by David Lynch
“I don’t know if he even looked at any of my work,” Watts added. “David works from his gut and it’s all intuition, and he can get a performance out of anyone. Sometimes he’ll turn to someone in his crew and say, ‘Here, put this costume on,’ and next thing they know they’re speaking pages of dialogue.”
Starring as Adam Kesher, the male lead in the film, is Justin Theroux, who recalled, “I got a phone call from Johanna Ray saying, ‘David would like to meet you, today if possible.’ I live in New York so I flew out the next day, and after I got in I was on my way to my hotel and the production office called and said, ‘Why don’t you go straight to the house?’ I was a huge David Lynch fan, but I didn’t know what he looked like or what his demeanor was, and he answered the door in his buttoned-up white shirt, with that big shock of hair, and he was wonderfully disarming. The first thing that struck me was what a warm smile he had and his unique way of speaking. He’s very endearing. I’ve never had a bad moment with David.”3
Ann Miller turns in her final onscreen appearance as an eccentric, straight-shooting landlady named Coco. Prior to the making of the film, Gaye Pope happened to sit behind Miller at an Academy function and later enthused to Lynch about how charismatic she was. Lynch remembers things like that. Also appearing in the film in a memorable cameo is Monty Montgomery, who’d never acted in anything before.
“When David made the deal with Ciby 2000, there wasn’t room for me, so even though we were always talking about what we were working on, we didn’t work together again,” Montgomery said. “We were still friendly after we stopped working together, though, and David used to come up to my house pretty regularly.
“In late 1998 my wife and I moved to an island in Maine, and several months later David started calling, saying, ‘I want you to do this part I’ve written for you.’ I said, ‘Forget it, I’m not doing that.’ He kept calling, and then he started saying, ‘We’re going to film this thing pretty soon,’ and I’d say, ‘I’m not gonna do it! I’m not an actor, and this just isn’t on my radar.’ Then the production manager started calling and asking, ‘What day will you be here?’ They kept changing the schedule to accommodate my part, then they scheduled a whole night for it, and it got to the point that I just couldn’t say no. I didn’t even look at the script until I got on the plane, and Johanna Ray and Justin Theroux sat with me and crammed. Justin really worked on the scene with me and he was terrific, so hats off to him and Johanna.”
Theroux recalls shooting the scene vividly. “I remember going into Monty’s trailer to meet him the night we shot that scene and I shook his hand and asked him if he wanted to run the lines. He said, ‘No, that’s okay, I’m pretty good,’ and I thought, Did he look at his lines or did he learn them? We get on set and David says, “Action,” and Monty gets a few words into his first line and he freezes—so we pasted his lines on my chest and forehead and David shot Monty over my shoulder. We worked on the scene for a while then David said, ‘Cut, let’s move on,’ and I went over to him and said, ‘David, I think we might want to reshoot that because Monty gave a very wooden performance. It’s very flat.’ David said, ‘No, we got it, that was gangbusters.’ And then, of course, I saw it and Monty’s character comes across as the most disturbing character in the movie.”
To her surprise, script supervisor Cori Glazer appears in the film, too. “The script had been written and there was no Blue Lady in it,” she recalled of the mysterious woman she plays in the film. “Then we get to this beautiful old theater in downtown L.A. and David notices this opera balcony above the stage. It was a long lighting setup that day, and at a certain point somebody says, ‘Cori, David’s looking for you,’ so I run in and say, ‘Yes, David,’ and he just stares at me, which was unusual, then he said, ‘Never mind.’ I went back to work, and ten minutes later he calls me over again and he pushes my hair out of my face and stares at me. Then he yelled, ‘Get makeup and wardrobe over here!’ The makeup girl came running over and he said, ‘How fast could you make someone’s hair blue? Like a big blue bouffant—how quick could you do that?’ Then wardrobe shows up and he said, ‘How fast could you get a blue Victorian dress?’ The wardrobe girl said, ‘I need to know who the dress is for,’ and he said, ‘It’s for Cori, but I haven’t told her yet.’ I said, ‘David! I can’t act! I get really nervous!’ He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You’re with your buddy Dave. You’ll be fine.’ ” And she was. As for how the Blue Lady fits into the story, Glazer said, “David’s favorite thing to say is, ‘I don’t care—it’s modular!’ ”
Shooting began in late February of 1999, and Edelstein remembered it as a “blissful, brilliant experience. There’s a sequence in a hotel where a woman gets hit by a bullet through a wall, and shooting stuff like that, you’re just dying laughing,” he added. “Everyone’s laughing, like thirty people gathered around the monitor giggling, seeing David’s magic work.”
