Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Heading into the final phase of the shoot, Lynch found a location an hour outside of London that he felt would work well for a scene set in Belgium. Shooting at the location would’ve been prohibitively expensive, so Stuart Craig devised a way to re-create it on a soundstage; the set he created required a soundstage of a scale Wembley couldn’t provide, however. The Lee brothers had just acquired Shepperton Studios, a much larger facility on the opposite side of London that could also accommodate the film’s post-production needs, so Fisk and Lynch moved to a flat in Twickenham and the production moved to Shepperton, where the movie was completed.

  There were seven soundstages at Shepperton then (there are fifteen today), and when Lynch arrived there were movies in production on all of them. Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners was just gearing up and consumed a great deal of space with a major exterior set. “David and I had to park far from our offices because we were now the little movie in the back,” Sanger recalled.

  During this final phase of the shoot, Alan Splet arrived at Shepperton, and he and Lynch worked together alone in a room without conferring with the sound crew already in place. “The sound people didn’t know why Alan was there, because people didn’t understand what sound design was at that point. There weren’t many sound designers in movies then and Alan was really one of the pioneers in the field,” said Sanger of Splet, who won an Academy Award in 1979 for his sound design on Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion.

  Fisk recalled, “As the shoot was getting close to the end, David felt that the film was bogging down. I knew what he was going for, because we talked about it all the time, so he decided I should see a rough cut. A few people working on the film heard there was going to be a screening and they came, too. Afterward, one of the people who’d seen it called David and said he hated the film and wanted his name taken off of it, and nobody could believe he’d made this piece of junk. I had to scrape David off the floor.

  “While David was still editing the film, EMI edited a version without him, then called Mel and told him they had a cut of the film to show him,” Fisk continued. “Mel said, ‘I’m not even going to look at what you’ve done. We’re going with David’s version.’ The studio guys will crush you, and they were going to crush David, and Mel was an unreal advocate for him.”

  The first cut of the film ran for almost three hours and was edited down to a final version that’s two hours and six minutes. “There were lots of shots of people walking down long hallways and atmosphere stuff that ended up being cut,” said Cornfeld, “but most of what was shot wound up onscreen. Mel had final cut but he deferred to David on that, and he took no credit at all on the film because he didn’t want his name to create any expectations about what the film was.”

  Lynch’s idea of relaxing is to make something, and when Fisk returned to America for additional medical care following her miscarriage, he came up with a project for himself. The day she left London, he went to a fish counter and purchased a mackerel, took it home, dissected it, laid out the parts, labeled them for ease in reassembly, then photographed the display. “What the average person sees as grotesque isn’t grotesque to me,” Lynch has commented. “I’m obsessed with textures. We’re surrounded by so much vinyl that I find myself constantly in pursuit of textures.” He called his mackerel project a Fish Kit, and it included instructions to “place finished fish in water, and feed your fish.” It was the first in a series of kits that included a Chicken Kit and a Duck Kit. He also collected six dead mice for a Mouse Kit he never got around to making, and he left the mice in a freezer in the house in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he lived while making Blue Velvet. He was interested in doing kits of larger animals but never got the opportunity.

  Filmmakers are photographers, too—it’s a crucial aspect of location scouting—and Lynch began actively pursuing photography at approximately the same time that he was making The Elephant Man. The photographs he’s produced over the past thirty-eight years have two enduring themes: women and abandoned factories. He’s often commented on how compelling he finds the power and grandeur of machinery, and he developed a particular fascination with industrial ruins during his months in England. “I heard that the north of England had the greatest factories, so I organized a trip with Freddie Francis, but I probably missed it by just a few years,” Lynch has recalled. “Everywhere we went, the factories had been all torn down. It was a very depressing trip.”7

  Post-production was still in progress when Fisk returned to London in early summer of 1980. “He wasn’t on such a pressured schedule by then, and we did watercolors together at home,” she recalled. “We also took a week off and went to Paris, which was fantastic. The first night was terrible, though, because David is a penny-pincher and I was always nervous about spending money on anything, so I got a hotel he was horrified by. The neighborhood didn’t seem bad to me, but he said, ‘I’m not going out of the room!’ ”

  In September of 1980 Lynch returned to L.A. with a finished print of the film, and promotion for it began immediately. Lynch and Fisk were still living in the tiny bungalow on Rosewood when the billboard for The Elephant Man went up on Sunset Boulevard, and Fisk recalled that “it didn’t seem like much changed when we first got home. David didn’t start getting a lot of attention until after the film came out in October, so we just sort of picked up where we left off.”

