November 21, 2025 • 16 mins
Offer an extensive biographical overview of filmmaker David Lynch, detailing his early life, creative development, and career milestones through a combination of his own recollections and those of his family, friends, and professional collaborators. The text traces his upbringing in a supportive yet strict family environment and his subsequent move to Alexandria, Virginia, which he remembers as a profound, upsetting shift. A significant portion of the material covers the production of his most notable films, including the demanding, low-budget creation of Eraserhead and his experience with studio interference during the making of Dune, contrasting this with the relative creative freedom he enjoyed on projects like The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, which was largely financed by Dino De Laurentiis. Furthermore, the sources explore Lynch's work in television, most notably Twin Peaks, and his deep commitment to Transcendental Meditation as a core influence on his life and art.
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Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Room-Dream-David-Lynch/dp/039958921X?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=386f125b4b40e0f61ab029db2c985b9a&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back. We are diving deep today into a story
that's well, it's less a standard biography and more like
exploring two parallel worlds colliding in one creative mind. We're
digging into the life and work of David Lynch exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
We've got stacks of material, memories, interviews, analysis, and our
mission is really to distill that into a cohesive story.
We want to understand how this almost picture perfect American
childhood could possibly lead to the kind of dark, surreal
art he's known for.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
It's that central tension, isn't it the collision? How does
someone who describes his early life as really magical end
up creating worlds filled with such well, unsettling forces.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's the core question, and it starts right back at
the beginning in Boise, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, those early years in Boise. These sound incredibly idyllic,
pure Americana almost. He talks about summers with friends like
Mark Smith, building these big subterranean forts.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Ours just playing army, completely lost in It. Sounds like
total freedom.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
But it wasn't just unstreng ructured freedom, right There was
a foundation there, oh.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Absolutely. The family life, while devoutly Presbyterian, was very supportive.
His mother, Sonny he called her, was apparently a fantastic homemaker,
great seamstress, real dedication. His father, His father had these
definite standards of behavior, especially about craft, you know, doing
things properly, meticulously. That seems pretty key. That respect for
(01:25):
the process.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I love those little details that set up the contrasts.
He must have felt like his family in their sensible
Pontiac going off to church and then seeing the neighbors,
the Smiths, roaring off in their cool Thunderbird convertible to
go skiing. He apparently thought that was so cool, right.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
You can see him gravitating towards the adventuress, the slightly
rebellious even then, even if his own family was more
maybe stable.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And predictable, And that pull towards extremes wasn't just about cars.
It it was internal too.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Definitely, he said he came into the world with an
unusually intense capacity for joy, which is quite a statement.
But alongside that joy, there was this fascination with well.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
The edges, like discovering rock and roll Dave Brubeck.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, Blue Rondo, Ela Turk in fifty nine that blew
him away. But it wasn't just music. There was darker
stuff too, more adventurous play.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
You mean the pipe bombs. That's quite a leap from
playing army.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
It really is. They were making these things in Riley
Cutler's basement and they weren't messing around. One test apparently
blew a board off of Gordy Templeton's fence.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Wow. So his friends later on, like Mark Smith, they
just couldn't square that, could they? The happy kid they
knew with the darkness and the films.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Not at all. But Lynch himself acknowledges that duality. He
remembers shooting chipmunks with his dad in the fourth service
pickup right, and this really visceral memory of accidentally hitting
a bird, just seeing the feathers explode. So even in
those idyllic memories, there's this sudden, jarring violence. It's almost
like a template for his films, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, where the ordinary gets punctured by something brutal, and
that balance, that duality, it was about to get seriously
disrupted big time.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Nineteen sixty the family moves he's fourteen.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
To Alexandria, Virginia, and he was not happy about it.
He called it the end of an era. Said the
music stopped. What was so traumatic about that move for him?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, compared to the open spaces of Boise, he found
Virginia really dark, almost suffocating. It kicked off this really
turbulent phase for him.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Became a bit of a juvenile delinquent.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah for a while, sneaking out, getting incredibly drunk on
gin for the first time, hating the kind of restrictive atmosphere.
