property. Founded by George Stevens, Jr., the American Film Institute was directed by Toni Vellani from 1968 through 1977; it was these two who recognized Lynch’s talent and brought him to the school.
John Lynch graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, shortly before his brother moved west, so he drove to Philadelphia, helped him pack his belongings into a yellow Hertz truck, and left his car in the backyard of a friend of David’s so he could accompany him on the drive to Los Angeles. “At the last minute Jack Fisk decided to come along with his dog, so it was three guys and a dog, and we had a good time,” recalled John Lynch.
Vellani and Stevens had been so impressed by Alan Splet’s work on The Grandmother that they’d made him head of the AFI’s sound department. Splet moved to L.A. in July and was already settled in when Lynch arrived in late August to stay with him. After spending two weeks sorting out living arrangements, Lynch and his brother headed to Berkeley to visit their parents—who lived there for a brief period—and collect Peggy and Jennifer.
“David’s father gave us two hundred fifty dollars a month for two years, which was how long it was supposed to take to graduate from the AFI, and the rent on our house was two twenty a month,” Reavey recalls. “Our place wasn’t big but it had lots of little rooms, and our part of the rent was eighty dollars because we had all these people living with us.” The Lynch house was flanked by three-story apartment buildings—“one of them blasted the Jackson 5’s ‘I’ll Be There’ for hours at a time,” said Reavey—“and we found an old washing machine that we installed on the back porch. We didn’t have a dryer, so there was usually wash hanging out back.”
Fisk’s sister Mary was in and out of the picture in L.A. during the early 1970s, too. She wanted to live near her brother, who’d relocated to L.A. shortly after Lynch settled there, so after training to be an airline stewardess for Pan American Airways, she moved to L.A. and rented the place next door to the Lynches.
Lynch began classes on September 25th, joining the members of the AFI’s first graduating class, which included filmmakers Terrence Malick, Caleb Deschanel, Tim Hunter, and Paul Schrader. At that point the school curriculum largely revolved around watching films and discussing them, and of particular importance to the thirty students in Lynch’s class were studies in film analysis taught by Czechoslovakian filmmaker Frank Daniel. Daniel came to the United States in 1968 under the agency of George Stevens, Jr., who sent plane tickets to him and his family when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and he’s cited by many AFI alumni as an inspiring presence. It was Daniel who devised what’s known as the sequencing paradigm for screenwriting, which advocates devising seventy elements relating to specific scenes, writing each of them on a note card, then organizing the note cards in a coherent sequence. Do this and you’ll have a screenplay. It’s a simple idea that proved useful to Lynch.
The AFI was a loose, freewheeling place, but being a fellow was not without pressure; students were expected to find their own way, and Lynch spent much of his first year struggling to find a direction. “He’d been working on the script for Gardenback, which was a film about infidelity inspired by a painting he made in Philadelphia, but that wasn’t what he was feeling in his heart,” said Reavey, “so he couldn’t get anywhere with it.”
Frank Daniel and Caleb Deschanel were fans of Gardenback, and Deschanel took the script to a producer friend at Twentieth Century Fox who offered Lynch fifty thousand dollars to expand the forty-page treatment into a full-length feature. Lynch participated in a series of writing sessions with Daniel, Vellani, and writer Gill Dennis, but by the time he’d arrived at a feature-length script he’d lost interest in the project, and he abandoned it in late spring of 1971.
Then, over the summer months, Eraserhead began to crystallize in his mind. Lynch has commented that “I felt Eraserhead, I didn’t think it,” and anyone who fully surrenders to the film understands what he means. Much has been made of the queasy humor of Eraserhead, but to focus on its comical aspects is to give a superficial reading of a multi-layered work. A magisterial film that operates without filters of any sort, Eraserhead is pure id. The narrative of the movie is simple. Living in a dismal, post-industrial dystopia, a young man named Henry Spencer meets a girl named Mary, who becomes pregnant. Henry is gripped with anxiety at the arrival of their deformed infant and longs for release from the horror he feels. He experiences the mystery of the erotic, then the death of the child, and, finally, the divine intercedes and his torment ends. In a sense, it’s a story about grace.
Lynch’s screenwriting style is direct and clear, and the Eraserhead script has the rigor and exactitude of a Beckett play. Just twenty-one pages long, it has a minimum of stage direction and mostly focuses on evocative description; it’s apparent that the film’s mood—palpable and slightly sinister—was of primary importance to Lynch. The first half of the movie we’ve come to know matches the script pretty much word for word; however, the narrative in the second half of the film differs significantly from the script. In Lynch’s original vision, the film concluded with Henry being devoured by the demonic baby. This doesn’t occur in the film; rather, a new character is introduced in the third act and she transforms the conclusion of the story. Lynch experienced a spiritual awakening over the five years Eraserhead was in production, and it makes sense that the film changed along the way.
“Eraserhead is about karma,” said Jack Fisk, who plays a character called the Man in the Planet. “I didn’t realize it when we were working on it, but the Man in the Planet is pulling levers that symbolize karma. There are so many spiritual things in Eraserhead, and David made it before he started meditating. David’s always been that way, and he’s gotten more spiritual over time.”
Lynch himself has said that “ Eraserhead is my most spiritual film, but no one has ever gotten that from it. The way it happened was I had these feelings, but I didn’t know what it really was about for me. So I get out the Bible and start reading, and I’m reading along, reading along, and I come to this sentence and I say, ‘That’s exactly it.’ I can’t say which sentence it is, though.”
When Lynch returned to the AFI in September of 1971, he found that he’d been assigned to classes with first-year students and was furious at the school. He was preparing to quit altogether when he received an enthusiastic go-ahead to make Eraserhead, so he decided to stick around. His film needed funding, but the financial politics at the AFI were at a weird juncture at that point. The previous year the school had given a substantial sum to student Stanton Kaye to complete In Pursuit of Treasure, which was to be the first feature produced by the AFI. A lot of money was spent on Kaye’s film, which was never finished and was deemed a complete failure, and the prospect of financing another student feature was anathema to the AFI for quite a while afterward. This wasn’t a problem for Lynch, whose minimal script for Eraserhead appeared to be for a short, so the school committed ten thousand dollars to the film, which went into pre-production as 1971 wound to a close.
Nestled below the main mansion at the AFI was a complex of abandoned servants’ quarters, garages, a greenhouse, stables, and a hayloft; Lynch planted his flag among these crumbling brick buildings and created a modest studio he was to occupy for the next four years. There was a camera room, a bathroom, a food room, an editing area, a green room, and a vast loft where the sets were housed. There was privacy, too; the school gave Lynch access to its equipment and left him in peace to make his movie.
In assembling his cast and crew, Lynch looked first to trusted friends and asked Splet, Fisk, and Herb Cardwell, a director of photography who’d worked at Calvin de Frenes, to participate. A significant member of the crew fell into place when Doreen Small took the job of production manager. Born and raised in New York, Small visited friends in Topanga Canyon in 1971, then rented a place in Laurel Canyon. Shortly after she’d moved in, her landlord, James Newport, mentioned that he was assisting Jack Fisk on the blaxploitation film Cool Breeze and they needed assistants. “I ran around getting props and costumes,” Small recalled, “then Jack said, ‘I have a friend at the AFI who needs help. Would you go and meet David?’
“So I went to the stables and met David,” she continued. “He was wearing three neckties, a panama hat, a blue oxford shirt with no elbows, baggy