Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
Speaker 2: that gives you the little known, fascinating facts and figures
Speaker 2: behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We
Speaker 2: are your two guides to the deep dive. I'm Alex
Speaker 2: Heigel and I'm Jordan Runta. And Jordan I sat in
Speaker 2: thought for a long time about how I was going
Speaker 2: to introduce this, but there is no introducing what we're
Speaker 2: talking about today. There is no introducing David Lynch's Eraserhead,
Speaker 2: which turned forty five this year. There are two camps
Speaker 2: to this movie. You have seen it and are haunted
Speaker 2: by it. And even if you can't stand this film,
Speaker 2: it will haunt you to some degree. Or you've never
Speaker 2: seen it and are therefore only biding your time until
Speaker 2: you become haunted by it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they used to sell lapel buttons that just read Eraserhead.
Speaker 1: I saw it, and that about sums it up. Lynch
Speaker 1: has repeatedly said that he will never reveal his intended
Speaker 1: meeting for this what I guess I'll just call a
Speaker 1: lucid nightmare, saying only that it's a dream of dark
Speaker 1: and troubling things and you can say that again. Most
Speaker 1: critics describe it as an abstract meditation on urban isolation, fatherhood,
Speaker 1: and sexual repression, but Freud called it the feel good
Speaker 1: film of the year.
Speaker 2: I will get into this later. I refuse to believe
Speaker 2: that the beating of this film is as oblique as
Speaker 2: he would like it to be. It seems pretty straightforward
Speaker 2: to me. But we're putting the head ahead of the eraser. Now,
Speaker 2: that was terrible. I apologize for that. Jordan. Are you
Speaker 2: a David Lynch guy capitol d LG No?
Speaker 1: I just his daily YouTube weather reports and his guest
Speaker 1: spots on Louis as the comedy coach. I went to
Speaker 1: NYU for film, and I think that just kind of
Speaker 1: spoiled him for me because I knew Lynch people. I
Speaker 1: knew a guy in class who literally had the words
Speaker 1: club Celensio from a Holland Drive tattooed on his wrists.
Speaker 1: So I too much David Lynch in my life. Sure,
Speaker 1: which is weird because I didn't watch much of it, But.
Speaker 2: Just well, wait, what have what? What of it? Have
Speaker 2: you watched Mulholland Drive in school? And really that was it?
Speaker 2: I know? The worst? No? Oh, I'm so excited for this, Folks.
Speaker 2: Let it be known that Jordan pitched this, I believe
Speaker 2: with the intention that I would not take him up
Speaker 2: on it, and he's regretted ever since.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd never seen it, and then I watched it
Speaker 1: for the first time about a week ago, and I
Speaker 1: haven't slept since.
Speaker 2: But you know, why do you? Yeah, why do you
Speaker 2: love David Lynch?
Speaker 1: I have? There are three reasons why I love David Lynch.
Speaker 1: Like me, he's a massive Beatles fan, and he attended
Speaker 1: their first ever concert in the United States in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C.
Speaker 2: In February of nineteen sixty four, so that's cool.
Speaker 1: He also spent his fifteenth birthday in front of the
Speaker 1: US Capitol watching the inauguration of JFK with his Scout
Speaker 1: troop and heigel like you, he's an Eagle Scout.
Speaker 2: We don't talk about that.
Speaker 1: And finally, when he was in college in Boston, he
Speaker 1: was the roommate of Jay Giles band singer Peter Wolfe
Speaker 1: aka the guy who sang Centerfold and Freeze Frame, but
Speaker 1: apparently Lynch kicked him out of the dorm because he
Speaker 1: was too weird. He was too weird for David Lynch.
Speaker 2: I love that the popular log line with David Lynch
Speaker 2: is Jimmy Stewart on acid right, because he's like this
Speaker 2: midwestern you know, if you will see, if you put
Speaker 2: me at ease enough, I might bust out the David
Speaker 2: Lynch impression. Oh woh, but yeah, I would be hard
Speaker 2: pressed to think of another person so genuinely avant garde
Speaker 2: and bizarre who has had such an impact on mainstream
Speaker 2: American cinema in such a short amount of time. I mean,
Speaker 2: you think about Eraserhead. Eraser Head to Mulholland Drive is
Speaker 2: like twenty five years in that neighborhood. I'm really bad
Speaker 2: at that in that neighborhood. Yeah, that's wild. To coming
Speaker 2: in within spitting distance of an oscar in a quarter
Speaker 2: century of your career after this, that's nuts.
Speaker 1: I was shocked about how comparatively little he'd done. I mean,
Speaker 1: for somebody who has, you know, such a legion of followers.
Speaker 1: I was just very surprised that his cannon was not Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was very very surprised by that.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that. But folks, enough banter. Yeah, we're
Speaker 2: delaying the inevitable here, Yeah, join us now as we
Speaker 2: take in the industrial wastelands of both Philadelphia and David
Speaker 2: Lynch's subconscious pierce the veil of Jack Nance's haircut and
Speaker 2: attempt on my part at least far too many Gordon
Speaker 2: Cole impressions. Here's everything you didn't know about eraser Head Jordan.
Speaker 2: In the late sixties. You might say that David Lynch
Speaker 2: was at a crossroads. Never get sold every time, but
Speaker 2: that crossroads was in Philadelphia. He's talked a lot about
Speaker 2: how he had a very very happy childhood, a very
Speaker 2: stable and happy childhood. Do we believe that, I kind
Speaker 2: of do. I mean, we'll get into mel Brooks's what
Speaker 2: mel Brooks thought of David Lynch later, but yeah, so's.
Speaker 2: He bounced around the US a good bit. His dad
Speaker 2: was in the USDA, and by the late sixties he's
Speaker 2: been enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in
Speaker 2: Philadelphia to study painting. Have you seen his paintings? His cartoons? Oh, well,
Speaker 2: his cartoon.
Speaker 1: He had a cartoon in The Angriest Dog in the World, Yes,
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles Daily Reader for like a decade, and
Speaker 1: it's just still images of this dog, and it's always
Speaker 1: prefaced by this thing. It's like this dog is so
Speaker 1: angry that he can't move, he can't speak, he can't eat,
Speaker 1: rigor mortis has set in, and it's just this still
Speaker 1: images of this dog with like morbid thoughts, like what
Speaker 1: if this is as good as it gets? It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: So yes, I have seen that. Then his paintings. His
Speaker 1: paintings are like Francis Bacon meets John Wayne Gacy.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I'm loving this already. Anyway, So he's there
Speaker 2: to work on that aesthetic, and he marries a fellow student,
Speaker 2: Peggy Reve in nineteen sixty seven, and she's the mother
Speaker 2: of their daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer was born in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: eight and would go on to direct Boxing Helena, which
Speaker 2: is a really bad movie. Anyway. This little nuclear family
Speaker 2: is living in a North Philadelphia neighborhood called Fairmont, which
Speaker 2: was not a great place to live at the time.
Speaker 2: David Lynch's quotes about Philadelphia are their own art form.
Speaker 2: I want to do a David Lynch style surrealist podcast
Speaker 2: that's just me reading his quotes about Philadelphia. We lived cheap,
Speaker 2: but the city was full of fear, he told Chris
Speaker 2: Radley in a book called Lynch. On Lynch, a kid
Speaker 2: was shot to death down the street. We were robbed twice,
Speaker 2: had windows shot out, and a car stolen. The house
Speaker 2: was first broken into only three days after we moved in,
Speaker 2: and according to another Lynch site by Mike Hartman, called
Speaker 2: the City of Absurdity, Lynch said that Erase Herhead was
Speaker 2: born in Philadelphia, and my favorite quote, I had my
Speaker 2: first thrilling thought in Philadelphia, which sounds like a Paul
Speaker 2: Anka song.
Speaker 1: The less successful follow up till I left my heart
Speaker 1: in San Francisco. I had my first thrilling thought in
Speaker 1: Philadelphia talking about a racerhead. In later years, I think
Speaker 1: it might have been in the Lynch and Lynch book,
Speaker 1: he said. I call it my Philadelphia story. It just
Speaker 1: doesn't have Jimmy Stewart in it.
Speaker 2: And that's for damn sure, I'm gonna get into it.
Speaker 2: I lived at fourteenth and would right Kitty corner from
Speaker 2: the Morgue. That's real industrial. There's my first Lynch. That
Speaker 2: was good. That was really good. Thank you. It's a
Speaker 2: tough one to nail too. I'm impressed you very flat
Speaker 2: for that. It's very Western. You gotta unless it was
Speaker 2: at five o'clock. There's nobody in that neighborhood, No one
Speaker 2: lives there, And he says, I really do like that.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful if you see it in the right way,
Speaker 2: which is such a great thesis for so much of
Speaker 2: his work with this industrial stuff. And it's beautiful if
Speaker 2: you look at it in the right way. His roommate
Speaker 2: at the time, a childhood friend named Jack Fisk, told
Speaker 2: The New York Times in nineteen ninety that David would
Speaker 2: dress up to visit the Morgue. Oh, I love it.
Speaker 2: He was fascinated, and he would always wear at least
Speaker 2: two ties, one for luck. Have you seen the set
Speaker 2: photos of him around this time when he's wearing like
Speaker 2: the big wide brimmed hat and like and three times
Speaker 2: neck ties. Yeah. I saw a woman in the backyard
Speaker 2: squawking like a chicken. No, it's going, it's getting away
Speaker 2: from me. I saw a spopping that chicken. I saw
Speaker 2: a grown woman grab her breast and speak like a baby,
Speaker 2: complaining her nipples hurt. This kind of thing will set
Speaker 2: you back. And hey, so we're hearing about it, all right,
Speaker 2: We're gonna I gotta stop. I got a sub subjected
Speaker 2: you to David Lynch quotes about Philadelphia. One time I
Speaker 2: was walking around with it at night with a stick
Speaker 2: with nails driven through it, and a squad car pulls
Speaker 2: up alongside of me and he says, what have you
Speaker 2: got there? And I showed this stick with nails driven
Speaker 2: through it. He said, good for you, Bud, and took
Speaker 2: off Jesus. So, now that we have the set and
Speaker 2: setting of a raiser Head, it's important to know that
Speaker 2: it was not his first choice for a project, based
Speaker 2: on the strength of some early shorts that he did.
Speaker 2: Around this time, Lynch had been accepted into the American
Speaker 2: Film Institutes Center for Advanced Film Studies in nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: in Beverly Hills, and while he was there, he studied
Speaker 2: with the Czechoslovakian filmmaker named Frank Daniel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, not a lot of people know this,
Speaker 1: but Lynch actually moved to la after getting into a
Speaker 1: fight on the basketball court with two guys who were
Speaker 1: up to no good making trouble in his neighborhood. So
Speaker 1: he went to live with some family members in bel Air.
Speaker 1: He didn't I'm sure I'll cut that out if I
Speaker 1: really committed to it.
Speaker 2: Something had come but No, this is gets into like
Speaker 2: David Lynch's thing about being like, that's not what the
Speaker 2: movie's about, but it's like, obviously what the movies about.
Speaker 2: He had a script for a film called Garden Back,
Speaker 2: which is really bizarre obviously, but it's about infidelity because
Speaker 2: he had cheated on Peggy, I believe repeatedly. But yeah,
Speaker 2: tell us about garden Back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of these characters were inspired by characters in
Speaker 1: his paintings, which we touched on earlier. Is that before
Speaker 1: he was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he
Speaker 1: studied in Boston at the School of the Museum of
Speaker 1: Fine Arts. So he's very accomplished painter and musician. Like
Speaker 1: he almost sat during breaks of filming.
