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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the little known, fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two guides to the deep dive. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runta. And Jordan I sat in thought for a long time about how I was going to introduce this, but there is no introducing what we're talking about today. There is no introducing David Lynch's Eraserhead, which turned forty five this year. There are two camps to this movie. You have seen it and are haunted by it. And even if you can't stand this film, it will haunt you to some degree. Or you've never seen it and are therefore only biding your time until you become haunted by it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, they used to sell lapel buttons that just read Eraserhead. I saw it, and that about sums it up. Lynch has repeatedly said that he will never reveal his intended meeting for this what I guess I'll just call a lucid nightmare, saying only that it's a dream of dark and troubling things and you can say that again. Most critics describe it as an abstract meditation on urban isolation, fatherhood, and sexual repression, but Freud called it the feel good film of the year.

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Speaker 2: I will get into this later. I refuse to believe that the beating of this film is as oblique as he would like it to be. It seems pretty straightforward to me. But we're putting the head ahead of the eraser. Now, that was terrible. I apologize for that. Jordan. Are you a David Lynch guy capitol d LG No?

00:01:39
Speaker 1: I just his daily YouTube weather reports and his guest spots on Louis as the comedy coach. I went to NYU for film, and I think that just kind of spoiled him for me because I knew Lynch people. I knew a guy in class who literally had the words club Celensio from a Holland Drive tattooed on his wrists. So I too much David Lynch in my life. Sure, which is weird because I didn't watch much of it, But.

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Speaker 2: Just well, wait, what have what? What of it? Have you watched Mulholland Drive in school? And really that was it? I know? The worst? No? Oh, I'm so excited for this, Folks. Let it be known that Jordan pitched this, I believe with the intention that I would not take him up on it, and he's regretted ever since.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd never seen it, and then I watched it for the first time about a week ago, and I haven't slept since.

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Speaker 2: But you know, why do you? Yeah, why do you love David Lynch?

00:02:31
Speaker 1: I have? There are three reasons why I love David Lynch. Like me, he's a massive Beatles fan, and he attended their first ever concert in the United States in Washington, d C.

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Speaker 2: In February of nineteen sixty four, so that's cool.

00:02:43
Speaker 1: He also spent his fifteenth birthday in front of the US Capitol watching the inauguration of JFK with his Scout troop and heigel like you, he's an Eagle Scout.

00:02:54
Speaker 2: We don't talk about that.

00:02:55
Speaker 1: And finally, when he was in college in Boston, he was the roommate of Jay Giles band singer Peter Wolfe aka the guy who sang Centerfold and Freeze Frame, but apparently Lynch kicked him out of the dorm because he was too weird. He was too weird for David Lynch.

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Speaker 2: I love that the popular log line with David Lynch is Jimmy Stewart on acid right, because he's like this midwestern you know, if you will see, if you put me at ease enough, I might bust out the David Lynch impression. Oh woh, but yeah, I would be hard pressed to think of another person so genuinely avant garde and bizarre who has had such an impact on mainstream American cinema in such a short amount of time. I mean, you think about Eraserhead. Eraser Head to Mulholland Drive is like twenty five years in that neighborhood. I'm really bad at that in that neighborhood. Yeah, that's wild. To coming in within spitting distance of an oscar in a quarter century of your career after this, that's nuts.

00:03:57
Speaker 1: I was shocked about how comparatively little he'd done. I mean, for somebody who has, you know, such a legion of followers. I was just very surprised that his cannon was not Yeah, I was very very surprised by that.

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Speaker 2: I didn't know that. But folks, enough banter. Yeah, we're delaying the inevitable here, Yeah, join us now as we take in the industrial wastelands of both Philadelphia and David Lynch's subconscious pierce the veil of Jack Nance's haircut and attempt on my part at least far too many Gordon Cole impressions. Here's everything you didn't know about eraser Head Jordan. In the late sixties. You might say that David Lynch was at a crossroads. Never get sold every time, but that crossroads was in Philadelphia. He's talked a lot about how he had a very very happy childhood, a very stable and happy childhood. Do we believe that, I kind of do. I mean, we'll get into mel Brooks's what mel Brooks thought of David Lynch later, but yeah, so's. He bounced around the US a good bit. His dad was in the USDA, and by the late sixties he's been enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia to study painting. Have you seen his paintings? His cartoons? Oh, well, his cartoon.

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Speaker 1: He had a cartoon in The Angriest Dog in the World, Yes, the Los Angeles Daily Reader for like a decade, and it's just still images of this dog, and it's always prefaced by this thing. It's like this dog is so angry that he can't move, he can't speak, he can't eat, rigor mortis has set in, and it's just this still images of this dog with like morbid thoughts, like what if this is as good as it gets? It's pretty amazing. So yes, I have seen that. Then his paintings. His paintings are like Francis Bacon meets John Wayne Gacy.

00:05:53
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I'm loving this already. Anyway, So he's there to work on that aesthetic, and he marries a fellow student, Peggy Reve in nineteen sixty seven, and she's the mother of their daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer was born in nineteen sixty eight and would go on to direct Boxing Helena, which is a really bad movie. Anyway. This little nuclear family is living in a North Philadelphia neighborhood called Fairmont, which was not a great place to live at the time. David Lynch's quotes about Philadelphia are their own art form. I want to do a David Lynch style surrealist podcast that's just me reading his quotes about Philadelphia. We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear, he told Chris Radley in a book called Lynch. On Lynch, a kid was shot to death down the street. We were robbed twice, had windows shot out, and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in, and according to another Lynch site by Mike Hartman, called the City of Absurdity, Lynch said that Erase Herhead was born in Philadelphia, and my favorite quote, I had my first thrilling thought in Philadelphia, which sounds like a Paul Anka song.

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Speaker 1: The less successful follow up till I left my heart in San Francisco. I had my first thrilling thought in Philadelphia talking about a racerhead. In later years, I think it might have been in the Lynch and Lynch book, he said. I call it my Philadelphia story. It just doesn't have Jimmy Stewart in it.

00:07:20
Speaker 2: And that's for damn sure, I'm gonna get into it. I lived at fourteenth and would right Kitty corner from the Morgue. That's real industrial. There's my first Lynch. That was good. That was really good. Thank you. It's a tough one to nail too. I'm impressed you very flat for that. It's very Western. You gotta unless it was at five o'clock. There's nobody in that neighborhood, No one lives there, And he says, I really do like that. It's beautiful if you see it in the right way, which is such a great thesis for so much of his work with this industrial stuff. And it's beautiful if you look at it in the right way. His roommate at the time, a childhood friend named Jack Fisk, told The New York Times in nineteen ninety that David would dress up to visit the Morgue. Oh, I love it. He was fascinated, and he would always wear at least two ties, one for luck. Have you seen the set photos of him around this time when he's wearing like the big wide brimmed hat and like and three times neck ties. Yeah. I saw a woman in the backyard squawking like a chicken. No, it's going, it's getting away from me. I saw a spopping that chicken. I saw a grown woman grab her breast and speak like a baby, complaining her nipples hurt. This kind of thing will set you back. And hey, so we're hearing about it, all right, We're gonna I gotta stop. I got a sub subjected you to David Lynch quotes about Philadelphia. One time I was walking around with it at night with a stick with nails driven through it, and a squad car pulls up alongside of me and he says, what have you got there? And I showed this stick with nails driven through it. He said, good for you, Bud, and took off Jesus. So, now that we have the set and setting of a raiser Head, it's important to know that it was not his first choice for a project, based on the strength of some early shorts that he did. Around this time, Lynch had been accepted into the American Film Institutes Center for Advanced Film Studies in nineteen seventy in Beverly Hills, and while he was there, he studied with the Czechoslovakian filmmaker named Frank Daniel.

00:09:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, not a lot of people know this, but Lynch actually moved to la after getting into a fight on the basketball court with two guys who were up to no good making trouble in his neighborhood. So he went to live with some family members in bel Air. He didn't I'm sure I'll cut that out if I really committed to it.

00:09:42
Speaker 2: Something had come but No, this is gets into like David Lynch's thing about being like, that's not what the movie's about, but it's like, obviously what the movies about. He had a script for a film called Garden Back, which is really bizarre obviously, but it's about infidelity because he had cheated on Peggy, I believe repeatedly. But yeah, tell us about garden Back. Yeah.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: A lot of these characters were inspired by characters in his paintings, which we touched on earlier. Is that before he was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he studied in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. So he's very accomplished painter and musician. Like he almost sat during breaks of filming.