It was his first real taste of that seedy side
of life he'd later explore so much.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
And it even affected how he saw his home life,
thinking his mom's dinners were too clean.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Right, It's like he was actively rejecting that tidy, orderly
world he came from. He did finish his Eagle Scout
rank around then, Oh really Yeah, but apparently it was
mostly just to please his dad, that kind of compromise.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Maybe, So this term oil is happening right when his
interest in art, specifically painting, is really taking of exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
It's all intertwined artistic rebellion alongside the personal rebellion. He
tried art school in Boston, but that didn't stick field
some courses.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Then the Europe trip Salzburg went belly up as he
put it, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Bit half baked. He even went to Athens hoping to
run into Nancy Briggs, the girl who'd broken his heart.
Didn't happen, just another dead end, really.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Which brought him back to Alexandria. And that's where he
meets Jack Fisk or John Newton's as he was known then.
That seems like a tiviotal connection.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh, massively important. They rented this tiny studio together for
like twenty five bucks a month, and they read Robert
Hanries The Art Spirit.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
What was so special about that book?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
It sort of gave them permission, you know, validated their
intense focus on art, made them feel less alone. And
Lynch's painting immediately went dark, lots of docs at night,
dying animal's moody, atmospheric.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Stuff, which his parents didn't get at.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
All, not one bit. They were apparently, like, why don't
you draw something that looks good like you used to?
But he was finding his voice, you know, in those shadows.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
And Fisk encouraged him to make the next big leap,
didn't he Philadelphia?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yep? In Philadelphia. Yeah, that was a whole different world, terrifying, violent, poor,
but Lynch called it rich. Mulch for his imagination.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
It really stripped away any remaining illusions, didn't it. That
boise innocence was.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Long gone, completely gone. He saw things there. He visited
a morge late when night, saw body stacked on shelves,
and his reaction wasn't fear. It was interest, just interested,
which is kind of chilling.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
That detachment is something else. But it wasn't all detached observation,
was it. There is real fear too.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Oh yeah, that story about the police scopping him and
a friend just for pausing in a yellow.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Light, thrown in a paddy wagon, nearly accused of a crime.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Until someone cleared them. He said that made him really nervous.
So the threat, the potential for random violence, it was
suddenly very real, very personal.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
So you have this mix intense artistic focus, this immersion
in a really gritty, sometimes scary reality, and.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
That leads directly to the moment nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
He's painting a figure in dark foliage and.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
He feels this little wind, sees movement in the painting,
and boom, the idea hits him. A moving painting cinema.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Which became six men getting sick six times that one
minute animation cost him two hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Made in this gutted hotel room using casts of Jack
Fisk's face. He was even messing around with highly flammable
or resin the first batch apparently just bursts into flames.
Shows the dedication.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Right absolutely, and then he connects with Alan Splitt, sound genius.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Ah Split described as looking like Van Go, skinny as
a pencil and blind as a bat, but his sound
work that became the other essential half of Lynch's world.
That texture of the atmosphere, the dread, a lot of
that comes in the sound.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And that intense focus, that dedication. It all culminates in
a raserhead five years.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I've grueling years, mostly made with scavenged materials, stuff they
bought for one hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Just unbelievable commitment well kept him going for that long
on one project, just staying true to the idea. He
obsessed over every single detail. Henry Spencer's walk, the way
he moved, every gesture had to feel right, loaded with meaning.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And the actress playing Mary Charlotte Stewart, Yeah, he encouraged her.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
To design her own costume, which ended up being this
ill fitting dress symbolizing her lack of confidence, and he
actually applied makeup to her ear before every single take
to suggest an ear infection that wasn't even in the script.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
That level of detail is just wow.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
It's total immersion. But then the crew screening disaster like
a toothache, someone.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Said, rejected by Kahn, rejected by the New York Film
Festival must have felt like a total failure.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
You'd think so. But then Jackfiske's sister Mary basically forced
him to submit it to film ICs in LA And
that's what did it. It found its audience, became this
huge midnight movie cult hit.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And why did it can? What was it about? A razorhead?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Lynch himself said, the scenes were more inside my head
than they are on the screen. It was just pure,
unfiltered subconscious maybe, and somehow that resonated deeply.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And that resonance reached incredibly.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Mel Brooks, Yeah, Brooks saw it, apparently loved it, said
it was all symbols, but it's real. And just like that,
hires Lynch, the guy who just spent five years in
a stable making this bizarre art film, to direct The
Elephant Man.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
The Leap is just staggering. Suddenly he's working with Anthony Hopkins,
proper classically trained actors. How do he handle that?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
He did great. Actually there was some initial friction. Sure,
Hopkins apparently complained early on. I don't think he has
a total grasp of what has to be done here.
