, I think peace would be way closer.

Five years or so after that reading, I’m talking with Mark Frost in a booth in Du-par’s on Ventura Boulevard. People are coming and going and at one point somebody walked by with a woman and I glimpsed some guy’s pants, a kind of orangey-pink sweater, and a little bit of a brownish-pink head. So I’m talking to Mark and then the coins started dropping. I turned around, and just then he turned around, and I said, “James?” And he said, “David?” I went over and talked to him, and there was something strange about him. His skin had sort of a red-orange hue to it, then later I heard that James died of AIDS. He was a brilliant astrologer and an incredible psychic and a really good person.

I played Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde in the food room at the stables, and Jack and I would listen to it at sunset as it got dark before we started shooting. I played it really loud, and I also played Vladimir Horowitz’s Moonlight Sonata. Oh my God, this guy could play it. He plays it slow, and I heard that he had the ability to play a piano key in one hundred different intensities, from the tiniest little note to a break-the-window note. Such soul comes through when he plays it. And Beethoven wrote that damn thing when he was deaf! Just amazing. Captain Beefheart was really a great artist, and I used to listen to Trout Mask Replica all the time then, too. People would start showing up at the stables at around six o’clock, and while we were waiting, Jack and I would sit in the food room and crank the music. We were in the best part of Beverly Hills, and we’d sit and watch the woods and the sunlight getting dimmer and smoke cigarettes and listen to this really loud music.

During that first year working on the film, I was drifting away from home, but not on purpose—I was just working all the time. Peggy and I were always friends and there was no dispute at home, because she’s an artist, too. When Jennifer and I made her a mud sculpture on the dining room table for her birthday, we got buckets and buckets of mud, and the mound went up at least three feet and to the very edge of the table. How many wives would love that in their dining room? About one! They’d fucking freak out! They’d say, You’re ruining the table! Peg just went crazy for it. She’s a great girl and she was letting me be an artist, but she had to take the back seat for a long time and I think she got depressed. It wasn’t a good time for her.

I ran out of money a year into shooting Eraserhead and Herb left, but I understood why Herb had to leave. Herb was a very interesting fellow. He was an excellent pilot because he thought in three dimensions, and he was a great mechanical engineer. One time Herb said to Peggy and me, “I’m getting an airplane. How would you like to fly out to the desert with me for the day?” We said, “Great.” When we got back it was getting dark, and as he was taxiing in he got on the radio and said good night to the tower. The way he said good night to the tower made the hair on the back of my neck go up. I had this feeling that in another time Herb was a long-distance space pilot. The way he said good night was just so beautiful, like he’d been saying it for a billion years.

One time Herb and Al decided to fly back east. Al is legally blind but he’s going to navigate, so they take off to go across the country, headed first for Pocatello, Idaho. They fly up there and Herb radios ahead to the little airport up there, and the guy said, “I’ll have a rental car here for you with the keys in the car. Turn off the lights and lock up when you leave.” So Herb parks the plane and they get in the rental car and start driving into Pocatello. They’re driving along at night on a two-lane highway with Herb driving, and Herb starts talking. As he’s talking, his voice starts to go up in pitch and he starts going off the road. Al says, “Herb!” Herb gets back on the highway. He keeps talking and his voice is going up even higher and he’s going off the road again, then he goes off the road completely and his voice is super high. Al is screaming at him, “Herb!” Finally Herb comes out of it and gets back on the road and he’s okay. Who knows what that was about.

Sometimes we’d get through shooting at two or three in the morning and it was too late to start another shot, so we’d all leave. Herb was living with us, but he wouldn’t come home. No one knew where Herb went, and then at nine in the morning his car would pull into the driveway. He’d come in and not say a word and you sort of knew not to ask. Jen remembers Herb in the morning and he moved real slow, not grumpy but not happy, and he’d reach up into this stash he had of chocolate breakfast bars that no one was allowed to touch. Jen wanted one of those breakfast bars so bad and I don’t think he ever shared one with her.

When Herb was working at Calvin de Frenes, there were times when you’d need high-security clearance to work on films because they were government films, and Herb had that clearance—a lot of people thought Herb worked for the CIA. Herb got a job designing 16mm projections for airplanes and had to go to London on a job. He’s traveling with some guys and they all know Herb’s an interesting guy. They were supposed to meet one morning in the Gatwick area, so these guys show up and they’re waiting for Herb and he’s not showing up. They call his room and there’s no answer, so they call the manager of his hotel and ask him to check Herb’s room, and they go up there and Herb is dead in the bed. They did an autopsy in London and find no cause of death. His mother has a funeral home in North Carolina and they did an autopsy, too, but they couldn’t find a cause of death, either. That was Herb.