Speaker 2: He used to like play trumpet, just like for the
Speaker 2: heck of it with Have you heard his record Crazy
Speaker 2: Clown Time? I haven't it? Is it what I imagine?
Speaker 2: It's weird, it's weird, imagine it's just weird. A lot
Speaker 2: of the quotes were taken from this come from Eraserhead
Speaker 2: comma The David Lynch Files, Volume one, the full story
Speaker 2: of one of the strangest films ever made by a
Speaker 2: guy named Kenneth George Godwin, really incredible book. But it's
Speaker 2: funny given that Lynch became such an iconoclass because there
Speaker 2: was a lot of interest in him at Afi at
Speaker 2: the time. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who is Yes, Zoe's dad
Speaker 2: and her mom is in Twin Peaks. She's Mama Heyward.
Speaker 2: She's Doc Heyward's wife who's in the wheelchair. So Caleb
Speaker 2: introduces Lynch to a twentieth century Fox producer who wanted
Speaker 2: to option Garden Back from a short into a feature,
Speaker 2: and the process of doing this, and these negotiations and
Speaker 2: talks exasperated Lynch so much that he quit. I mean,
Speaker 2: he has in various interviews he talks about basically the
Speaker 2: storming into the Dean's office. Yeah, I'd be like, I'm
Speaker 2: done with this, and then getting home and Peggy being
Speaker 2: like they can call and non stop. Yeah, like he was.
Speaker 2: He was, they really wanted him, and she's crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, but I cannot imagine a film institution doing
Speaker 1: that now. Apparently the deed even said to him, Hey,
Speaker 1: if you're this unhappy, we're doing something wrong here.
Speaker 2: What do you want? What's wrong?
Speaker 1: Which is I cannot imagine getting a vote of confidence
Speaker 1: like that. It's really artistic institution. Now there's something that
Speaker 1: I mean, you know you.
Speaker 2: Alluded to this with the weather reports, but there is
Speaker 2: something magnetic about him. Yeah. The fact that he was
Speaker 2: able to get people on board with this his ridiculous
Speaker 2: ideas is really a testament to his charisma. I don't know,
Speaker 2: powers of persuasion anyway. Garden Back crashes and burns, Lynch
Speaker 2: almost quits the afi and Daniels is like, whatever we
Speaker 2: got to do, let's do it. And that turns out
Speaker 2: to be Eraserhead twenty one page shooting script is where
Speaker 2: this comes from. And there's a great documentary from two
Speaker 2: thousand and one that is called eraser Head Stories. It's
Speaker 2: just him talking into a mic, pretty tight close up
Speaker 2: on his shoulders and head, and at one point the
Speaker 2: log lady Catherine Colson, who is part of this film,
Speaker 2: we'll talk about her. She's like conference called in and
Speaker 2: half of it is just him like yelling at her,
Speaker 2: like on speakerphone off the mic, like yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 2: did cut his hair for that, didn't you. How many
Speaker 2: years were you on this, Kathy? Yeahh oh oh, I
Speaker 2: don't remember that.
Speaker 1: Oh, and I can't he in like very big text.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of it, it said that this is documentary's
Speaker 1: directed by him as well, which I think is hilarious
Speaker 1: that it's just a tideshot of him and an old
Speaker 1: nineties speakerphone.
Speaker 2: What. I can't remember when I got the idea, when
Speaker 2: the word eraser Head or any part of the idea
Speaker 2: came to me first, He says, I can't remember if
Speaker 2: it was in Philadelphia or when I came to California.
Speaker 2: Don't remember writing the script, and don't remember the ideas
Speaker 2: coming in. It all came from Philadelphia, but I don't
Speaker 2: remember when. And it's I mean, not only was he
Speaker 2: at a crossroads, but he was at a low point
Speaker 2: when he started filming this in seventy two with a
Speaker 2: projected runtime of forty two minutes. Dorian Small, who's Eraserheads
Speaker 2: production manager, there's a theme in David Lynch's movies in
Speaker 2: which he has affairs with the women he's working on.
Speaker 2: Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet was one of them, and
Speaker 2: so he split from Peggy around this time because he
Speaker 2: was having an affair with Dorian Small. And Jennifer was
Speaker 2: born with clubbed feet, which is a deformity that I
Speaker 2: guess was a lot more common back then, and you
Speaker 2: had to wear like corrective footwear. I don't know where
Speaker 2: I'm going with this. The point is is that this
Speaker 2: movie is almost certainly about the dissolution of his relationship
Speaker 2: and having a daughter who had medical challenges when she
Speaker 2: was born, and his complete uninterest in being a father, disinterest,
Speaker 2: lack of interest, I don't know, but he's you know,
Speaker 2: if you're listening to him or Jennifer. Apparently that is
Speaker 2: not what it's about, because she said I don't think
Speaker 2: David credits that directly as where eraser Head comes from.
Speaker 2: But then she says, it's not just that, it's a
Speaker 2: million other things.
Speaker 1: So I just think that the fact that she calls
Speaker 1: her dad David is very interesting. Yeah, I mean, I imagine,
Speaker 1: despite what he says, that fatherhood and the anxieties surrounding
Speaker 1: it was a major inspiration. But I've also read that
Speaker 1: some of these other things that they mentioned could include
Speaker 1: the Kafka novel Metamorphosis, for which I think he actually
Speaker 1: wrote a script adaptation, and the Goggle short story from
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty six, The Nose. Both of those may have
Speaker 1: helped sow the seeds of this idea for eraser Head.
Speaker 1: The Kapka influence is really apparent in the character of Henry,
Speaker 1: who is just like so many of Kafka's characters, just
Speaker 1: simultaneously bemused by the world and terrified of it and
Speaker 1: extremely paranoid. And Lynch himself is copped to the Kafka thing,
Speaker 1: and he said that in I think it was in
Speaker 1: Lynch on Lynch that he's quote the one artist I
Speaker 1: feel could be my brother.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so many of these characters are just like
Speaker 2: caught up in institutions and machinery bigger than them. That's
Speaker 2: actually really interesting because like so much of you think about,
Speaker 2: like the Trial and like a lot of the other
Speaker 2: Kofka stuff, that's just about like being stuck in some
Speaker 2: kind of institutional machine that is far bigger than you.
Speaker 2: And David Lynch literalizes it with people actually stuck in machine. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean just.
Speaker 1: Even the famous picture of Henry, the main character in
Speaker 1: eraser Head, that's you know, on T shirts and posters
Speaker 1: and dorm rooms across the globe, just that look on
Speaker 1: his face that's completely unidentifiable. Is that mix of amusement
Speaker 1: and paranoia and terror, which is I just think is
Speaker 1: interesting because that's such a hallmark of Kafka's work. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not an especially groundbreaking thought for you know, you know,
Speaker 1: for either of Lynch scholar but or a Kafa scholar,
Speaker 1: neither of I. I was an English major, so theoretically
Speaker 1: I should have closer I should be closer to it
Speaker 1: than you, and I am not. David Foster Wallace was
Speaker 1: a big David Lynch fan, and he yeah, he read
Speaker 1: about I remember on of the first things I read
Speaker 1: from him as that essay about Lost Highway. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think he described Lynchi and as the unbelievably grotesque
Speaker 1: existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal.
Speaker 2: There it is speaking of Jack Nance, David went through
Speaker 2: his spiritual crisis when he was making Eraser head Nance
Speaker 2: told the New York Times for that article we cited
Speaker 2: earlier from nineteen ninety and Lynch has it's become a
Speaker 2: meme at this point of David Lynch, the thing that says,
Speaker 2: believe it or not, Eraser is my most spiritual work.
Speaker 2: And somebody that the interviewer says, elaborate on that, and he says, no.
Speaker 1: I don't talk about that is the thing that he
Speaker 1: usually says in these interviews that I've seen, I don't
Speaker 1: talk about that.
Speaker 2: The other thing that I heard is that he opened
Speaker 2: a Bible randomly and was inspired by a Biblical verse,
Speaker 2: but he says he doesn't remember which one, or even
Speaker 2: if it was the Old or New Testament. So you know,
Speaker 2: we've had a lot of unreliable narrators on here. I
Speaker 2: don't think Lynch is up there with Neil Young or
Speaker 2: Jimmy Page, who are very interested in or Robert Planet even,
Speaker 2: who are all very interested in their own hagiography. But
Speaker 2: Lynch just does not seem to remember things or wants
Speaker 2: to consciously obfuse skate anyway. The shoestring this thing is
Speaker 2: made on is so fascinating to me. AFI gave him
Speaker 2: ten thousand dollars to make this, but everything else on
Speaker 2: this was done so close to the bone. He was
Speaker 2: living at a property in Beverly Hills called Graystone Mansion
Speaker 2: that was owned by the AFI and this this place
Speaker 2: is its own weird vibe. It was built by the
Speaker 2: oil tycoon Edward Doeny or Doheiney, I don't know. He
Speaker 2: was the inspiration from Daniel Plainview in there will be blood,
Speaker 2: and he gave it to his son ned who in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty nine died in a guest bedroom in a
Speaker 2: murder suicide alongside his secretary Hugh Plunkett. And this thing
Speaker 2: has been in everything. It would take less time for
Speaker 2: us to name what it hasn't been in.
Speaker 1: I preferred to zero in on two in particular, that
Speaker 1: this property has been featured in It's in The Big Lebowski.
Speaker 2: It's the other Jeffrey Lebowski's house. Mistere Lebowski is in
Speaker 2: seclusion in the in the in the West Wings.
Speaker 1: I think all the interiors were filmed there for that,
Speaker 1: and it was also used in the video for meatloafs.
Speaker 1: I would do anything for love. I just love the
Speaker 1: fact that David Lynch lived at this place. It costs
Speaker 1: the equivalent of sixty three million dollars when it was built,
Speaker 1: making it the most expensive home in California at the time,
Speaker 1: and certainly one of the biggest. It's forty six thousand
Speaker 1: square feet fifty five rooms. Thinking about where Lynch was
Speaker 1: living in Philadelphia, and it's just an insane jump, but
Speaker 1: you know, predicting the stinky cologne of death that would
Speaker 1: follow this film for the next few years. Several people
Speaker 1: associated with the eraser Head production, including star Jack Nance,
Speaker 1: claimed to have seen the ghost of Ned Doheny while
Speaker 1: they were filming. I think it's Doheny because I think
Speaker 1: Doheiny the street in la is named.
Speaker 2: After him or to the family. I think, you know,
Speaker 2: this is a crazy connection. My mind just made. David
Speaker 2: Lynch loves milkshakes. What's the famous line from there will be?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I drink your milk tree, Wow, drink
Speaker 1: it run and I have a straw that reaches all.
Speaker 2: God. I love that movie. When he says this is
Speaker 2: gonna be my gravestone when he goes, I don't know
Speaker 2: how much longer I can keep doing it with these people.
Speaker 2: He puts people. You hear the verbal air quotes around people.
Speaker 2: I love it so much. It's bad. I see myself
Speaker 2: and all these terrible characters, isn't it, Jordan, I'm the dad.
Speaker 2: I'm the dad in a racer head. We don't talk
Speaker 2: too much about the dinner scene, but I this is
Speaker 2: the thing about this movie. Man. People were like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's a surrealis well, it's a comedy, so much of
Speaker 2: it until it gets really horrifying, and the baby. The
Speaker 2: baby is the only thing that undercuts the comedy. But
Speaker 2: that dinner scene is so funny. It's like Alish comedy
Speaker 2: of manners or something. She has that weird seizure and
Speaker 2: runs out of the room and he goes, she'll be
Speaker 2: fine in a minute. It's very English. It's very like
Speaker 2: a Joe Orton player or something. Yeah, all right, anyway,
Speaker 2: so David Lynch is living in though there will be bloodhouse,
Speaker 2: he's squatting, essentially, their blankets taped over the windows, and
Speaker 2: it's this extended sort of subterranean part of the property
Speaker 2: that stables, garages, staffed quarters, a hayloft, a greenhouse, and
Speaker 2: he kind of commandeered it. He said, we had about
Speaker 2: five or six rooms in this giant loft where all
Speaker 2: of the sets were built, a minture soundstage, and a studio.