  Lynch has an impressive ability to do several different things at once, and on returning to Los Angeles he appeared in director John Byrum’s movie adaptation of Carolyn Cassady’s autobiography, Heart Beat, which starred his friend Sissy Spacek. Lynch plays an artist, and he made the paintings that appear in the film, too.

  He also deepened his involvement with photography and shot a series of pictures at a defunct oil well located in the heart of Los Angeles. It was a peculiar relic of the past that’s now gone, and the pictures he took there served as a kind of template for all the images that were to follow. Lynch’s industrial photographs are classically composed and formal, and his pictures have an ineffable softness; it’s as if they’ve been printed on velvet. The whites are never crisp or shrill, and everything shades into gray. Those early photographs shot in L.A. depict coiled hoses, pipes, faucet heads, and large tanks bound with neat rows of rivets, as elegant as hand-stitching on a shirt. Twenty years later Lynch was to find the factories of his dreams in Łódź, Poland, and the roots of the pictures he took there are visible in those images he made in Los Angeles in 1980.

  Lynch kept busy as The Elephant Man edged toward its release date and occupied himself with other things. “David didn’t go to the cast-and-crew screening—he was too much a bundle of nerves—but I went and I sat next to John Hurt’s good friend Jeremy Irons,” recalled Fisk.

  Lynch skipped the premiere of the film, as well. “David was too nervous to go, so he stayed home on Rosewood and babysat my six-month-old son, Andrew, while I went to the premiere with our parents and two of our aunts, Margaret and Nonie, who are our dad’s sisters,” recalled Martha Levacy. “David hadn’t told us much about the movie so we had no idea what to expect, and we were just blown away as this incredible movie unfolded in front of us. We were speechless and the audience was mesmerized.”

  Released on October 3rd, 1980, the film netted eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture, director, actor, adapted screenplay, editing, original score, art direction, and costume design. “I remember Charlie Lutes saying, ‘David’s entering a whole new world now,’ ” Levacy recalled, “and his life changed a lot after The Elephant Man.”

  The change came fast, too. “Jack and I always knew how cool David was, but once he did The Elephant Man we had to share him with the rest of the world,” recalled Sissy Spacek. “Once people work with David they want to work with him again and get near the flame, because he completely surrenders himself to the creative process. Sometimes that’s like plowing a field and other times it’s like being in a rocket
ship, but it’s always exciting, and David takes people on that journey.”

  Mary Fisk recalled how thrilled Lynch was when the film got those nominations. “When we were living on Rosewood, I had a grocery shopping cart and I used to go to the market across the street from this exclusive restaurant called Chasen’s,” she continued. “I could only spend thirty dollars a week, then I’d walk the groceries home. One night I looked over at Chasen’s and saw this big limo pull up and Diahann Carroll and Cary Grant stepped out, which seemed very glamorous. A year or so later a limo pulled up to Chasen’s and David and I got out for a party for The Elephant Man, with all the executives, actors, writers, and producers. David always had big dreams, but I’ve never seen dreams come true the way they have for him. We literally went from rags to riches.

  “David always knew he was going to be famous,” Fisk added. “He had that vision for himself.”

  Lynch’s career had picked up a great deal of momentum by the end of the year, when Fisk became pregnant again. “When David asked me to marry him I told him I wanted a family,” said Fisk, “and he said, ‘When I make seventy-five thousand a year we’ll have children.’ He didn’t even have a job when he said that, so the idea of making that much money seemed pretty remote, but that’s exactly what his salary was for The Elephant Man. Several months later I brought it up again, and he said, ‘You can have a baby if Sissy has a baby,’ thinking she’d never get pregnant because she was focused on her work. Then Sissy got pregnant in October of 1981, but David still resisted the idea. Finally, I decided to have my tubes tied and had the procedure scheduled, but David didn’t like that idea, so on December 28th, he said, ‘We’ll make love tonight, and if you get pregnant then it’s meant to be.’ And I got pregnant.”