00:10:23
Speaker 2: He used to like play trumpet, just like for the heck of it with Have you heard his record Crazy Clown Time? I haven't it? Is it what I imagine? It's weird, it's weird, imagine it's just weird. A lot of the quotes were taken from this come from Eraserhead comma The David Lynch Files, Volume one, the full story of one of the strangest films ever made by a guy named Kenneth George Godwin, really incredible book. But it's funny given that Lynch became such an iconoclass because there was a lot of interest in him at Afi at the time. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who is Yes, Zoe's dad and her mom is in Twin Peaks. She's Mama Heyward. She's Doc Heyward's wife who's in the wheelchair. So Caleb introduces Lynch to a twentieth century Fox producer who wanted to option Garden Back from a short into a feature, and the process of doing this, and these negotiations and talks exasperated Lynch so much that he quit. I mean, he has in various interviews he talks about basically the storming into the Dean's office. Yeah, I'd be like, I'm done with this, and then getting home and Peggy being like they can call and non stop. Yeah, like he was. He was, they really wanted him, and she's crazy.

00:11:42
Speaker 1: I mean, but I cannot imagine a film institution doing that now. Apparently the deed even said to him, Hey, if you're this unhappy, we're doing something wrong here.

00:11:50
Speaker 2: What do you want? What's wrong?

00:11:52
Speaker 1: Which is I cannot imagine getting a vote of confidence like that. It's really artistic institution. Now there's something that I mean, you know you.

00:12:00
Speaker 2: Alluded to this with the weather reports, but there is something magnetic about him. Yeah. The fact that he was able to get people on board with this his ridiculous ideas is really a testament to his charisma. I don't know, powers of persuasion anyway. Garden Back crashes and burns, Lynch almost quits the afi and Daniels is like, whatever we got to do, let's do it. And that turns out to be Eraserhead twenty one page shooting script is where this comes from. And there's a great documentary from two thousand and one that is called eraser Head Stories. It's just him talking into a mic, pretty tight close up on his shoulders and head, and at one point the log lady Catherine Colson, who is part of this film, we'll talk about her. She's like conference called in and half of it is just him like yelling at her, like on speakerphone off the mic, like yeah, yeah, you did cut his hair for that, didn't you. How many years were you on this, Kathy? Yeahh oh oh, I don't remember that.

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Speaker 1: Oh, and I can't he in like very big text. At the beginning of it, it said that this is documentary's directed by him as well, which I think is hilarious that it's just a tideshot of him and an old nineties speakerphone.

00:13:13
Speaker 2: What. I can't remember when I got the idea, when the word eraser Head or any part of the idea came to me first, He says, I can't remember if it was in Philadelphia or when I came to California. Don't remember writing the script, and don't remember the ideas coming in. It all came from Philadelphia, but I don't remember when. And it's I mean, not only was he at a crossroads, but he was at a low point when he started filming this in seventy two with a projected runtime of forty two minutes. Dorian Small, who's Eraserheads production manager, there's a theme in David Lynch's movies in which he has affairs with the women he's working on. Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet was one of them, and so he split from Peggy around this time because he was having an affair with Dorian Small. And Jennifer was born with clubbed feet, which is a deformity that I guess was a lot more common back then, and you had to wear like corrective footwear. I don't know where I'm going with this. The point is is that this movie is almost certainly about the dissolution of his relationship and having a daughter who had medical challenges when she was born, and his complete uninterest in being a father, disinterest, lack of interest, I don't know, but he's you know, if you're listening to him or Jennifer. Apparently that is not what it's about, because she said I don't think David credits that directly as where eraser Head comes from. But then she says, it's not just that, it's a million other things.

00:14:43
Speaker 1: So I just think that the fact that she calls her dad David is very interesting. Yeah, I mean, I imagine, despite what he says, that fatherhood and the anxieties surrounding it was a major inspiration. But I've also read that some of these other things that they mentioned could include the Kafka novel Metamorphosis, for which I think he actually wrote a script adaptation, and the Goggle short story from eighteen thirty six, The Nose. Both of those may have helped sow the seeds of this idea for eraser Head. The Kapka influence is really apparent in the character of Henry, who is just like so many of Kafka's characters, just simultaneously bemused by the world and terrified of it and extremely paranoid. And Lynch himself is copped to the Kafka thing, and he said that in I think it was in Lynch on Lynch that he's quote the one artist I feel could be my brother.

00:15:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so many of these characters are just like caught up in institutions and machinery bigger than them. That's actually really interesting because like so much of you think about, like the Trial and like a lot of the other Kofka stuff, that's just about like being stuck in some kind of institutional machine that is far bigger than you. And David Lynch literalizes it with people actually stuck in machine. Well, I mean just.

00:16:01
Speaker 1: Even the famous picture of Henry, the main character in eraser Head, that's you know, on T shirts and posters and dorm rooms across the globe, just that look on his face that's completely unidentifiable. Is that mix of amusement and paranoia and terror, which is I just think is interesting because that's such a hallmark of Kafka's work. I mean, that's not an especially groundbreaking thought for you know, you know, for either of Lynch scholar but or a Kafa scholar, neither of I. I was an English major, so theoretically I should have closer I should be closer to it than you, and I am not. David Foster Wallace was a big David Lynch fan, and he yeah, he read about I remember on of the first things I read from him as that essay about Lost Highway. Yeah, and I think he described Lynchi and as the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal.

00:16:54
Speaker 2: There it is speaking of Jack Nance, David went through his spiritual crisis when he was making Eraser head Nance told the New York Times for that article we cited earlier from nineteen ninety and Lynch has it's become a meme at this point of David Lynch, the thing that says, believe it or not, Eraser is my most spiritual work. And somebody that the interviewer says, elaborate on that, and he says, no.

00:17:20
Speaker 1: I don't talk about that is the thing that he usually says in these interviews that I've seen, I don't talk about that.

00:17:25
Speaker 2: The other thing that I heard is that he opened a Bible randomly and was inspired by a Biblical verse, but he says he doesn't remember which one, or even if it was the Old or New Testament. So you know, we've had a lot of unreliable narrators on here. I don't think Lynch is up there with Neil Young or Jimmy Page, who are very interested in or Robert Planet even, who are all very interested in their own hagiography. But Lynch just does not seem to remember things or wants to consciously obfuse skate anyway. The shoestring this thing is made on is so fascinating to me. AFI gave him ten thousand dollars to make this, but everything else on this was done so close to the bone. He was living at a property in Beverly Hills called Graystone Mansion that was owned by the AFI and this this place is its own weird vibe. It was built by the oil tycoon Edward Doeny or Doheiney, I don't know. He was the inspiration from Daniel Plainview in there will be blood, and he gave it to his son ned who in nineteen twenty nine died in a guest bedroom in a murder suicide alongside his secretary Hugh Plunkett. And this thing has been in everything. It would take less time for us to name what it hasn't been in.

00:18:43
Speaker 1: I preferred to zero in on two in particular, that this property has been featured in It's in The Big Lebowski.

00:18:49
Speaker 2: It's the other Jeffrey Lebowski's house. Mistere Lebowski is in seclusion in the in the in the West Wings.

00:18:57
Speaker 1: I think all the interiors were filmed there for that, and it was also used in the video for meatloafs. I would do anything for love. I just love the fact that David Lynch lived at this place. It costs the equivalent of sixty three million dollars when it was built, making it the most expensive home in California at the time, and certainly one of the biggest. It's forty six thousand square feet fifty five rooms. Thinking about where Lynch was living in Philadelphia, and it's just an insane jump, but you know, predicting the stinky cologne of death that would follow this film for the next few years. Several people associated with the eraser Head production, including star Jack Nance, claimed to have seen the ghost of Ned Doheny while they were filming. I think it's Doheny because I think Doheiny the street in la is named.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: After him or to the family. I think, you know, this is a crazy connection. My mind just made. David Lynch loves milkshakes. What's the famous line from there will be?

00:19:55
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I drink your milk tree, Wow, drink it run and I have a straw that reaches all.

00:20:06
Speaker 2: God. I love that movie. When he says this is gonna be my gravestone when he goes, I don't know how much longer I can keep doing it with these people. He puts people. You hear the verbal air quotes around people. I love it so much. It's bad. I see myself and all these terrible characters, isn't it, Jordan, I'm the dad. I'm the dad in a racer head. We don't talk too much about the dinner scene, but I this is the thing about this movie. Man. People were like, oh, it's a surrealis well, it's a comedy, so much of it until it gets really horrifying, and the baby. The baby is the only thing that undercuts the comedy. But that dinner scene is so funny. It's like Alish comedy of manners or something. She has that weird seizure and runs out of the room and he goes, she'll be fine in a minute. It's very English. It's very like a Joe Orton player or something. Yeah, all right, anyway, so David Lynch is living in though there will be bloodhouse, he's squatting, essentially, their blankets taped over the windows, and it's this extended sort of subterranean part of the property that stables, garages, staffed quarters, a hayloft, a greenhouse, and he kind of commandeered it. He said, we had about five or six rooms in this giant loft where all of the sets were built, a minture soundstage, and a studio. But there are some exteriors on.

