Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Jack was like Harry Dean. You could sit with Jack for hours not talking, just sitting there, or he might tell a story. Very few people ever heard the end of any of Jack Nance’s stories, because he’d take these huge, long pauses when he talked, and they’d think the story was over and stop paying attention. It was like a fade-out, and after a while you’re in the black and you think this thing’s got to be over, but then he’d fade back in to another part of the story if you waited long enough. I remember one day he said to me in his slow, kind of soft way, “You ever see an alluvial fan?” When rocks come down out of a mountain, if there’s really a lot of them they flow out and make a fan. So Jack saw one of these things somewhere and he brought up this alluvial fan, and then he said, “But someone put up a concrete wall.” Then he waits for the longest time, I mean really long, and he says, “And it stopped the alluvial fan.” He was devastated that this concrete wall had stopped nature. I can see him spending hours studying this mountain and what was happening to it. Other people walked by and didn’t notice anything, but not Jack. He’d study it and then he’d realize, that’s an alluvial fan. Jack never rushed anywhere. Jack lived in slow motion and he’d notice things and give long, detailed descriptions of things. If he was telling you about a dog trying to get out from behind a screen door, he’d describe the screen door in detail, the shape of the dog’s head—every little thing. He was a brilliant guy, really smart and he read a lot, and there’s a lot hiding in this guy. Jack was my buddy and it’s a terrible shame he’s gone. Lost Highway was the last thing we did together, but he never got to see it.

  I showed Lost Highway to Brando after I finished it but before it was released. We rented this theater and told the owner Brando was going to come to see this film, and the theater owner was pretty pumped. So we get this thing all set up and Brando comes into the theater by himself and they have all these treats out for him. He’s already got a burger and fries with him, but he fills his pockets with candy anyway and goes into the theater eating candy with his burger. He called me later and said, “It’s a damn good film, but it won’t make a nickel.” It was good. He liked it. A lot of people thought Lost Highway wasn’t a commercial choice, and that was true, but it did okay. Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs down, so I got the guy at October Films, Bingham Ray, to run a big ad that had an image of two thumbs down and text that said: “Two more great reasons to see Lost Highway.”

  While Lynch was in the midst of making the first season of Twin Peaks, he was at dinner one night with Tony Krantz and mentioned an idea for a series called Mulholland Drive. “The plan was that if Twin Peaks succeeded, the second season would end with Audrey Horne—Sherilyn Fenn—coming to Los Angeles to build a career in Hollywood,” Krantz said. “That story would’ve been told in a movie released that summer—Mulholland Drive—which would’ve served as the pilot for a new fall television series about Audrey Horne making it in show business. It would’ve been a kind of dance between film and television, and nobody’s done that to this day, but David could’ve done it.” They commemorated the moment at Muse by signing a placemat Krantz taped to his refrigerator door.

  During this period Neal Edelstein began playing a more prominent role in Lynch’s professional life. “By 1998 I was working in David’s office every day, gearing up for his website and producing smaller stuff, and I noticed that the scripts and books that were always coming in weren’t getting looked at,” he said. “I started reading things and reaching out to the people who’d sent them, and I finally said to David, ‘Why don’t we start a production company? There are opportunities here for you to executive-produce stuff, and I’ll read through this material and meet with everybody.’ I knew there were people who wanted to be in business with David and he was agentless by this time, so we launched Picture Factory. The plan was for it to oversee the website, new media, and tech stuff. I’d develop things David could executive-produce, Mary and I would produce David’s movies, and it would all come under one roof.”

  Many opportunities were laid at Lynch’s door, but he mostly passed on them. He was invited to direct American Beauty, which wound up being directed by Sam Mendes in 1999, and Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn was offered for optioning, but he said no. Today, Lynch has no memory of any of these projects. He was also asked to direct the American remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film The Ring; Lynch can’t recall getting that offer, either, and Edelstein wound up producing the film, which starred Naomi Watts.

  After Lynch’s experiences with On the Air and Hotel Room, he’d pretty much washed his hands of television, but by the end of the 1990s Krantz and Edelstein were encouraging him to reconsider it. “Then one night we had a meeting on the patio at Orso and David agreed to go forward with Mulholland Drive,” recalled Edelstein. “He’d had the idea in his head several years earlier, but it had to sit in there for a while.”

  As is invariably the case with Lynch, he was already busy with other things when that dinner at Orso took place, and he was gearing up to shoot the feature film The Straight Story. The true story of Alvin Straight, a seventy-three-year-old World War II veteran who drove a 1966 John Deere lawnmower two hundred and forty miles to visit his estranged brother who’d suffered a stroke, the film was developed and co-written by Mary Sweeney.

  “I read about Alvin Straight when he was actually making his trip in the summer of 1994,” Sweeney recalled. “It was in the media a lot, and because I’m from the Midwest it spoke to me. When I looked into getting the rights to his story I learned Ray Stark had optioned them but he wasn’t doing anything with them, so I kept tracking it. Four years passed and Stark let the rights lapse; then in 1996 Alvin died and the rights reverted to his heirs. I visited them in Des Moines and got the rights, and in April of 1998 I started working on a script with a friend from Wisconsin named John Roach.