Fred Elmes came in after Herb left, and the film changed as it went along. I’m always drawing stuff in the food room, so I’m in there and I’m drawing this little woman and when I finish the drawing I’m looking at her and that’s when the Lady in the Radiator got born. I don’t know if I had the lyrics for “In Heaven” then, but the lady was there, and I knew she lived in the radiator where it’s warm. I ran into Henry’s room because I’d forgotten what the radiator in there looked like, and of all the radiators I’ve seen since then, none of them have what this radiator had, which was a little compartment where someone could live. I couldn’t believe it. These things you just don’t argue with. The final shot of Henry with the Lady in the Radiator is so beautiful because it just burned out white. Glowing.

Whenever we had to build a set someplace on the grounds other than the stables, we’d have to work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and get it cleaned up by Monday before the gardeners came in. If we were in their way, we could get in trouble. We shot the scene where we come in on the planet in an area at the AFI where they stored firewood, and we did the fetus floating in space in my garage. The shots of Henry floating and of the planet surface were done in Fred’s living room. I built this long piece at my place then brought it to Fred, and he put together a beautiful track for the camera to be aimed down at this steep angle and track along. So you’re moving in on a planet, then you cut in and you’re traveling along the surface of the planet. Fred would tap in above the electrical box at his house, so we were stealing electricity, and we had big cables coming into his place. When we had questions about special effects, we’d talk to C-movie places—not B movies, C movies. We met some real characters and I learned something every place I went. Mostly I learned that it’s all common sense and that we could figure out how to do the effects shots ourselves.

I built the planet so it would break in a certain place, and I wanted to build a catapult that would shoot a chunk of the planet backed with lead or steel so when it hit the planet it would explode. Al had a completely different catapult idea, and I said, “That won’t work,” and he said, “No, yours won’t work,” so we built both of them and neither of them worked. Finally I just threw a chunk of the planet at it but it only broke half of the piece, and I threw another chunk. So it worked out great because there were two explosions instead of just one.

We had to shoot lots of things twice. Like the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall: Herb lit that scene with little pools of hard light, but Judith didn’t look beautiful under this light and the mood wasn’t right. So Herb relit the thing so it was like a soft wind of inky-black light, just beautiful.

One weekend we were shooting what was called the dime scene and I’d emptied my bank account and gotten sixty dollars worth of dimes. This was based on a dream I had about a dirt adobe wall. I scratch the surface of it and I see a little bit of silver, and inside the earth wall were rows and rows of dimes. You could just dig them out! It was incredible.

In the scene, which Henry witnesses from his apartment window, some kids find the dimes and then some adults come and chase them away and start fighting over them. So I bring in all this earth and these pipes and make a pond of dirty oil water. Then we had to set the camera up so it was angled from the point of view of somebody looking down on this scene. It took us so long, carrying these heavy things up a hill and building this thing, and we only have three days to do it. I remember Jack saying to me, “Lynch, they’ll never know,” and in a way that’s true with everything. So much goes on that people will never know about with every film. You can tell all the stories you want, but you still haven’t gotten across what the experience was like. It’s like telling somebody a dream. It doesn’t give them the dream.

So we got the scene done but only a small part of it wound up in the film. Jack had been drinking that night, and after we finished shooting, Catherine took me aside and said, “David, Jack is putting the dimes in his pocket.” So I went over and said, “Jack, I want those dimes back,” and he said, “Yeah, Lynch, you want it all!” And it hit me. I decided that night that I would give people points in the film because they’d been with me all the way through. That was the night that did it.

Jack was pissed off at Catherine for ratting on him about the dimes and he says to her, “Get in the stall, horse face!” Catherine is bigger than Jack, and she hauled back and slammed him in the nose and her ring cut his nose and he went down. So she left and I’m there with Jack and I say, “Come on, Jack, let’s go get some coffee,” and we drove to the Copper Penny and we had the greatest talk that night.

I was a seeker before I found TM and I’d been looking into different forms of meditation. Al was into Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, but they left me cold, and sometimes Al and I would get in big arguments about this stuff. Al didn’t drink all the time because he couldn’t afford to, but when he drank he’d get argumentative, and a lot of times he’d storm out and go home. We’d have good arguments.

Peggy’s father read constantly, and one day he gave me a book on Zen Buddhism. He never gave me any other books. I read it and a week later I went for a walk in the woods with him, and we’re walking along and he says, “That book says life is a mirage; do you understand that?” I said, “Yeah, I think I do.” And I did understand it. He was a really interesting guy. When we were living in Philadelphia we’d go to Peggy’s parents’ house for dinner on Sunday nights. These were the days before I got my car, so I was taking the train to work, and one Sunday night Peggy’s father said, “Okay, Wednesday morning when you get to the train station, go to platform nine. My train will be coming in and your train won’t have left yet. Hide behind the train, and at exactly 9:07 come out from behind the train and wave and then go away. I’ll do the same thing. Let’s coordinate our watches right now.” It had to be Wednesday, so I had to remember this thing for two days. Wednesday comes and I go to the station and I’m hiding behind my train, I’m there waiting and waiting, twenty seconds more, waiting and waiting, five, four, three, two, one; out I go, and I see him come out across the way from behind a train and we wave and go away. That was it, and it was so good for me because I did not let him down.

