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David Lynch

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David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana) is an American filmmaker.

Lynch's films are known for their elements of surrealism, their nightmarish and dreamlike sequences, their stark and strange images, and their meticulously crafted audio. Often his work explores the seedy underside of small-town U.S.A. (e.g. Blue Velvet and the Twin Peaks television series) or sprawling metropolises (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive). Due to his peculiar style and focus on the American psyche, producer Mel Brooks once called Lynch "Jimmy Stewart from Mars."

Over a lengthy career, Lynch has developed a consistent approach to narrative and visual style that has become instantly recognizable to audiences worldwide. Although not a box office giant, he is a consistent favorite of film critics and has maintained a strong cult following.

Contents

Career

Early days

Lynch grew up an archetypal all-American boy. His father was a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist. He was raised throughout the Pacific Northwest. He attained the rank of Eagle Scout, and on his fifteenth birthday served as an usher at John F. Kennedy's Presidential inauguration.

With the intention of becoming an artist, Lynch attended classes at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. while finishing high school. He enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for one year before leaving for Europe with the plan to study with expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. Though he had planned to stay for three years, Lynch returned to the US after 15 days.

Philadelphia and the short films

In 1966, Lynch relocated to Philadelphia, attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) and made a series of complex mosaics in geometric shapes which he called Industrial Symphonies. Here too he began working with film. His first short film Six Figures Getting Sick (1966), which he described as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit," was played on a loop at an art exhibit. It won the Academy’s annual film contest. This led to a commission from H. Barton Wasserman to do a film installation in his home. After a disastrous first attempt that resulted in a completely blurred, frameless print, Lynch created The Alphabet.

In 1970, Lynch turned his attention away from visual art and focused primarily on film. He won a $5,000 grant from the American Film Institute to produce The Grandmother, about a neglected boy who “grows” a grandmother from a seed. The 30-minute film exhibited many elements that would become Lynch trademarks, including unsettling sound and imagery and a focus on unconscious desires instead of traditional narration.

Eraserhead

Actor Jack Nance and Lynch on the set of Eraserhead (1978).
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Actor Jack Nance and Lynch on the set of Eraserhead (1978).

In 1971, Lynch moved to Los Angeles to attend the M.F.A. studies at the AFI Conservatory. At the Conservatory, Lynch began working on his first feature-length film, Eraserhead, using a $10,000 grant from the AFI. The grant did not provide enough money to complete the film and, due to lack of a sufficient budget, Eraserhead was filmed intermittently until 1977. Lynch used money from friends and family, including boyhood friend Jack Fisk, a production designer and the husband of actress Sissy Spacek, and even took a paper route to finish it.

A stark and enigmatic film, Eraserhead tells the story of a quiet young man (Jack Nance) living in an industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a constantly hissing mutant baby. Lynch has referred to Eraserhead as "my Philadelphia story", meaning it reflects all of the dangerous and fearful elements he encountered while studying and living in Philadelphia ([link]). He said "this feeling left its traces deep down inside me. And when it came out again, it became Eraserhead".

The film also reflects the director's own fears and anxieties about fatherhood, personified in the form of the bizarre baby, which has become one of the most notorious props in film history. Lynch refuses to discuss how the baby was made, and a long-standing urban legend claims that it was created using an embalmed cow fetus [link].

The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it became an instant cult classic and was a staple of midnight movie showings for the next decade. It was also a critical success, launching Lynch to the forefront of avant-garde filmmaking. Stanley Kubrick said that it was one of his all-time favorite films. It cemented the team of actors and technicians who would continue to define the texture of his work for years to come, including cinematographer Frederick Elmes, sound designer Alan Splet, and actor Jack Nance.

The Elephant Man and Dune

The Elephant Man (1980).
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The Elephant Man (1980).

Eraserhead brought Lynch to the attention of producer Mel Brooks who hired him to direct 1980’s The Elephant Man, a biopic of deformed Victorian era socialite Joseph Merrick. The film was a huge financial and commercial success and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch. It also established his place as a commercially viable, if somewhat dark and unconventional, Hollywood director.

Afterwards, Lynch agreed to direct a big budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune for Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis’s De Laurentiis Entertainment Group on the condition that the company release a second Lynch project, over which the director would have complete creative control. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be the next , Lynch’s Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud, costing $45 million to make and grossing a mere $27.4 million domestically. The film may have been hampered by cuts — the 137-minute film was cut down from Lynch’s three and a half hour director's cut in a way that made the plot incomprehensible. The studio released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television in which some legitimate footage originally cut from the film was reinstated; however, the main caveat was that certain shots from elsewhere in the film were repeated throughout the story to give the impression that other footage had been added. Whatever the case, this was not representative of Lynch’s intended cut, but rather a cut that the studios felt was more comprehensible than the original theatrical cut. Lynch objected to these changes and disowned the extended cut, which has Allen Smithee credited as the director. This version has since been released on video worldwide.