00:21:33
Speaker 1: This Yeah, probably the most famous one at the beginning, when he's kind of walking through this urban, white industrial wasteland. It was filmed in a muddy lot which is now the Beverly Center mall in Los Angeles, which is a very very upscale establishment. So it's really funny that it has this historical pedigree. It's even funnier considering how cheaply this movie was shot. I mean they were literally it was like the classic like they were they were wily e coyote pulling the track up behind them and putting it down in front of them, only run in reverse.

00:22:03
Speaker 2: Because they would build this stuff. They would buy equipment, tear the sets down, reconfigure the sets into other stuff, and then whenever they were done using it, sell it. Like Lynch talked about, he got this what's the big editing bay thing called a movie movieola Moviola. Yeah, you got the and then sold it when they were done, so much of it. Catherine Colson we talked about this, the log lady from Twin Peaks. She was married to Jack Nance while the star of the movie. Yeah, and she was a production manager on this, and so she had done so much of this logwork or legwork, log work, and she said, all of these rooms with the same space with different sets built in. David really pretty much did everything himself.

00:22:47
Speaker 1: And I guess he would later reuse a lot of the chunks of the set for Twin Peaks in later years, like the zigzag floor in the lobby of Henry's apartment building or hotel, whatever the hell it is was the same set piece that was used for the Red Room in Twin Peaks. But yeah, Kevin Colson is kind of the MVP of this production. In addition to working as a waitress, which I think she gave like all of her paychecks to the production, she held the mic boom, she operated the cameras, she took on set photos, and she catered.

00:23:17
Speaker 2: And she cut Jack Nance's hair, and she took over David Lynch's paper route for him, which is the most you're talking about. Jimmy Stewart on acid, David Lynch driving around LA at four in the morning delivering papers. Wait, we got more to say on that. Yeah, but I love that he insisted on paying the actors. I think that's so touching.

00:23:37
Speaker 1: I guess he gave him I think it was twenty five dollars a week, and then when he ran out of money, he insisted on giving them all a piece of the film. And they worked out this deal on Napkins during one of their trips to Bob's Big Boys Diner from Milkshakes, which has a tie to Austin Powers. Oh that previous episodes oh explain, Oh yeah, well explained for the listeners. The Bob's Big Boy figurine is what it's like a space It's like Doctor Evil spaceship or something.

00:24:07
Speaker 2: No, I'm trying to remember what it was used as. Yeah, so they furnished this film. They did wardrobe from you know, flea market Swap meets the Salvation Army Goodwill and Jack Nansen Catherine Coleson gave their living room furniture up as a set, so they went without it for months, five years to shoot. Did they just not have living room furniture for Yeah, I guess. The warehouse only costs about thirty five or fifty dollars to build, but a lot of other things cost money. Lynch said, So the front of Mister and Missus X House, the which is not even in the movie that much. It's like one establishing shot of this house. The steps are styrofoam. There is no porch at all, and when Henry walks up on that, he is standing on a plane. And Lynch said, the whole thing was barely held together.

00:24:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean some of the flats, which are like the walls that are used in sound stages to construct you know, interior rooms. They Lynch would repair them with paper mache, using newspapers from his paper root day job, and a lot of like the art deco detailing on the elevator and in Henry's lobby, like the apartment lobby is all made out of wax.

00:25:13
Speaker 2: It's all stuff that David Lynch made out of wax.

00:25:16
Speaker 1: And also that it was really interesting they dip the white sheets into tea to make it so that, you know, in black and white, it wouldn't be this brilliant white on film, but this kind of more dull gray, which kind of like what they do with newspapers to make it look old, like when you're making treasure maps and stuff.

00:25:31
Speaker 2: They dip it in tea. I was gonna say, all my childhood craft books told me to do that. Unsurprisingly, his parents, Peggy's parents pitched in. But my favorite part about this is his paper route delivering the Wall Street Journal. He made forty eight to fifty a week on his two hundred and ten paper route. Wow. His very first night the run took him six hours, but he eventually narrowed it down to an hour. How I've beating Gus Catherine Coleson, like we said, took it over at one point, because he would do these marathon shoots and then sometimes not be left with enough time to do the route, so she would dip out and do it for him, and she would have these directions that he gave her on a tape recorder, so which probably means I was gonna say somewhere there's a tape of him being like, when you get to the Orange House, turn right, Catherine, and you know the angel what we call in the stortup culture, an angel investor Lynch's buddies, Jack Fisk's girlfriend and eventually wife, Sissy Spasic.

00:26:36
Speaker 1: That is crazy, but also it makes a certain amount of spiritual sense because the sight of her in a bloody prom dress is probably one of the most haunting cinematic images of the seventies, so it does make sense that she would be mixed up with something equally disturbing. She apparently would come on the set and help out and hold the slate when Jack Fisk was in the shot, which earned her a thanks in the credits.

00:26:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that she's credited in this. My other favorite David Lynch odd job is plumbing. His pool. Quote on that is that there's something deeply satisfying about directing the flow of water, which you know there is he's onto something there.

00:27:12
Speaker 1: You know, Jack Nance had a day job too, delivering flowers. Can you imagine it's Mother's Day and the doorbell rings, and Henry with the hair because he kept the hair for all the years in production, so presumably he looked just like the guy on the eraserhead poster answered the door.

00:27:32
Speaker 2: In there he is with a bouquet of flowers. No nuts to me, no thank you, just like we don't want them they get. He says that we got kicked out of AFI after about two or three years of being down there, which yes, they were squatting and shooting a film more or less illegally there, and so it got down to the wire. They finished initial shots on this thirty hours straight. They shot huh wow, overnight shoot. Yeah.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: They used to do a lot of shoots at night because I guess during the day there were a lot of gardeners on the property and it just they made too much noise and also probably maybe they didn't want the witnesses to all the stuff. They were sure, and they would shoot until dawn until the birds came out, and I guess there would be this call of birds that went around, which was like the unofficial sign.

00:28:18
Speaker 2: That the shoot was over for the night. Yeah, I mentioned earlier, there's these great on set photos from there. So like him in this not in keeping with our later image of him. This like wide brimmed hat at the three ties we've talked about. He loves coffee, which we've talked about. It's obvious from Twin Peaks and everything, but like twenty cups a day at some point, right shitload of coffee. And he was a chainsmoker when he started working on this film, but he took up transcendental meditation, which he is a big proponent of. There's a David Lynch Transcendental Meditation foundation. He took that up during the shoot and went vegetarian. And so he would he talks about like it's important, it's important to give yourself a treat. Ah, it's getting worse. I know, I disagree. I think, okay, commit to them dialing it in. So yeah, he would say it's important to get yourself a treat after a long day of filming, and it started. His treat started as grilled cheese sandwiches. He would go into diners in the restaurant where Colson worked in order grilled cheeses in the afternoon. But he now his big thing since then has been Bob's Big Boy milkshakes, and he talks about like, yeah, I just get him and pour sugar into him and drink him up and get all kinds of neat ideas.

00:29:34
Speaker 1: And he went there every day for like eight years, right, something like that, And then he had to not because he was gonna miss like the editing due date to get a film submitted to like con or something. And he was like, yeah, killed me, like almost killed me not to make it.

00:29:49
Speaker 2: Jack Nance real Weirdoh love jack Nance. But you know he's the iconic image from the film. He's he's Pete in Twin Peaks. He's a just a delight. Lynch called one of my best friends to the Criterion collection in twenty fourteen, but they did not have a particularly good interview. Nance was married to Colson at the time, and I think he actually got her involved. But their bonding point, which solidified this great friendship for the Ages was David Lynch's Volkswagen, which he had jury rigged with a like a wooden rack to like a luggage rack kind of thing to help him haul crap around, and I guess this was out in the parking lot or something. Jack Nance looked at it and said, boy, whoever built that thing must be on the ball. So David Lynch then said, thank you, Jack, I did that, and you're hired. That was his audition to get into a Razorhead was complimenting his tricked out VW beatalize him. I hope it was a Probably it might have been one of their weird truck things. But yeah, that thing, I mean, between that and the paper rude, that thing did the That was the real unsung hero over razor Head, David Lynch's Volkswagen.

00:31:00
Speaker 1: Well, man, you know what they say, flattery will get you a mutated calf carcass.

00:31:04
Speaker 2: Oh boy, where do we get to the baby? Oh yeah, that's fair. We'll talk about the baby later. I mean, yeah, that's Hold your horses, hold your babies, hold your calf fetuses. We'll get there.