  It was time to move out of the tiny bungalow on Rosewood. Lynch and Fisk began looking at real estate, and early in 1982 they purchased a small house in Granada Hills for $105,000. “David didn’t love being in the Valley, but we couldn’t afford anything in L.A.,” said Fisk. “We’d become friends with Jonathan Sanger and his wife, and they lived in Northridge, and Charlie and Helen Lutes and some other meditator friends lived in the Valley, so we gravitated there.”

  Levacy described their new house as “nice, but real predictable, and not the kind of house David would choose. He knew it was important to Mary, though, and I never heard him complain. They were expecting a baby and it was thoughtful, him buying that house, and he did that for Mary. It didn’t seem like a place for him, though.”

  Lynch and Fisk didn’t last long in Granada Hills; the Hollywood elite was finally hip to Lynch, and he was about to experience a whirlwind of attention that would take him out of the San Fernando Valley and knock him slightly off course. Most of the studios and producers who came calling didn’t know quite what to do with him, but everyone agreed he was uniquely gifted.

  “David really is a bit of a genius, no two ways about it,” Mel Brooks concluded, “and he understands the human psyche and emotions and the human heart. He’s all screwed up, too, of course, and he projects his own emotional and sexual turmoil into his work and assaults us with the feelings he’s being assaulted by. And he does that brilliantly in every movie he makes. I love the guy, and I’m grateful to him for making what may be the best movie Brooksfilms ever produced.”

  YOU KNOW HOW Bushnell Keeler was such an important person in my life? How we all have important people? Stuart Cornfeld is another one of my important people. One day I came home and Mary Fisk said, “A man named Stuart Cornfeld called.” There was something about his name and I started walking around the house saying, “Stuart Cornfeld called, Stuart Cornfeld called.” Then he called back, and when I answered the phone he said, “You’re a fuckin’ genius,” and that made me feel good. He wanted to take me to lunch so we went to Nibblers, and he wanted to help me get Ronnie Rocket going. Stuart had a great sense of humor and good energy—he’s a guy who’s just pushing forward and I liked that.

  Before I met Stuart a guy named Marty Michelson tried to help me for a while. He liked Eraserhead, and I guess he was my agent for a short time, but nothing came of that. I’d also had one meeting at a studio about Ronnie Rocket, with this guy who produced Car Wash. He said, “Okay, hotshot, whaddya got?” I said, “I have this film called Ronnie Rocket,” and he said, “What’s it about?” I said, “It’s about a man who’s three and a half feet tall, with a red pompadour, who runs on sixty-cycle alternating-current electricity.” He said, “Get out of my office.”

  Ronnie Rocket wasn’t happening, so it wasn’t a stretch for me to consider directing something written by somebody else. I was married, I wasn’t working, and I was in a shed-building mode, doing small jobs and maybe working on some art if I had any money. I didn’t really care about money and Mary was supporting me. She was a great executive secretary and could get a job in a second. She was totally boss looking and was great at the job, and every morning she’d look like a million dollars as she headed off to executive world while I stayed home like a bum. I don’t remember what I did all day, but I probably just thought about Ronnie Rocket. Finally my mother-in-law said to Mary, “Nothing’s going to happen with Ronnie Rocket and you better light a fire under this turkey. Maybe he could direct something written by somebody else.”

  I’d been thinking maybe I could do that, too, so I called Stuart and said, “Stuart, do you know of any films I could direct?” He said, “David, I know of four films you could direct—meet me at Nibblers.” So I went to Nibblers and as soon as we sat down in a booth I said, “Okay, Stuart, tell me.” He said, “The first one is called The Elephant Man,” and a hydrogen bomb went off in my brain. I said, “That’s it.” It was like I knew it from somewhere in the deep past. That was absolutely the one, and I never heard what the other three were and didn’t want to know. Stuart said, “There’s a script,” and I said, “I wanna read it.”

