X), and Jeanne Bates (Mrs. X)—were members of the repertory company Theater West. Bates was a seasoned veteran of movies and television and was well into her fifties when she was cast in Eraser-head. Lynch was nonetheless worried that she was too pretty for the role, so he fashioned a mole sprouting a single hair for her face. Like most people who met Lynch, Bates was enchanted by him. “I remember Jeanne sitting there patiently while he applied this ugly mole to her face,” Small said. “David was working with very experienced actors, and from the start they thought he was a genius and trusted him.”
The cast for the film fell into place fairly quickly; creating the realm where Eraserhead takes place demanded a good deal more, and this is where Lynch’s genius really became evident. Largely built out of scavenged materials, Henry’s world is some kind of miracle in that Lynch did so much with so little. Everything was repurposed and repeatedly reused to create meticulously built sets that included an apartment, a lobby, a theater stage, a pencil factory, a suburban home, an office, and a front porch. Lynch and Splet soundproofed the sets with blankets and fiberglass insulation in burlap bags, and Lynch rented the equipment he needed for special sequences. Eraserhead includes several complex effects shots, and answers to technical questions often involved cold calls to effects people at local studios. Lynch is a practical person who enjoys problem-solving, and he learned through trial and error.
Doreen Small scoured flea markets and thrift stores for clothing and props, and Coulson and Nance emptied their own living room to furnish the lobby of Henry’s apartment. A particularly valuable resource was Coulson’s aunt, Margit Fellegi Laszlo, who lived in a seventeen-room house in Beverly Hills. A designer for bathing-suit company Cole of California, Laszlo had a basement full of stuff, and Coulson and Lynch often dug through it looking for props. “That’s where we found the humidifier for the baby,” Coulson recalled.3
The props list for Eraserhead included things considerably more offbeat than a humidifier. “David wanted a dog with a litter of nursing puppies, so I called vets to find people who had dogs with new litters, then called them and asked if they’d loan us their dogs,” Small recalled. “To get umbilical cords I lied to hospitals and told them the cords would just be in jars in the background in a movie scene. Those are real umbilical cords in the film, and we got five or six of them—Jack called them ‘billy cords.’ I had to find some unusual things.”
The baby in Eraserhead—christened “Spike” by Nance—is the most crucial prop in the film, and Lynch began working on it months before the shoot started; he’s never disclosed how he created the baby, nor have any of the cast and crew. The film also called for two large props—a planet and a baby head—which were fashioned out of various materials. The “giant baby head,” which is how they referred to it, was constructed in Lynch’s yard and took several months to complete. “It sat out there for quite a while, and the neighbors referred to it as ‘the big egg,’ ” Reavey recalled.
As part of pre-production, Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun for his cast and crew. The black-and-white photography in both films is particularly saturated and rich, and Small recalled that “he wanted us to understand his concept of the color black. He also encouraged us to go see this guy named James in some canyon and have our horoscopes read.”
Principal photography began on May 29th, 1972, and the first scene on the shooting schedule was Henry’s dinner with Mary’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. X. “I couldn’t believe how long everything took that first night,” recalled Charlotte Stewart, “and the reason it took so long was because David had to do everything himself—really, he did everything. The light fixtures had to be just so; he made the chickens for the dinner—he had to touch everything on the set. I remember thinking, Oh my God, this kid is never going to make it; he doesn’t understand that you can’t take this long in this business. I felt bad for him that he didn’t know this.”
The film progressed at a glacial pace, and a year into the shoot DP Herb Cardwell decided he needed a job that could pay him a living wage and left the film. This created an opening for cinematographer Fred Elmes. Born in East Orange, New Jersey, Elmes studied still photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, then enrolled in the film-studies program at New York University. When an instructor there told him about the AFI, he headed west.
Elmes began classes at the AFI in the fall of 1972 and recalled, “A few months after I arrived, Toni Vellani said, ‘We have a filmmaker here who needs a DP and you should meet him.’ I met David and he showed me a reel of scenes and I had no idea what to make of what I was seeing, but I was captivated. It was shot in this beautiful black and white and was so curious and beautifully designed, and the acting style was fascinating. Everything about it knocked me out and I couldn’t possibly say no.4
“One of the main challenges was how to light a black movie that you could see,” Elmes continued of the film, which was shot almost entirely at night. That’s what Eraserhead demanded in terms of mood, of course, but it was also the only time the AFI grounds were quiet enough for Lynch to work. “We’d shoot all night,” said Coulson, “then at a certain point Alan Splet would say, ‘Birds, I hear birds,’ and we knew it was time to stop working.”
And the film “couldn’t be dark enough,” said Elmes, who spent two weeks working with Cardwell to get up to speed prior to his departure. “David and I would look at dailies and say, ‘I see a detail in that black shadow that shouldn’t be there—let’s make it darker.’ David and I agreed that the mood you create is the most important thing. Yes, there’s the writing and the acting, but the mood and the feeling of the light is what makes a film take off. With Eraserhead, David told the story almost purely through mood and the way things look.”
For the film’s few daytime exterior shots, Coulson recalled, “We shot many of the exteriors, including the opening scene, beneath a bridge in downtown L.A. We worked fast when we shot on location because we never had permits, so it was kind of stressful but it was fun.”
“People love working for David,” said Reavey. “If you do something as minor as getting him a cup of coffee, he makes you feel like you’ve done the greatest thing in the world. It’s, like, fantastic! And I think that’s really how he feels. David likes to feel excited about stuff.”
“David is a charismatic, powerful person,” said Elmes, “and we all felt very involved. Certainly we were making David’s movie, but he was thankful for everyone’s work, and without thinking about it he kind of raised the bar on everything around him. He was constantly drawing, for instance, and seeing that was inspiring. It made us all want to work hard and try new things.”
Lynch had no time to spend in a painting studio while Eraserhead was in production, but he never stopped making visual art during those years. Any blank surface would do, and he completed several bodies of work, including series on matchbooks, diner napkins, and cheap notebook paper. The materials he used were humble, but the work can’t be dismissed as doodling. It’s too polished and thought out for that.
Intricate renderings executed on empty matchbooks, the works in the matchbook series are tiny universes that feel vast and expansive, despite their size. Another series revolves around obsessive patterning and operates differently: The nests of patterned lines are imploded and dense and feel slightly threatening. The napkin drawings are composed of odd shapes rendered in red, black, and yellow, floating in white fields; they almost look like something identifiable but are pure geometric abstraction. And there are drawings that are clearly preparatory studies for Eraserhead. There’s a portrait of Henry staring at a mound of dirt on a bedside table, and an image of the baby lying next to a volcano form with a lone branch protruding from the top. A sketch of the baby after its white swaddling has been cut open has a lyrical quality that the related scene in the film, which is quite gruesome, definitely does not have.
Lynch