00:31:14
Speaker 1: I love that we're taping this on Mother's Day. By the way, there's something Oh yeah, that's so weird. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information in just a moment Jack Nance's hair. Where do we begin.

00:31:42
Speaker 2: Jack had a particular type of hair that when you tease it and comb it, it just stays. It was the most fantastic head of hair. And when we first saw what happened for the tall look and how tall it was, we were shocked. After a few minutes, I said, this is it. He said, he doesn't remember if it was Jack Nance who did it the first time, whether it was by a woman named Charlotte Stewart or Coulson, but Colson wound up dragooned into maintaining it. We mentioned earlier. She also cooked because they were feeding everyone on takeout, and then they were like, the takeout budget's been slashed, Catherine, can you cook egg salad, grilled cheese. Yeah. So she ends up the person in charge of doing the hair, and she said, I took a kind of maniacal pleasure from backcombing his hair, and it apparently made the entire crew burst out laughing the first time they saw him. And you said earlier that he wore this hairstyle for the entire duration of the shoot, which is not strictly speaking true. What happened was his hair was on call for this, so they would, I know. So I don't know if we mentioned this up talk up top five years to shoot this, to finish this movie because they had no money.

00:32:50
Speaker 1: It was just like like as soon as they had a little bit of money to literally just buy like film stock, that they would go.

00:32:57
Speaker 2: It was.

00:32:57
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't like they were using that to build anything, elab it or even necessarily about the end anybody. It was literally to get film stock to shoot on, and half the time they would get it donated or used.

00:33:09
Speaker 2: Well, because the soundtrack is old film soundstock that had been thrown out, they drove his VW there.

00:33:15
Speaker 1: Some of the film stock too, because Peter Bugdanovitch was making paper Moon on black and white film, and some of the leftover stuff that he didn't use they got donated too.

00:33:24
Speaker 2: Oh, Peter Bugdanovitch, I should be wearing a necker chief right now. Colson. On jack Nance's hair, she said, when he wasn't shooting for a long time, he would let it go, but then he would have to have another haircut before we started to shoot again. My family didn't know him any other way except for that goofy hair. We have a lot of family pictures at Christmas time with Jack with this haircut, which is amazing because somewhere in the world there are Christmas portraits of Jack Nance and the log Lady from Twin Peak with his hair in the razorhead, and their parents that it was partially responsible for them getting divorced, but they also work together on Twin Peaks. They remained friends. Nance who is responsible for another great bit of the eraser head lore, which is that the baby who we're gonna get to, we keep teasing this baby. This is like Chekhov's gun. We mentioned it in the first act and now someone's gonna have to get shot with it. In the third act. That baby is named Spike, and someone asked asked Nance where he got that, and he said, I think it was on the birth certificate. And he has a positively kafka esque a bit of what they asked him. Yeah, his rider. Essentially it was a room and a chair.

00:34:41
Speaker 1: That's all he wanted for accommodations, for which I mean, given the budget and how long this.

00:34:46
Speaker 2: Time, say, that might have been a stretch, they'd probably try to argue him down to a stool. All right, So we haven't talked about the other side of the family. We haven't talked about Mary X.

00:34:57
Speaker 1: Yes, Mary X is Henry's Girlfriend's long stuff forring girlfriend. In this She's played by Charlotte Stewart, and I love this connection. She would often come to the eraser Head set straight from her day job shooting The Little House on the Prairie, where she had a starring role as Miss Beatle. I just I love that she would go from the most Hallmarky show.

00:35:20
Speaker 2: In existence to eraser Head off and on the same day. I mean, I can't believe she made it out alive. I like the idea of her confusing her lines from like sleep deprivation, Like she's on a little House on the prairie and she's like, they're not even sure it is a baby. This film was only supposed to take six weeks. Twenty white pages projected forty two minute runtime. False. No, that was long.

00:35:46
Speaker 1: They initially said twenty one the dean if I was like twenty one minutes, and it's like it might be a hair longer, okay, four because like script pages usually equate to one page a minute, so I thought forty two minutes max.

00:35:59
Speaker 2: Come on, Like, what are we thinking here? Yeah? I mean they yeah, I mean Lynch was who's squatting. He lived in Henry's actual room. But yeah, please tell us about Lynch's living situation further.

00:36:11
Speaker 1: I mean, because it was illegal, they had to make it look like he wasn't there, So he was living in Henry's room. That just absolutely claustrophobic, cubby hole that is. You know, it's got a great radiator. It's got a great radiator, it does. That's where David Lynch actually lived for I would assume years during this production. But because it was illegal, day to make it look like he wasn't there, So they achieved this by bolting him in with one door and padlocking the other from the outside so as not to arouse suspicion. So he's locked in this room, which is which adds a whole other level of terrifying. It's also a very Bushwick thing.

00:36:51
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, what's your personal experience with this living arrangement?

00:36:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, my dear friend did something similar. He was living in the furnace room of his art gallery in Bushwick, and the room was hidden behind a movable tool shelf that was just on hinges. But you know, when it was in place, it looked just like a regular shelf, and as a sort of makeshift handle, he bolted a shovel that just looked like it was just hanging there, but it was just bolted there, didn't go anywhere.

00:37:16
Speaker 2: So yeah, Yeah, Probably the most exemplary part of this shooting schedule is there's a shot in this film. There's a cut in which the first part of the shot and the second part occurred eighteen months apart.

00:37:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, Henry opens up the door to his apartment and he's seen entering from the other side, and the next shot a year and.

00:37:40
Speaker 2: A half late, he had aged eighteen months. Yeah.

00:37:46
Speaker 1: I mean the filming took so long for this that several years in Lynch's own family tried to talk him out of the project, and he's talked about this in a couple different interviews. Recalled his parents and his younger brother saying to him, you know, you've been on this erazorhead for many years. You have a wife and a daughter to think about. We think it's time you get a regular job, take responsibility. And he said this was devastating to me, as you know, I assume it would be after sinking years into this, And there was even a time when he briefly considered finishing the movie with an animated Henry to just fill in the gaps in the movie.

00:38:22
Speaker 2: I wish for everyone attempting any kind of creative life, I wish you the iron will that propelled David Lynch to finish your raiser headh Segue. A lot of people died. So many people died, not really so many people, but we mentioned that enough enough people died to make this movie. There's that weird murder suicide of Greystone, so that's ding Ding one and two. The film's original director of photography, Herbert Cardwell, died in his sleep two months in Ding. Peter Ivers, the musician who wrote the film's theme in Heaven, which we will talk about later, was found bludgeoned to death by a hammer in his apartment in nineteen eighty three Ding, a crime that remains unsolved. And lastly, Jack Nance got into a fight outside of Winchel's Donuts in nineteen ninety six and he told his friends, I guess I got what I deserved after that, and then he went home and died of a subdural hematoma, which is a fairly common way of dying in a fight. You get your head knocked, you think you're fine, you go home, and you have an internal hemorrhage. Essentially, good Lord.

00:39:33
Speaker 1: For those of you keeping track at home, the subdural hemorrhage count in this episode is at one stands at one.

00:39:41
Speaker 2: Uh. It might not seem like it based on the finished project, but Eraserhead was tightly rehearsed and shot within an inch of its life. Every reaction and every look and everything that was happening inside Henry's head. We had to get into that in great detail. Nance said, I remember one partic shot, a very simple quick shot. I was supposed to say no kidding or something like that, and turn and walk away. And we worked on take after take after take, a whole reel of film, and you'll remember they were picking this out of trash cans and driving it around La Cardwell, he said, just opened up the magazine and started throwing the film out on the floor, saying, well, at least we won't have to look at that in the screening room, which is just what you want your DP to say. Ah. There is a period of time when we would rehearse just me and Jack in that room, Sorry I'm doing it again, and work things out this is David Lynch, obviously, and those rehearsals took a long long time. Every little thing would be planned. The film's first shot one take, Wow, drops Mike Damn.

00:40:54
Speaker 1: And now enough about the visuals, let's talk about the audio.

00:40:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, we now come to the real meat of this episode, which is Alan Split, Alan Split everyone. This is kind of messed up. Alan Splett, who was also a Philly guy, Lynch's long term sound designer. I think we should say he has also referred to him as a best friend. He famously became a punchline when he was nominated for the sound design for Black Stallion at the Oscars, and he won, but he was not at the ceremony because he was working on Elephant Man in London with Lynch and Johnny Carson turned it into a running punchline on the show. And you love Johnny Carson, so I want you to do this. Yeah.

00:41:32
Speaker 1: He was hosting the Oscars that night and he kept doing Alan's split updates because nobody could believe that. Like, you know, it's like, this is one thing if you have like Marlon Brando or George c. Scott skipping the Oscars to make a political point or because they're filming some.

00:41:45
Speaker 2: Other movie or something.