Lynch can do a lot with a little, but sometimes he needs a lot; a case in point is the spectacular car crash that kicks off the story of Mulholland Drive. “That car crash was probably the trickiest thing David and I ever did together,” said Gary D’Amico. “It took us three days to set up that shot. We had a hundred-foot construction crane in Griffith Park and a car cabled to a six-thousand-pound weight that we free-fell from the crane—that’s what launched the car. It was a crazy rig, and for sure we only got one crack at that shot.”
Harring recalled, “I was sleeping in the trailer while they did final preparations for that scene, and when David came to wake me up he said, ‘Laura, we need you to get dirty. I think it’d be easiest if you just get down and roll on the floor,’ and he got down and rolled around to show me what he wanted me to do. We shot that scene in January at four in the morning and it was maybe forty-eight degrees out. I was wearing a little spaghetti-strap dress, but David was out there directing in a ski suit. He had on a onesie!”
In March of 1999 the shoot was wrapping, and initially the executives at ABC were thrilled with the dailies. Then they began getting twitchy. They felt the pace was too slow and that Watts and Harring were “a little old.” Lynch began receiving nitpicking memos from the standards-and-practices department concerning things like language and images of gunshot wounds, dog shit, and cigarettes. Lynch is good at tuning out static of this sort, though, so he just kept working and spent April mixing the soundtrack at his home studio. At the end of the month he sent a cut that ran for two hours and five minutes to Tarses and Bloomberg; on receiving it they immediately responded that it needed to be cut to eighty-eight minutes. The following night Tony Krantz arrived at Lynch’s house with two bottles of Lynch-Bages, and a list of approximately thirty notes from Steve Tao.
“I think the minute they saw it they knew they weren’t going to pick it up,” Sweeney speculated. “For starters, it was supposed to be one hour and David just didn’t adhere to the running time, but Tony nonetheless came over with pages of notes. I think David felt that Tony was saying, Yes, they’re right, because he made a very impassioned argument for why we should make the changes they were asking for. David objected to every note, but after Tony left we stayed up all night and did the notes, and we cut the pilot down to eighty-eight minutes and turned it in to them.”
In retrospect, Krantz felt he did what needed to be done. “When I looked at Mulholland Drive, I told David the truth,” said Krantz. “I said, ‘It’s not that good and it’s slow and I agree with the ABC notes.’ In many ways that burst the bubble of our relationship, because to David it was like, You’re one of them now and you’re not on my side. And in that case I wasn’t.
“Maybe it was my mistake to try to get a compromised version of Mulholland Drive,” Krantz continued. “But David’s unwillingness to compromise and sort of blend in with Mark Frost and form that bond is part of what led to the demise of Twin Peaks. David has the art part, but he doesn’t have the piece that guarantees success in the entertainme
nt industry, which is very much a collaborative community. You can’t win and beat show business. The town is littered with people who’ve tried.”
Needless to say, nobody in Lynch’s camp felt that ABC’s response to the pilot was justified. “The notes were ridiculous and so politically correct that they leached any sense of creativity out of the thing,” said Edelstein. “Why would you green-light a pilot with David Lynch and then not want David Lynch’s vision? It was like, are you serious? In the original script Justin Theroux had an Asian gardener who was a font of Zen wisdom. ABC thought an Asian gardener was a racist stereotype, so that character had to be cut.”
“It was a very joyous, fun set that felt like summer camp,” Theroux recalled, “and we were all devastated when the show wasn’t picked up.”
