Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Now it’s getting to be five-thirty, so we decide to pack it in and we both head back in our separate boats. It’s still sunny when we leave, but when I get to the end of the line of buoys I turn left and when I turn it was like the Twilight Zone. It went from a sunny day to the darkest night and a full storm. Like in an instant. I had to stand up in the boat because the rain was pelting and I couldn’t see out the windshield, and I had an engine on the boat that had a top speed of twenty miles an hour, and the waves are getting bigger and bigger. Then I remembered that I hadn’t measured the gas before I headed out, which is something you’re always supposed to do. So I’m going along in these waves and I lost track of how many buoys I counted, then I come up behind this giant fishing vessel, like two or three stories high. It was all lit up, and I got in its wake and it was real smooth and I’m going along enjoying being in this boat’s wake. Then it starts veering off to the left and I think, This boat is going out to sea and I don’t want to go out to sea. So I turned right and the waves are really big now, and it’s pitch-dark, just fog and storm. Suddenly I see shore lights and there’s the arch to the mouth of the river, and I drove in and parked. That’s a chickenshit story for real sailors, for sure, but it was hair-raising for me.

  * * *

  —

  I was living in an apartment in Westwood after Blue Velvet, but I like modern architecture and I wanted a modern house of my own. I heard Crosby Doe Real Estate was the place to go, so I called them and there was a guy there named Jan who was my guy to talk to. He took me to a couple of places that I didn’t like, and then I left for New York. Not long after I got there I get a call from him and he said, “I think I found your house.” I came back to L.A. and he picked me up to go see it and told me the house was pink. We’re winding through the Hollywood Hills and I see the house, and the second I look at it I had to have it. I said, “That’s it,” and I was trembling. We went in and met this guy, Will, who owned the house, and he had white wall-to-wall shag carpet in there, but I didn’t care. I knew what the house was. Will said, “I want David to have it and this is the price,” and I said, “Okay,” and I moved in in June of 1987. When I moved into the Pink House I set up a studio in the basement and I did a lot of painting down there.

  I was able to buy this house, yeah, but I wouldn’t say I felt rich then. I’ve never felt rich. In fact, when I was living on Rosewood I was richer than I was when I bought the house. When I moved into Rosewood my rent was eighty-five dollars a month and I had a big room with a dividing wall, so I had a bedroom, a sitting area, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a tub and shower. I’d built a shed outside for all my tools. I had a drawing table set up, I had a refrigerator, a stove, and a washing machine, and on the flat roof was a clothesline. I had a car, a television, chairs, lamps, and a telephone, and I could go to this gas station called “Y-Pay-More” on Santa Monica Boulevard and San Vicente and fill up the car for three dollars.

  Money’s a funny thing. The whole point of having money is to feel free, and relatively speaking, I guess I have some money now, but I’ve never felt free. It’s the weirdest thing. I’ve never really felt free. One time right after Peggy and I decided to split up, I had a euphoria of freedom. I remember I was riding in a convertible on one of those freeway cloverleafs in downtown L.A., and I was on a section where it seemed to soar up into the air and I felt real freedom for a moment or two. And that’s pretty much the extent of my ever feeling free. I don’t know what it is that I feel is constraining me, but I do know that I have obligations, so I’m not really free.

  A lot of different stuff was happening in that period. I acted in Tina Rathborne’s film Zelly and Me, and I don’t know how that happened, but I did it and didn’t regret doing it. It’s Tina’s story and she grew up in the world that’s in that film, and Isabella liked Tina and wanted to do it.

  It was right around then that I met Monty Montgomery and we became friends. Monty is a very gracious human being and he was always inviting me places, and he was such a character. During that period I made a commercial for the first time; it was for Yves St. Laurent’s perfume Opium, and it was fun. Monty said that I love to shoot anything, and that’s pretty much true. You do commercials for money, but I always learn something when I do them, because they use the latest and greatest technology, so you learn what’s going on. There’s an efficiency you learn making them, and commercials are little stories that can be really beautiful. Pierre Edelman got that commercial for me, then Monty helped me with post-production and that’s when we began working together.