Oh but Lynch found his footing and crucially mel Brooks
backed him all the way protected his final cut when
the studio wanted to mess with it. It proved Lynch
could navigate the system, you know, without totally compromising.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
But then then came Doune, the big budget sci fi
epic for a Dino de Laurentis, a three picture deal
that must have felt like jumping into the deep end.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Oh completely, it was this massive, sprawling production. He actually
loved the Delarentes family, felt really welcomed by them. Dino
showed him all this amazing Venetian architecture that inspired the sets.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
So parts of it were good.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The personal connection, yes, But the shoot itself down in Mexico,
total chaos, four crews working at once. Lynch described feeling
deep horror. He even injured his back. The rough cut
was something like five hours long.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Just sounds overwhelming, a nightmare of scale.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Pretty much. Lynch later admitted we destroyed dune in the
editing room. Control was taken away. It was a huge
studio flop, but he learned something vital from it. That
kind of massive failure, it could be weirdly freeing. It
let him pivot back to something much more personal.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
And that pivot was Blue Velvet. Back to small town America,
but peeling back the surface to find the darkness underneath.
The casting stories for this one are legendary.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Oh. Absolutely, Dennis Hopper basically demanding the part of Frank Booth.
Oh oh, I have to belay Frank Booth because I'm
Frank Booth chilling. And Robert Loggia.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, that's amazing, Loja. Apparently through this huge tantrum when
he didn't get an audition for Blue Velvet. Years later,
Lynch remembered that explosive rage and cast him as mister
Eddie and lost highway. He stored away that real life intensity.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Incredible. Yeah. Isabelle Rossellini too, of course. And the music, yeah,
Angelo Padelamenti Mysteries of Love. That wasn't the original plan,
was it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
No. He desperately wanted the song to the Siren by
Tim Buckley, but couldn't get the rights couldn't afford it,
so he gave did Alomendy some lyrics he'd written described
the mood, and out came that classic haunting track sung
by Julie Cruz.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Wench called it Fate said it was pretty perfect in
the end, and the film was a hit, got him
an Oscar nomination, which led to another amazing story.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Ah the Elizabeth Taylor moment.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yes, at Swifty Lazar's big Hollywood party after the Oscars,
He's talking to Liz Taylor.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
She loved blue velvet, and he blurts out that he
I wish she'd won so he could have kissed her.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
She just says, come here, amazing. He leaned down, saw
her famous violet eyes and said her lips felt miles deep.
Just this totally surreal, classic Hollywood encounter born out of
the success of his dark, disturbing film.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
The Contrast Just keep coming with him, and that success
flowed right into television. Twin Peaks, co created with Mark Frost.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Groundbroking Stuff completely changed television, and the scariest part the
villain Bob Pure accident.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
The set dresser Frank Silva.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yep accidentally caught in a reflection in a mirror during
a take with Gray Sabriski. Yeah, Lynch saw it in
the dailies, loved the unsettling vibe and just wrote him in,
asked Frank to repeat the move. Bob was born right there,
incredible serendibity.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
But the show's massive success didn't last. Lynch left to
direct Wild at Heart, and.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Twin Peaks just kind of fell apart, didn't. It became
as someone put it in Aarsets version of itself. Meanwhile,
Wild at Heart was just full on Lynch, unapologetically violent, sexy.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Weird, with Cheryl Lee as Glinda the Goodwitch floating sixty
feet up on piano wire at the end.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Right a huge technical challenge, and the film won the
Paldor at Cohn famously greeted with both cheers.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
And booze, which probably just reinforced that lesson he learned
from Doune.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Right exactly, failure can free you. You follow the idea,
take the risks. You can't lose more, but you might
change something amazing.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
After Wild at Heart he did Lost Highway, which was well,
pretty inscrutable, featured that shilling performance from Robert Blake.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, the Mystery Man, very creepy. Then came Mulholland Drive,
which had its own complicated.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Birth, started as a TV pilot that got rejected.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
That's right. It probably would have died there. But his friend,
this French producer, Pier Edelman, apparently a real character, used
to organize cockroach races in prison. That's the story. Anyway,
Edelman was like a terrier, just wouldn't let it go.
He somehow found the money to let Lynch rework the
pilot into the feature film. We know, amazing persistence.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
And then just to keep everyone guessing, he makes the
straight story, co written with Mary Sweeney.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
His longtime editor and partner, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Distributed by Disney, a g rating about an old guy
driving a lawnmower across states to see his brother. How
does that fit?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
But Lynch insisted it was totally part of his world.
