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 from being demolished, Greystone Mansion was leased to the AFI from 1969 through 1981 for one dollar a year in the hopes that the school would restore and maintain the 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