Lynch found out the series officially wasn’t a go in mid-May, as he was leaving for the airport headed to Cannes with The Straight Story, and he’s admitted to feeling a wave of euphoria when he heard the news. He felt that the cut of the show that was then in play had been butchered and was relieved to learn it would die a quiet death. ABC gave the Mulholland Drive time slot to Wasteland, a series about six twenty-something college friends who move to New York and try to find themselves. The show premiered on October 7th, 1999, and a week later, on October 15th, The Straight Story opened in selected theaters throughout the country. Wasteland was canceled after three episodes.
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Lynch has said that Mulholland Drive had the journey it needed to have, and it certainly triumphed in the end: Its resurrection was initiated by his old friend Pierre Edelman.
“Ciby was gone by the time the Mulholland Drive pilot was rejected, and Pierre was at StudioCanal,” said Sweeney. “It was Pierre who put together the deal and massaged all the difficulties that allowed it to be turned into a film. This is an impossible situation and nobody can make this deal work? That’s like a drug to Pierre, who is a terrier who won’t let go until he fixes it, and he got Alain Sarde to take Mulholland Drive under his shingle at StudioCanal. ABC didn’t want it and had put it on the shelf, so they were happy to sell the negative.”
Edelman described the Mulholland Drive experience as complex. “It wasn’t until many months after that episode with ABC that David finally told me about the pilot,” said Edelman, who persuaded Sarde to purchase the pilot for seven million dollars for Le StudioCanal Plus, a film subsidiary of a French subscription channel that’s funded several American independent films. “But when he told me about it he said, ‘I don’t want to hear anything about this anymore.’ I asked for his permission to look at the pilot, and he said okay but said again that he wanted nothing more to do with it. I watched it, then told him I was convinced it would be a wonderful feature film.
“At that point I didn’t foresee all the troubles waiting for me,” Edelman continued. “I had to raise four million dollars, and most of that went toward buying back the rights. Then I had to transform a TV pilot shot at twenty-five frames a second into a print that was twenty-four frames a second for cinema. I also had to get the entire cast and crew to sign an agreement for the film to become a theatrical release. Mary Sweeney handled those negotiations for a while, and some of them were complicated. These people had worked on a TV pilot for much less than they would’ve been paid for a theatrical release, and some people insisted on additional money. And, of course, we needed money to shoot the footage needed to turn it into a feature.”
Sarde agreed to put in two million dollars more to cover the costs of additional shooting; however, Lynch was ambivalent about returning to the project. The sets had been clumsily dismantled and damaged, Disney had lost all the props and costumes, and he still had a bad taste in his mouth from the debacle the series had become. His reluctance to go forward proved to be the last hurrah for his relationship with Krantz.
“Mulholland Drive was a seven-million-dollar investment for Disney, and when Pierre Edelman came to me and said, ‘I can get Canal to buy it from Disney,’ I thought that was great,” said Krantz. “Then right before the deal was consummated, David says, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ I asked why not and he said, ‘We destroyed the sets.’ I said, ‘What do you mean you destroyed the sets? You don’t even have a script for what you’re going to shoot, so what sets are you talking about?’ At that point the thing was sitting there dead because of what I considered a chickenshit, bullshit excuse, and I got pissed off. I knew there was money in it for Brian [Grazer] and Ron [Howard] and me, and I thought David was being a baby. I’d gone way out on the line with Disney getting them to buy the pilot, and my relationship with them was at stake, so I got Disney to say, ‘We are going to sue you to compel you to do this,’ and that was the end for David and me. And I don’t regret doing what I did.
“But at the end of the day would I rather have David Lynch in my life? Yes, absolutely,” Krantz added. “David is authentically himself, always, and he’s humble and funny and sweet and shrewd and brilliant, and he has the same wide-eyed optimism and integrity he had the day I met him. Success didn’t change him at all. I miss him, and I wrote him a note apologizing for the things I did and told him I hoped he could forgive me and that we could work together again one day. He said that he did forgive me but he didn’t leave the door open to working again, and I can understand that.”