He talked about the beauty of it, especially that final
scene between Richard Farnsworth and Harry Dean Stanton, the sun
setting perfectly as Farnsworth delivers his last line.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So the tender, the beautiful, it's just as important to
his vision as the dark stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Absolutely, it's all part of the tapestry. Then he really
embraced digital with Inland Empire.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Shot on a consumer camcorder, a Sony P one fifty YEP.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Three hours long, barely a script, improvised a lot. Called
it a spiritual opus, and he shot a lot of
it in Odo, poland loved the atmosphere there, the dark, secrets,
devastated factories, fog shadows.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
This is like the exact opposite of sunny, magical boise
where he started.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
It is, but he finds inspiration in both extremes, doesn't
he That seems key? And to protect that ability to
find ideas, he keeps his life incredibly controlled.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Hasn't pumped his own gas in decades. Lunch just appears.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Pretty much all designed to maximize the time for daydreaming,
for catching ideas.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Why such rigid control for art that often feels so chaotic.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Because he sees ideas as these pure things, like gifts.
The artist's job isn't to force them, it's just to
be open, catch them and then stay true to the idea,
don't mess it up.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
And transcendental meditation is the anchor for all this.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
He credits TM completely for his happiness, his stability, says
it lets him appreciate all of life, including the dark parts.
It lets him navigate those worlds without getting lost in them.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Maybe he still seems to find beauty everywhere. Talks about
the light in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah, the light and the fact that it's spread out,
contrasts it with feeling claustroslobic in New York. It all
feeds back into observation instinct. He worries we're losing that
ability to just see.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Losing the ability to see the stars. He said, forgetting
how grand the whole show.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Is exactly that sense of mystery is vital.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
So the journey is incredible, from a kid building forts
and pipe bombs and boise to directing Hollywood legends, getting
kissed by Elizabeth Taylor, finding inspiration in Polish factories. It's
all held together by that tension, isn't it? The sunny
surface and the dark depths.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It really is. And speaking of those dark decks and
the figures who inhabit them, Drawing from everything we've looked at,
here's something to leave you with a final thought to consider. Okay,
think about the recurring figure in his work, the woman
in Trouble, the mysterious woman whose identity shifts Laura Palmer,
the women in Mulholland Drive. Could it be that all
these major works are, in some fundamental way circling around
(15:48):
the ultimate American woman in trouble, around Marilyn Monroe and
the kind of shared cultural anxiety she represents.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Wow, that's definitely something to chew on. An extraordinary story,
contradictions in all driven by this fierce loyalty to the idea.
Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. We'll see
you next time.
Welcome back. We are diving deep today into a story
that's well, it's less a standard biography and more like
exploring two parallel worlds colliding in one creative mind. We're
digging into the life and work of David Lynch exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
We've got stacks of material, memories, interviews, analysis, and our
mission is really to distill that into a cohesive story.
We want to understand how this almost picture perfect American
childhood could possibly lead to the kind of dark, surreal
art he's known for.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
It's that central tension, isn't it the collision? How does
someone who describes his early life as really magical end
up creating worlds filled with such well, unsettling forces.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's the core question, and it starts right back at
the beginning in Boise, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, those early years in Boise. These sound incredibly idyllic,
pure Americana almost. He talks about summers with friends like
Mark Smith, building these big subterranean forts.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Ours just playing army, completely lost in It. Sounds like
total freedom.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
But it wasn't just unstreng ructured freedom, right There was
a foundation there, oh.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Absolutely. The family life, while devoutly Presbyterian, was very supportive.
His mother, Sonny he called her, was apparently a fantastic homemaker,
great seamstress, real dedication. His father, His father had these
definite standards of behavior, especially about craft, you know, doing
things properly, meticulously. That seems pretty key. That respect for
(01:25):
the process.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I love those little details that set up the contrasts.
He must have felt like his family in their sensible
Pontiac going off to church and then seeing the neighbors,
the Smiths, roaring off in their cool Thunderbird convertible to
go skiing. He apparently thought that was so cool, right.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
You can see him gravitating towards the adventuress, the slightly
rebellious even then, even if his own family was more
maybe stable.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And predictable, And that pull towards extremes wasn't just about cars.
It it was internal too.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Definitely, he said he came into the world with an
unusually intense capacity for joy, which is quite a statement.