  “We weren’t writing the script for David—he made that crystal clear—and I never tried to convince him to direct it, because that would’ve worked against me,” Sweeney continued. “He said, ‘It’s an interesting idea but not my cup of tea.’ I gave him the script in June of 1998 just to see if he thought it was any good, and it struck an emotional chord with him. I wasn’t surprised he responded to it, because there’s a Twin Peaks small-town quirkiness to it, and there’s tenderness. There’s tenderness in all his films, but this is a sweeter tenderness, and I was surprised when he said, ‘I think I should make this.’ ”

  The elements of the film fell into place quickly, and it was in pre-production in August of 1998 when Lynch and Krantz—who’d left CAA by that point to become head of Imagine Television—pitched Mulholland Drive to Jamie Tarses, president of ABC Entertainment, and senior executive Steve Tao. (At the time, Imagine Television was producing shows in partnership with the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC.) Lynch’s two-page pitch laid out the story of a beautiful actress who suffers amnesia after a car accident on Mulholland Drive. ABC liked it and committed 4.5 million dollars to a pilot, and Disney’s Touchstone Television put in an additional 2.5 million, with the proviso that Lynch shoot a closed ending. Disney’s Buena Vista International planned to recoup their investment by releasing Mulholland Drive as a feature film in Europe.

  Shortly after getting those ducks in a row, Lynch left for the Midwest to shoot The Straight Story, which wrapped at the end of October. Returning to Los Angeles, he hunkered down to write Mulholland Drive. “David planned to write the script on his own, but Tony wanted a co-writer to help guide it, so he hired Joyce Eliason,” said Edelstein. “David met with her a few times, then they parted ways because he wanted to write it himself. She had almost no input on that script—and the original script was amazing. David knew where the trajectory of the story was going and the first season was totally mapped out. It was by no means simply an homage to Hollywood, but certainly David’s love of Sunset Boulevard as the street of broken dreams is in there.”

  On January 4th, 1999, Lynch
turned a ninety-two-page script in to ABC, and the following day Tarses and Stu Bloomberg (who was then co-chairman of ABC Entertainment Television Group) called Krantz and told him the project was a go. The expectation was that Mulholland Drive would premiere as part of ABC’s fall season. The network had ordered seven pilots and could only pick up three or four, but Lynch’s series seemed like a strong contender.

  Two weeks later Tarses and Bloomberg called a “notes” meeting in an ABC conference room that included representatives from the network, Imagine, and Lynch’s production company. There were twenty people in attendance and Lynch was there, but he declined to share much about what he intended to do with the series. Notes meetings have never been his thing. He just got to work making the film he saw in his head.

  The plot of Mulholland Drive is complex, but it makes sense in light of the fact that life doesn’t unfold in a clear, straight line. All of us flicker in and out of memories, fantasies, desires, and dreams of the future as we move through what’s actually happening around us over the course of a day. These zones of the mind bleed in and out of one another, and Mulholland Drive has a fluid logic that reflects these multiple levels of awareness, and it explores various themes. Among them are the hopes and shattered dreams of creative young people; what the movie business does to people and the diabolical power brokers who attempt to control the artists who work in it; and erotic obsession that degenerates into murderous hatred. The city of Los Angeles is also a theme in the film, which was shot on locations throughout Southern California.

  During the making of The Elephant Man, Lynch made a drawing for Mel Brooks that depicts the words “City of Dreams” in soft gray pastel, and this is how he sees the city. Infused with a drowsy sensuality tainted with corruption, Los Angeles is a city of extremes of abject misery and deliriously glamorous success, and it’s a place for dreamers. Lynch loves Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard partly because it embodies much of this, and Mulholland Drive includes several nods to Wilder’s film; there’s a shot of the entrance to Paramount Studios that Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond passes through, and a car parked on the lot that’s identical to one that appeared fifty years earlier in Wilder’s film.

  Mulholland Drive operates in an indeterminate time zone where graceful old apartment buildings with lush courtyards and softly curving interior walls coexist with grim coffee shops with dirty pay phones. Several scenes were shot in just such a coffee shop at the corner of Sunset and Gower, which was formerly the site of the Copper Penny, where extras would line up in the morning during the 1920s, hoping for work in one of the many Westerns being produced at the time. Hollywood’s streets are full of dreams, but they’re full of creepy things, too.

  “David always wants to try new things and experiment,” said Deming of the way the mood of Mulholland Drive was developed. “Whenever we come across a weird new piece of equipment we always show him and he plants it in his brain, then figures out where to apply it. There are certain kinds of lighting apparatus we carry when we work with David that we don’t carry on any other jobs, and one of them is a lightning machine. In fact, we now have different sizes; there’s a giant one for nighttime exteriors, and a little one for interiors that sort of whites everything out for a second.

  “I can never anticipate what he’s going to want from reading the script,” Deming continued. “There’s a scene where Rita says the words ‘Mulholland Drive’ for the first time, and David said that even though she’s indoors we should have the sense of a cloud passing over the sun when she says those words. That’s the kind of lighting direction you only get from David.”

