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 khaki pants, and work boots. He was very pretty and it was immediately clear he was a unique individual—everybody who met David saw that spark. He told me that what he really needed was a production manager, and asked, ‘Can you do that?’ and I said ‘Sure.’ Then he said, ‘I need a script supervisor, too; can you do that?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and he bought me a stopwatch so I could do continuity.”1
Shortly after meeting Lynch, Small was at a party in Topanga and was introduced to Charlotte Stewart, who was a prominent young television actress at the time. The two decided to rent a place together and were roommates for the next two years. “Doreen knew David needed an actress for his film, so she invited him to dinner in Topanga, which was a pretty rural area back then,” Stewart recalled. “I open the door and here stands this guy and Peggy, and he’s this eager young man. He had a sack of wheat seeds in his hand, which he handed to me, and I thanked him, but I’m thinking, What the hell? I guess he figured, Hey, they live in the country—maybe they’d like to plant some wheat.
“At dinner he seemed like a nice person, and he seemed very young,” she continued. “He brought the script for Eraserhead, and I thumbed through it and didn’t understand a word of it—as far as I could tell it was something about a young couple and a baby who wasn’t really a baby. There wasn’t much dialogue, and I thought, Fine, I can do this in a few weeks.”2
Lynch was looking for his leading man when he met Catherine Coulson and Jack Nance. Coulson and her family moved to California from Illinois when her father was hired to run a radio station in Riverside, and she made her radio debut there at the age of four on a local broadcast called Breakfast with the Coulsons. She was an art history major at Scripps College in Claremont, and by the time Coulson enrolled in graduate school at San Francisco State, the focus of her life had shifted to theater. In 1967, members of the Dallas Theater Center were artists in residence at San Francisco State, and among the company was actor Jack Nance. Coulson and Nance became a couple, and after marrying in La Jolla, California, in 1968, they became members of David Lindeman’s Interplayers Circus, a theater company founded by Lindeman, who briefly attended the AFI in 1971. Lindeman mentioned to Lynch that Nance might be good for the part of Henry Spencer, and Lynch agreed Nance was perfect.
A
