either all letters or all numbers, and my license had letters and numbers, and I later learned that letters and numbers aren’t the same height. So this rookie cop spots my license as a fake because everything was the same height, and this cop was a hero at the precinct for spotting this thing. So cops came to the door and Peggy was crying—it was serious! They came back later and wanted the license plate for the police museum. It was a fuckin’ beautiful job! That was the first time a museum acquired my work.
One night I came home from a movie and went up to the second floor and started to tell Peggy about it, and her eyes are like saucers because someone is outside the bay window. So I go downstairs where our phone is, and our next-door neighbor Phyllis calls right then. She’s a character and she’s talking away until I interrupt her and say, “Phyllis, I’ve gotta hang up and call the police. Somebody was trying to break in.” While I’m on the phone with her I see a pipe move, then I hear breaking glass, and I see someone outside the window and realize someone was in the basement, too—so there were two people. I don’t remember sitting on the couch the next night with a gun like Peggy said—I don’t think we ever had a gun at that place. But, yeah, these sorts of things happened there. Another time I’m sound asleep and I’m woken by Peggy’s face like two inches from mine. “David! There’s somebody in the house!” I get up and put my underpants on backward and reach under the bed and get this ceremonial sword Peggy’s father gave us, and I go to the head of the stairs and yell, “Get the hell out of here!” There were two black couples standing down there and they’re looking at me like I’m totally fucking crazy, right? They’d come in to make love or party or something because they thought it was an abandoned house. They said, “You don’t live here,” and I said, “The hell I don’t!”
By the time Jen was born I’d left school and I wrote that bullshit letter to the administration. Then I got a job. Christine McGinnis and Rodger LaPelle were both painters, but to make money Christine would knock out these animal engravings, and she had her mother, Dorothy, who was known as Flash, in there printing. It was the perfect job for me. Flash and I worked next to each other and there would be a little TV in front of us, and behind us were a hand press and some sinks. You’d start by inking the plate, then you’d take one of these used nylon socks Rodger would get and you’d fold it in a certain way, then you’d dance this nylon over the plate, hitting the mountains and leaving the valleys. Then you’d run a print on real good paper. While I was working in the shop, Rodger told me, “David, I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars to paint on the weekends and I’ll keep the paintings you make.” After I moved to L.A. he would send me paper and pencils to do drawings for him, still paying me. Rodger was and is a friend to artists.
One afternoon I found a used Bolex with a beautiful leather case for four hundred fifty dollars that I wanted to buy at Photorama, but they said, “David, we can’t put a hold on this camera. If someone comes in and wants it, we have to sell it. If you’re here tomorrow morning with the money and it’s still here, you can have it.” I panicked because I didn’t want anybody else to get this thing. I couldn’t wake up in the morning in those days, so Jack and his girlfriend, Wendy, and I took amphetamines and stayed up all night, and I was at the store when they opened. I got the camera.
I did some great drawings on amphetamines. In those days girls were going to doctors and getting diet pills, and it’s like they were giving out scoopfuls of these pills. They’d come home from the doctor with big bags of pills! I wasn’t anti-drug. Drugs just weren’t important to me. One time Jack and I were going to go up to Timothy Leary’s farm at Millbrook and drop acid and stay up there, but that turned out to be a pipe dream that lasted just a couple of days. We didn’t go to the concert at Woodstock, but we did go to Woodstock. It was in the winter and we went up there because we’d heard about this hermit who lived there, and I wanted to see this hermit. Nobody could ever see him. He built this kind of mound place out of earth and rocks and twigs with little streamers on them, and when we went there it was covered with snow. He lived in there, and I think he had places he could peek out to see if someone was coming near him, but you couldn’t see him. We didn’t see him, but we felt him being there.
I don’t know where the idea for The Grandmother came from. There’s a scene where Virginia Maitland and Bob Chadwick come up out of holes in the ground, and I can’t explain why I wanted them to come up out of the earth—it just had to be that way. It wasn’t supposed to look real but it had to be a certain way, and I dug these holes and they got in them. When the scene opens you just see leaves and bushes, then all of a sudden out come these people. Bob and Ginger did great. They weren’t really buried in there, and mostly they had to struggle out of leaves. Then Richard White comes out of his own hole and the two of them bark at him, and there are distorted close-ups of barking. I was doing some sort of stop motion, but I couldn’t tell you how I did it. It was poor man’s stuff but it worked for me. I always say that filmmaking is just common sense. Once you figure out how you want it to look, you kind of know how to do it. Peggy said things went my way when I was making those films, and that’s sort of true. I could just find stuff. I’d just get it.
When it came time to do the sound for The Grandmother, I went and knocked on the sound department door at Calvin de Frenes and Bob opens the door and he says, “David, we have so much work that I had to hire an assistant, and you’ll be working with my assistant, Alan Splet.” My heart kind of dropped and I look over and see this guy—pale, skinny as a rail, old shiny black suit—and Al comes up wearing Coke-bottle glasses and smiles and shakes my hand, and I feel the bones in his arm rattle. That’s Al. I tell him I need a bunch of sounds, so he played me some sound-effects records and said, “Something like this?” I said no. He plays another track and he says, “Maybe this?” I said no. This goes on for a while, then he said, “David, I think we’re going to have to make these sounds for you,” and we spent sixty-three days, nine hours a day, making sounds. Like, the grandmother whistles, right? They hardly had any equipment at Calvin de Frenes and they didn’t have a reverb unit. So Al got an air-conditioning duct that was thirty or forty feet long. We went to a place where I whistled into this duct and Al put a recorder at the other end. Because of the hollowness of the duct, that whistle was a little bit longer by the time it reached the other end. Then he’d play the recording through a speaker into the duct and record it again, and now the reverb is twice as long. We did that over and over until the reverb sounded right. We made every single sound and it was so much fun I cannot tell you. Then I mixed the thing at Calvin de Frenes, and Bob Column very seriously said, “David, number one, you can’t take the film out of here until you pay your bill. Number two, if they charge an hourly rate your bill is going to be staggering. If they charge a ten-minute reel rate, it’s going to be an incredibly good deal for you.” He talked to the people he worked for and I got the ten-minute reel rate.
You had to submit a budget to the AFI to get a grant, and I wrote that my film would cost $7,119, and it ended up costing $7,200. I don’t know how I did that, but I did. The original grant was for $5,000 but I needed $2,200 more to get the film out of Calvin, so Toni Vellani took the train from Washington, D.C. I picked him up at the train station and showed him the film and he said, “You got your money.” While I was driving him back to the train station he said, “David, I think you should come to the Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, California.” That’s like telling somebody, You have just won five hundred trillion dollars! Or even greater than that! It’s like telling somebody, You’re going to live forever!
Spike
When Lynch left Philadelphia to attend the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1970, it was like stepping out of a dark closet into shimmering sunshine. At the time the AFI was housed in Greystone Mansion, a lavish fifty-five-room Tudor Revival–style residence situated on eighteen acres of land, which was built in 1928 by oil baron Edward Doheny. Acquired by the city of Beverly Hills in 1965 to prevent it