LITMIR.BIZ

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after Herb left, and the film changed as it went along. I’m always drawing stuff in the food room, so I’m in there and I’m drawing this little woman and when I finish the drawing I’m looking at her and that’s when the Lady in the Radiator got born. I don’t know if I had the lyrics for “In Heaven” then, but the lady was there, and I knew she lived in the radiator where it’s warm. I ran into Henry’s room because I’d forgotten what the radiator in there looked like, and of all the radiators I’ve seen since then, none of them have what this radiator had, which was a little compartment where someone could live. I couldn’t believe it. These things you just don’t argue with. The final shot of Henry with the Lady in the Radiator is so beautiful because it just burned out white. Glowing.

      Whenever we had to build a set someplace on the grounds other than the stables, we’d have to work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and get it cleaned up by Monday before the gardeners came in. If we were in their way, we could get in trouble. We shot the scene where we come in on the planet in an area at the AFI where they stored firewood, and we did the fetus floating in space in my garage. The shots of Henry floating and of the planet surface were done in Fred’s living room. I built this long piece at my place then brought it to Fred, and he put together a beautiful track for the camera to be aimed down at this steep angle and track along. So you’re moving in on a planet, then you cut in and you’re traveling along the surface of the planet. Fred would tap in above the electrical box at his house, so we were stealing electricity, and we had big cables coming into his place. When we had questions about special effects, we’d talk to C-movie places—not B movies, C movies. We met some real characters and I learned something every place I went. Mostly I learned that it’s all common sense and that we could figure out how to do the effects shots ourselves.

      I built the planet so it would break in a certain place, and I wanted to build a catapult that would shoot a chunk of the planet backed with lead or steel so when it hit the planet it would explode. Al had a completely different catapult idea, and I said, “That won’t work,” and he said, “No, yours won’t work,” so we built both of them and neither of them worked. Finally I just threw a chunk of the planet at it but it only broke half of the piece, and I threw another chunk. So it worked out great because there were two explosions instead of just one.

      We had to shoot lots of things twice. Like the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall: Herb lit that scene with little pools of hard light, but Judith didn’t look beautiful under this light and the mood wasn’t right. So Herb relit the thing so it was like a soft wind of inky-black light, just beautiful.

      One weekend we were shooting what was called the dime scene and I’d emptied my bank account and gotten sixty dollars worth of dimes. This was based on a dream I had about a dirt adobe wall. I scratch the surface of it and I see a little bit of silver, and inside the earth wall were rows and rows of dimes. You could just dig them out! It was incredible.

      In the scene, which Henry witnesses from his apartment window, some kids find the dimes and then some adults come and chase them away and start fighting over them. So I bring in all this earth and these pipes and make a pond of dirty oil water. Then we had to set the camera up so it was angled from the point of view of somebody looking down on this scene. It took us so long, carrying these heavy things up a hill and building this thing, and we only have three days to do it. I remember Jack saying to me, “Lynch, they’ll never know,” and in a way that’s true with everything. So much goes on that people will never know about with every film. You can tell all the stories you want, but you still haven’t gotten across what the experience was like. It’s like telling somebody a dream. It doesn’t give them the dream.

      So we got the scene done but only a small part of it wound up in the film. Jack had been drinking that night, and after we finished shooting, Catherine took me aside and said, “David, Jack is putting the dimes in his pocket.” So I went over and said, “Jack, I want those dimes back,” and he said, “Yeah, Lynch, you want it all!” And it hit me. I decided that night that I would give people points in the film because they’d been with me all the way through. That was the night that did it.

      Jack was pissed off at Catherine for ratting on him about the dimes and he says to her, “Get in the stall, horse face!” Catherine is bigger than Jack, and she hauled back and slammed him in the nose and her ring cut his nose and he went down. So she left and I’m there with Jack and I say, “Come on, Jack, let’s go get some coffee,” and we drove to the Copper Penny and we had the greatest talk that night.

      I was a seeker before I found TM and I’d been looking into different forms of meditation. Al was into Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, but they left me cold, and sometimes Al and I would get in big arguments about this stuff. Al didn’t drink all the time because he couldn’t afford to, but when he drank he’d get argumentative, and a lot of times he’d storm out and go home. We’d have good arguments.

      Peggy’s father read constantly, and one day he gave me a book on Zen Buddhism. He never gave me any other books. I read it and a week later I went for a walk in the woods with him, and we’re walking along and he says, “That book says life is a mirage; do you understand that?” I said, “Yeah, I think I do.” And I did understand it. He was a really interesting guy. When we were living in Philadelphia we’d go to Peggy’s parents’ house for dinner on Sunday nights. These were the days before I got my car, so I was taking the train to work, and one Sunday night Peggy’s father said, “Okay, Wednesday morning when you get to the train station, go to platform nine. My train will be coming in and your train won’t have left yet. Hide behind the train, and at exactly 9:07 come out from behind the train and wave and then go away. I’ll do the same thing. Let’s coordinate our watches right now.” It had to be Wednesday, so I had to remember this thing for two days. Wednesday comes and I go to the station and I’m hiding behind my train, I’m there waiting and waiting, twenty seconds more, waiting and waiting, five, four, three, two, one; out I go, and I see him come out across the way from behind a train and we wave and go away. That was it, and it was so good for me because I did not let him down.

      I was looking for something but I hadn’t found it yet, and one day I’m talking to my sister on the phone and she starts telling me about Transcendental Meditation. I said, “A mantra! I’ve gotta have a mantra,” and I got off the phone and said to Catherine, “Do you want to start meditating with me?” and she said, “Sure.” I told her to call and find out where we should go, and she happened to dial the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center. In L.A. then there was the Students International Meditation Society and SRM, and my sister is right when she says SRM was the perfect place for me. Charlie Lutes was giving introductory lectures, and Charlie was the right guy for me because he was interested in the spiritual side of meditation as opposed to the scientific side. Thank goodness for Charlie and Helen—I loved both of them and learned so much from them. Charlie would see I had holes in my shirts and give me shirts that were old for him but were mint condition for me. They sort of looked after me a little bit.

      Charlie loved Maharishi, and in the early days he was pretty much his right-hand man. Before Charlie met Maharishi he was into all kinds of things, though, and sometimes he would tell tall tales about different things, like one night he was picked up by aliens and flew from L.A. to Washington, D.C., and then back to L.A. in a matter of minutes. One night after his lecture he said, “Did you see it?” I said, “See what?” He said, “There was a huge angel in the back of the room during my lecture.” He wasn’t nuts, but he was on another frequency big time. Before Charlie and Helen moved to Scottsdale, they went to Vlodrop to see Maharishi and he said to Charlie, “Come here and be with me,” and Charlie said, “Our dogs need taking care of,” and Maharishi just waved his hand dismissively. A lot of people around Maharishi were upset with Charlie, but Maharishi wasn’t. He didn’t really get upset.

      I didn’t care one bit about meditation when the Beatles were meditating, but then it was as if a switch had been thrown and I couldn’t get enough. Everything in me changed when I started meditating. Within two weeks of starting, Peggy comes to me and says, “What’s going on?” I said, “What are you talking about?” because she could’ve been referring to any number of things. And she says, “Your anger. Where did it go?” I used to be really bad in the morning and if I didn’t have my cereal exactly

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