Sunday, January 29, 2006
I Just Love David Lynch, His Films, His Visions
From Newsday: "Do Not Disturb Isn't His Motto":
David Lynch will tell you of his obsession with "organic phenomenon," an interest that prompted him one day to phone up a veterinarian to see if he had any dead cats.
Ten minutes later, the vet called back to let him know that, wouldn't you know, a dead cat had just rolled in the door. He said Lynch could have it, provided it did not show up in the film he was making or was in any way recognizable.
Lynch accommodated his request, sort of. He put the cat in a jar of formaldehyde ("It slid in like a Slinky," he fondly recalls) and jiggered it out with great trouble at the end of the day, rigid with rigor mortis. In the coming two years, this "steel cat" would end up being soaked in tar, dredged in mud and tugged with a wire by an actor with a permanently furrowed brow and hair teased upward like a Brillo pad in a state of high anxiety.
True to his word, Lynch made the cat thoroughly unidentifiable, and it never made the final cut of his movie, a 90-minute primal scream that would be known to denizens of midnight movies everywhere as "Eraserhead." But it has returned to haunt the menu of the newly released and crisply remastered DVD edition of "Eraserhead."
His most glaring absence, though, comes in the extended edition, which he disowned years ago as being a bastardization of his cinematic vision. So even though Lynch directed and wrote the film, the directing credit reads "Alan Smithee" (a pseudonym that disgruntled directors often use as a sign of protest) with the writing credit "Judas Booth" (a pseudonym reportedly referring to the biblical Judas to express a feeling of betrayal and to Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth as a sign that the studio "killed" his film).
Filmmaker, Artist, Painter: David Lynch
I do have a screenplay he may be interested in reading...
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