Speaker 2: But there are some exteriors on.
Speaker 1: This Yeah, probably the most famous one at the beginning,
Speaker 1: when he's kind of walking through this urban, white industrial wasteland.
Speaker 1: It was filmed in a muddy lot which is now
Speaker 1: the Beverly Center mall in Los Angeles, which is a
Speaker 1: very very upscale establishment. So it's really funny that it
Speaker 1: has this historical pedigree. It's even funnier considering how cheaply
Speaker 1: this movie was shot. I mean they were literally it
Speaker 1: was like the classic like they were they were wily
Speaker 1: e coyote pulling the track up behind them and putting
Speaker 1: it down in front of them, only run in reverse.
Speaker 2: Because they would build this stuff. They would buy equipment,
Speaker 2: tear the sets down, reconfigure the sets into other stuff,
Speaker 2: and then whenever they were done using it, sell it.
Speaker 2: Like Lynch talked about, he got this what's the big
Speaker 2: editing bay thing called a movie movieola Moviola. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: got the and then sold it when they were done,
Speaker 2: so much of it. Catherine Colson we talked about this,
Speaker 2: the log lady from Twin Peaks. She was married to
Speaker 2: Jack Nance while the star of the movie. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: she was a production manager on this, and so she
Speaker 2: had done so much of this logwork or legwork, log work,
Speaker 2: and she said, all of these rooms with the same
Speaker 2: space with different sets built in. David really pretty much
Speaker 2: did everything himself.
Speaker 1: And I guess he would later reuse a lot of
Speaker 1: the chunks of the set for Twin Peaks in later years,
Speaker 1: like the zigzag floor in the lobby of Henry's apartment
Speaker 1: building or hotel, whatever the hell it is was the
Speaker 1: same set piece that was used for the Red Room
Speaker 1: in Twin Peaks. But yeah, Kevin Colson is kind of
Speaker 1: the MVP of this production. In addition to working as
Speaker 1: a waitress, which I think she gave like all of
Speaker 1: her paychecks to the production, she held the mic boom,
Speaker 1: she operated the cameras, she took on set photos, and
Speaker 1: she catered.
Speaker 2: And she cut Jack Nance's hair, and she took over
Speaker 2: David Lynch's paper route for him, which is the most
Speaker 2: you're talking about. Jimmy Stewart on acid, David Lynch driving
Speaker 2: around LA at four in the morning delivering papers. Wait,
Speaker 2: we got more to say on that. Yeah, but I
Speaker 2: love that he insisted on paying the actors. I think
Speaker 2: that's so touching.
Speaker 1: I guess he gave him I think it was twenty
Speaker 1: five dollars a week, and then when he ran out
Speaker 1: of money, he insisted on giving them all a piece
Speaker 1: of the film. And they worked out this deal on
Speaker 1: Napkins during one of their trips to Bob's Big Boys
Speaker 1: Diner from Milkshakes, which has a tie to Austin Powers.
Speaker 1: Oh that previous episodes oh explain, Oh yeah, well explained
Speaker 1: for the listeners. The Bob's Big Boy figurine is what
Speaker 1: it's like a space It's like Doctor Evil spaceship or something.
Speaker 2: No, I'm trying to remember what it was used as. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so they furnished this film. They did wardrobe from you know,
Speaker 2: flea market Swap meets the Salvation Army Goodwill and Jack
Speaker 2: Nansen Catherine Coleson gave their living room furniture up as
Speaker 2: a set, so they went without it for months, five
Speaker 2: years to shoot. Did they just not have living room
Speaker 2: furniture for Yeah, I guess. The warehouse only costs about
Speaker 2: thirty five or fifty dollars to build, but a lot
Speaker 2: of other things cost money. Lynch said, So the front
Speaker 2: of Mister and Missus X House, the which is not
Speaker 2: even in the movie that much. It's like one establishing
Speaker 2: shot of this house. The steps are styrofoam. There is
Speaker 2: no porch at all, and when Henry walks up on that,
Speaker 2: he is standing on a plane. And Lynch said, the
Speaker 2: whole thing was barely held together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean some of the flats, which are like
Speaker 1: the walls that are used in sound stages to construct
Speaker 1: you know, interior rooms. They Lynch would repair them with
Speaker 1: paper mache, using newspapers from his paper root day job,
Speaker 1: and a lot of like the art deco detailing on
Speaker 1: the elevator and in Henry's lobby, like the apartment lobby
Speaker 1: is all made out of wax.
Speaker 2: It's all stuff that David Lynch made out of wax.
Speaker 1: And also that it was really interesting they dip the
Speaker 1: white sheets into tea to make it so that, you know,
Speaker 1: in black and white, it wouldn't be this brilliant white
Speaker 1: on film, but this kind of more dull gray, which
Speaker 1: kind of like what they do with newspapers to make
Speaker 1: it look old, like when you're making treasure maps and stuff.
Speaker 2: They dip it in tea. I was gonna say, all
Speaker 2: my childhood craft books told me to do that. Unsurprisingly,
Speaker 2: his parents, Peggy's parents pitched in. But my favorite part
Speaker 2: about this is his paper route delivering the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2: He made forty eight to fifty a week on his
Speaker 2: two hundred and ten paper route. Wow. His very first
Speaker 2: night the run took him six hours, but he eventually
Speaker 2: narrowed it down to an hour. How I've beating Gus
Speaker 2: Catherine Coleson, like we said, took it over at one point,
Speaker 2: because he would do these marathon shoots and then sometimes
Speaker 2: not be left with enough time to do the route,
Speaker 2: so she would dip out and do it for him,
Speaker 2: and she would have these directions that he gave her
Speaker 2: on a tape recorder, so which probably means I was
Speaker 2: gonna say somewhere there's a tape of him being like,
Speaker 2: when you get to the Orange House, turn right, Catherine,
Speaker 2: and you know the angel what we call in the
Speaker 2: stortup culture, an angel investor Lynch's buddies, Jack Fisk's girlfriend
Speaker 2: and eventually wife, Sissy Spasic.
Speaker 1: That is crazy, but also it makes a certain amount
Speaker 1: of spiritual sense because the sight of her in a
Speaker 1: bloody prom dress is probably one of the most haunting
Speaker 1: cinematic images of the seventies, so it does make sense
Speaker 1: that she would be mixed up with something equally disturbing.
Speaker 1: She apparently would come on the set and help out
Speaker 1: and hold the slate when Jack Fisk was in the shot,
Speaker 1: which earned her a thanks in the credits.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that she's credited in this. My other
Speaker 2: favorite David Lynch odd job is plumbing. His pool. Quote
Speaker 2: on that is that there's something deeply satisfying about directing
Speaker 2: the flow of water, which you know there is he's
Speaker 2: onto something there.
Speaker 1: You know, Jack Nance had a day job too, delivering flowers.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine it's Mother's Day and the doorbell rings,
Speaker 1: and Henry with the hair because he kept the hair
Speaker 1: for all the years in production, so presumably he looked
Speaker 1: just like the guy on the eraserhead poster answered the door.
Speaker 2: In there he is with a bouquet of flowers. No
Speaker 2: nuts to me, no thank you, just like we don't
Speaker 2: want them they get. He says that we got kicked
Speaker 2: out of AFI after about two or three years of
Speaker 2: being down there, which yes, they were squatting and shooting
Speaker 2: a film more or less illegally there, and so it
Speaker 2: got down to the wire. They finished initial shots on
Speaker 2: this thirty hours straight. They shot huh wow, overnight shoot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They used to do a lot of shoots at night
Speaker 1: because I guess during the day there were a lot
Speaker 1: of gardeners on the property and it just they made
Speaker 1: too much noise and also probably maybe they didn't want
Speaker 1: the witnesses to all the stuff. They were sure, and
Speaker 1: they would shoot until dawn until the birds came out,
Speaker 1: and I guess there would be this call of birds
Speaker 1: that went around, which was like the unofficial sign.
Speaker 2: That the shoot was over for the night. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: mentioned earlier, there's these great on set photos from there.
Speaker 2: So like him in this not in keeping with our
Speaker 2: later image of him. This like wide brimmed hat at
Speaker 2: the three ties we've talked about. He loves coffee, which
Speaker 2: we've talked about. It's obvious from Twin Peaks and everything,
Speaker 2: but like twenty cups a day at some point, right
Speaker 2: shitload of coffee. And he was a chainsmoker when he
Speaker 2: started working on this film, but he took up transcendental meditation,
Speaker 2: which he is a big proponent of. There's a David
Speaker 2: Lynch Transcendental Meditation foundation. He took that up during the
Speaker 2: shoot and went vegetarian. And so he would he talks
Speaker 2: about like it's important, it's important to give yourself a treat. Ah,
Speaker 2: it's getting worse. I know, I disagree. I think, okay,
Speaker 2: commit to them dialing it in. So yeah, he would
Speaker 2: say it's important to get yourself a treat after a
Speaker 2: long day of filming, and it started. His treat started
Speaker 2: as grilled cheese sandwiches. He would go into diners in
Speaker 2: the restaurant where Colson worked in order grilled cheeses in
Speaker 2: the afternoon. But he now his big thing since then
Speaker 2: has been Bob's Big Boy milkshakes, and he talks about like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I just get him and pour sugar into him and
Speaker 2: drink him up and get all kinds of neat ideas.
Speaker 1: And he went there every day for like eight years, right,
Speaker 1: something like that, And then he had to not because
Speaker 1: he was gonna miss like the editing due date to
Speaker 1: get a film submitted to like con or something. And
Speaker 1: he was like, yeah, killed me, like almost killed me
Speaker 1: not to make it.
Speaker 2: Jack Nance real Weirdoh love jack Nance. But you know
Speaker 2: he's the iconic image from the film. He's he's Pete
Speaker 2: in Twin Peaks. He's a just a delight. Lynch called
Speaker 2: one of my best friends to the Criterion collection in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, but they did not have a particularly good interview.
Speaker 2: Nance was married to Colson at the time, and I
Speaker 2: think he actually got her involved. But their bonding point,
Speaker 2: which solidified this great friendship for the Ages was David
Speaker 2: Lynch's Volkswagen, which he had jury rigged with a like
Speaker 2: a wooden rack to like a luggage rack kind of
Speaker 2: thing to help him haul crap around, and I guess
Speaker 2: this was out in the parking lot or something. Jack
Speaker 2: Nance looked at it and said, boy, whoever built that
Speaker 2: thing must be on the ball. So David Lynch then said,
Speaker 2: thank you, Jack, I did that, and you're hired. That
Speaker 2: was his audition to get into a Razorhead was complimenting
Speaker 2: his tricked out VW beatalize him. I hope it was
Speaker 2: a Probably it might have been one of their weird
Speaker 2: truck things. But yeah, that thing, I mean, between that
Speaker 2: and the paper rude, that thing did the That was
Speaker 2: the real unsung hero over razor Head, David Lynch's Volkswagen.
Speaker 1: Well, man, you know what they say, flattery will get
Speaker 1: you a mutated calf carcass.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, where do we get to the baby? Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: that's fair. We'll talk about the baby later. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's Hold your horses, hold your babies, hold your calf fetuses.
