Room to Dream - Kristine McKenna

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manager, and asked, ‘Can you do that?’ and I said ‘Sure.’ Then he said, ‘I need a script supervisor, too; can you do that?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and he bought me a stopwatch so I could do continuity.”1

      Shortly after meeting Lynch, Small was at a party in Topanga and was introduced to Charlotte Stewart, who was a prominent young television actress at the time. The two decided to rent a place together and were roommates for the next two years. “Doreen knew David needed an actress for his film, so she invited him to dinner in Topanga, which was a pretty rural area back then,” Stewart recalled. “I open the door and here stands this guy and Peggy, and he’s this eager young man. He had a sack of wheat seeds in his hand, which he handed to me, and I thanked him, but I’m thinking, What the hell? I guess he figured, Hey, they live in the country—maybe they’d like to plant some wheat.

      “At dinner he seemed like a nice person, and he seemed very young,” she continued. “He brought the script for Eraserhead, and I thumbed through it and didn’t understand a word of it—as far as I could tell it was something about a young couple and a baby who wasn’t really a baby. There wasn’t much dialogue, and I thought, Fine, I can do this in a few weeks.”2

      Lynch was looking for his leading man when he met Catherine Coulson and Jack Nance. Coulson and her family moved to California from Illinois when her father was hired to run a radio station in Riverside, and she made her radio debut there at the age of four on a local broadcast called Breakfast with the Coulsons. She was an art history major at Scripps College in Claremont, and by the time Coulson enrolled in graduate school at San Francisco State, the focus of her life had shifted to theater. In 1967, members of the Dallas Theater Center were artists in residence at San Francisco State, and among the company was actor Jack Nance. Coulson and Nance became a couple, and after marrying in La Jolla, California, in 1968, they became members of David Lindeman’s Interplayers Circus, a theater company founded by Lindeman, who briefly attended the AFI in 1971. Lindeman mentioned to Lynch that Nance might be good for the part of Henry Spencer, and Lynch agreed Nance was perfect.

      A few actors with small parts in Eraserhead came through Coulson, and several other cast members—including Judith Roberts (Beautiful Girl Across the Hall), Allen Joseph (Mr. X), and Jeanne Bates (Mrs. X)—were members of the repertory company Theater West. Bates was a seasoned veteran of movies and television and was well into her fifties when she was cast in Eraser-head. Lynch was nonetheless worried that she was too pretty for the role, so he fashioned a mole sprouting a single hair for her face. Like most people who met Lynch, Bates was enchanted by him. “I remember Jeanne sitting there patiently while he applied this ugly mole to her face,” Small said. “David was working with very experienced actors, and from the start they thought he was a genius and trusted him.”

      The cast for the film fell into place fairly quickly; creating the realm where Eraserhead takes place demanded a good deal more, and this is where Lynch’s genius really became evident. Largely built out of scavenged materials, Henry’s world is some kind of miracle in that Lynch did so much with so little. Everything was repurposed and repeatedly reused to create meticulously built sets that included an apartment, a lobby, a theater stage, a pencil factory, a suburban home, an office, and a front porch. Lynch and Splet soundproofed the sets with blankets and fiberglass insulation in burlap bags, and Lynch rented the equipment he needed for special sequences. Eraserhead includes several complex effects shots, and answers to technical questions often involved cold calls to effects people at local studios. Lynch is a practical person who enjoys problem-solving, and he learned through trial and error.

      Doreen Small scoured flea markets and thrift stores for clothing and props, and Coulson and Nance emptied their own living room to furnish the lobby of Henry’s apartment. A particularly valuable resource was Coulson’s aunt, Margit Fellegi Laszlo, who lived in a seventeen-room house in Beverly Hills. A designer for bathing-suit company Cole of California, Laszlo had a basement full of stuff, and Coulson and Lynch often dug through it looking for props. “That’s where we found the humidifier for the baby,” Coulson recalled.3

      The props list for Eraserhead included things considerably more offbeat than a humidifier. “David wanted a dog with a litter of nursing puppies, so I called vets to find people who had dogs with new litters, then called them and asked if they’d loan us their dogs,” Small recalled. “To get umbilical cords I lied to hospitals and told them the cords would just be in jars in the background in a movie scene. Those are real umbilical cords in the film, and we got five or six of them—Jack called them ‘billy cords.’ I had to find some unusual things.”

      The baby in Eraserhead—christened “Spike” by Nance—is the most crucial prop in the film, and Lynch began working on it months before the shoot started; he’s never disclosed how he created the baby, nor have any of the cast and crew. The film also called for two large props—a planet and a baby head—which were fashioned out of various materials. The “giant baby head,” which is how they referred to it, was constructed in Lynch’s yard and took several months to complete. “It sat out there for quite a while, and the neighbors referred to it as ‘the big egg,’ ” Reavey recalled.

      As part of pre-production, Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun for his cast and crew. The black-and-white photography in both films is particularly saturated and rich, and Small recalled that “he wanted us to understand his concept of the color black. He also encouraged us to go see this guy named James in some canyon and have our horoscopes read.”

      Principal photography began on May 29th, 1972, and the first scene on the shooting schedule was Henry’s dinner with Mary’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. X. “I couldn’t believe how long everything took that first night,” recalled Charlotte Stewart, “and the reason it took so long was because David had to do everything himself—really, he did everything. The light fixtures had to be just so; he made the chickens for the dinner—he had to touch everything on the set. I remember thinking, Oh my God, this kid is never going to make it; he doesn’t understand that you can’t take this long in this business. I felt bad for him that he didn’t know this.”

      The film progressed at a glacial pace, and a year into the shoot DP Herb Cardwell decided he needed a job that could pay him a living wage and left the film. This created an opening for cinematographer Fred Elmes. Born in East Orange, New Jersey, Elmes studied still photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, then enrolled in the film-studies program at New York University. When an instructor there told him about the AFI, he headed west.

      Elmes began classes at the AFI in the fall of 1972 and recalled, “A few months after I arrived, Toni Vellani said, ‘We have a filmmaker here who needs a DP and you should meet him.’ I met David and he showed me a reel of scenes and I had no idea what to make of what I was seeing, but I was captivated. It was shot in this beautiful black and white and was so curious and beautifully designed, and the acting style was fascinating. Everything about it knocked me out and I couldn’t possibly say no.4

      “One of the main challenges was how to light a black movie that you could see,” Elmes continued of the film, which was shot almost entirely at night. That’s what Eraserhead demanded in terms of mood, of course, but it was also the only time the AFI grounds were quiet enough for Lynch to work. “We’d shoot all night,” said Coulson, “then at a certain point Alan Splet would say, ‘Birds, I hear birds,’ and we knew it was time to stop working.”

      And the film “couldn’t be dark enough,” said Elmes, who spent two weeks working with Cardwell to get up to speed prior to his departure. “David and I would look at dailies and say, ‘I see a detail in that black shadow that shouldn’t be there—let’s make it darker.’ David and I agreed that the mood you create is the most important thing. Yes, there’s the writing and the acting, but the mood and the feeling of the light is what makes a film take off. With Eraserhead, David told the story almost purely through mood and the way things look.”

      For the film’s few daytime exterior shots, Coulson recalled, “We shot many of the exteriors, including the opening scene, beneath a bridge in downtown L.A. We worked fast when we shot on location because we never had

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