  Mulholland Drive is a very big picture considering its budget, and it required the creation of a few key sets. Production designer Jack Fisk said that “it was hard dealing with ABC and Disney, and they wouldn’t give us our money to start filming. I met with the construction people at Disney and told them what I needed to build the main set, which was Betty’s apartment, and they said, ‘Our construction people can’t build it that cheaply.’ I said, ‘But I can.’ They didn’t give me an okay to go forward for six weeks, so we only had four weeks to build the set, and they said, ‘You can build it at that price, but there’s no overtime or extra labor.’ They made it almost impossible.

  “David did a little drawing on a paper bag of a sofa he wanted in Betty’s apartment, and he did a sketch of her apartment, but when I looked at them I couldn’t make any sense of the drawings.” Fisk laughed. “And, of course, he made the little blue box that’s part of the story.”

  Lynch has little interest in whoever’s hot at a given moment, and Johanna Ray knows he prefers working with relative unknowns. With that in mind, she set to work finding actresses for the two key characters in the story: an innocent blonde named Betty, and Rita, a sultry brunette.

  “When it comes to casting women, the actress has to have an air of mystery first and foremost,” said Ray. “From Blue Velvet through Lost Highway, he often cast a part based on a photo, but with Mulholland Drive we started working differently. After we’d gone through all the photos and he’d picked actors, he’d have me tape them having a conversation with me. He said, ‘I want to feel as if I’m in the room with them, getting to know them.’ He’s occasionally picked someone for a part and I’ve said, ‘David, I don’t think this person can act,’ but that didn’t stop him from casting them if he had a good feeling about them.”

  Laura Elena Harring was cast as Rita after a single meeting. A Mexican American actress whose movie career was jump-started in 1985 when she was crowned Miss U.S.A., Harring made her movie debut in the 1989 horror film Silent Night, Deadly Night 3. She appeared in six more films prior to meeting Lynch, and actor Eric Da Re was in one of them.

  “I met Eric’s mother, Johanna Ray, and she took me to the premiere of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” Harring recalled. “She introduced me to David, who struck me as very shy—he doesn’t like the limelight—and I remember thinking, Wow, he’s handsome! A few years later—it was Monday, January 3rd, 1999, to be exact—Johanna called and said, ‘David Lynch wants to meet you. Can you stop by right now?’ In the excitement of going, I had a minor car accident, and when I got to his house and told Gaye Pope about it she said, ‘Have you read the script? Your character has an accident at the beginning of the story.’ I thought, There’s a little bit of magic going on here. I walked in and David looked at me and all he said was ‘Good, good.’ And I started giggling.

  “All women feel love for David,” Harring continued. “He’s drop-dead gorgeous, and when he smiles at you it’s like the sun is shining on you. He’s a loving, charismatic, funny genius and we had a special bond—everyone thinks there must’ve been something going on, but we had a platonic, spiritual connection. David’s kindness really impressed me. The lady who dressed me sent a letter saying she wanted me to lose weight, and when I told David about it he said, ‘Don’t you lose one pound, Laura!’ He made me feel like I was okay the way I was and gave me the confidence I needed to play Rita. One day we were on set and [actress] Ann Miller wanted to stop by and pick up something she’d left there. David kept the set at a standstill while we waited for her, and after she left he said, ‘Isn’t she cute!’ He had such respect for her, and her comfort came first.”1

  Lynch came along just in time for Naomi Watts, who was cast as Betty. “I’d had ten years of auditioning and no real breaks, and I was carrying around all those years of rejection like a wound that was always with me,” said Watts. “I was walking into these rooms with such desperation and intensity and trying to reshape myself constantly, and it’s no wonder nobody would hire me. What do you want? Who should I be? Tell me what you need and I’ll be that. It wasn’t going well for me. I’d met Johanna Ray several times but she’d never cast me in anything; then she called my agent and said David was interested in meeting me.”2

  Watts was living in New York at the time and she flew to L.A. the next day. “I wal
ked in the room and David was just beaming with light, like no one I’d ever seen in an audition room before,” she remembered. “I felt like his eyes were real and true and interested. I didn’t know anything about the character he was casting, and that probably worked in my favor because I didn’t feel like I had to be someone else—I felt I could be myself. He asked me some questions, and after I gave a long answer to one of them I stopped and said, ‘Do you really want to talk about this?’ He said, ‘Yes, tell me the story!’ I felt like we were two equals and he was interested in me, and I was shocked by that because it hadn’t happened before. I had no faith in my ability at that point and my self-esteem was at an all-time low, so I didn’t go out of there punching the air, but I did walk out with the sense that something great had happened, and I was grateful for the experience.

  “I’d just come off the plane and must’ve looked like shit the day we met, and the next day I got a call and was asked to go back to his house,” Watts continued. “They told me to put on makeup and look a little more glamorous, and I thought, Oh no, I’m never going to get it; he wants a supermodel. But I got my hair blown out and wore a tight dress and he obviously saw something he was looking for. When I finally read the script, I couldn’t believe how much Betty’s story matched my own, and I thought, Oh my God, I know how to play this part. I don’t know if Johanna told David about how long I’d been struggling, but he definitely tapped into that part of me.