Speaker 2: We'll get there.
Speaker 1: I love that we're taping this on Mother's Day. By
Speaker 1: the way, there's something Oh yeah, that's so weird. We're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break, but we'll be right
Speaker 1: back with more. Too much information in just a moment
Speaker 1: Jack Nance's hair. Where do we begin.
Speaker 2: Jack had a particular type of hair that when you
Speaker 2: tease it and comb it, it just stays. It was
Speaker 2: the most fantastic head of hair. And when we first
Speaker 2: saw what happened for the tall look and how tall
Speaker 2: it was, we were shocked. After a few minutes, I said,
Speaker 2: this is it. He said, he doesn't remember if it
Speaker 2: was Jack Nance who did it the first time, whether
Speaker 2: it was by a woman named Charlotte Stewart or Coulson,
Speaker 2: but Colson wound up dragooned into maintaining it. We mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2: She also cooked because they were feeding everyone on takeout,
Speaker 2: and then they were like, the takeout budget's been slashed, Catherine,
Speaker 2: can you cook egg salad, grilled cheese. Yeah. So she
Speaker 2: ends up the person in charge of doing the hair,
Speaker 2: and she said, I took a kind of maniacal pleasure
Speaker 2: from backcombing his hair, and it apparently made the entire
Speaker 2: crew burst out laughing the first time they saw him.
Speaker 2: And you said earlier that he wore this hairstyle for
Speaker 2: the entire duration of the shoot, which is not strictly
Speaker 2: speaking true. What happened was his hair was on call
Speaker 2: for this, so they would, I know. So I don't
Speaker 2: know if we mentioned this up talk up top five
Speaker 2: years to shoot this, to finish this movie because they
Speaker 2: had no money.
Speaker 1: It was just like like as soon as they had
Speaker 1: a little bit of money to literally just buy like
Speaker 1: film stock, that they would go.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't like they were using that to
Speaker 1: build anything, elab it or even necessarily about the end anybody.
Speaker 1: It was literally to get film stock to shoot on,
Speaker 1: and half the time they would get it donated or used.
Speaker 2: Well, because the soundtrack is old film soundstock that had
Speaker 2: been thrown out, they drove his VW there.
Speaker 1: Some of the film stock too, because Peter Bugdanovitch was
Speaker 1: making paper Moon on black and white film, and some
Speaker 1: of the leftover stuff that he didn't use they got
Speaker 1: donated too.
Speaker 2: Oh, Peter Bugdanovitch, I should be wearing a necker chief
Speaker 2: right now. Colson. On jack Nance's hair, she said, when
Speaker 2: he wasn't shooting for a long time, he would let
Speaker 2: it go, but then he would have to have another
Speaker 2: haircut before we started to shoot again. My family didn't
Speaker 2: know him any other way except for that goofy hair.
Speaker 2: We have a lot of family pictures at Christmas time
Speaker 2: with Jack with this haircut, which is amazing because somewhere
Speaker 2: in the world there are Christmas portraits of Jack Nance
Speaker 2: and the log Lady from Twin Peak with his hair
Speaker 2: in the razorhead, and their parents that it was partially
Speaker 2: responsible for them getting divorced, but they also work together
Speaker 2: on Twin Peaks. They remained friends. Nance who is responsible
Speaker 2: for another great bit of the eraser head lore, which
Speaker 2: is that the baby who we're gonna get to, we
Speaker 2: keep teasing this baby. This is like Chekhov's gun. We
Speaker 2: mentioned it in the first act and now someone's gonna
Speaker 2: have to get shot with it. In the third act.
Speaker 2: That baby is named Spike, and someone asked asked Nance
Speaker 2: where he got that, and he said, I think it
Speaker 2: was on the birth certificate. And he has a positively
Speaker 2: kafka esque a bit of what they asked him. Yeah,
Speaker 2: his rider. Essentially it was a room and a chair.
Speaker 1: That's all he wanted for accommodations, for which I mean,
Speaker 1: given the budget and how long this.
Speaker 2: Time, say, that might have been a stretch, they'd probably
Speaker 2: try to argue him down to a stool. All right,
Speaker 2: So we haven't talked about the other side of the family.
Speaker 2: We haven't talked about Mary X.
Speaker 1: Yes, Mary X is Henry's Girlfriend's long stuff forring girlfriend.
Speaker 1: In this She's played by Charlotte Stewart, and I love
Speaker 1: this connection. She would often come to the eraser Head
Speaker 1: set straight from her day job shooting The Little House
Speaker 1: on the Prairie, where she had a starring role as
Speaker 1: Miss Beatle. I just I love that she would go
Speaker 1: from the most Hallmarky show.
Speaker 2: In existence to eraser Head off and on the same day.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can't believe she made it out alive.
Speaker 2: I like the idea of her confusing her lines from
Speaker 2: like sleep deprivation, Like she's on a little House on
Speaker 2: the prairie and she's like, they're not even sure it
Speaker 2: is a baby. This film was only supposed to take
Speaker 2: six weeks. Twenty white pages projected forty two minute runtime. False. No,
Speaker 2: that was long.
Speaker 1: They initially said twenty one the dean if I was
Speaker 1: like twenty one minutes, and it's like it might be
Speaker 1: a hair longer, okay, four because like script pages usually
Speaker 1: equate to one page a minute, so I thought forty
Speaker 1: two minutes max.
Speaker 2: Come on, Like, what are we thinking here? Yeah? I
Speaker 2: mean they yeah, I mean Lynch was who's squatting. He
Speaker 2: lived in Henry's actual room. But yeah, please tell us
Speaker 2: about Lynch's living situation further.
Speaker 1: I mean, because it was illegal, they had to make
Speaker 1: it look like he wasn't there, So he was living
Speaker 1: in Henry's room. That just absolutely claustrophobic, cubby hole that is.
Speaker 1: You know, it's got a great radiator. It's got a
Speaker 1: great radiator, it does. That's where David Lynch actually lived
Speaker 1: for I would assume years during this production. But because
Speaker 1: it was illegal, day to make it look like he
Speaker 1: wasn't there, So they achieved this by bolting him in
Speaker 1: with one door and padlocking the other from the outside
Speaker 1: so as not to arouse suspicion. So he's locked in
Speaker 1: this room, which is which adds a whole other level
Speaker 1: of terrifying. It's also a very Bushwick thing.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, what's your personal experience with this
Speaker 2: living arrangement?
Speaker 1: Yeah, my dear friend did something similar. He was living
Speaker 1: in the furnace room of his art gallery in Bushwick,
Speaker 1: and the room was hidden behind a movable tool shelf
Speaker 1: that was just on hinges. But you know, when it
Speaker 1: was in place, it looked just like a regular shelf,
Speaker 1: and as a sort of makeshift handle, he bolted a
Speaker 1: shovel that just looked like it was just hanging there,
Speaker 1: but it was just bolted there, didn't go anywhere.
Speaker 2: So yeah, Yeah, Probably the most exemplary part of this
Speaker 2: shooting schedule is there's a shot in this film. There's
Speaker 2: a cut in which the first part of the shot
Speaker 2: and the second part occurred eighteen months apart.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Henry opens up the door to his apartment and
Speaker 1: he's seen entering from the other side, and the next
Speaker 1: shot a year and.
Speaker 2: A half late, he had aged eighteen months. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean the filming took so long for this that
Speaker 1: several years in Lynch's own family tried to talk him
Speaker 1: out of the project, and he's talked about this in
Speaker 1: a couple different interviews. Recalled his parents and his younger
Speaker 1: brother saying to him, you know, you've been on this
Speaker 1: erazorhead for many years. You have a wife and a
Speaker 1: daughter to think about. We think it's time you get
Speaker 1: a regular job, take responsibility. And he said this was
Speaker 1: devastating to me, as you know, I assume it would
Speaker 1: be after sinking years into this, And there was even
Speaker 1: a time when he briefly considered finishing the movie with
Speaker 1: an animated Henry to just fill in the gaps in
Speaker 1: the movie.
Speaker 2: I wish for everyone attempting any kind of creative life,
Speaker 2: I wish you the iron will that propelled David Lynch
Speaker 2: to finish your raiser headh Segue. A lot of people died.
Speaker 2: So many people died, not really so many people, but
Speaker 2: we mentioned that enough enough people died to make this movie.
Speaker 2: There's that weird murder suicide of Greystone, so that's ding
Speaker 2: Ding one and two. The film's original director of photography,
Speaker 2: Herbert Cardwell, died in his sleep two months in Ding.
Speaker 2: Peter Ivers, the musician who wrote the film's theme in Heaven,
Speaker 2: which we will talk about later, was found bludgeoned to
Speaker 2: death by a hammer in his apartment in nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: three Ding, a crime that remains unsolved. And lastly, Jack
Speaker 2: Nance got into a fight outside of Winchel's Donuts in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six and he told his friends, I guess
Speaker 2: I got what I deserved after that, and then he
Speaker 2: went home and died of a subdural hematoma, which is
Speaker 2: a fairly common way of dying in a fight. You
Speaker 2: get your head knocked, you think you're fine, you go home,
Speaker 2: and you have an internal hemorrhage. Essentially, good Lord.
Speaker 1: For those of you keeping track at home, the subdural
Speaker 1: hemorrhage count in this episode is at one stands at one.
Speaker 2: Uh. It might not seem like it based on the
Speaker 2: finished project, but Eraserhead was tightly rehearsed and shot within
Speaker 2: an inch of its life. Every reaction and every look
Speaker 2: and everything that was happening inside Henry's head. We had
Speaker 2: to get into that in great detail. Nance said, I
Speaker 2: remember one partic shot, a very simple quick shot. I
Speaker 2: was supposed to say no kidding or something like that,
Speaker 2: and turn and walk away. And we worked on take
Speaker 2: after take after take, a whole reel of film, and
Speaker 2: you'll remember they were picking this out of trash cans
Speaker 2: and driving it around La Cardwell, he said, just opened
Speaker 2: up the magazine and started throwing the film out on
Speaker 2: the floor, saying, well, at least we won't have to
Speaker 2: look at that in the screening room, which is just
Speaker 2: what you want your DP to say. Ah. There is
Speaker 2: a period of time when we would rehearse just me
Speaker 2: and Jack in that room, Sorry I'm doing it again,
Speaker 2: and work things out this is David Lynch, obviously, and
Speaker 2: those rehearsals took a long long time. Every little thing
Speaker 2: would be planned. The film's first shot one take, Wow,
Speaker 2: drops Mike Damn.
Speaker 1: And now enough about the visuals, let's talk about the audio.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we now come to the real meat of this episode,
Speaker 2: which is Alan Split, Alan Split everyone. This is kind
Speaker 2: of messed up. Alan Splett, who was also a Philly guy,
Speaker 2: Lynch's long term sound designer. I think we should say
Speaker 2: he has also referred to him as a best friend.
Speaker 2: He famously became a punchline when he was nominated for
Speaker 2: the sound design for Black Stallion at the Oscars, and
Speaker 2: he won, but he was not at the ceremony because
Speaker 2: he was working on Elephant Man in London with Lynch
Speaker 2: and Johnny Carson turned it into a running punchline on
Speaker 2: the show. And you love Johnny Carson, so I want
Speaker 2: you to do this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was hosting the Oscars that night and he kept
Speaker 1: doing Alan's split updates because nobody could believe that. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, this is one thing if you
Speaker 1: have like Marlon Brando or George c. Scott skipping the
Speaker 1: Oscars to make a political point or because they're filming some.
Speaker 2: Other movie or something.
