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Room to Dream. Kristine McKenna
Читать онлайн.Название Room to Dream
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782118404
Автор произведения Kristine McKenna
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
“David is a charismatic, powerful person,” said Elmes, “and we all felt very involved. Certainly we were making David’s movie, but he was thankful for everyone’s work, and without thinking about it he kind of raised the bar on everything around him. He was constantly drawing, for instance, and seeing that was inspiring. It made us all want to work hard and try new things.”
Lynch had no time to spend in a painting studio while Eraserhead was in production, but he never stopped making visual art during those years. Any blank surface would do, and he completed several bodies of work, including series on matchbooks, diner napkins, and cheap notebook paper. The materials he used were humble, but the work can’t be dismissed as doodling. It’s too polished and thought out for that.
Intricate renderings executed on empty matchbooks, the works in the matchbook series are tiny universes that feel vast and expansive, despite their size. Another series revolves around obsessive patterning and operates differently: The nests of patterned lines are imploded and dense and feel slightly threatening. The napkin drawings are composed of odd shapes rendered in red, black, and yellow, floating in white fields; they almost look like something identifiable but are pure geometric abstraction. And there are drawings that are clearly preparatory studies for Eraserhead. There’s a portrait of Henry staring at a mound of dirt on a bedside table, and an image of the baby lying next to a volcano form with a lone branch protruding from the top. A sketch of the baby after its white swaddling has been cut open has a lyrical quality that the related scene in the film, which is quite gruesome, definitely does not have.
Lynch always knew what was right for Eraserhead, but he encouraged input from the cast and embraced a good idea when he saw one. Charlotte Stewart was given the task of styling Nance’s hair the evening shooting commenced, and she began back-combing it frenetically. Everyone in the room with her was laughing, but when Lynch walked in he took one look and declared, “That’s it.” Henry Spencer’s signature hairstyle was the result of happenstance.
Stewart’s take on her own character seemed intrinsically correct to Lynch, too. “I asked David if it would be all right for me to make my own dress, because Mary seems like a girl who sews her own clothes, but not very well, and nothing fits right—we wanted the top to be kind of ill-fitting so you could see her bra strap falling off her shoulder,” Stewart recalled. “Mary has no confidence, which is why she’s so stooped and closed in, and she has ear infections. Before we’d shoot, David always made a drippy ear infection in the outside of my right ear. It never showed, but we knew it was there.
“I have no idea why David thought I was right for the part. David casts people very strangely, and he doesn’t care what your background is and never makes actors read. He meets you and talks to you about wood or whatever and sees what he needs. And the way he worked with actors on Eraserhead is the same way he works with actors now,” said Stewart, who went on to appear in all three seasons of Twin Peaks. “He’s very private with actors and never gives you direction when other people are listening. He comes up to you very quietly and whispers in your ear. It’s real confidential direction.”
Lynch is big on rehearsal, and although Henry Spencer doesn’t seem to do much, it took considerable effort to achieve that effect; Lynch choreographed Henry’s movements so intricately that the slightest gesture is fraught with meaning. Reflecting on his working relationship with Lynch, Nance recalled that “we had these long, strange conversations, skull sessions, and things would reveal themselves a lot as we went along. And Henry was very easy. It was like putting on a comfortable suit to put on that character. I would put on the coat and tie and there was Henry.”5
The cast for Eraserhead was small, but the crew was even smaller and often came down to just Coulson. “I did everything from rolling paper to make it look like the elevator was moving to pushing the dolly,” said Coulson, who worked as a waitress at the time and often contributed tips and food to the production. “Fred was my mentor and he taught me how to shoot stills and be a camera assistant. I was also the courier to the lab that processed our film. We had to have it in by a certain time, and I’d get in the VW Bug and speed over to Seward Street in the middle of the night to get it to Mars Baumgarten, this great guy who worked there on the night shift. Because we worked long hours we had meals at the stables, and I cooked everything on a little hot plate with a frying pan. It was almost always the same food because David usually likes to eat only one thing, and it was grilled cheese or egg salad sandwiches then.”
Eraserhead was beginning to consume Lynch’s life, but throughout 1972 his ties to his family remained relatively sturdy. “We had a round oak table in the dining room, and for my birthday David and Jen got all this mud and piled it up into a peak on the table, and carved nooks and caves into it, and made clay figures and stuck them in there,” recalled Reavey. “I loved it. We had to eat in the living room with plates in our laps for quite a while because nobody wanted to dismantle the mound. It was on the table for several months.”
There were momentary diversions, but Eraserhead was the central concern in the Lynch household from the moment he began working on it. “Maybe this is a testament to my father’s brilliance as a director, but he convinced us that Eraserhead was the secret of happiness and he was just letting us in on it,” said Jennifer Lynch. “I was on that set a lot, and Eraserhead was just part of my childhood. I thought it was great and I didn’t realize there was anything different about my childhood until I was ten or eleven years old. I never felt like my father was a weirdo and I was always proud of him. Always.”
Lynch felt his cast and crew should be paid, so each of them received twenty-five dollars a week for the first two years of the shoot. (By the time the film wrapped, he’d been forced to cut salaries to $12.50.) It was a modest wage, but Lynch still went through the money the AFI had given him by spring 1973. He was told he could continue using school equipment but no additional funds would be forthcoming, and Eraserhead went on a forced hiatus that continued intermittently for almost a year.
“David was always trying to get money for the film, and I gave him some when I came back from doing Badlands,” said Fisk, who was the art director on Terrence Malick’s debut film of 1973. (Lynch and Splet introduced Fisk to Malick.) “I was used to making a hundred dollars a week and suddenly I was making a lot more, and it almost felt like free money. Over the years I probably gave David around four thousand dollars, and I’ve gotten all that back and more.”
Co-starring in Badlands was actress Sissy Spacek, who married Fisk a year after they met and was ushered into the world of Eraserhead. “When I met Jack on Badlands, he told me all about his best friend, David, and as soon as we got back to L.A. he took me to meet him,” Spacek recalled. “We went in the dead of night and everything was shrouded in intrigue and secrecy. David was living in the stables at the AFI, where he’d shoot all night and his crew would lock him in on the set during the day and he’d sleep. You had to knock a certain number of times and have the key, and it was like getting into Fort Knox.
“Jack was the first real artist I’d ever met,” Spacek continued, “and he introduced me to all these incredibly talented people, including David. I’ve always felt grateful that I met them at a time in my life and career when they were able to influence me. David and Jack are artists through and through—they throw themselves into every aspect of their work, they would never sell out, ever, and they love creating things.”6
After having returned to the East Coast, Fisk’s sister Mary was back in L.A. by 1973. She was in a brief marriage at the time and lived in Laurel Canyon for six months prior to separating from her husband and returning east. While in L.A., she’d worked for Nash Publishing and helped Reavey get a job there as a receptionist.
Lynch did various odd jobs during the hiatus, and money that allowed the shoot to resume materialized in fits and starts; the irregular shooting schedule coupled with the painstaking craftsmanship Lynch brought to his work made patience an essential