was given the task of styling Nance’s hair the evening shooting commenced, and she began back-combing it frenetically. Everyone in the room with her was laughing, but when Lynch walked in he took one look and declared, “That’s it.” Henry Spencer’s signature hairstyle was the result of happenstance.
Stewart’s take on her own character seemed intrinsically correct to Lynch, too. “I asked David if it would be all right for me to make my own dress, because Mary seems like a girl who sews her own clothes, but not very well, and nothing fits right—we wanted the top to be kind of ill-fitting so you could see her bra strap falling off her shoulder,” Stewart recalled. “Mary has no confidence, which is why she’s so stooped and closed in, and she has ear infections. Before we’d shoot, David always made a drippy ear infection in the outside of my right ear. It never showed, but we knew it was there.
“I have no idea why David thought I was right for the part. David casts people very strangely, and he doesn’t care what your background is and never makes actors read. He meets you and talks to you about wood or whatever and sees what he needs. And the way he worked with actors on Eraserhead is the same way he works with actors now,” said Stewart, who went on to appear in all three seasons of Twin Peaks. “He’s very private with actors and never gives you direction when other people are listening. He comes up to you very quietly and whispers in your ear. It’s real confidential direction.”
Lynch is big on rehearsal, and although Henry Spencer doesn’t seem to do much, it took considerable effort to achieve that effect; Lynch choreographed Henry’s movements so intricately that the slightest gesture is fraught with meaning. Reflecting on his working relationship with Lynch, Nance recalled that “we had these long, strange conversations, skull sessions, and things would reveal themselves a lot as we went along. And Henry was very easy. It was like putting on a comfortable suit to put on that character. I would put on the coat and tie and there was Henry.”5
The cast for Eraserhead was small, but the crew was even smaller and often came down to just Coulson. “I did everything from rolling paper to make it look like the elevator was moving to pushing the dolly,” said Coulson, who worked as a waitress at the time and often contributed tips and food to the production. “Fred was my mentor and he taught me how to shoot stills and be a camera assistant. I was also the courier to the lab that processed our film. We had to have it in by a certain time, and I’d get in the VW Bug and speed over to Seward Street in the middle of the night to get it to Mars Baumgarten, this great guy who worked there on the night shift. Because we worked long hours we had meals at the stables, and I cooked everything on a little hot plate with a frying pan. It was almost always the same food because David usually likes to eat only one thing, and it was grilled cheese or egg salad sandwiches then.”
Eraserhead was beginning to consume Lynch’s life, but throughout 1972 his ties to his family remained relatively sturdy. “We had a round oak table in the dining room, and for my birthday David and Jen got all this mud and piled it up into a peak on the table, and carved nooks and caves into it, and made clay figures and stuck them in there,” recalled Reavey. “I loved it. We had to eat in the living room with plates in our laps for quite a while because nobody wanted to dismantle the mound. It was on the table for several months.”
There were momentary diversions, but Eraserhead was the central concern in the Lynch household from the moment he began working on it. “Maybe this is a testament to my father’s brilliance as a director, but he convinced us that Eraserhead was the secret of happiness and he was just letting us in on it,” said Jennifer Lynch. “I was on that set a lot, and Eraserhead was just part of my childhood. I thought it was great and I didn’t realize there was anything different about my childhood until I was ten or eleven years old. I never felt like my father was a weirdo and I was always proud of him. Always.”
Lynch felt his cast and crew should be paid, so each of them received twenty-five dollars a week for the first two years of the shoot. (By the time the film wrapped, he’d been forced to cut salaries to $12.50.) It was a modest wage, but Lynch still went through the money the AFI had given him by spring 1973. He was told he could continue using school equipment but no additional funds would be forthcoming, and Eraserhead went on a forced hiatus that continued intermittently for almost a year.
“David was always trying to get money for the film, and I gave him some when I came back from doing Badlands,” said Fisk, who was the art director on Terrence Malick’s debut film of 1973. (Lynch and Splet introduced Fisk to Malick.) “I was used to making a hundred dollars a week and suddenly I was making a lot more, and it almost felt like free money. Over the years I probably gave David around four thousand dollars, and I’ve gotten all that back and more.”
Co-starring in Badlands was actress Sissy Spacek, who married Fisk a year after they met and was ushered into the world of Eraserhead. “When I met Jack on Badlands, he told me all about his best friend, David, and as soon as we got back to L.A. he took me to meet him,” Spacek recalled. “We went in the dead of night and everything was shrouded in intrigue and secrecy. David was living in the stables at the AFI, where he’d shoot all night and his crew would lock him in on the set during the day and he’d sleep. You had to knock a certain number of times and have the key, and it was like getting into Fort Knox.
“Jack was the first real artist I’d ever met,” Spacek continued, “and he introduced me to all these incredibly talented people, including David. I’ve always felt grateful that I met them at a time in my life and career when they were able to influence me. David and Jack are artists through and through—they throw themselves into every aspect of their work, they would never sell out, ever, and they love creating things.”6
After having returned to the East Coast, Fisk’s sister Mary was back in L.A. by 1973. She was in a brief marriage at the time and lived in Laurel Canyon for six months prior to separating from her husband and returning east. While in L.A., she’d worked for Nash Publishing and helped Reavey get a job there as a receptionist.
Lynch did various odd jobs during the hiatus, and money that allowed the shoot to resume materialized in fits and starts; the irregular shooting schedule coupled with the painstaking craftsmanship Lynch brought to his work made patience an essential quality for his cast and crew. Lynch’s team had to be ready to jump back into action at a moment’s notice and committed enough to wait while he perfected things on set.
“We did lots of waiting, and that’s one reason Jack Nance was the ideal person to play Henry—Jack could sit quietly for a very long time,” said Stewart. “David was always busy fiddling with a prop or something, and Catherine was busy doing whatever David wanted her to do, and Jack and I sat around and waited and nobody got crabby. Everybody was going through domestic ins and outs and we all became friends.”
Approximately a year into the shoot, Doreen Small began living on the Eraserhead set. “It was a long commute from Topanga,” she recalled, “and I wound up having a personal relationship with David—it happened one day in the music room and it was an intense relationship. My dad died during the shoot and my mom moved to Santa Monica, and David would sometimes stay with us. We all became very close, and my mom would buy clothes and art supplies for David.”
Needless to say, Lynch’s home life was unraveling and he and Reavey were headed toward a separation. “In Philadelphia I’d been an integral part of everything David did, but in L.A. that changed,” said Reavey. “I wasn’t part of it anymore, and there were all these assistant-type girls around—there was no place for me. My sister came to L.A. and visited the set, and she came back and said, ‘You know they’re all in love with him,’ and I said, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ I was very naïve.”
This was a stressful period for Lynch. He was making a film he passionately believed in but money was a constant problem, and his personal life was becoming complicated.
