by David Lynch
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.”
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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.
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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 s
easons 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
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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.”
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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.”
