Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  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.