But alongside that joy, there was this fascination with well.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
The edges, like discovering rock and roll Dave Brubeck.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, Blue Rondo, Ela Turk in fifty nine that blew
him away. But it wasn't just music. There was darker
stuff too, more adventurous play.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
You mean the pipe bombs. That's quite a leap from
playing army.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
It really is. They were making these things in Riley
Cutler's basement and they weren't messing around. One test apparently
blew a board off of Gordy Templeton's fence.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Wow. So his friends later on, like Mark Smith, they
just couldn't square that, could they? The happy kid they
knew with the darkness and the films.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Not at all. But Lynch himself acknowledges that duality. He
remembers shooting chipmunks with his dad in the fourth service
pickup right, and this really visceral memory of accidentally hitting
a bird, just seeing the feathers explode. So even in
those idyllic memories, there's this sudden, jarring violence. It's almost
like a template for his films, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, where the ordinary gets punctured by something brutal, and
that balance, that duality, it was about to get seriously
disrupted big time.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Nineteen sixty the family moves he's fourteen.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
To Alexandria, Virginia, and he was not happy about it.
He called it the end of an era. Said the
music stopped. What was so traumatic about that move for him?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, compared to the open spaces of Boise, he found
Virginia really dark, almost suffocating. It kicked off this really
turbulent phase for him.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Became a bit of a juvenile delinquent.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah for a while, sneaking out, getting incredibly drunk on
gin for the first time, hating the kind of restrictive atmosphere.
It was his first real taste of that seedy side
of life he'd later explore so much.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
And it even affected how he saw his home life,
thinking his mom's dinners were too clean.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Right, It's like he was actively rejecting that tidy, orderly
world he came from. He did finish his Eagle Scout
rank around then, Oh really Yeah, but apparently it was
mostly just to please his dad, that kind of compromise.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Maybe, So this term oil is happening right when his
interest in art, specifically painting, is really taking of exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
It's all intertwined artistic rebellion alongside the personal rebellion. He
tried art school in Boston, but that didn't stick field
some courses.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Then the Europe trip Salzburg went belly up as he
put it, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Bit half baked. He even went to Athens hoping to
run into Nancy Briggs, the girl who'd broken his heart.
Didn't happen, just another dead end, really.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Which brought him back to Alexandria. And that's where he
meets Jack Fisk or John Newton's as he was known then.
That seems like a tiviotal connection.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh, massively important. They rented this tiny studio together for
like twenty five bucks a month, and they read Robert
Hanries The Art Spirit.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
What was so special about that book?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
It sort of gave them permission, you know, validated their
intense focus on art, made them feel less alone. And
Lynch's painting immediately went dark, lots of docs at night,
dying animal's moody, atmospheric.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Stuff, which his parents didn't get at.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
All, not one bit. They were apparently, like, why don't
you draw something that looks good like you used to?
But he was finding his voice, you know, in those shadows.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
And Fisk encouraged him to make the next big leap,
didn't he Philadelphia?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yep? In Philadelphia. Yeah, that was a whole different world, terrifying, violent, poor,
but Lynch called it rich. Mulch for his imagination.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
It really stripped away any remaining illusions, didn't it. That
boise innocence was.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Long gone, completely gone. He saw things there. He visited
a morge late when night, saw body stacked on shelves,
and his reaction wasn't fear. It was interest, just interested,
which is kind of chilling.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
That detachment is something else. But it wasn't all detached observation,
was it. There is real fear too.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Oh yeah, that story about the police scopping him and
a friend just for pausing in a yellow.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Light, thrown in a paddy wagon, nearly accused of a crime.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Until someone cleared them. He said that made him really nervous.
So the threat, the potential for random violence, it was
suddenly very real, very personal.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
So you have this mix intense artistic focus, this immersion
in a really gritty, sometimes scary reality, and.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
That leads directly to the moment nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
He's painting a figure in dark foliage and.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
He feels this little wind, sees movement in the painting,
and boom, the idea hits him. A moving painting cinema.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Which became six men getting sick six times that one
minute animation cost him two hundred bucks.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Made in this gutted hotel room using casts of Jack
Fisk's face. He was even messing around with highly flammable
or resin the first batch apparently just bursts into flames.
Shows the dedication.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Right absolutely, and then he connects with Alan Splitt, sound genius.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Ah Split described as looking like Van Go, skinny as
a pencil and blind as a bat, but his sound
work that became the other essential half of Lynch's world.