00:41:47
Speaker 1: But this was just, you know, you don't expect the kind of anonymous tech guy skip the biggest night in the professional live. So he just made this ongoing joke about it and kept doing these recurring Alan split updates all night and Johnny at him.

00:42:00
Speaker 2: Oh he missed his freeway turn off.

00:42:02
Speaker 1: Oh he's at a gas station with carburetor trouble outside a band in California.

00:42:06
Speaker 2: He kept like having like all through the night. It was.

00:42:09
Speaker 1: It was medium funny, but Split totally deserved that Oscar. Because for Black Stallion, which was I think his first full length feature aside from Eraserhead, he strapped a special microphone to the underbelly of a race horse to capture the sound of galloping hoof beats, and he also attached a mic to the horse's head to catch its breathing while it was running. He did all these really innovative ways of getting the horse sounds.

00:42:38
Speaker 2: Horse sounds. The lesser loved follow up to pet Sound of horse Sounds. Yeah, he really is the other part of this movie. I mean, there's been all this stuff at Pitchfork and a lot of the music sites about how the soundtrack of this movie. The sound of this movie is so influential as far as sound design and ambient and industrial and all those sort of grimy out there music genres. Split was head of AFI's sound department at the time, and he is responsible for one of the ultimate hallmarks of David Lynch, which is the room tone, which is this sort of ambient buzzing of evil, which you could, I guess it probably comes from like trying to make fluorescent lights sound meaner because it's you think of all those shots in twin peaks of like a ceiling fan and there's this like thrumbing kind of under it.

00:43:34
Speaker 1: And he's very interested in electricity. He's talked about that in a lot of interviews. Electricity working and also failing and getting all that like crackling stuff.

00:43:43
Speaker 2: That's always been a hallmark for him. But you know, by doing this for pennies a day, they were forced to get creative with some of the sound design, and they got one of these by they put a big gallon water jug in a bathtub and floated it and then they put the microphone in that. So there's a microphone hanging inside of a big glass gallon jug. Floating in a bathtub and it would blow across that microphone.

00:44:11
Speaker 1: I just want to say that it was a Sparklet's water jug, which was the same brand that they used in pet Sounds to make on Caroline Know that weird?

00:44:22
Speaker 2: That weird. So sorry, just you mentioned pet Sounds earlier. I have to throw that back in. That is some galaxy brain. Do you know if it's the jug that is on the thirteenth floor elevator song that I don't know? You know what I'm saying. They amplified jug band. Yeah, they worked on the score for this for like nine hours a day over the course of two months. Colson. Another great Catherine Colson quote, as she said she got a call from them. I think it was like in the middle of the night and they were like, we need we need Catherine, Catherine, we need the sound of a radiator. She's like, what do you need? You need like he said, no, they wanted the sound of someone jumping off the radiator and landing in the room. And yeah, we mentioned earlier that they learned that a film studio was throwing out soundstock, so they just threw it in the back of this jury RIGGEDVW and high tailed it on out of there. My favorite Alan split bit other than all of this is the uh is the fact that apparently he was out of pocket for a while because he was in Findhorn in Northern Scotland recording wind, recording wind?

00:45:34
Speaker 1: Didn't they also split? Everyone couldn't make the oscars?

00:45:40
Speaker 2: Was recording Wind?

00:45:41
Speaker 1: Speaking of David's sound design, so much has been made of his famous room tone, but how about his ringtones? Are you aware that in two thousand and six, David Lynch debuted his own set of cell phone ring tones featuring recorded phrases such as I like to kill deer, my teeth are bleeding and what the hell? Damn, what the hell they're Unfortunately, sorry, I ruined this whole.

00:46:12
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. This is something that's send me crack up the most. Just you segueing from her room tones to ring tones and say I want to kill deer. Jordan just brought me to tears with his recitation of davidlyn She's ringtones. Did we find them? No?

00:46:38
Speaker 1: Well, wait a minute, I there. They're really hard to find. They're no longer available for download. There's supposedly on some fan websites. I can't tell what I'm hearing because it's not him saying them, which kind of makes it not as good. But at least the ones I've been able to find, but I can't tell fans have made them and they're just like right because of it or something.

00:47:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, damn it.

00:47:04
Speaker 1: Well get that last laughter in Heigel goes, We're about to go in.

00:47:08
Speaker 2: To a little segment I like to call it's the baby Gotta love it. Oh, so we mentioned earlier that this show needs tone. In the early part can kind of be described as like a surrealistic comedy. There's there's that bit where they're in the where they're waiting the lobby and the elevator doors are open for like a disconcertingly long time and they finally close like the timing of this of those cuts, and you compared it to British comedy earlier. But it quickly stops being funny when that baby shows up. Man, it is the worst thing in the world. And you were able to find a description of this for listeners who have not seen this movie.

00:47:54
Speaker 1: Yes, the writer Peter Slovinski for writing for Roger Ebert dot com. He's basically described it as imagine a cross between a fetal version of et and some form of a skinned ruminant that has been plagued with an eternal cold that causes it to cry, whine, and spit up various forms of goo practically around the clock.

00:48:17
Speaker 2: That's as good a description as Anny for audio. Ah, oh God, it's disgusting. Lynch has repeatedly denied that the film is about his anxieties about fatherhood. But the fact that this thing allegedly uses Jennifer's actual cries, his own daughter's actual daughter's cries, albeit manipulated in some degree, that is horrifying. And it feels like a bit of a cheat to hype this thing up so much and then not tell people how it's made. But the fact of the matter is no one knows. This is like the biggest secret around Eraserhead. People have been asking him about this for forty five years, and he refuses to talk about it. Jennifer knows, but she will not tell her own daughter. Her own daughter is apparently mad. She told Vice that, And he went so far to disguise what this thing is that he blindfolded the projectionist doing dailies on this film. For for non industry people, you shoot something, you shoot a whole day of film, and then you screen that for yourself and your editor and if you're really unlucky, the studio heads so that they can give feedback on it and you can kind of see how the day went. And Lynch blindfolded the guy doing that so he wouldn't see He Even the AFI heads came there and we're like, what are we spending our money on? And they were like, don't worry about it. Yeah, no, yeah. The speculation from people who are more invested in this than I am is that it's some kind of fetus from an anatomy class, like either a sheep cat or a cat, and they that they had to take it apart and like articulate it. It's you know, probably the most stirring argument in favor of that is Lynch himself, who has gone on record as confessing that he dissected a cat during the course of this film's production, which presumably, you know, high school biology classes do that stuff. That's probably how he got it. He said. I examined its parts, the membranes, the hair, the skin, and there are so many textures which may be gross on one side, but when you isolate them and consider them more abstractly, they are totally beautiful. So think about that, and then think about his next quote, which is, I don't know what good it did me, really, Jordan talk us through cat dissection.

00:50:52
Speaker 1: David Lynch has waxed poetics so much about dissecting this cat that it makes me think that that has actually really nothing to do the baby in a racer Head, because he wouldn't keep mentioning it. He's talked about it so many times in different interviews. In that two thousand and one documentary Racerhead Stories that we talked about earlier, he discussed it extensively, with an almost ecstatic fervor. He compared the organs to the Fellini film Roma, which I'm not sure if I follow, but he said it was unbelievable. The organs in the cat were brilliant colors, and he later buried it in the urban wasteland that we see at the start of the film, and I think in a deleted scene Henry actually like trips on it or something, and he buried it there, and then he excavated it some time later, which brought David Lynch even further delights. He said it was the perfect marriage of cat and earth, before adding that he took a photo of it.