  I met an art dealer named Jim Corcoran then who wanted to show my work, and Jim is a great guy. Mr. Minimal. He knows everybody in the art world, and him liking my work was a thrill. I loved Leo Castelli, too. He was a friend of Isabella’s, two Italians, and she introduced us. It wasn’t about art at all when we met, just talking to him and hanging out, and I don’t know how or where he saw my work. He gave me a show, but I wonder if he did it for Isabella or some kindness or something. Anyway, I had a show with Leo Castelli! And it was great.

  There was a guy named Jeff Ayeroff at Virgin Records then, and when Blue Velvet came out he wanted me to do a music video of “In Dreams.” Then I found out that Roy hated the way his song was used in Blue Velvet. This song was super personal to Roy because his first wife, Claudette, had been killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966 and even though he’d recorded “In Dreams” three years before she died, the song sort of became about that for him. Then a friend of his said, “Roy, you gotta go see the movie again—it’s super cool.” And being the great Roy Orbison, he went back and saw it and he said, “You’re right.” One thing led to another and I get to meet Roy, and Roy is a woodworker and we start talking shop, saws and stuff, and I just loved him. He was a down-to-earth, really good guy, super sweet.

  The record company that owned all his songs had gone bankrupt and his songs were locked in some kind of legal thing, so he couldn’t gain any revenue from them and had decided to rerecord all of them and sell them on late-night TV. Remember those ads at two in the morning? Jeff went to him and said, “Roy, Virgin Records will do this. You don’t have to do this—we’ll pay for the album.” Roy had already made all the recordings, though, and Jeff sent them to me and they were not good. I called Jeff and said, “You can’t put this out. They’re so far away from the original, you’ve gotta not do this.” Jeff said, “It’s too late, he’s going to do it, but if you want to try to redo ‘In Dreams,’ we could do that one.” I said, “That’s not what I’m saying! There shouldn’t be a remake with anybody doing it!” He said, “I know, but this might be a good thing for you and Roy to do.” So we went into the studio with T Bone Burnett. The recording we made doesn’t have the quality the original has, but how could it?

  Roy said, “David, during sessions in the old days, there would always be a director-type guy like you who’d say, ‘Come on, Roy, give it more power! Remember what you wrote the song about and give it some feeling!’ ” So I was kind of directing Roy and it was really fun. One time it was late and in come Bono and Bob Dylan. Bono wasn’t a big star then and was just coming up, but I figured since he was with Dylan he’s going to be big. I didn’t really meet Dylan then—I met him with Dennis Hopper, actually. I went with Dennis to a Bob Dylan concert at the Greek Theatre and Dennis and I went up to Bob Dylan’s dressing room, and it was kind of flattering. Bob says, “Oh, hey, David,” like he knew me, and it was great. Bob Dylan? Fuckin’ A, man. The best.

  Anyhow, Bono and Bob Dylan were talking to Roy, and after they left I asked the engineer if there was a room where I could go meditate, and he said, “Sure, I can get you a quiet room.” Then Barbara Orbison comes up to me and says, “What kind of meditation do you do?” I said Transcendental Meditation and she said, “Roy and I do Transcendental Meditation!” So Barbara and Roy and I went into a room and meditated together. It was fantastic meditating with the great Roy Orbison. The Big O
.

  That was the same year I made The Cowboy and the Frenchman. Frederic Golchan isn’t an actor—he’s a producer—but he was absolutely perfect for The Cowboy and the Frenchman. He has this crazy look in his eyes, and he’s French, and he did it great. Harry Dean Stanton’s in it, too, and what isn’t special about Harry Dean? One of the greatest guys in the world and I love him to pieces. I could sit next to him for hours, because everything that comes out of him is natural, no pretense, no bullshit, just beautiful, and he’s the kindest, gentlest soul. He’s got a melancholy thing, and he’s got his own spiritual thing going, too. He would never do TM. His meditation is just life, he says. And this guy can sing. A girl named Sophie Huber did a documentary on Harry Dean called Partly Fiction, and there’s a trailer for the film with some footage of Harry Dean at his house with a friend who’s playing the guitar. Harry Dean’s sitting on a couch leaning back, and first of all there’s a close-up of his face and there is some stuff going on in that face. He’s singing “Everybody’s Talkin’,” the song Harry Nilsson made popular, and tears were just shooting out of my eyes when I saw it. The way he sings it, it’s like, forget it. It’s so incredible. I can’t really believe he’s gone….