That texture of the atmosphere, the dread, a lot of
that comes in the sound.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And that intense focus, that dedication. It all culminates in
a raserhead five years.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I've grueling years, mostly made with scavenged materials, stuff they
bought for one hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Just unbelievable commitment well kept him going for that long
on one project, just staying true to the idea. He
obsessed over every single detail. Henry Spencer's walk, the way
he moved, every gesture had to feel right, loaded with meaning.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And the actress playing Mary Charlotte Stewart, Yeah, he encouraged her.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
To design her own costume, which ended up being this
ill fitting dress symbolizing her lack of confidence, and he
actually applied makeup to her ear before every single take
to suggest an ear infection that wasn't even in the script.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
That level of detail is just wow.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
It's total immersion. But then the crew screening disaster like
a toothache, someone.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Said, rejected by Kahn, rejected by the New York Film
Festival must have felt like a total failure.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
You'd think so. But then Jackfiske's sister Mary basically forced
him to submit it to film ICs in LA And
that's what did it. It found its audience, became this
huge midnight movie cult hit.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And why did it can? What was it about? A razorhead?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Lynch himself said, the scenes were more inside my head
than they are on the screen. It was just pure,
unfiltered subconscious maybe, and somehow that resonated deeply.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And that resonance reached incredibly.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Mel Brooks, Yeah, Brooks saw it, apparently loved it, said
it was all symbols, but it's real. And just like that,
hires Lynch, the guy who just spent five years in
a stable making this bizarre art film, to direct The
Elephant Man.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
The Leap is just staggering. Suddenly he's working with Anthony Hopkins,
proper classically trained actors. How do he handle that?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
He did great. Actually there was some initial friction. Sure,
Hopkins apparently complained early on. I don't think he has
a total grasp of what has to be done here.
Oh but Lynch found his footing and crucially mel Brooks
backed him all the way protected his final cut when
the studio wanted to mess with it. It proved Lynch
could navigate the system, you know, without totally compromising.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
But then then came Doune, the big budget sci fi
epic for a Dino de Laurentis, a three picture deal
that must have felt like jumping into the deep end.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Oh completely, it was this massive, sprawling production. He actually
loved the Delarentes family, felt really welcomed by them. Dino
showed him all this amazing Venetian architecture that inspired the sets.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
So parts of it were good.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The personal connection, yes, But the shoot itself down in Mexico,
total chaos, four crews working at once. Lynch described feeling
deep horror. He even injured his back. The rough cut
was something like five hours long.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Just sounds overwhelming, a nightmare of scale.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Pretty much. Lynch later admitted we destroyed dune in the
editing room. Control was taken away. It was a huge
studio flop, but he learned something vital from it. That
kind of massive failure, it could be weirdly freeing. It
let him pivot back to something much more personal.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
And that pivot was Blue Velvet. Back to small town America,
but peeling back the surface to find the darkness underneath.
The casting stories for this one are legendary.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Oh. Absolutely, Dennis Hopper basically demanding the part of Frank Booth.
Oh oh, I have to belay Frank Booth because I'm
Frank Booth chilling. And Robert Loggia.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, that's amazing, Loja. Apparently through this huge tantrum when
he didn't get an audition for Blue Velvet. Years later,
Lynch remembered that explosive rage and cast him as mister
Eddie and lost highway. He stored away that real life intensity.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Incredible. Yeah. Isabelle Rossellini too, of course. And the music, yeah,
Angelo Padelamenti Mysteries of Love. That wasn't the original plan,
was it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
No. He desperately wanted the song to the Siren by
Tim Buckley, but couldn't get the rights couldn't afford it,
so he gave did Alomendy some lyrics he'd written described
the mood, and out came that classic haunting track sung
by Julie Cruz.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Wench called it Fate said it was pretty perfect in
the end, and the film was a hit, got him
an Oscar nomination, which led to another amazing story.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Ah the Elizabeth Taylor moment.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yes, at Swifty Lazar's big Hollywood party after the Oscars,
He's talking to Liz Taylor.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
She loved blue velvet, and he blurts out that he
I wish she'd won so he could have kissed her.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
She just says, come here, amazing. He leaned down, saw
her famous violet eyes and said her lips felt miles deep.