  Jonathan Sanger had bought the script, and he got to know Stuart when both of them worked for Mel Brooks. Mel was busy starting his company Brooksfilms, and somehow Stuart got Mel’s wife, Anne Bancroft, to read the script, and luckily she loved it and told Mel to read it. Mel reads it and loves it and says, “This will be my first film for Brooksfilms.” So he got everybody together and he pointed to each one of them and said, “You’re in.” Then he said, “Who is this David Lynch?” They said, “He’s the guy who made this film Eraserhead,” and he said, “I want to see it.” They called me and said, “Mel wants to see Eraserhead before you can do this,” and I said, “It’s been nice knowing you guys.” I just felt, well, that’s it. They said, “He’s seeing it this afternoon and you have to come and meet him afterward.” So I’m in the lobby outside this screening room and the doors burst open after the film and Mel comes charging toward me, embraces me, and says, “You’re a madman, I love you!” It was really great.

  Chris and Eric had written a good script that caught the essence of the Elephant Man, but there was no turmoil in the thing and Mel, being a savvy guy, said, “It’s gotta be rewritten.” And I got to be a writer with Chris and Eric. I’d been doing the paper route and stuff and was making fifty dollars a week, and automatically I was making two hundred a week to do something that’s as much fun as writing! My mother-in-law’s happy, this is a gravy train—I had it fuckin’ made. We worked in an office on the Fox lot and we’d have lunch in the commissary and it was like suddenly I was in the movie business.

  Mel was pretty involved with the rewrite. I like more abstract things, but we needed to get some tension in the script; I don’t know who came up with the ideas, but the night porter and the bar and the hookers were born, so there was this force in opposition to the Elephant Man. None of us typed, so either Chris or Eric wrote what we came up with in longhand, and whichever one wasn’t writing was juggling. They had these little beanbags they’d juggle and I learned how to juggle then.

  I hadn’t flown too many places at that point in my l
ife, but here I am off to London with Jonathan, and we have to stop off in New York to meet this DP who was there shooting Billy Friedkin’s film Cruising, because maybe he’s going to shoot The Elephant Man. So we get there and go to see this wealthy friend of Jonathan’s who’s married to one of these TV news anchormen and lives on Central Park West. We get to the building and there’s a doorman, and you take this beautiful old wood elevator and when it stops you’re not on a floor; the doors open and you’re in their giant apartment. The butler meets us and takes us through these rooms and the walls are lined with deep green, brown, and violet suede. We go into this front room with a huge window overlooking Central Park and the butler starts bringing us hors d’oeuvres and wine, and we’re drinking and talking. This was the first time I’d been exposed to this kind of wealth. Meanwhile, Billy Friedkin’s in Central Park shooting Cruising with this DP we’re there to meet, and we’re supposed to go down there. I didn’t want to go, though, because I never want to go on other people’s sets. So Jonathan went and I waited in Central Park, which just reeked of urine. Pitch-black paths, urine, dark vibes everywhere, and I hated it. New York scares the shit out of me, right? So I’m freaking out. I guess we met the DP and he was a good guy, but he didn’t commit to anything; then the next day we get on the Concorde.

  Three hours and twenty minutes later and we’re in London. It was still light out because it was summer, so we walked around for a while, then when we got back to the hotel there was Stuart. We were sitting there talking to Stuart when he said, “Mel’s going to come over because he doesn’t know if David can hit the emotional points of this film.” I said, “What?” Then I stood up and said, “I’m outta here.” I went upstairs and couldn’t sleep, and I got a high fever and was sweating like crazy all night long. Like, torment. In the morning I showered and got dressed and meditated, then went downstairs thinking, If someone doesn’t apologize and straighten this thing out, I’m going home. The elevator doors open and Stuart’s standing there and he says, “I’m so sorry, David. Mel trusts you one hundred percent.” I don’t know why Stuart said what he’d said the day before, but this is what the making of that film was like. It was a testing thing.