Speaker 1: But this was just, you know, you don't expect the
Speaker 1: kind of anonymous tech guy skip the biggest night in
Speaker 1: the professional live. So he just made this ongoing joke
Speaker 1: about it and kept doing these recurring Alan split updates
Speaker 1: all night and Johnny at him.
Speaker 2: Oh he missed his freeway turn off.
Speaker 1: Oh he's at a gas station with carburetor trouble outside
Speaker 1: a band in California.
Speaker 2: He kept like having like all through the night. It was.
Speaker 1: It was medium funny, but Split totally deserved that Oscar.
Speaker 1: Because for Black Stallion, which was I think his first
Speaker 1: full length feature aside from Eraserhead, he strapped a special
Speaker 1: microphone to the underbelly of a race horse to capture
Speaker 1: the sound of galloping hoof beats, and he also attached
Speaker 1: a mic to the horse's head to catch its breathing
Speaker 1: while it was running. He did all these really innovative
Speaker 1: ways of getting the horse sounds.
Speaker 2: Horse sounds. The lesser loved follow up to pet Sound
Speaker 2: of horse Sounds. Yeah, he really is the other part
Speaker 2: of this movie. I mean, there's been all this stuff
Speaker 2: at Pitchfork and a lot of the music sites about
Speaker 2: how the soundtrack of this movie. The sound of this
Speaker 2: movie is so influential as far as sound design and
Speaker 2: ambient and industrial and all those sort of grimy out
Speaker 2: there music genres. Split was head of AFI's sound department
Speaker 2: at the time, and he is responsible for one of
Speaker 2: the ultimate hallmarks of David Lynch, which is the room tone,
Speaker 2: which is this sort of ambient buzzing of evil, which
Speaker 2: you could, I guess it probably comes from like trying
Speaker 2: to make fluorescent lights sound meaner because it's you think
Speaker 2: of all those shots in twin peaks of like a
Speaker 2: ceiling fan and there's this like thrumbing kind of under it.
Speaker 1: And he's very interested in electricity. He's talked about that
Speaker 1: in a lot of interviews. Electricity working and also failing
Speaker 1: and getting all that like crackling stuff.
Speaker 2: That's always been a hallmark for him. But you know,
Speaker 2: by doing this for pennies a day, they were forced
Speaker 2: to get creative with some of the sound design, and
Speaker 2: they got one of these by they put a big
Speaker 2: gallon water jug in a bathtub and floated it and
Speaker 2: then they put the microphone in that. So there's a
Speaker 2: microphone hanging inside of a big glass gallon jug. Floating
Speaker 2: in a bathtub and it would blow across that microphone.
Speaker 1: I just want to say that it was a Sparklet's
Speaker 1: water jug, which was the same brand that they used
Speaker 1: in pet Sounds to make on Caroline Know that weird?
Speaker 2: That weird. So sorry, just you mentioned pet Sounds earlier.
Speaker 2: I have to throw that back in. That is some
Speaker 2: galaxy brain. Do you know if it's the jug that
Speaker 2: is on the thirteenth floor elevator song that I don't know?
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying. They amplified jug band. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they worked on the score for this for like nine
Speaker 2: hours a day over the course of two months. Colson.
Speaker 2: Another great Catherine Colson quote, as she said she got
Speaker 2: a call from them. I think it was like in
Speaker 2: the middle of the night and they were like, we
Speaker 2: need we need Catherine, Catherine, we need the sound of
Speaker 2: a radiator. She's like, what do you need? You need
Speaker 2: like he said, no, they wanted the sound of someone
Speaker 2: jumping off the radiator and landing in the room. And yeah,
Speaker 2: we mentioned earlier that they learned that a film studio
Speaker 2: was throwing out soundstock, so they just threw it in
Speaker 2: the back of this jury RIGGEDVW and high tailed it
Speaker 2: on out of there. My favorite Alan split bit other
Speaker 2: than all of this is the uh is the fact
Speaker 2: that apparently he was out of pocket for a while
Speaker 2: because he was in Findhorn in Northern Scotland recording wind,
Speaker 2: recording wind?
Speaker 1: Didn't they also split? Everyone couldn't make the oscars?
Speaker 2: Was recording Wind?
Speaker 1: Speaking of David's sound design, so much has been made
Speaker 1: of his famous room tone, but how about his ringtones?
Speaker 1: Are you aware that in two thousand and six, David
Speaker 1: Lynch debuted his own set of cell phone ring tones
Speaker 1: featuring recorded phrases such as I like to kill deer,
Speaker 1: my teeth are bleeding and what the hell? Damn, what
Speaker 1: the hell they're Unfortunately, sorry, I ruined this whole.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. This is something that's send me crack up
Speaker 2: the most. Just you segueing from her room tones to
Speaker 2: ring tones and say I want to kill deer. Jordan
Speaker 2: just brought me to tears with his recitation of davidlyn
Speaker 2: She's ringtones. Did we find them? No?
Speaker 1: Well, wait a minute, I there. They're really hard to find.
Speaker 1: They're no longer available for download. There's supposedly on some
Speaker 1: fan websites. I can't tell what I'm hearing because it's
Speaker 1: not him saying them, which kind of makes it not
Speaker 1: as good. But at least the ones I've been able
Speaker 1: to find, but I can't tell fans have made them
Speaker 1: and they're just like right because of it or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, damn it.
Speaker 1: Well get that last laughter in Heigel goes, We're about
Speaker 1: to go in.
Speaker 2: To a little segment I like to call it's the
Speaker 2: baby Gotta love it. Oh, so we mentioned earlier that
Speaker 2: this show needs tone. In the early part can kind
Speaker 2: of be described as like a surrealistic comedy. There's there's
Speaker 2: that bit where they're in the where they're waiting the
Speaker 2: lobby and the elevator doors are open for like a
Speaker 2: disconcertingly long time and they finally close like the timing
Speaker 2: of this of those cuts, and you compared it to
Speaker 2: British comedy earlier. But it quickly stops being funny when
Speaker 2: that baby shows up. Man, it is the worst thing
Speaker 2: in the world. And you were able to find a
Speaker 2: description of this for listeners who have not seen this movie.
Speaker 1: Yes, the writer Peter Slovinski for writing for Roger Ebert
Speaker 1: dot com. He's basically described it as imagine a cross
Speaker 1: between a fetal version of et and some form of
Speaker 1: a skinned ruminant that has been plagued with an eternal
Speaker 1: cold that causes it to cry, whine, and spit up
Speaker 1: various forms of goo practically around the clock.
Speaker 2: That's as good a description as Anny for audio. Ah,
Speaker 2: oh God, it's disgusting. Lynch has repeatedly denied that the
Speaker 2: film is about his anxieties about fatherhood. But the fact
Speaker 2: that this thing allegedly uses Jennifer's actual cries, his own
Speaker 2: daughter's actual daughter's cries, albeit manipulated in some degree, that
Speaker 2: is horrifying. And it feels like a bit of a
Speaker 2: cheat to hype this thing up so much and then
Speaker 2: not tell people how it's made. But the fact of
Speaker 2: the matter is no one knows. This is like the
Speaker 2: biggest secret around Eraserhead. People have been asking him about
Speaker 2: this for forty five years, and he refuses to talk
Speaker 2: about it. Jennifer knows, but she will not tell her
Speaker 2: own daughter. Her own daughter is apparently mad. She told
Speaker 2: Vice that, And he went so far to disguise what
Speaker 2: this thing is that he blindfolded the projectionist doing dailies
Speaker 2: on this film. For for non industry people, you shoot something,
Speaker 2: you shoot a whole day of film, and then you
Speaker 2: screen that for yourself and your editor and if you're
Speaker 2: really unlucky, the studio heads so that they can give
Speaker 2: feedback on it and you can kind of see how
Speaker 2: the day went. And Lynch blindfolded the guy doing that
Speaker 2: so he wouldn't see He Even the AFI heads came
Speaker 2: there and we're like, what are we spending our money on?
Speaker 2: And they were like, don't worry about it. Yeah, no, yeah.
Speaker 2: The speculation from people who are more invested in this
Speaker 2: than I am is that it's some kind of fetus
Speaker 2: from an anatomy class, like either a sheep cat or
Speaker 2: a cat, and they that they had to take it
Speaker 2: apart and like articulate it. It's you know, probably the
Speaker 2: most stirring argument in favor of that is Lynch himself,
Speaker 2: who has gone on record as confessing that he dissected
Speaker 2: a cat during the course of this film's production, which presumably,
Speaker 2: you know, high school biology classes do that stuff. That's
Speaker 2: probably how he got it. He said. I examined its parts,
Speaker 2: the membranes, the hair, the skin, and there are so
Speaker 2: many textures which may be gross on one side, but
Speaker 2: when you isolate them and consider them more abstractly, they
Speaker 2: are totally beautiful. So think about that, and then think
Speaker 2: about his next quote, which is, I don't know what
Speaker 2: good it did me, really, Jordan talk us through cat dissection.
Speaker 1: David Lynch has waxed poetics so much about dissecting this
Speaker 1: cat that it makes me think that that has actually
Speaker 1: really nothing to do the baby in a racer Head,
Speaker 1: because he wouldn't keep mentioning it. He's talked about it
Speaker 1: so many times in different interviews. In that two thousand
Speaker 1: and one documentary Racerhead Stories that we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: he discussed it extensively, with an almost ecstatic fervor. He
Speaker 1: compared the organs to the Fellini film Roma, which I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if I follow, but he said it was unbelievable.
Speaker 1: The organs in the cat were brilliant colors, and he
Speaker 1: later buried it in the urban wasteland that we see
Speaker 1: at the start of the film, and I think in
Speaker 1: a deleted scene Henry actually like trips on it or something,
Speaker 1: and he buried it there, and then he excavated it
Speaker 1: some time later, which brought David Lynch even further delights.
Speaker 1: He said it was the perfect marriage of cat and earth,
Speaker 1: before adding that he took a photo of it.
Speaker 2: I genuinely I tend to think of him as a
Speaker 2: pretty innocuous guy, all things considered. But that's that's Stahmer
Speaker 2: level him. Uh yeah. Other unverifiable details about the baby
Speaker 2: Lynch made the cast sign NDA's that were specifically tied
Speaker 2: to how he made the thing. You could not use
Speaker 2: photos of it in promotional efforts for the film. Why
Speaker 2: would you? Yeah, exactly, here's that. Come see this. And
Speaker 2: he buried it when they were done, and they eulogized it.
Speaker 2: The rap party doubled as this thing's funeral. His quotes
Speaker 2: about this have remained admirably consistent. He says, maybe it
Speaker 2: was born nearby, or maybe it was found. God, it's
Speaker 2: buried it. Do some like film freaks like go and
Speaker 2: excavate it. And it was in the Winchell's Donuts. That's
Speaker 2: what jack Nance was there for. That was what he was.
Speaker 2: He's protecting the secret of the Eraser had baby and
Speaker 2: the Illuminati killed him. Wake Up Sheep. The film's production manager,
Speaker 2: Dorian Small, was the hands behind the baby that had Yah.
Speaker 2: That's interesting that she got the honor of Yeah, put
Speaker 2: your hands in this sheep calf Dorane what I don't
Speaker 2: know when you pulleys wires. Oh god, it's so gross.