I was looking for something but I hadn’t found it yet, and one day I’m talking to my sister on the phone and she starts telling me about Transcendental Meditation. I said, “A mantra! I’ve gotta have a mantra,” and I got off the phone and said to Catherine, “Do you want to start meditating with me?” and she said, “Sure.” I told her to call and find out where we should go, and she happened to dial the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center. In L.A. then there was the Students International Meditation Society and SRM, and my sister is right when she says SRM was the perfect place for me. Charlie Lutes was giving introductory lectures, and Charlie was the right guy for me because he was interested in the spiritual side of meditation as opposed to the scientific side. Thank goodness for Charlie and Helen—I loved both of them and learned so much from them. Charlie would see I had holes in my shirts and give me shirts that were old for him but were mint condition for me. They sort of looked after me a little bit.

Charlie loved Maharishi, and in the early days he was pretty much his right-hand man. Before Charlie met Maharishi he was into all kinds of things, though, and sometimes he would tell tall tales about different things, like one night he was picked up by aliens and flew from L.A. to Washington, D.C., and then back to L.A. in a matter of minutes. One night after his lecture he said, “Did you see it?” I said, “See what?” He said, “There was a huge angel in the back of the room during my lecture.” He wasn’t nuts, but he was on another frequency big time. Before Charlie and Helen moved to Scottsdale, they went to Vlodrop to see Maharishi and he said to Charlie, “Come here and be with me,” and Charlie said, “Our dogs need taking care of,” and Maharishi just waved his hand dismissively. A lot of people around Maharishi were upset with Charlie, but Maharishi wasn’t. He didn’t really get upset.

I didn’t care one bit about meditation when the Beatles were meditating, but then it was as if a switch had been thrown and I couldn’t get enough. Everything in me changed when I started meditating. Within two weeks of starting, Peggy comes to me and says, “What’s going on?” I said, “What are you talking about?” because she could’ve been referring to any number of things. And she says, “Your anger. Where did it go?” I used to be really bad in the morning and if I didn’t have my cereal exactly right I would make life miserable for Peggy. She’d see me start to get up and she’d race up to the Sun Bee Market on Sunset and race back home with cereal. I was not happy in those days and I took it out on her. I once showed Doreen Small something I was writing before I started meditating, and it made her cry because there was so much anger in it. When I started meditating the anger went away.

Before I started meditating I worried that doing it would make me lose my edge, and I didn’t want to lose the fire to make stuff. I found out it gives you more fire to make stuff and more happiness in the doing and way more of an edge. People think anger is an edge, but anger is a weakness that poisons you and the environment around you. It’s not a healthy thing and it’s not good for relationships, for sure.

I moved into the stables when Peggy and I split up, and that was the greatest place. I’d lock myself in Henry’s room and I loved sleeping there, but eventually I had to leave and I moved into a bungalow on Rosewood Avenue. Edmund Horn was my landlord, and my place was at the end of his driveway in the back. There’s a scene in Eraserhead of a bum on a bus bench, and the bum is wearing Edmund’s sweater. Edmund was around sixty years old when I met him and he was a concert pianist who traveled with Gershwin in the thirties. He was a homosexual who lived to be over a hundred years old, and because he didn’t have children he started buying properties, and he wound up owning lots of places in West Hollywood. He was a multimillionaire but he didn’t care about money; his clothes were filthy and he dressed like a bum. He was persnickety and he could get in a bad mood and turn on you, but I got along with him great. He tolerated all the things I wanted, and I think he thought I was a good tenant because I’d do odd jobs for him. I put in a lot of hot water heaters for Edmund and I kind of loved that job. When I had my paper route I always had some leftover newspapers, and I’d leave them on Edmund’s back porch and he loved to read them.

He had a Volkswagen parked outside his house, but it had refrigerator cardboard on top and the tires were cracked and he never drove it. He walked everywhere. He used to collect rainwater in these porcelain dishes, and he’d take this rainwater inside and shave his underarms with rainwater. Nothing was ever updated in his house—it was all stuff from the twenties—and he had one forty-watt bulb in there. He’d watch TV at night and that would be the only light in the house. He was very frugal. One night I hear this pounding coming from inside Edmund’s house and I go out and listen, and he’s banging on his walls with his fists, crying, “Help me,” from the depths of his being. He wasn’t calling for people to help him. He was crying out to the cosmos for help.