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet (1986).
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Blue Velvet (1986).

Lynch’s second De Laurentiis-financed project was 1986’s Blue Velvet, the story of a college student (Kyle MacLachlan) who discovers the dark side of his small hometown after investigating a severed ear he finds in a field. The film featured memorable performances from Isabella Rossellini as a tormented lounge singer and Dennis Hopper as a crude, sociopathic criminal and leader of a small gang of backwater hoodlums.

Blue Velvet was a huge critical success and earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The film introduced several common elements of his work, including abused women, the dark underbelly of small towns, and unconventional uses of vintage songs. Bobby Vinton’s "Blue Velvet" and Roy Orbison’s "In Dreams" are both featured in disturbing ways. It was also the first time Lynch worked with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who would contribute to all of his future full-length films.

Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Industrial Symphonies, American Chronicles and Hotel Room

After failing to secure funding for several completed scripts in the late 1980s, Lynch collaborated with television producer Mark Frost on the show Twin Peaks, about a small Washington town that is the site of several bizarre happenings. The show centered around the investigation by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) into the death of popular high school student Laura Palmer, an investigation that unearthed the secrets of many town residents. Lynch directed six episodes of the series, including the pilot, wrote or co-wrote several more and even acted in some episodes.

Lynch on the cover of the October 1, 1990 issue of Time Magazine.
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Lynch on the cover of the October 1, 1990 issue of Time Magazine.

The show debuted on the ABC Network on April 8, 1990 and slowly rose from cult hit to cultural phenomenon. No other Lynch-related project has gained such mainstream acceptance. Catch phrases from the show entered the cultural dialect and parodies of it were seen on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. Lynch appeared on the cover of Time magazine largely because of the success of the series. Lynch, who has seldom acted in his career, also appeared on the show as the partially-deaf, continually-shouting FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole.

However, Lynch clashed with the ABC Network on several matters, particularly whether or not to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer. The network insisted that the revelation be made during the second season but Lynch wanted the mystery to last as long as the series. Lynch soon became disenchanted with the series (many cast members would complain of feeling abandoned) and, after shooting the Twin Peaks pilot episode, set off to work on the film Wild at Heart.

Adapted from the novel by Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart was an almost hallucinatory crime/road movie starring Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern. It won the coveted Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival but met with a muted response from American critics and viewers. Reportedly, several people walked out of test screenings.

The missing link between Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart, however, is Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted. It was originally presented on-stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City on November 10, 1989 as a part of the New Music America Festival. Industrial Symphony No. 1 is another collaboration between composer Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. It features ten songs by Julee Cruise and stars several members of the Twin Peaks cast as well as Nick Cage, Laura Dern and Julee Cruise. Lynch described this musical spectacle as the "sound effects and music and ... happening on the stage. And, it has something to do with, uh, a relationship ending." David Lynch produced a 50 minute video of the performance in 1990.

Meanwhile, Twin Peaks suffered a severe ratings drop, and was cancelled in 1991. Still, Lynch scripted a prequel to the series, about the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer. The resulting film, (1992), flopped at the box office and garnered the most negative reviews of Lynch’s career.

As a quick blip during this time period, he and Mark Frost wrote and directed several episodes of the short lived comedy series On the Air for ABC, which followed the zany antics at a 1950's TV studio. In the US only three episodes were aired, although seven were filmed; In the Netherlands all 7 were aired by VPRO. Lynch also produced (with Frost) and directed the documentary television series [American Chronicles].

His next project was much more low-key; he directed two episodes of a three-episode HBO mini-series called Hotel Room about events that happened in the same hotel room in a span of decades.

Lost Highway (1997).
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Lost Highway (1997).

Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE

In 1997, Lynch returned with the non-linear, noir-like film Lost Highway, co-written by Barry Gifford and starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. The film failed commercially and received a mixed response from critics. However, thanks in part to a soundtrack featuring Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins, it helped gain Lynch a new audience of Generation X viewers.

In 1999, Lynch surprised fans and critics with the G-rated, Disney-produced The Straight Story, which was, on the surface, a simple and humble movie telling the true story of an Iowa man (Richard Farnsworth) who rides a lawnmower to Wisconsin to make peace with his ailing brother. The film garnered positive reviews and reached a new audience for its director.

Mulholland Drive (2001).
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Mulholland Drive (2001).

The same year, Lynch approached ABC once again with an idea for a television drama. The network gave Lynch the go-ahead to shoot a two-hour pilot for the series Mulholland Drive, but disputes over content and running time led to the project being shelved indefinitely.

With seven million dollars from the French distributor Canal Plus, Lynch completed the pilot as a film. Mulholland Drive is an enigmatic tale of the dark side of Hollywood and stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux. The film performed relatively well at the box office worldwide and was a critical success earning Lynch a Best Director prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There) and a Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Association.