Speaker 2: But when during scenes when it actually had to do
Speaker 2: a lot more, it was Alan split working it and
Speaker 2: she said, Dorian Small said, because he plays the cello
Speaker 2: and he has a certain kind of touch. Oh, moving
Speaker 2: right on down the line for this weird, gross thing
Speaker 2: that I'm already feeling bad about subjecting. You find people
Speaker 2: so much too. Colson was tasked with its death scene
Speaker 2: and spoilers. Henry gets morbidly curious about what's happening in there,
Speaker 2: and the baby is wrapped up like mummified, and he
Speaker 2: cuts the bandages open and they're they essentially were keeping
Speaker 2: the thing together because it just, oh god, it's so
Speaker 2: messed up. But she I just love this quote. I
Speaker 2: had to put this on there. She talks about special
Speaker 2: effects departments at the time, where like kind of a
Speaker 2: loose community, so different people working on different things kind
Speaker 2: of knew that they could kind of call each other
Speaker 2: and be like, hey, how do you do this? How
Speaker 2: do you do that? I have to shoot such and
Speaker 2: such a scene. What should I do? And she said,
Speaker 2: do you remember calling the special effects department? At Universal
Speaker 2: and saying, do you have any suggestion as to how
Speaker 2: to fill a room full of mush? This is funny.
Speaker 2: My wife and ever watching this and she was like,
Speaker 2: that baby is disgusting and incredible and real. And then
Speaker 2: when the head gets really really big and fills up
Speaker 2: the whole room, she was like, that doesn't look as good.
Speaker 2: It's not as she goes, it's not as moist. It
Speaker 2: doesn't so that the baby's head fills up the whole
Speaker 2: room during the climax, And apparently they had moved to
Speaker 2: a different neighborhood in LA at this point and they
Speaker 2: just built it in their backyard. So imagine at some
Speaker 2: point in the mid seventies in LA, you look out
Speaker 2: your window, beautiful La day, and there's giant, weird egg
Speaker 2: baby head in your backyard and you look down and
Speaker 2: there's David Lynch in three ties and a straw hat
Speaker 2: and he's waving to you.
Speaker 1: Oht know, in the mid seventies in LA. That seems
Speaker 1: just kind of part for the chorus ha ha hey.
Speaker 2: And having said all that, we'll be right back with
Speaker 2: more too much information right after this, wow, wow, all
Speaker 2: right in everything we should get new has Neil Young
Speaker 2: ever covered that. I was a state of cover versions
Speaker 2: of this earlier, and the Pixies one, the Black Francis one,
Speaker 2: is probably the he has the closest to that woman's voice,
Speaker 2: I think anyway. The Lady and the Radiator the theme
Speaker 2: song to this movie in Heaven Ah, It's probably the
Speaker 2: second most famous David Lynch musical cue after the end
Speaker 2: Low Bottle Lamentee theme song to Twin Peaks or Little
Speaker 2: Jimmy Scott singing Sycamore Trees from the season two finale.
Speaker 2: But you differ to me on this well. Also, I'm
Speaker 2: not a huge lynchhead, but I still love the this
Speaker 2: is the Girl scene from Maholland Drive with I've told
Speaker 2: every little star that was always pretty. But I'm also
Speaker 2: a giant sixties nerd too. But uh yeah, that in
Speaker 2: Heaven song is haunting, and I know Divo were big
Speaker 2: fans of it, and they loved it so much that
Speaker 2: they actually asked David Lynch if they could play it live.
Speaker 2: But also Bauhaus Comedy two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 2: is nuts. Man. Do you know about Peter Rivers? I
Speaker 2: know you're like a national lampoon guy. Is this the
Speaker 2: first year hearing of him. I know Doug Kenny and
Speaker 2: all the people who's connected to I'd never heard of
Speaker 2: him though, I again a whole podcast. We could do
Speaker 2: a whole episode on him, but I'll just give you
Speaker 2: the even the just the two graphs of his Wikipedia
Speaker 2: article are insane. His biographer Josh Frank described him as
Speaker 2: being connected by a second degree to every major pop
Speaker 2: culture event of the last thirty years. So he was Yeah,
Speaker 2: I know. He was a musician first and foremost. His
Speaker 2: first instrument was the harmonica. He played with Muddy Waters
Speaker 2: at one point, and in nineteen sixty eight, Buddy Waters
Speaker 2: called him the greatest harp player alive when he was
Speaker 2: in Laws. I'm just gonna keep saying these with question marks.
Speaker 2: They're not actually question marks, but it's just insane. In
Speaker 2: La he was signed to Warner Brothers by Van Dyke,
Speaker 2: Parks and Lenny Waronker to one hundred grand contract. It's
Speaker 2: a solo artist back when that made something. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: well he made it. And then he made his live
Speaker 2: debut opening for the New York Dolls. He was on
Speaker 2: bills with Fleetwood, Mac and John Kale. David Lynch asks
Speaker 2: him to write this song for Razor Ed he does.
Speaker 2: Then he goes on to score a Ron Howard movie,
Speaker 2: Grand Theft Auto, and then an episode of BJ the Bear,
Speaker 2: and then he becomes a ghost raw songwright. He wrote
Speaker 2: songs for the Pointer Sisters, Jefferson Airplanes, Marty Ballen, Balen
Speaker 2: on his solo career, Diana Ross, and as you mentioned,
Speaker 2: you know about Doug Kenny, who founded the National Lampoon
Speaker 2: that was Peter Ivers's best friend. We are also not
Speaker 2: even talking about the Los Angeles area UAHF show that
Speaker 2: he hosted called New Wave Theater, which was this early
Speaker 2: day's not quite public access, but for yeah, they were
Speaker 2: responsible for bringing huge parts of the La punk subculture
Speaker 2: into the mainstream or as mainstream as a UAHF channel, Cockpit,
Speaker 2: Bad Religion, Fear the Dead, Kennedy's The Circle Jerks. Guests
Speaker 2: on this show included Deborah Winger, Beverly di'angelo from National
Speaker 2: Lampion's Vacation, and Elvira and So. In that Pitchfork interview
Speaker 2: from twenty twelve, Lynch said, I don't know how I
Speaker 2: heard about Petere RVers, but this I love this story
Speaker 2: so much. Alan and I went up to Pete's house
Speaker 2: and we asked him if he could write the music
Speaker 2: and sing these lyrics in the Spirits of Fats Waller.
Speaker 2: Alan Split had played David Lynch these Fats Waller recordings
Speaker 2: of Fats Waller playing pipe organ and he had gotten
Speaker 2: them off an out of print LP. So he was
Speaker 2: playing them to David Lynch on two inch tape or
Speaker 2: quarter inch tape, excuse me, and so he said, David, like,
Speaker 2: this album is out of print. All I have are
Speaker 2: these bootleg tapes. And so they went to Peter Iver's
Speaker 2: house and said, hey, can you play us like a
Speaker 2: facsimile of these bootleg Fats Waller recordings? And Peter Ivers
Speaker 2: goes over to his album stack and pulls out the
Speaker 2: out of print Fats Waller album is like, you mean
Speaker 2: this one? And he does it. He records the organ part.
Speaker 2: It's like the only non ambient industrial stuff on the soundtrack.
Speaker 2: And so David Lynch has the lyrics in heaven does
Speaker 2: he write the lyrics? He write that? Yeah, David Lynch
Speaker 2: wrote the lyrics and he took them over to Ivers
Speaker 2: house and he said he's been laying on this Chez
Speaker 2: lounge and he's got a microphone dangling over him. And
Speaker 2: he sang it right in front of me, sang the
Speaker 2: whole song that was used in this film, in this
Speaker 2: falsetto voice, and he loved the lyrics, which made me
Speaker 2: feel really good. And Fats Waller actually does appear in
Speaker 2: the film because when Henry goes in and puts his
Speaker 2: turntable on, that's the Fats Waller record. And David Lynch
Speaker 2: has confirmed that Henry is a Fats Waller fan, says
Speaker 2: he loves him. While we're on the topic of radiators, Segue, I.
Speaker 1: Just want to say that Heigel titled this section what
Speaker 1: we talk about when we talk about radiators.
Speaker 2: You're welcome, Thank you. Mentioned earlier, David Lynch has a
Speaker 2: thing about light bulbs, the sound of electricity, the kind
Speaker 2: of ambient tones in a room that machinery generates, radiators
Speaker 2: big thing split. Talking to Terry Gross in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: four on Fresh Air, he says, we had a big
Speaker 2: gas heater in the editing room where I was working,
Speaker 2: which had a big metal case on it, and so
Speaker 2: one day we stuck a tiny little microphone in the
Speaker 2: bottom of this thing, and David was blowing on the
Speaker 2: top of it, and we got a lot of sounds
Speaker 2: this way, so that's bing radiator number one. The lady
Speaker 2: in the Radiator wasn't even in the film's original draft.
Speaker 2: In another interview from nineteen seventy nine, Lynch said, we'd
Speaker 2: already shot scenes of the radiator, so he was already
Speaker 2: using establishing shots of this radiator. And he said it
Speaker 2: was just natural. But it was a certain kind of
Speaker 2: radiator that had a little compartment in there. And I
Speaker 2: had done a little drawing of a lady and I
Speaker 2: looked at this drawing and an idea came in. I
Speaker 2: felt this lady lived in the radiator, and I thought,
Speaker 2: is that a place where she could live? And I
Speaker 2: went running into Henry's room and looked at the radiator.
Speaker 2: And I got this radiator from an old studio that
Speaker 2: was closing, and this particular radiator had a little place
Speaker 2: that she could live in. You got to just do
Speaker 2: a sound effect for every time I say radiator in there.
Speaker 2: I love it. I mean, I'm I find it touching
Speaker 2: how concerned he is that there's a place for this
Speaker 2: fictitious figure to live in the radiator, despite the fact
Speaker 2: that you would have to be two inches tall and
Speaker 2: not get burned up by the heat and the radiator.
Speaker 2: He's really like concerned that there's not like a little box. Again,
Speaker 2: I'm not a Lynch guy, but I love the love
Speaker 2: that he has for these terrible, weird characters. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: he has like a genuine empathy and affection for these people.
Speaker 2: And then the characters that he creates, there's never like
Speaker 2: a contempt with any of them. You know. It's a
Speaker 2: good point. Yeah, even like the villains in Twin Peaks,
Speaker 2: ostensibly he still like finds fascinating and gives them space.
Speaker 2: And anyway, you're gonna have to cut out all my
Speaker 2: David Lynch guy stuff. In twenty fourteen, he gave an
Speaker 2: interviewed A Vulture where he says she first came along
Speaker 2: as a drawing, but then in that same interview, he
Speaker 2: says that she came along about a year after they
Speaker 2: started shooting, when he started doing transcendental meditation. Have you
Speaker 2: ever heard of his book Catching the Big Fish. It's
Speaker 2: this whole book about transitant meditation. He talks about the
Speaker 2: idea that ideas are like fish, and your mind is
Speaker 2: like a thing that you fish in, and so for
Speaker 2: the small ideas come when you're fishing in the shallow
Speaker 2: water and the big fish come from the deeper water
Speaker 2: and transit meditation lets you get really deep into your subconscious.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting because he talks about doing this. Is
Speaker 2: it Mulholland Dry or Lost Highway with the jump scare
Speaker 2: the thing that comes out of the domsty. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think it's either that or something in Mulholland Dry that
Speaker 2: he talks about in that book. He was like meditating
Speaker 2: in his trailer and he walked outside and it's afternoon
Speaker 2: in La and he puts his hand on the hood
Speaker 2: of a car and the car is really hot, and
Speaker 2: the shock when he pulled his hand off. He says,
Speaker 2: that entire sequence suddenly came to him. Wow, it's so interesting, right,
Speaker 2: Like Yeah, when you think about all of his stuff,
Speaker 2: people are like, ah, he's completely random and he does
Speaker 2: these like you know, it's the Simpsons bit or the
Speaker 2: Saturday Night Live bit making fun of twin Peaks, where
Speaker 2: it's like, I have no idea, brilliant, I have no
Speaker 2: idea what this means. If you just think about all
Speaker 2: of these visuals as just like the dross and detritus
Speaker 2: of your subconscious or your dream world, that gets dredged up,
Speaker 2: it suddenly becomes like I don't know a lot clearer anyway.