00:51:52
Speaker 2: I genuinely I tend to think of him as a pretty innocuous guy, all things considered. But that's that's Stahmer level him. Uh yeah. Other unverifiable details about the baby Lynch made the cast sign NDA's that were specifically tied to how he made the thing. You could not use photos of it in promotional efforts for the film. Why would you? Yeah, exactly, here's that. Come see this. And he buried it when they were done, and they eulogized it. The rap party doubled as this thing's funeral. His quotes about this have remained admirably consistent. He says, maybe it was born nearby, or maybe it was found. God, it's buried it. Do some like film freaks like go and excavate it. And it was in the Winchell's Donuts. That's what jack Nance was there for. That was what he was. He's protecting the secret of the Eraser had baby and the Illuminati killed him. Wake Up Sheep. The film's production manager, Dorian Small, was the hands behind the baby that had Yah. That's interesting that she got the honor of Yeah, put your hands in this sheep calf Dorane what I don't know when you pulleys wires. Oh god, it's so gross. But when during scenes when it actually had to do a lot more, it was Alan split working it and she said, Dorian Small said, because he plays the cello and he has a certain kind of touch. Oh, moving right on down the line for this weird, gross thing that I'm already feeling bad about subjecting. You find people so much too. Colson was tasked with its death scene and spoilers. Henry gets morbidly curious about what's happening in there, and the baby is wrapped up like mummified, and he cuts the bandages open and they're they essentially were keeping the thing together because it just, oh god, it's so messed up. But she I just love this quote. I had to put this on there. She talks about special effects departments at the time, where like kind of a loose community, so different people working on different things kind of knew that they could kind of call each other and be like, hey, how do you do this? How do you do that? I have to shoot such and such a scene. What should I do? And she said, do you remember calling the special effects department? At Universal and saying, do you have any suggestion as to how to fill a room full of mush? This is funny. My wife and ever watching this and she was like, that baby is disgusting and incredible and real. And then when the head gets really really big and fills up the whole room, she was like, that doesn't look as good. It's not as she goes, it's not as moist. It doesn't so that the baby's head fills up the whole room during the climax, And apparently they had moved to a different neighborhood in LA at this point and they just built it in their backyard. So imagine at some point in the mid seventies in LA, you look out your window, beautiful La day, and there's giant, weird egg baby head in your backyard and you look down and there's David Lynch in three ties and a straw hat and he's waving to you.

00:55:11
Speaker 1: Oht know, in the mid seventies in LA. That seems just kind of part for the chorus ha ha hey.

00:55:19
Speaker 2: And having said all that, we'll be right back with more too much information right after this, wow, wow, all right in everything we should get new has Neil Young ever covered that. I was a state of cover versions of this earlier, and the Pixies one, the Black Francis one, is probably the he has the closest to that woman's voice, I think anyway. The Lady and the Radiator the theme song to this movie in Heaven Ah, It's probably the second most famous David Lynch musical cue after the end Low Bottle Lamentee theme song to Twin Peaks or Little Jimmy Scott singing Sycamore Trees from the season two finale. But you differ to me on this well. Also, I'm not a huge lynchhead, but I still love the this is the Girl scene from Maholland Drive with I've told every little star that was always pretty. But I'm also a giant sixties nerd too. But uh yeah, that in Heaven song is haunting, and I know Divo were big fans of it, and they loved it so much that they actually asked David Lynch if they could play it live. But also Bauhaus Comedy two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is nuts. Man. Do you know about Peter Rivers? I know you're like a national lampoon guy. Is this the first year hearing of him. I know Doug Kenny and all the people who's connected to I'd never heard of him though, I again a whole podcast. We could do a whole episode on him, but I'll just give you the even the just the two graphs of his Wikipedia article are insane. His biographer Josh Frank described him as being connected by a second degree to every major pop culture event of the last thirty years. So he was Yeah, I know. He was a musician first and foremost. His first instrument was the harmonica. He played with Muddy Waters at one point, and in nineteen sixty eight, Buddy Waters called him the greatest harp player alive when he was in Laws. I'm just gonna keep saying these with question marks. They're not actually question marks, but it's just insane. In La he was signed to Warner Brothers by Van Dyke, Parks and Lenny Waronker to one hundred grand contract. It's a solo artist back when that made something. Yeah, yeah, well he made it. And then he made his live debut opening for the New York Dolls. He was on bills with Fleetwood, Mac and John Kale. David Lynch asks him to write this song for Razor Ed he does. Then he goes on to score a Ron Howard movie, Grand Theft Auto, and then an episode of BJ the Bear, and then he becomes a ghost raw songwright. He wrote songs for the Pointer Sisters, Jefferson Airplanes, Marty Ballen, Balen on his solo career, Diana Ross, and as you mentioned, you know about Doug Kenny, who founded the National Lampoon that was Peter Ivers's best friend. We are also not even talking about the Los Angeles area UAHF show that he hosted called New Wave Theater, which was this early day's not quite public access, but for yeah, they were responsible for bringing huge parts of the La punk subculture into the mainstream or as mainstream as a UAHF channel, Cockpit, Bad Religion, Fear the Dead, Kennedy's The Circle Jerks. Guests on this show included Deborah Winger, Beverly di'angelo from National Lampion's Vacation, and Elvira and So. In that Pitchfork interview from twenty twelve, Lynch said, I don't know how I heard about Petere RVers, but this I love this story so much. Alan and I went up to Pete's house and we asked him if he could write the music and sing these lyrics in the Spirits of Fats Waller. Alan Split had played David Lynch these Fats Waller recordings of Fats Waller playing pipe organ and he had gotten them off an out of print LP. So he was playing them to David Lynch on two inch tape or quarter inch tape, excuse me, and so he said, David, like, this album is out of print. All I have are these bootleg tapes. And so they went to Peter Iver's house and said, hey, can you play us like a facsimile of these bootleg Fats Waller recordings? And Peter Ivers goes over to his album stack and pulls out the out of print Fats Waller album is like, you mean this one? And he does it. He records the organ part. It's like the only non ambient industrial stuff on the soundtrack. And so David Lynch has the lyrics in heaven does he write the lyrics? He write that? Yeah, David Lynch wrote the lyrics and he took them over to Ivers house and he said he's been laying on this Chez lounge and he's got a microphone dangling over him. And he sang it right in front of me, sang the whole song that was used in this film, in this falsetto voice, and he loved the lyrics, which made me feel really good. And Fats Waller actually does appear in the film because when Henry goes in and puts his turntable on, that's the Fats Waller record. And David Lynch has confirmed that Henry is a Fats Waller fan, says he loves him. While we're on the topic of radiators, Segue, I.

01:00:33
Speaker 1: Just want to say that Heigel titled this section what we talk about when we talk about radiators.

01:00:41
Speaker 2: You're welcome, Thank you. Mentioned earlier, David Lynch has a thing about light bulbs, the sound of electricity, the kind of ambient tones in a room that machinery generates, radiators big thing split. Talking to Terry Gross in nineteen ninety four on Fresh Air, he says, we had a big gas heater in the editing room where I was working, which had a big metal case on it, and so one day we stuck a tiny little microphone in the bottom of this thing, and David was blowing on the top of it, and we got a lot of sounds this way, so that's bing radiator number one. The lady in the Radiator wasn't even in the film's original draft. In another interview from nineteen seventy nine, Lynch said, we'd already shot scenes of the radiator, so he was already using establishing shots of this radiator. And he said it was just natural. But it was a certain kind of radiator that had a little compartment in there. And I had done a little drawing of a lady and I looked at this drawing and an idea came in. I felt this lady lived in the radiator, and I thought, is that a place where she could live? And I went running into Henry's room and looked at the radiator. And I got this radiator from an old studio that was closing, and this particular radiator had a little place that she could live in. You got to just do a sound effect for every time I say radiator in there. I love it. I mean, I'm I find it touching how concerned he is that there's a place for this fictitious figure to live in the radiator, despite the fact that you would have to be two inches tall and not get burned up by the heat and the radiator. He's really like concerned that there's not like a little box. Again, I'm not a Lynch guy, but I love the love that he has for these terrible, weird characters. Yeah, you know, he has like a genuine empathy and affection for these people. And then the characters that he creates, there's never like a contempt with any of them. You know. It's a good point. Yeah, even like the villains in Twin Peaks, ostensibly he still like finds fascinating and gives them space. And anyway, you're gonna have to cut out all my David Lynch guy stuff. In twenty fourteen, he gave an interviewed A Vulture where he says she first came along as a drawing, but then in that same interview, he says that she came along about a year after they started shooting, when he started doing transcendental meditation. Have you ever heard of his book Catching the Big Fish. It's this whole book about transitant meditation. He talks about the idea that ideas are like fish, and your mind is like a thing that you fish in, and so for the small ideas come when you're fishing in the shallow water and the big fish come from the deeper water and transit meditation lets you get really deep into your subconscious. It's really interesting because he talks about doing this. Is it Mulholland Dry or Lost Highway with the jump scare the thing that comes out of the domsty. Yeah, I think it's either that or something in Mulholland Dry that he talks about in that book. He was like meditating in his trailer and he walked outside and it's afternoon in La and he puts his hand on the hood of a car and the car is really hot, and the shock when he pulled his hand off. He says, that entire sequence suddenly came to him. Wow, it's so interesting, right, Like Yeah, when you think about all of his stuff, people are like, ah, he's completely random and he does these like you know, it's the Simpsons bit or the Saturday Night Live bit making fun of twin Peaks, where it's like, I have no idea, brilliant, I have no idea what this means. If you just think about all of these visuals as just like the dross and detritus of your subconscious or your dream world, that gets dredged up, it suddenly becomes like I don't know a lot clearer anyway. So the woman who played the Lady in The Radiator, Laurel Near, she was in a singing trio with her two sisters, one of whom was a friend of Catherine Colson's, and that was how she got pulled into the film. She'd never worked in a film before. I don't think she has since. I think this is like one of her two IMDb credits. And she just said, David Lynch liked my smile. I thought I was going to just go and dance across the stage, she said. And in a rare lack of foresight, they built the stage for her months before they shot it, and I guess that just sat around one of the few things they didn't tear down and sell. And she talks about those cheek, the chipmunk cheek makeup that they had to do for her, and she said it kind of peeled your skin off when they took it off. And David Lynch has said to me, the Lady in the Radiator is sort of a beacon of light. Henry's world was really dark without her, and she represents some hope there for old Henry. She's a very strange looking woman. For sure. She's got skin problems that she's trying to cover up with pancake makeup.