Lynch may have forgiven Krantz, but most of Lynch’s colleagues haven’t forgotten the episode. “It’s disgusting that Tony threatened to sue David,” said Edelstein. “David’s got an old-school set of rules—actually, it’s not old school, it’s more like the golden rule. If you look someone in the eye and shake their hand and tell them, This is what I’m going to do, then that’s what you do. You don’t need lawyers and you don’t need to threaten people with lawsuits. People who do that when they don’t get their way are like babies throwing temper tantrums.”
Temper tantrums aside, negotiations for the project were well under way before Lynch finally got an idea for how to transform the pilot into a film; one evening at six-thirty it came to him, and by seven o’clock he knew how to conclude the story. At that point he began to get excited and contacted Harring and Watts.
“When ABC didn’t pick up the show I thought, Great, I’m in the only David Lynch project that’s never going to see the light of day and I’m back to my struggle,” said Watts. “Then he got the call from Canal Plus saying, ‘We want to buy it back and make it into a feature,’ and David wrote eighteen pages that introduced the character of Diane. I remember going up to his house to read those eighteen pages and thinking, Oh my God, this is incredible. You couldn’t ask for a more exciting character, and the fact that Betty and Diane are so different—you don’t get two roles like that in one career, much less one movie.”
“After a year of David saying, ‘Mulholland Drive is dead in the water and nobody will ever see it,’ he called Naomi and me to come to his house,” Harring recalled. “So, we’re sitting there, with Naomi on his right and me on his left, and he said, ‘Mulholland Drive is going to be an international feature film—but there’s going to be nudity!’ ”
Much of what Lynch added during seventeen days of shooting, which commenced in late September and wrapped in early October, never would’ve flown on network television. Betty and Rita were friendly co-conspirators in the original pilot, but as is revealed in a graphic sex scene, they’re lovers in the feature. “David was right to add the love scene—it’s one of the key parts of the story—but it was hard,” said Harring. “I was nervous and felt very vulnerable when I walked on set, then David said, ‘Laura, what are you worried about? The set will be dark.’ It was dark, too, so I relaxed, then for the last take he said, ‘Pump it up, Pete,’ which meant pump up the lights, so it was much brighter. He told me he wouldn’t show details, though, and against everyone’s wishes he blurred my pubic hair because he’d given me his word that he would.”
Considerably tougher th
an the love scene between Watts and Harring is a wrenching scene of Watts tearfully masturbating. “David usually gets things in one take, and will maybe do three at the very most, and he made Naomi do at least ten takes of that scene,” Glazer recalled. “By the tenth take she was incredibly angry, and I think he made her do all those takes because he wanted her to be completely fried in the scene, and he needed to put her through that in order for her to get to that place.”
Watts has vivid memories of the shooting of the scene. “I had a bad stomach situation that day because I was so freaked out,” she recalled. “How do you masturbate in front of an entire film crew? I tried to talk David into shooting it another day, and he said, ‘No, Naomi, you can do it, you’re fine, go to the bathroom.’ He wanted angry desperation and intensity, and every time the camera got close to me I’d say, ‘I can’t do this, David, I can’t do it!’ He’d say, ‘That’s okay, Naomi,’ and just keep the cameras rolling, and that made me angry. He was definitely pushing me, but he did it in a gentle way.”
It’s abundantly clear that much of the brilliance of Mulholland Drive pivots on Lynch’s ability to take actors to places they haven’t been before. “There are two scenes where Naomi delivers exactly the same dialogue but the scenes are completely different,” observed Deming. “It’s like a master class in directing.”
Lynch got what he wanted during the shoot, but Edelman felt he wasn’t out of the woods yet. “When David was editing the film, he asked me to come to his studio to watch an assembly of a section, and after I left I was walking in the street crying,” he said. “I thought, This is a catastrophic situation and no one will ever see this film. I felt I should get a second opinion, so I called Alain Sarde, who was the signatory for the film, and asked him to come to L.A. to see the assembly. He came to David’s studio and watched it and afterward he said to me, ‘I don’t understand why you had me come here. This is a masterpiece.’ ”