Speaker 2: So the woman who played the Lady in The Radiator,
Speaker 2: Laurel Near, she was in a singing trio with her
Speaker 2: two sisters, one of whom was a friend of Catherine Colson's,
Speaker 2: and that was how she got pulled into the film.
Speaker 2: She'd never worked in a film before. I don't think
Speaker 2: she has since. I think this is like one of
Speaker 2: her two IMDb credits. And she just said, David Lynch
Speaker 2: liked my smile. I thought I was going to just
Speaker 2: go and dance across the stage, she said. And in
Speaker 2: a rare lack of foresight, they built the stage for
Speaker 2: her months before they shot it, and I guess that
Speaker 2: just sat around one of the few things they didn't
Speaker 2: tear down and sell. And she talks about those cheek,
Speaker 2: the chipmunk cheek makeup that they had to do for her,
Speaker 2: and she said it kind of peeled your skin off
Speaker 2: when they took it off. And David Lynch has said
Speaker 2: to me, the Lady in the Radiator is sort of
Speaker 2: a beacon of light. Henry's world was really dark without her,
Speaker 2: and she represents some hope there for old Henry. She's
Speaker 2: a very strange looking woman. For sure. She's got skin
Speaker 2: problems that she's trying to cover up with pancake makeup.
Speaker 1: And that song in Heaven is available on the soundtrack
Speaker 1: that was released on the Dead Kennedy's record label, Alternative Tentacles.
Speaker 1: And the funny part to me is that the whole
Speaker 1: record is mostly clanks and rumbles and room tone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, room tone. It's basically like a John Cage or
Speaker 2: Stockhausen album. I listened to it a lot. I'm going
Speaker 2: to get back.
Speaker 1: To something you said earlier about just like sort of
Speaker 1: Lynch's scenes being you know, the detritus of your subconscious
Speaker 1: I mean something. One of the shows I host is
Speaker 1: a show where I interview musicians, and I'm somebody who
Speaker 1: loves music with all of his heart but has never
Speaker 1: been able to write.
Speaker 2: A song ever.
Speaker 1: And I'm so curious about what compels people to do.
Speaker 1: So one of my favorite questions to ask people is
Speaker 1: do you ever listen to your songs back and learn
Speaker 1: something about yourself? Almost like a dream reading, you know,
Speaker 1: you hear it back and you know, were able to
Speaker 1: get some kind of perspective on it. Or parse it
Speaker 1: apart like you do when you dissect the dream. And
Speaker 1: I don't know, I think that's interesting, just and I
Speaker 1: want to hear more about you know, what you have
Speaker 1: to say about?
Speaker 2: Well, what if people said very different? Some people say no,
Speaker 2: not at all.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people usually from the vantage point of several years
Speaker 1: on when they're singing, like you know, for their big hits,
Speaker 1: for example, it's been a couple of years later, and
Speaker 1: they kind of have to keep revisiting them. They say like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I see what I was doing at that time a
Speaker 1: lot more clearly than I did at the time. All Right, So, folks,
Speaker 1: we just cut about fifteen minutes of Jordan and I
Speaker 1: talking about our dreams and our childhood traumas Lynch cut
Speaker 1: about twenty minutes worth of this film from the final footage.
Speaker 2: So there you go. That's a great segue. That's a
Speaker 2: great segue. Just as we cut moments of oversharing between
Speaker 2: two dear friends, Lynch cut twenty minutes worth of footage
Speaker 2: from this film. Jordan, why don't you tell us about that?
Speaker 2: And also your fears? Yes.
Speaker 1: These lost scenes include a sequence of Catherine Colson finally
Speaker 1: getting her part in this movie.
Speaker 2: But it was ultimately cut.
Speaker 1: She's playing the baby's midwife. There's a scene of Henry
Speaker 1: playing with the with David Lynch's beloved dead cat, and
Speaker 1: then there's another scene of a man abusing two women
Speaker 1: in strapped to a bed with a car battery, which
Speaker 1: David Lynch has said he cut because it was too disturbing, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: given what he felt was totally fine for us to.
Speaker 2: See Wolf, Yeah, well you don't want to see the stuff.
Speaker 2: Lynch is like, that was a bridge too far.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And he's later said I loved them as little scenes,
Speaker 1: but they didn't belong in the film, and he cut
Speaker 1: them from the composite print, which is like the master
Speaker 1: version of the film, And Catherine Colson is quoted as saying,
Speaker 1: we didn't have any money to cut negatives, so we
Speaker 1: just cut the entire scenes from this master version. That
Speaker 1: was what happened to my scene when I'm tied to
Speaker 1: the bed with pattery cables. That's probably in a landfill somewhere.
Speaker 1: And many fans of Hope that they, you know, include
Speaker 1: these deleted scenes and the criterion release or some kind
Speaker 1: of expanded version, but it really seems like these scenes
Speaker 1: are lost forever. And in the documentary we've mentioned many
Speaker 1: times so far Racer heead stories, Lynch gets weirdly emotional
Speaker 1: talking about all this stuff that he wished he'd saved
Speaker 1: from the production, which is kind of weirdly touching. And
Speaker 1: all this left of these scenes are the memories of
Speaker 1: the cast that were in them and a few production photos.
Speaker 1: There's a scene of these people strapped to the bed
Speaker 1: with a car battery a jumper cables nearby, and that's it.
Speaker 2: It just goes back to what I was saying, man, Like,
Speaker 2: even the grotesque, messed up stuff in his movies he cherishes. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because it's there, you know, because it's he made it.
Speaker 2: I really, it's in all of us. Yeah, Man, I
Speaker 2: don't know I got him. I had David Lynch guy.
Speaker 2: Is that the sad realization I'm coming to with this?
Speaker 2: Are we all are David Lynch guys? Really? If you're
Speaker 2: texted or if you tweeted us with a hashtag jack
Speaker 2: Nance's Winchles Donuts order, we will send you an hour
Speaker 2: and a half of Alex doing David Lynch room tones
Speaker 2: into the microphone and our twenty minutes of dream analysis. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's another bonus feature Patreon.
Speaker 1: Yep, all right, so he cut these scenes out after
Speaker 1: the first couple screenings of eraser Head, the very first,
Speaker 1: I think the premiere of Eraserhead, well you can't really
Speaker 1: call it that, but the earliest screening of Eraserhead was
Speaker 1: held at the screening room at the AFI Graystone Mansion
Speaker 1: where it was filmed, and Lynch invited his parents, which
Speaker 1: is amazing, And when it was over, someone seated next to.
Speaker 2: His mom overheard her say, Oh, I wouldn't want to
Speaker 2: have a dream like that, which makes you wonder how
Speaker 2: he sold Like what are we son, what are we
Speaker 2: giving this money to? And he's like, oh, it's a
Speaker 2: movie about a dream I had.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's cute though he Lynch later paid his father
Speaker 1: back all the money that he kept, like meticulous log
Speaker 1: of how much money his father gave him, and then
Speaker 1: when he was successful, he paid it all back and
Speaker 1: which he said was a totally on this necessary jester.
Speaker 1: His dad did not expect to get it back, but
Speaker 1: he paid him, and Lynch said that was one of
Speaker 1: the happiest days was life. So even if they didn't
Speaker 1: get his movies, they lived to see him reap the rewards.
Speaker 2: Which is sweet. What a sweet boy he is. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Ugh Eraserhead was perhaps needless to say Erassahead was ejected
Speaker 2: from Can. Rejected from Can, although they've put like Lars
Speaker 2: von Trier and on Can. So he think he just
Speaker 2: missed it. I think he just missed the entry probably
Speaker 2: and the New York Film Festival, although he's said he
Speaker 2: was rejected from Yeah, he says he brought all twenty
Speaker 2: four reels of the film to the New York Film
Speaker 2: Festival in a shopping cart that he took from his
Speaker 2: nearby farmer's market and the third third Times a charm Baby.
Speaker 2: He was accepted into the Los Angeles International Film Exposition
Speaker 2: aka film X in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: And in anticipation of the years of midnight screenings that
Speaker 1: would ultimately bolster the film's repe this Film XS premiere
Speaker 1: did indeed take place at midnight, very fitting, and the
Speaker 1: writer Danny Lee wrote a great piece about Eraserhead's premiere
Speaker 1: for The Guardian a few years back, and he features
Speaker 1: this amazing lead. On March nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven, the
Speaker 1: world changed, after which there was a long, uncomfortable silence.
Speaker 1: The occasion was the first public screening of Eraserhead, the
Speaker 1: feature debut of David Lynch, at the Film X Festival
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: It was not a hot ticket.
Speaker 1: The film arrived with little advanced publicity at the only
Speaker 1: festival to accept it. The screening took place at midnight,
Speaker 1: drawing a modest crowd who dutifully watched for the next
Speaker 1: two hours. The film was then longer than the eighty
Speaker 1: nine minutes it became. When it ended, nothing but no
Speaker 1: one left either, just silence, then finally applause en scene.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, but so someone who is there passed word
Speaker 2: of the film along to Ben Barrenholtz of New York's
Speaker 2: Libra Films. This guy is probably one of the most
Speaker 2: influential figures in twentieth century cinema. I own the song, certainly,
Speaker 2: yeah exactly, just not a name, but you know, he
Speaker 2: basically pioneered the concept of a midnight movie at his theater,
Speaker 2: which is the Elgin in Chelsea and New York and
Speaker 2: stuff like Pink Flamingos El Topo by yor Rowski, The
Speaker 2: Harder They Come, the Jimmy Cliff film, and he slotted
Speaker 2: eraser Head.
Speaker 1: In, and his invitation to it was priceless and keeping
Speaker 1: with the whole baby theme, he made it look like
Speaker 1: a birth announcement, which read We'd like you to meet
Speaker 1: the sweet little girl who has brought so much sunshine
Speaker 1: and joy to our world. Name Eraserhead, Birthday, Midnight weight, heavy,
Speaker 1: dot dot dot in quotation marks parents David k Lynch,
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 2: Imagine being on top of the world in nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: and just it world is your oyster and you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: let's go to a midnight movie and you markey horrors
Speaker 2: last week. Let's see what Yeah, what a fun whimsical
Speaker 2: time that was, Like let's go to let's get a
Speaker 2: little zouited or whatever, and Saturday Night Fever has just
Speaker 2: come out. There's nowhere to go but up, let's go
Speaker 2: see I don't know, Eraserhead. This looks fun anyway. This
Speaker 2: movie unsurprisingly in retrospect, but got a lot of really
Speaker 2: heavy endorsements, one of whom John Waters. Desperate Living was
Speaker 2: screening in New York around the same time, and John
Speaker 2: Waters called Eraserhead his favorite moving at a press event
Speaker 2: for his own film and encouraged everyone in the audience
Speaker 2: to see it. Stanley Kubrick, while he was making the shining.
Speaker 2: A few years later, he screened Eraserhead to his cast
Speaker 2: and crew, which makes a lot of sense. All of
Speaker 2: those eerie shots of the hallways at God. I don't
Speaker 2: really think I ever thought of this before.
Speaker 1: But even the floor isn't there like the crazy pattern? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then the lobby and eraser He's got tho zigzag.
Speaker 2: Wow. I never thought of that. And as you mentioned,
Speaker 2: Lynch screened Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but when they first started filming Eraserhead seventy
Speaker 1: years before. Yeah, he sat down and watched Sunset Boulevard
Speaker 1: with the cast and crew, clearly trying to evoke some
Speaker 1: kind of haunting presence of some kind.