01:05:36
Speaker 1: And that song in Heaven is available on the soundtrack that was released on the Dead Kennedy's record label, Alternative Tentacles. And the funny part to me is that the whole record is mostly clanks and rumbles and room tone.

01:05:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, room tone. It's basically like a John Cage or Stockhausen album. I listened to it a lot. I'm going to get back.

01:05:59
Speaker 1: To something you said earlier about just like sort of Lynch's scenes being you know, the detritus of your subconscious I mean something. One of the shows I host is a show where I interview musicians, and I'm somebody who loves music with all of his heart but has never been able to write.

01:06:15
Speaker 2: A song ever.

01:06:17
Speaker 1: And I'm so curious about what compels people to do. So one of my favorite questions to ask people is do you ever listen to your songs back and learn something about yourself? Almost like a dream reading, you know, you hear it back and you know, were able to get some kind of perspective on it. Or parse it apart like you do when you dissect the dream. And I don't know, I think that's interesting, just and I want to hear more about you know, what you have to say about?

01:06:45
Speaker 2: Well, what if people said very different? Some people say no, not at all.

01:06:52
Speaker 1: Sometimes people usually from the vantage point of several years on when they're singing, like you know, for their big hits, for example, it's been a couple of years later, and they kind of have to keep revisiting them. They say like, oh, yeah, I see what I was doing at that time a lot more clearly than I did at the time. All Right, So, folks, we just cut about fifteen minutes of Jordan and I talking about our dreams and our childhood traumas Lynch cut about twenty minutes worth of this film from the final footage.

01:07:22
Speaker 2: So there you go. That's a great segue. That's a great segue. Just as we cut moments of oversharing between two dear friends, Lynch cut twenty minutes worth of footage from this film. Jordan, why don't you tell us about that? And also your fears? Yes.

01:07:41
Speaker 1: These lost scenes include a sequence of Catherine Colson finally getting her part in this movie.

01:07:47
Speaker 2: But it was ultimately cut.

01:07:48
Speaker 1: She's playing the baby's midwife. There's a scene of Henry playing with the with David Lynch's beloved dead cat, and then there's another scene of a man abusing two women in strapped to a bed with a car battery, which David Lynch has said he cut because it was too disturbing, which, yeah, given what he felt was totally fine for us to.

01:08:12
Speaker 2: See Wolf, Yeah, well you don't want to see the stuff. Lynch is like, that was a bridge too far.

01:08:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, And he's later said I loved them as little scenes, but they didn't belong in the film, and he cut them from the composite print, which is like the master version of the film, And Catherine Colson is quoted as saying, we didn't have any money to cut negatives, so we just cut the entire scenes from this master version. That was what happened to my scene when I'm tied to the bed with pattery cables. That's probably in a landfill somewhere. And many fans of Hope that they, you know, include these deleted scenes and the criterion release or some kind of expanded version, but it really seems like these scenes are lost forever. And in the documentary we've mentioned many times so far Racer heead stories, Lynch gets weirdly emotional talking about all this stuff that he wished he'd saved from the production, which is kind of weirdly touching. And all this left of these scenes are the memories of the cast that were in them and a few production photos. There's a scene of these people strapped to the bed with a car battery a jumper cables nearby, and that's it.

01:09:23
Speaker 2: It just goes back to what I was saying, man, Like, even the grotesque, messed up stuff in his movies he cherishes. Yeah. Yeah, because it's there, you know, because it's he made it. I really, it's in all of us. Yeah, Man, I don't know I got him. I had David Lynch guy. Is that the sad realization I'm coming to with this? Are we all are David Lynch guys? Really? If you're texted or if you tweeted us with a hashtag jack Nance's Winchles Donuts order, we will send you an hour and a half of Alex doing David Lynch room tones into the microphone and our twenty minutes of dream analysis. Yeah, that's another bonus feature Patreon.

01:10:09
Speaker 1: Yep, all right, so he cut these scenes out after the first couple screenings of eraser Head, the very first, I think the premiere of Eraserhead, well you can't really call it that, but the earliest screening of Eraserhead was held at the screening room at the AFI Graystone Mansion where it was filmed, and Lynch invited his parents, which is amazing, And when it was over, someone seated next to.

01:10:32
Speaker 2: His mom overheard her say, Oh, I wouldn't want to have a dream like that, which makes you wonder how he sold Like what are we son, what are we giving this money to? And he's like, oh, it's a movie about a dream I had.

01:10:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's cute though he Lynch later paid his father back all the money that he kept, like meticulous log of how much money his father gave him, and then when he was successful, he paid it all back and which he said was a totally on this necessary jester. His dad did not expect to get it back, but he paid him, and Lynch said that was one of the happiest days was life. So even if they didn't get his movies, they lived to see him reap the rewards.

01:11:10
Speaker 2: Which is sweet. What a sweet boy he is. Yeah, Ugh Eraserhead was perhaps needless to say Erassahead was ejected from Can. Rejected from Can, although they've put like Lars von Trier and on Can. So he think he just missed it. I think he just missed the entry probably and the New York Film Festival, although he's said he was rejected from Yeah, he says he brought all twenty four reels of the film to the New York Film Festival in a shopping cart that he took from his nearby farmer's market and the third third Times a charm Baby. He was accepted into the Los Angeles International Film Exposition aka film X in nineteen seventy seven.

01:11:55
Speaker 1: And in anticipation of the years of midnight screenings that would ultimately bolster the film's repe this Film XS premiere did indeed take place at midnight, very fitting, and the writer Danny Lee wrote a great piece about Eraserhead's premiere for The Guardian a few years back, and he features this amazing lead. On March nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven, the world changed, after which there was a long, uncomfortable silence. The occasion was the first public screening of Eraserhead, the feature debut of David Lynch, at the Film X Festival in Los Angeles.

01:12:27
Speaker 2: It was not a hot ticket.

01:12:29
Speaker 1: The film arrived with little advanced publicity at the only festival to accept it. The screening took place at midnight, drawing a modest crowd who dutifully watched for the next two hours. The film was then longer than the eighty nine minutes it became. When it ended, nothing but no one left either, just silence, then finally applause en scene.

01:12:50
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, but so someone who is there passed word of the film along to Ben Barrenholtz of New York's Libra Films. This guy is probably one of the most influential figures in twentieth century cinema. I own the song, certainly, yeah exactly, just not a name, but you know, he basically pioneered the concept of a midnight movie at his theater, which is the Elgin in Chelsea and New York and stuff like Pink Flamingos El Topo by yor Rowski, The Harder They Come, the Jimmy Cliff film, and he slotted eraser Head.

01:13:28
Speaker 1: In, and his invitation to it was priceless and keeping with the whole baby theme, he made it look like a birth announcement, which read We'd like you to meet the sweet little girl who has brought so much sunshine and joy to our world. Name Eraserhead, Birthday, Midnight weight, heavy, dot dot dot in quotation marks parents David k Lynch, I love that.

01:13:53
Speaker 2: Imagine being on top of the world in nineteen eighty and just it world is your oyster and you're like, oh, let's go to a midnight movie and you markey horrors last week. Let's see what Yeah, what a fun whimsical time that was, Like let's go to let's get a little zouited or whatever, and Saturday Night Fever has just come out. There's nowhere to go but up, let's go see I don't know, Eraserhead. This looks fun anyway. This movie unsurprisingly in retrospect, but got a lot of really heavy endorsements, one of whom John Waters. Desperate Living was screening in New York around the same time, and John Waters called Eraserhead his favorite moving at a press event for his own film and encouraged everyone in the audience to see it. Stanley Kubrick, while he was making the shining. A few years later, he screened Eraserhead to his cast and crew, which makes a lot of sense. All of those eerie shots of the hallways at God. I don't really think I ever thought of this before.

01:14:53
Speaker 1: But even the floor isn't there like the crazy pattern? Yeah, and then the lobby and eraser He's got tho zigzag.