Just this totally surreal, classic Hollywood encounter born out of
the success of his dark, disturbing film.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
The Contrast Just keep coming with him, and that success
flowed right into television. Twin Peaks, co created with Mark Frost.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Groundbroking Stuff completely changed television, and the scariest part the
villain Bob Pure accident.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
The set dresser Frank Silva.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yep accidentally caught in a reflection in a mirror during
a take with Gray Sabriski. Yeah, Lynch saw it in
the dailies, loved the unsettling vibe and just wrote him in,
asked Frank to repeat the move. Bob was born right there,
incredible serendibity.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
But the show's massive success didn't last. Lynch left to
direct Wild at Heart, and.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Twin Peaks just kind of fell apart, didn't. It became
as someone put it in Aarsets version of itself. Meanwhile,
Wild at Heart was just full on Lynch, unapologetically violent, sexy.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Weird, with Cheryl Lee as Glinda the Goodwitch floating sixty
feet up on piano wire at the end.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Right a huge technical challenge, and the film won the
Paldor at Cohn famously greeted with both cheers.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
And booze, which probably just reinforced that lesson he learned
from Doune.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Right exactly, failure can free you. You follow the idea,
take the risks. You can't lose more, but you might
change something amazing.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
After Wild at Heart he did Lost Highway, which was well,
pretty inscrutable, featured that shilling performance from Robert Blake.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, the Mystery Man, very creepy. Then came Mulholland Drive,
which had its own complicated.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Birth, started as a TV pilot that got rejected.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
That's right. It probably would have died there. But his friend,
this French producer, Pier Edelman, apparently a real character, used
to organize cockroach races in prison. That's the story. Anyway,
Edelman was like a terrier, just wouldn't let it go.
He somehow found the money to let Lynch rework the
pilot into the feature film. We know, amazing persistence.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
And then just to keep everyone guessing, he makes the
straight story, co written with Mary Sweeney.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
His longtime editor and partner, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Distributed by Disney, a g rating about an old guy
driving a lawnmower across states to see his brother. How
does that fit?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
But Lynch insisted it was totally part of his world.
He talked about the beauty of it, especially that final
scene between Richard Farnsworth and Harry Dean Stanton, the sun
setting perfectly as Farnsworth delivers his last line.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So the tender, the beautiful, it's just as important to
his vision as the dark stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Absolutely, it's all part of the tapestry. Then he really
embraced digital with Inland Empire.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Shot on a consumer camcorder, a Sony P one fifty YEP.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Three hours long, barely a script, improvised a lot. Called
it a spiritual opus, and he shot a lot of
it in Odo, poland loved the atmosphere there, the dark, secrets,
devastated factories, fog shadows.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
This is like the exact opposite of sunny, magical boise
where he started.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
It is, but he finds inspiration in both extremes, doesn't
he That seems key? And to protect that ability to
find ideas, he keeps his life incredibly controlled.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Hasn't pumped his own gas in decades. Lunch just appears.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Pretty much all designed to maximize the time for daydreaming,
for catching ideas.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Why such rigid control for art that often feels so chaotic.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Because he sees ideas as these pure things, like gifts.
The artist's job isn't to force them, it's just to
be open, catch them and then stay true to the idea,
don't mess it up.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
And transcendental meditation is the anchor for all this.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
He credits TM completely for his happiness, his stability, says
it lets him appreciate all of life, including the dark parts.
It lets him navigate those worlds without getting lost in them.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Maybe he still seems to find beauty everywhere. Talks about
the light in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah, the light and the fact that it's spread out,
contrasts it with feeling claustroslobic in New York. It all
feeds back into observation instinct. He worries we're losing that
ability to just see.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Losing the ability to see the stars. He said, forgetting
how grand the whole show.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Is exactly that sense of mystery is vital.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
So the journey is incredible, from a kid building forts
and pipe bombs and boise to directing Hollywood legends, getting
kissed by Elizabeth Taylor, finding inspiration in Polish factories. It's
all held together by that tension, isn't it? The sunny
surface and the dark depths.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It really is. And speaking of those dark decks and
the figures who inhabit them, Drawing from everything we've looked at,
here's something to leave you with a final thought to consider. Okay,
think about the recurring figure in his work, the woman
in Trouble, the mysterious woman whose identity shifts Laura Palmer,
the women in Mulholland Drive. Could it be that all
these major works are, in some fundamental way circling around
(15:48):
the ultimate American woman in trouble, around Marilyn Monroe and
the kind of shared cultural anxiety she represents.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Wow, that's definitely something to chew on. An extraordinary story,
contradictions in all driven by this fierce loyalty to the idea.
Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. We'll see
you next time.
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