Speaker 2: Because that's interesting. Yeah, such an interesting through line of
Speaker 2: the whole thread of Hollywood history is this movie. I
Speaker 2: this is one of those things that gets passed around
Speaker 2: on the internet. I have not been able to find
Speaker 2: this original interview, but Charles Bukowski of being Head Fame
Speaker 2: just one of the most simultaneously influential authors, poets, and
Speaker 2: worst people in the world. He claimed it the first
Speaker 2: thing he ever saw when he got cable was Eraserhead,
Speaker 2: which subsequently ruined all other television for him. Lastly, mel
Speaker 2: Brooks we mentioned earlier mel Brooks, of all people, was
Speaker 2: a fan of this film and got Lynch. Basically launched
Speaker 2: Lynch's career because this is not a student film, but
Speaker 2: this is more or less a student film. Mel Brooks
Speaker 2: sees it and he's producing Elephant. Man. He's he's already
Speaker 2: in pre pro for this movie and pushes Lynch to
Speaker 2: work on it, and that launches, you know, from there,
Speaker 2: he does Dune. He famously turned down Return of the
Speaker 2: Jedi around this time. And then it's a short hop
Speaker 2: skimp at a jump to blue velvet, twin peaks and
Speaker 2: mahalland drive. So mel Brooks, man, I love it. He
Speaker 2: hadn't heard of Lynch before. He hadn't heard it. Well,
Speaker 2: who would have? Yeah, he goes to see a Razorhead
Speaker 2: and he comes out of the screening yelling at David's there.
Speaker 2: He says, you're a mad man. I love you. You're
Speaker 2: in and this is my favorite like the producers, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's what he thought, that they would lose money
Speaker 2: on Elephant instead of winning Oscars. Oh, man, I gotta
Speaker 2: bust out my John hurt for you at some point. Hi,
Speaker 2: I'm not hold at them all. Hi. How a human? Uh?
Speaker 2: That was all right and a half, he said, despite
Speaker 2: expecting Lynch to be quote a grotesque, a fat little
Speaker 2: german with fat stains running down his chin, just eating pork.
Speaker 2: But he thought, he said, he was flabbergasted by an Eraserhead.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful and it's very clear. It's like Beckett, which
Speaker 2: I get, Samuel Beckett. It's like ion Esco, not a reference.
Speaker 2: I understand you're a film student anything anything. He's like
Speaker 2: a he's like a theater of the absurd type. Yes, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: all right, Well you pulled some reviews for this, which
Speaker 2: I think are great. Yeah. I mean, and it's kind
Speaker 2: of a theme in pretty much every movie that we've
Speaker 2: talked about on here that went on to.
Speaker 1: Become a beloved classic. Not loved at the time, but
Speaker 1: doubly so in this case. Variety called Eraserhead a sickening,
Speaker 1: bad taste exercise, and Tom Buckley at the New York
Speaker 1: Times I think in nineteen eighty so, a few years
Speaker 1: after this had been making the rounds in the midnight
Speaker 1: movie circuit called it a murkily potentious shocker with an
Speaker 1: excruciatingly slow pace.
Speaker 2: I mean great. Yeah, we mentioned before this movie was
Speaker 2: made for like, I don't know, ten thousand from a
Speaker 2: five plus, Like what do you thinking of David Lynch's dad? Yeah,
Speaker 2: another ten fifteen from friends and family if that? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm seeing figures seven million groast with re releases.
Speaker 1: And Catherine Colson would later say that the percentage points
Speaker 1: she got on this movie h put her daughter through college.
Speaker 2: So I mean it made something good? Lord, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean is this is probably Halloween. Halloween for a long
Speaker 2: time was the most profitable independent film of all time.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be up there with blair Witch, right in
Speaker 2: terms of like, hey, well it was Halloween until was
Speaker 2: blair Witch. Oh okay, and then I mean just a
Speaker 2: total likecase.
Speaker 1: Probably for inflation, blair Witch and Eraser had probably around
Speaker 1: the same amount. How little it was, I think you
Speaker 1: know what it was is probably the special effects on
Speaker 1: the Eraser head that made it less profitable. I mean,
Speaker 1: you think about the actual VFX in that movie, heavy
Speaker 1: quotation marks vfx. We didn't get into this, but the
Speaker 1: lady across the hall, who's like the prostitute character or whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, the last place she popped up in is
Speaker 1: Orange is the New Black?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's Russian. She's one of the like Russia, like
Speaker 2: the old woman that's kind of like peripherally in Red's circle.
Speaker 2: She's got like white hair down to her shoulders, but
Speaker 2: she's got that same very She's super cool again. Yeah, yeah, man,
Speaker 2: I thought it was an Bancroft when she first came
Speaker 2: on the screen. Speaking of mel Brooks, Oh yeah, that
Speaker 2: would have been great. Maybe that's why he liked it.
Speaker 2: He was was Mary Dan Bancroft. For anyone who doesn't
Speaker 2: have Mail Brooks's personal history on lock, for some reason,
Speaker 2: I want to do. I mean, I wonder if Orson
Speaker 2: we watched all those orson Wales interviews. I wanted to
Speaker 2: find if Orson Welles ever said anything about David Lynch, Well,
Speaker 2: did you watch the Dick Habot ones? It was in
Speaker 2: that Twitter threat I send you to him insulting various people.
Speaker 1: He he was on Dick Habot at least twice, if
Speaker 1: not three times, and they're on Prime and maybe even
Speaker 1: just on YouTube and they're so good. Actually, speaking of
Speaker 1: I looked up because I imagine that you know, the
Speaker 1: five year filming period, production period of Eraserhead must certainly
Speaker 1: make it on a list of movies it's the longest
Speaker 1: time to produce, Oh sure. And there is a Wikipedia
Speaker 1: list and the top of the list is the Orson
Speaker 1: Wells movie that just came out, was finished off a
Speaker 1: few years ago.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's a great unfinished thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What was it, The The Other Side of the Wind
Speaker 1: that came out in twenty eighteen. I think he started
Speaker 1: producing it in nineteen seventy. Yeah, so it's a forty
Speaker 1: eight year production period, although I don't know, I feel
Speaker 1: weird counting that. Considering yeah, I'm sure for a good
Speaker 1: thirty years nothing was done. But still, but at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, what the hell else do you
Speaker 1: say about Eraserhead? I mean I mentioned earlier, I cannot
Speaker 1: think of another filmmaker, and I'm sure film Twitter or
Speaker 1: David Lynch Twitter will get after me with this. I
Speaker 1: can't think of another filmmaker who, in twenty five years,
Speaker 1: which is not a big span of time for a
Speaker 1: director's career, twenty five years, went from making something like
Speaker 1: Eraserhead to coming within a hair's distance of an oscar
Speaker 1: from a hall in drive. You know, he did Elephant
Speaker 1: Man after Eraserhead, and then he turned down Return of
Speaker 1: the Jedi, and with the exception of Dune, which is
Speaker 1: the movie why largely thanks to Dilarentis, he has final cut.
Speaker 2: On all of his stuff. So then I said this before,
Speaker 2: but Blue Velvet, twin Peaks, mullholland drive boom boom boom.
Speaker 2: I love that story about him turning down Return of
Speaker 2: the Jedi. Apparently he was personally asked by George Lucas
Speaker 2: but turned him down in part because he hated the Wookies,
Speaker 2: which I mean, to be fair, is probably the least
Speaker 2: Lynchian creature to ever exist. Wookies are the ewoks or
Speaker 2: sorry the ewoks? Yes, the ewoks.
Speaker 1: And he was quoted as saying, I had next door
Speaker 1: to zero interest in doing Return of the Jedi, but
Speaker 1: I've always admired George. George is a guy who does
Speaker 1: what he loves and I do what I love. The
Speaker 1: differences what George does makes hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 2: Ain't that the truth?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 2: That's what I'm saying again, Like, oh man, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think I'm a David Lynch guy. Jordan, what does
Speaker 2: the razorhead mean? What does it all mean.
Speaker 1: As with the infant prop David Lynch has remained extremely
Speaker 1: tight lipped about the actual meaning of a raserhead. He
Speaker 1: gave the opposite of an answer when speaking the Vulture
Speaker 1: a few years ago. This doesn't answer the question, but
Speaker 1: it's an interesting take. Nonetheless, he said, every viewer is different.
Speaker 1: People go into a world and they have an experience,
Speaker 1: and they bring so much of what makes them react.
Speaker 1: It's already inside of them. Each viewer gets a different
Speaker 1: thing from every film. So there are some people where
Speaker 1: a racerhead speaks to them, and others it doesn't speak
Speaker 1: to them at all. It's just the way it goes.
Speaker 1: But no one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the
Speaker 1: film the way I see it. The interpretation of what
Speaker 1: it's all about has never been my interpretation. So, as
Speaker 1: with most art, perhaps it's best to not seek a
Speaker 1: literal answer. Getting back to Subsinski's piece for Rogeribert dot
Speaker 1: Com that I mentioned earlier, he wrote to quote explain,
Speaker 1: a raserhead would be like cut a drum open to
Speaker 1: see what makes the noise. You may get your answer,
Speaker 1: but you tend to ruin the drum in the process.
Speaker 1: That's a cool analogy.
Speaker 2: Similarly, Yeah, I two thousand and four. It goes into
Speaker 2: the Library of Congress. I again filmed. Man, I'm making
Speaker 2: enemies out of film Twitter. I think this is the
Speaker 2: most influential surrealist film of all time, regardless of whatever
Speaker 2: film Twitter thinks. I'm calling it easily the most liked.
Speaker 2: We talked about seven million. I couldn't verify that with
Speaker 2: any real hard data, but on aw we said it
Speaker 2: was twenty five thousand, probably ten thousand from a five
Speaker 2: plus whatever he was able to finagle. That's more than
Speaker 2: it deserves. Yeah, and I mean that in the nicest way.
Speaker 2: But yeah, man, it hasn't eighty from again for a
Speaker 2: movie like this, for something this bizarre, hasn't eighty seven
Speaker 2: on Metacritic, has a ninety and rotten Tomatoes. Wow, that's wild,
Speaker 2: even taking in every Tom Dick and hair. I don't
Speaker 2: know what it is in letter but I'm not on
Speaker 2: a letterbox yet, but even taking in every guy who
Speaker 2: just hears this is a good movie to like, rip
Speaker 2: a bong to and watch it. That is an astoundingly
Speaker 2: good record. I mean, how much of it you think
Speaker 2: It's like an Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing, too. Though,
Speaker 2: after so many years of I Kubrick's favorite movie, yeah,
Speaker 2: people be unwilling to call it out. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe you're signing the trumpet on a new charge, a
Speaker 2: new dawn on of calling out a racer heead for
Speaker 2: being orsh. You know, Jordan, As the song goes in heaven,
Speaker 2: everything is fine. You've got your good thing and I've
Speaker 2: got mine. You're a good thing is a racer head,
Speaker 2: and mine is in like Flint, Austin Power's favorite movie. Folks.
Speaker 2: As always, thank you for listening. This has been too
Speaker 2: much information. I'm Alex Heigel and.
Speaker 1: I'm Jordan run Tagg. Thanks so much for spending this
Speaker 1: time with us, you poor pastors. What too much Information
Speaker 1: was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive.
Speaker 2: Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The supervising producer
Speaker 2: is Mike Johns. The show was researched, written and hosted
Speaker 2: by Jordan Runtalk and Alex Heigel.
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
Speaker 1: If you like what you heard, please subscribe.
Speaker 2: And leave us a review.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.