When you rent a place a garage usually goes with it, but with Edmund you didn’t get a garage. Edmund, why don’t I get the garage? Look in the garage. What’s in the garage? Cardboard boxes. He loved cardboard boxes. His favorites were waxed fruit boxes. And Edmund’s boxes weren’t folded up—they were stacked, floor to ceiling, cardboard boxes. I talked Edmund into letting me build him a new garage and taking over the garage that was already there, which was a big garage. I built Edmund a new garage and he was happy with it, but he upped my rent a little bit and all his boxes had to be moved from the old garage to the new one. Then I built an L-shaped gable shed in the yard and a second shed, where I could store my tools. I had my table saw out in the yard and I sprayed WD-40 on it all the time so it wouldn’t rust out, and I covered it with a canvas. This old garage of Edmund’s was where I did the post-production on Eraserhead. I had a really old Moviola, but it wasn’t a bubble-top Moviola; it was upgraded to have a viewer and it was really kind to film. So I was cutting on a Moviola, not even a flatbed, and I had all my film in racks, and I had an editing table and some synchronizers in there.

I was still working on the film when Al left for Findhorn, and it really depressed me when he left. Al was a funny one. He’s a hell-bent-for-leather person, and when he gets on a thing he just goes and does it. Fine. But I really wanted him to help me with Eraserhead. So off he goes. I think he enjoyed it for a while but he came back after several months, and I was really glad to see him when he did. He lived in my garage after he got back and he’d have his salads, and he eats his salads the same way he did everything. Mixing and eating salads was just ferocious. Al had a desk on one side of the garage, and although we hardly had any sound equipment Al was over there doing sound. Al did this thing in the morning we called “putting in his eyes,” and he’d have the same setup each time. He’d have a paper towel and he’d fold it a specific way and he’d have a shallow bowl with liquid in it and his little container of contacts. He’d open up this container and take one of the contacts and move it around in the solution really fast, then he’d put it in and blot his fingers on the paper towel. Then he’d do the other one, work that contact like crazy in the solution, put it in, and he’d be done.

There was a big room in the Doheny mansion called the Great Hall that was originally a ballroom, and the AFI built a slanted floor in there and put in a big screen and a projection booth with dubbers in a balcony that was originally a place for an orchestra. Down below they had the mixing console. The Great Hall had a chandelier that would rise up into the ceiling and dim as it went up, so when you saw a film there it was quite a show. One day Al and I were in there mixing and these people came in. I didn’t want anybody in there and I told them to leave, then somebody else came in and said, “These people from Cannes are here. Could they come in and see something? This could be really good for you, David.” Normally I would say no but I said okay, just a little bit. I didn’t really see them but I pictured a bunch of people wearing berets, and they saw maybe five or seven minutes. Later I was told they said, “He out-Buñueled Buñuel,” and that I should take the film to New York, where they were screening films for Cannes.

That opened the door to thinking maybe we could get into Cannes, and Al said, “If you want to make that date we have to work around the clock and you have to stop going to Bob’s.” It almost killed me. I had to give up milkshakes. Al felt sorry for me, though, and one day he said, “Let’s take a break and go to Hamburger Hamlet.” So we go and have coffee and I see this piece of Dutch apple pie in the case. I get a slice and it’s so good but it’s expensive, so I can’t do that again. One day I’m in the supermarket and I see an entire Dutch apple pie that costs just a little more than that slice did, so I buy the pie, read the instructions, put it in the oven, and it cooks. I’d cut a slice and wrap it in tinfoil and hide it under my jacket, then go to Hamburger Hamlet for coffee and sneak bites of the pie while we were having coffee. And we finished the film in time for Cannes.

I used to go to Du-par’s at the Farmers Market, where they had these tall blue-gray wooden shopping carts with two wheels, so I found the office of the manager of the Farmers Market and went up these wooden steps to this beautiful office on the second or third floor of a building there. This guy invited me in and I said, “I’ve gotta take twenty-four rolls of film to New York City. Could I borrow a shopping cart to take them there?” He said, “Listen, pal, people steal those fuckin’ things all the time and they don’t ever come in and ask. It’s nice of you to ask, so of course you can. And good luck to you.” I had twelve rolls of picture and twelve rolls of sound and I loaded them all onto this heavy cart, taped it all together, and checked it in as baggage. I took all my money out of the bank for a ticket on the red-eye, and I was really sick when I flew there, with a bad cold and a fever. The Lady in the Radiator’s sister lived there and she gave me breakfast, then helped me get in a cab, and I went to a theater downtown. I took the film in and this guy said, “Just set it there—these films here are ahead of you,” and he pointed to a long row of films. I went and got coffees and donuts and all day long I was pacing out front, then finally the projectionist started running it late in the afternoon. I’m listening at the door—the film seemed so long! He finally said, “Okay, it’s done,” and I packed it up and went home.