In 2002, Lynch treated his fans to his own version of a sitcom via his [website] - Rabbits, eight episodes of surrealism in a rabbit suit. Later, he showed his experiments with Digital Video (DV) in the form of the Japanese style horror short Darkened Room.

At the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Lynch announced that he had spent over a year shooting his new film digitally in Poland. The film, titled INLAND EMPIRE (in capitals), included Lynch regulars such as Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, and Justin Theroux, as well as Jeremy Irons. Lynch described the film as "a mystery about a woman in trouble". It is scheduled to be released in 2006 and will be Lynch's first feature shot entirely on DV.

A recent DVD from Digidesign featured Lynch in interview and apparently showcasing a scene from INLAND EMPIRE. A detailed review of the scene appeared on the [film ick] website but it was not at all positive, particularly critical of Lynch's decision to use digital video for the project. Many details of the scene that were given did, however, seem like the David Lynch his fans know and love.

In 2005, Lynch created a series of online shorts entitled Dumb Land. Intentionally crude both in content and execution, the eight-episode series was later released on DVD.[link]

Awards and honors

Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film and served as President of the jury at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where he had previously won the Palme d'Or in 1990. He was also honored in 2002 by the French government with the Legion of Honor. In 2006 he will be awarded the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival.

To date he has received four Academy Award nominations: Best Director for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), as well as Best Adapted Screenplay for The Elephant Man (1980). He has yet to win.

Frequent collaborators

Lynch often uses the same actors in his productions: Many of Lynch's films have bit parts played by musicians who have various degrees of acting experience: Sting in Dune, Chris Isaak in Fire Walk With Me, David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me, Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me, John Lurie in Wild at Heart, Marilyn Manson in Lost Highway, Henry Rollins in Lost Highway, and Billy Ray Cyrus in Mullholland Drive.

Lynch himself appears in The Amputee, Dune, Twin Peaks and . He is also in a deleted scene from Lost Highway.

Influences

Lynch has cited Un Chien Andalou as a major influence on his style.#redirect

Although more an "admiring of" rather than an inspired by, Lynch admires filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, writer Franz Kafka, & artist Francis Bacon. He states that the majority of Kubrick films are in his top ten, that he really loves Franz Kafka, and that Francis Bacon rather paints images that are both visually stunning, and emotionally touching.

Private life

Lynch has been married three times:

  1. Peggy Lentz (1967-1974), (one daughter Jennifer Chambers Lynch, the film director)
  2. Mary Fisk (21 June 1977-1987), (one son-- Austin Jack Lynch)
  3. Mary Sweeney (May 2006-July 2006), (one son Riley Lynch)

Trivia

Transcendental meditation

In December 2005, Lynch told the Washington Post that he had been practicing transcendental meditation twice a day, for 20 minutes each time, for 32 years. [link]. He advocates its use in bringing peace to the world. He has launched the [David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and Peace] to fund research about TM's positive effects, and he promotes the technique and his vision by an ongoing tour of college campuses that began in September 2005. [link] A streaming video of one of Lynch's public performances is available at his foundation's website.

Lynch is working for the establishment of seven "peace factories," each with 8000 salaried people practicing advanced techniques of TM, "pumping peace for the world". He estimates the cost at $7 billion; as of December 2005 he had spent $400,000 of his own money and raised $1 million in donations from a handful of wealthy individuals and organizations. [link]

Other interests

Lynch has cited the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka as an inspiration for his works. He described the twentieth century artist Francis Bacon as "to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter". He continues to present art installations and stage designs. In his spare time, he also designs and builds furniture. Lynch was also responsible for the comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World.

Lynch is a big fan of Bob's Big Boy restaurants, an Americana restaurant chain whose chief icon is a cartoon male with a tray of dinner plates. Lynch has said that early on in his career he got a chocolate milkshake at one restaurant near his house almost every day for seven years in a row, along with "four, five, six, seven cups of coffee--with lots of sugar" [link]. Although he doesn't eat sugar anymore [link], the director attributes the inspiration for many of his films and ideas to his daily sugar rushes in this period.

Lynch also designed [davidlynch.com], a site exclusive to paying members, where he posts short films, interviews and other items. The site also features a daily weather report, where Lynch gives a brief description of the weather in Los Angeles, where he resides.

Lynch also has a love for the film The Wizard of Oz and frequently makes reference to it in his films, the most obvious being Wild at Heart.

Filmography

As director

As an actor

See also

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
[Special]


David Lynch
Feature films
Eraserhead • The Elephant Man • Dune • Blue Velvet • Wild at Heart • Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me • Lost Highway • The Straight Story • Mulholland Dr. • Inland Empire
TV series
Twin Peaks • On the Air • Hotel Room
Other work
Short films • Industrial Symphony No. 1 • Rabbits • Dumb Land

 

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