  Like I said, I was doing a lot of different things then, and right after I finished shooting Wild at Heart I went to New York and Industrial Symphony No. 1 happened. We only had two weeks to get it together, and I wrote this sort of factory thing and did some drawings, and I wanted Patty Norris to work on it. But she said, “David, you can’t use me, because it’s in New York and if I come into their world they’ll turn against me. You need somebody from there.” So I got this woman who had a factory in New Jersey and she did the most beautiful set.

  Angelo and I wrote a few new things for it, but mostly it was Julee Cruise doing four songs from her album, then I shot this thing with Nic Cage and Laura Dern that was projected. I was working with Johnny W. [Wentworth] on this thing, and most of the sound was to playback. The morning of the day of the show these guys bring in this giant state-of-the-art digital playback machine. We want to see how it sounds, so we start rehearsing and this thing crapped out. I said, “That can never happen.” They started it up again and it crapped out a second time, so we know we can’t use that. Johnny W. and I each had one of these tiny little Panasonic DAT players, and we said, “Fuck it, we’re gonna run the whole show on these DAT machines.” So Johnny W. and I are with somebody from BAM at this little card table set up way back against the wall at the highest part of the theater. Johnny’s DAT and my DAT are on the table and we push them at the same time so if mine craps out we can switch over to the other one and they’re perfectly synchronized, and these little bitty machines filled that hall with sound like you cannot fuckin’ believe.

  We had one day to rehearse and it’s the day of the show and people work a little bit and an hour’s gone by and we really haven’t even started! Then I got this idea that saved the day, and this idea is something I would use again for sure. You take each person by the shoulders and you look them straight in the eye and you say: “You see that thing over there? When this thing happens, you go over there and you do this and then you do that, and when you finish you run off that way. Have you got that?” Then you do the same thing with the next person, and you tell each person what they’re going to do at a certain time and that’s the only thing they have to remember. We had to do two shows back to back and I had to get twenty people to do some task and everybody did their task fine.

  Part of the show was this skinned deer played by John Bell that was twelve or thirteen feet tall. He’s got big antlers and he’s on stilts that are wrapped in rubber that looks like skin and he’s got hooves at the bottom of the stilts and he doesn’t have any fur because he’s a skinned deer. The people I worked with there made all this stuff. It’s un-fuckin’-real what they did! Two hospital gurneys are strapped together, and at the opening of the show the skinned deer is lying on these gurneys. Isabella’s daughter, Elettra, was little then, and she sees this thing on the gurney and it’s not moving and she knew it was going to move at some point, and she was so afraid of that skinned deer lying there.

  John Bell was a stilt-walker and he’s playing the deer, so he’s inside this costume lying down and it’s warm in there. All of a sudden there’s a point in the show where these workmen wearing hard hats come rushing out with these yellow light bulbs that they’re waving and twirling around the deer, who comes to life and stands up. And he’s huge. The deer starts walking and little Mike [Anderson] is down there with a searchlight lighting him up, so the guy on stilts has this blinding light shining in his eyes and the blood is rushing from his head because he’s been lying there for a long time, and he starts tilting forward and falling into the orchestra pit. The guy on the snare drum caught him. Half the audience thought this was horrible, and the other half thought it was part of the show. So it’s time for the second show and the fuckin’ deer won’t come out of his dressing room. I had to go from the tiny card table way up in the back of the theater all the way down to these sub-basement dressing rooms and beg him to do it. There was this big water tank onstage, and I told him, “You can hang on to the water tank,” and he said, “Okay, if I can hang on to the water tank I’ll do it.” So he did it. Live theater. It was sort of thrilling and it worked perfect except for the deer.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t know if I could work with Mark Frost when we met, but I was willing to check it out. He was tied to this Goddess thing at the time, and like ten million others, I like Marilyn Monroe, so we started working together on that. It’s hard to say exactly what it is about Marilyn Monroe, but the woman-in-trouble thing is part of it. It’s not just the woman-in-trouble thing that pulls you in, though. It’s more that some women are real mysterious. Goddess didn’t fly because of the Kennedy connection—Marilyn Monroe was this loose cannon there at the end and they had to get rid of her. But it’s a story I kept loving. You could say that Laura Palmer is Marilyn Monroe, and that Mulholland Drive is about Marilyn Monroe, too. Everything is about Marilyn Monroe.