01:15:01
Speaker 2: Wow. I never thought of that. And as you mentioned, Lynch screened Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

01:15:09
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but when they first started filming Eraserhead seventy years before. Yeah, he sat down and watched Sunset Boulevard with the cast and crew, clearly trying to evoke some kind of haunting presence of some kind.

01:15:24
Speaker 2: Because that's interesting. Yeah, such an interesting through line of the whole thread of Hollywood history is this movie. I this is one of those things that gets passed around on the internet. I have not been able to find this original interview, but Charles Bukowski of being Head Fame just one of the most simultaneously influential authors, poets, and worst people in the world. He claimed it the first thing he ever saw when he got cable was Eraserhead, which subsequently ruined all other television for him. Lastly, mel Brooks we mentioned earlier mel Brooks, of all people, was a fan of this film and got Lynch. Basically launched Lynch's career because this is not a student film, but this is more or less a student film. Mel Brooks sees it and he's producing Elephant. Man. He's he's already in pre pro for this movie and pushes Lynch to work on it, and that launches, you know, from there, he does Dune. He famously turned down Return of the Jedi around this time. And then it's a short hop skimp at a jump to blue velvet, twin peaks and mahalland drive. So mel Brooks, man, I love it. He hadn't heard of Lynch before. He hadn't heard it. Well, who would have? Yeah, he goes to see a Razorhead and he comes out of the screening yelling at David's there. He says, you're a mad man. I love you. You're in and this is my favorite like the producers, Yeah, exactly. Maybe that's what he thought, that they would lose money on Elephant instead of winning Oscars. Oh, man, I gotta bust out my John hurt for you at some point. Hi, I'm not hold at them all. Hi. How a human? Uh? That was all right and a half, he said, despite expecting Lynch to be quote a grotesque, a fat little german with fat stains running down his chin, just eating pork. But he thought, he said, he was flabbergasted by an Eraserhead. It's beautiful and it's very clear. It's like Beckett, which I get, Samuel Beckett. It's like ion Esco, not a reference. I understand you're a film student anything anything. He's like a he's like a theater of the absurd type. Yes, oh, okay, all right, Well you pulled some reviews for this, which I think are great. Yeah. I mean, and it's kind of a theme in pretty much every movie that we've talked about on here that went on to.

01:18:04
Speaker 1: Become a beloved classic. Not loved at the time, but doubly so in this case. Variety called Eraserhead a sickening, bad taste exercise, and Tom Buckley at the New York Times I think in nineteen eighty so, a few years after this had been making the rounds in the midnight movie circuit called it a murkily potentious shocker with an excruciatingly slow pace.

01:18:33
Speaker 2: I mean great. Yeah, we mentioned before this movie was made for like, I don't know, ten thousand from a five plus, Like what do you thinking of David Lynch's dad? Yeah, another ten fifteen from friends and family if that? Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing figures seven million groast with re releases.

01:18:58
Speaker 1: And Catherine Colson would later say that the percentage points she got on this movie h put her daughter through college.

01:19:05
Speaker 2: So I mean it made something good? Lord, Yeah, I mean is this is probably Halloween. Halloween for a long time was the most profitable independent film of all time. It's gonna be up there with blair Witch, right in terms of like, hey, well it was Halloween until was blair Witch. Oh okay, and then I mean just a total likecase.

01:19:25
Speaker 1: Probably for inflation, blair Witch and Eraser had probably around the same amount. How little it was, I think you know what it was is probably the special effects on the Eraser head that made it less profitable. I mean, you think about the actual VFX in that movie, heavy quotation marks vfx. We didn't get into this, but the lady across the hall, who's like the prostitute character or whatever, you know, the last place she popped up in is Orange is the New Black?

01:19:53
Speaker 2: Oh, that's Russian. She's one of the like Russia, like the old woman that's kind of like peripherally in Red's circle. She's got like white hair down to her shoulders, but she's got that same very She's super cool again. Yeah, yeah, man, I thought it was an Bancroft when she first came on the screen. Speaking of mel Brooks, Oh yeah, that would have been great. Maybe that's why he liked it. He was was Mary Dan Bancroft. For anyone who doesn't have Mail Brooks's personal history on lock, for some reason, I want to do. I mean, I wonder if Orson we watched all those orson Wales interviews. I wanted to find if Orson Welles ever said anything about David Lynch, Well, did you watch the Dick Habot ones? It was in that Twitter threat I send you to him insulting various people.

01:20:44
Speaker 1: He he was on Dick Habot at least twice, if not three times, and they're on Prime and maybe even just on YouTube and they're so good. Actually, speaking of I looked up because I imagine that you know, the five year filming period, production period of Eraserhead must certainly make it on a list of movies it's the longest time to produce, Oh sure. And there is a Wikipedia list and the top of the list is the Orson Wells movie that just came out, was finished off a few years ago.

01:21:12
Speaker 2: Oh, he's a great unfinished thing. Yeah.

01:21:14
Speaker 1: What was it, The The Other Side of the Wind that came out in twenty eighteen. I think he started producing it in nineteen seventy. Yeah, so it's a forty eight year production period, although I don't know, I feel weird counting that. Considering yeah, I'm sure for a good thirty years nothing was done. But still, but at the end of the day, what the hell else do you say about Eraserhead? I mean I mentioned earlier, I cannot think of another filmmaker, and I'm sure film Twitter or David Lynch Twitter will get after me with this. I can't think of another filmmaker who, in twenty five years, which is not a big span of time for a director's career, twenty five years, went from making something like Eraserhead to coming within a hair's distance of an oscar from a hall in drive. You know, he did Elephant Man after Eraserhead, and then he turned down Return of the Jedi, and with the exception of Dune, which is the movie why largely thanks to Dilarentis, he has final cut.

01:22:12
Speaker 2: On all of his stuff. So then I said this before, but Blue Velvet, twin Peaks, mullholland drive boom boom boom. I love that story about him turning down Return of the Jedi. Apparently he was personally asked by George Lucas but turned him down in part because he hated the Wookies, which I mean, to be fair, is probably the least Lynchian creature to ever exist. Wookies are the ewoks or sorry the ewoks? Yes, the ewoks.

01:22:38
Speaker 1: And he was quoted as saying, I had next door to zero interest in doing Return of the Jedi, but I've always admired George. George is a guy who does what he loves and I do what I love. The differences what George does makes hundreds of billions of dollars.

01:22:53
Speaker 2: Ain't that the truth?

01:22:54
Speaker 1: Man?

01:22:54
Speaker 2: That's what I'm saying again, Like, oh man, I don't know. I think I'm a David Lynch guy. Jordan, what does the razorhead mean? What does it all mean.

01:23:04
Speaker 1: As with the infant prop David Lynch has remained extremely tight lipped about the actual meaning of a raserhead. He gave the opposite of an answer when speaking the Vulture a few years ago. This doesn't answer the question, but it's an interesting take. Nonetheless, he said, every viewer is different. People go into a world and they have an experience, and they bring so much of what makes them react. It's already inside of them. Each viewer gets a different thing from every film. So there are some people where a racerhead speaks to them, and others it doesn't speak to them at all. It's just the way it goes. But no one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the film the way I see it. The interpretation of what it's all about has never been my interpretation. So, as with most art, perhaps it's best to not seek a literal answer. Getting back to Subsinski's piece for Rogeribert dot Com that I mentioned earlier, he wrote to quote explain, a raserhead would be like cut a drum open to see what makes the noise. You may get your answer, but you tend to ruin the drum in the process. That's a cool analogy.

01:24:09
Speaker 2: Similarly, Yeah, I two thousand and four. It goes into the Library of Congress. I again filmed. Man, I'm making enemies out of film Twitter. I think this is the most influential surrealist film of all time, regardless of whatever film Twitter thinks. I'm calling it easily the most liked. We talked about seven million. I couldn't verify that with any real hard data, but on aw we said it was twenty five thousand, probably ten thousand from a five plus whatever he was able to finagle. That's more than it deserves. Yeah, and I mean that in the nicest way. But yeah, man, it hasn't eighty from again for a movie like this, for something this bizarre, hasn't eighty seven on Metacritic, has a ninety and rotten Tomatoes. Wow, that's wild, even taking in every Tom Dick and hair. I don't know what it is in letter but I'm not on a letterbox yet, but even taking in every guy who just hears this is a good movie to like, rip a bong to and watch it. That is an astoundingly good record. I mean, how much of it you think It's like an Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing, too. Though, after so many years of I Kubrick's favorite movie, yeah, people be unwilling to call it out. I don't know. Maybe you're signing the trumpet on a new charge, a new dawn on of calling out a racer heead for being orsh. You know, Jordan, As the song goes in heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good thing and I've got mine. You're a good thing is a racer head, and mine is in like Flint, Austin Power's favorite movie. Folks. As always, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and.

01:25:51
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01:26:06
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01:26:15
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