  After Goddess didn’t happen, Mark and I started working on One Saliva Bubble and we were laughing our butts off. Even though we’re really different we get along great when we’re writing, and we were having fun when we were writing that and it cemented our relationship. For a little bit of time I was friends with Steve Martin because he loved One Saliva Bubble and wanted to do it with Martin Short. I think Steve got pissed off at me when I asked him if he wanted to buy it—he got really upset—but before that he took me to his house in Beverly Hills and he had a beautiful art collection, really incredible.

  Tony Krantz was a hotshot up-and-coming TV agent, and he was always bugging Rick Nicita that he wanted to talk to me about doing TV. Television seemed like a horrible thing to me, and in those days it was pathetic. All the commercial interruptions—network television was the theater of the absurd and this was the nature of the beast. But one thing led to another and Tony talked Mark and me into writing something for TV and we wrote this thing called The Lemurians. We laughed a lot when we were writing it, but it wasn’t going to happen and we never sold it that I recall.

  Tony’s version of how Twin Peaks came about may be where it came from in Tony’s mind, but it’s not how I remember it. Still, I have to say that Tony did a lot of good for me, because he got me to do Twin Peaks and I love Twin Peaks. I love the characters and the world and the humor and the mystery combo.

  I saw the pilot as the same thing as a feature film, and as far as I’m concerned the only thing in the entire first two seasons that’s really Twin Peaks is the pilot. The rest is stage stuff and was done like TV, but the pilot really got the mood. That had everything to do with the fact that we were shooting on location. The place itself is so important. It’s always arduous to shoot on location but it was really beautiful there, and there was a feeling of freedom, because we weren’t bot
hered by ABC at all. They sent notes a couple of times about language and made me change some lines, but the lines I made up turned out to be better than the original ones ABC didn’t like.

  And it was the greatest cast. When I met Sherilyn Fenn I could see that she could play a girl like Audrey Horne, and even though Piper Laurie was known, I knew she could disappear into Catherine Martell. It’s just a coincidence that Piper and Richard Beymer and Peggy Lipton and Russ Tamblyn are all from the same generation and had similar kinds of careers. I’ve got Dennis Hopper to thank for Russ, because Dennis threw me my fortieth birthday party and Russ was there, and when it was time to cast Dr. Jacoby, something in my head went ding! And he became Dr. Jacoby.

  In the script for the pilot there’s a scene where Cooper and Sheriff Truman are riding in an elevator and when the doors open Cooper notices a one-armed man walking away. And that was what Al Strobel was hired for. That was gonna be his time in Twin Peaks and he was gonna go home. Then I heard Al Strobel’s voice, which is an incredible voice, and I had to write something for that voice. I think Deepak was driving the car and I remember exactly where we were. We were coming off the freeway going down a ramp and I was writing this thing that started out, “Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see.” So I wrote a new scene where Al meets Cooper in his room and he recites this thing, and we shot it and sent it to Duwayne who was editing. It’s late at night and Duwayne’s about to go home when he gets this footage, and he says, “What the fuck?” But that scene with Al started a whole bunch of threads that bring him into this story.

  Richard Beymer’s been meditating longer than I have and he was with Maharishi for a long time, but I didn’t know that when I cast him as Ben Horne. I didn’t even talk to him about meditation when we met—I just loved Richard. Isabella was supposed to be in Twin Peaks but she didn’t want to do it, so the character she was going to play became Josie Packard, who was played by Joan Chen. Joan is beautiful and she’s a foreigner like Isabella, and she felt perfect for Josie Packard. I knew Peggy Lipton had been a big TV star in the sixties when she was in The Mod Squad, but I never saw that show, because I wasn’t watching TV during the time when it was on the air. I cast Peggy because she was Norma Jennings. That’s kind of how it was with the actors in Twin Peaks. Nobody else but them could’ve played the characters they played. When you think about it, nobody but Kyle could play Agent Cooper. I always wanted it to be Kyle, but at first Mark said, “Isn’t he a little young?” Then Mark came around and the rest is history.