to seal the deal with Lynch. The official handshake took place at Schwab’s Pharmacy, which is the setting for a scene in Sunset Boulevard and thus had particular meaning for Lynch.
As Eraserhead began making its way safely into port, Lynch’s personal life continued to be messy. “One day not long after Ben agreed to take Eraserhead, David told me he wanted to be with Martha Bonner,” said Fisk. “David and I had moved in together by that point, and I said, ‘Fine, I’m moving back to Virginia,’ and I left. Three days after I left, David called and asked me to marry him. My mother was against it because he had no money, and my brother didn’t think I should marry him, either. He sat me down and said, ‘David is different, Mary, the marriage won’t last,’ but I didn’t care. David has this incredible love inside of him, and when you’re with him you feel like you’re the most important person in the world. Just the tone of his voice and the amount of caring he gives people is extraordinary.”
On June 21st, 1977, Lynch and Fisk married in a small ceremony at the church his parents attended in Riverside. “We were married on a Tuesday and David’s father had arranged to have the flowers from the Sunday service saved for us, so we had flowers, and he also hired an organist,” said Fisk. “We had a traditional wedding, then went on a honeymoon of one night in Big Bear.”
Sixteen days later Lynch registered a treatment with the Writers Guild for what he hoped would be his next film, Ronnie Rocket, then he and Fisk headed to New York City. Lynch lived in Barenholtz’s apartment there for three months while he worked with a lab, attempting to get a satisfactory release print of Eraserhead. Barenholtz paid to clear the rights to the Fats Waller music that plays an integral role in setting the mood of the film, and it was good to go. It premiered at Cinema Village in Manhattan that fall, with a birth announcement serving as the invitation to its official opening.
Getting a distributor for Eraserhead did nothing to solve Lynch’s money problems, and after returning from New York he spent the next few months living in Riverside, where he worked with his father remodeling a house they planned to flip. While Lynch was in Riverside, Fisk worked in the property-management division of Coldwell Banker and visited him on weekends. “We lived with David’s parents on and off for a while after we got married,” said Fisk. “He and his dad would come home from working on that house and his mother would rush to the door with her arms open and hug David and his dad. They’re a very loving family. The profit on the renovated house was seven thousand dollars, and David’s parents gave it all to him. They worried about him because they didn’t see the dreams he saw for himself—and yet they helped fund The Grandmother. It’s extraordinary that they would look at a son making work they could never grasp and support it anyway.”
At the end of 1977 Lynch was still in a black hole financially, so he converted his post-production facility into a workshop and began what he’s referred to as his “shed-building” phase, which means exactly that—he was building sheds and picking up odd carpentry jobs. Discouraging though this may sound, Lynch’s hopes were undimmed. “He was excited,” said Mary Fisk. “He’d finished the film, it had been at Filmex, and there was a buzz. I’d wake up to David and he’d have this big smile, ready for the day. He was ready for the next thing.
“Our social life revolved around spending time with the meditation community at the center,” she continued. “We were there every Friday night, and the people there became our closest friends. We’d meet up with them and go to movies—I saw lots of movies with David—but we weren’t caught up in the movie business at all.”
Meanwhile, Eraserhead was quietly becoming a word-of-mouth sensation on the midnight movie circuit and was in the early days of what turned out to be a four-year run at Los Angeles theater the Nuart. Eraserhead came along at an opportune time in that precisely the sort of hip audience capable of appreciating it was coalescing in Los Angeles then. Radical performance art was in its heyday, punk rock was gathering steam, and outré publications like Wet magazine, Slash, and the L.A. Reader, which celebrated all things experimental and underground, were flourishing. People from these factions of the city filled the seats at the Nuart and embraced Lynch as one of their own. John Waters encouraged his fans to see Eraserhead, Stanley Kubrick loved the film, and Lynch’s name started to get around.
He was still an outsider, but Lynch’s life had been transformed. He had a spiritual practice that anchored him, he had a new wife, and he’d made a film that was exactly what he set out to make. “I stayed real true to my original idea with Eraserhead,” Lynch has said, “to the point that there are scenes in the movie that feel like they’re more inside my head than they are on the screen.” And, finally, he had a handful of industry insiders and thousands of moviegoers who understood what he’d achieved with the film.
“David connects with a lot more people than you’d expect, and there’s something about his vision that people identify with,” concluded Jack Fisk. “The first time I saw Eraserhead was at a midnight screening at the Nuart, and the audience was riveted and knew all the dialogue. I thought, Oh my God! He’s found an audience for his stuff!”
JACK, JACK’S DOG Five, and my brother, John, drove cross country from Philly with me, and the drive west was beautiful. I remember one point when we were driving down into this gigantic valley and the sky was so big that when you came up over the ridge you could see four different kinds of weather at the same time. There was sunshine in one part of the sky and a violent storm in another part. We drove thirty hours straight to Oklahoma City, where we stayed with my aunt and uncle, then the second day we drove a long way and pulled off the road at night in New Mexico. It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and we saw a horse tied to one of the bushes. When we woke up the next morning there were Indians in pickup trucks driving in circles around us. We were on an Indian reservation and they probably wondered why the hell we were on their property, and I don’t blame them. We didn’t know we were on a reservation.
We got into L.A. after midnight on the third day. We drove down Sunset Boulevard, then turned at the Whisky a Go Go and went to Al Splet’s place, where we spent the night. The next morning I woke up and that’s when I discovered L.A. light. I almost got run over, because I was standing in the middle of San Vicente Boulevard—I couldn’t believe how beautiful the light was! I loved Los Angeles right off the bat. Who wouldn’t? So I’m standing out there looking at the light and I look over and there’s 950 San Vicente with a for rent sign. Within a couple of hours I rented that house for two hundred twenty dollars a month.
I’d sold the Ford Falcon back in Philly and I needed a car, so Jack, John, and I walked down to Santa Monica Boulevard and stuck our thumbs out. We got a ride with this actress and she said, “All the used-car lots are on Santa Monica Boulevard down in Santa Monica and I’m going that way, so I’ll take you right there.” We went in and out of a few places, then my brother spotted a 1959 Volkswagen with faded gray paint. My brother knows about cars, so he looked it over and said, “This is a good car.” I’d just won second prize in the Bellevue Film Festival for The Grandmother and the prize was two hundred and fifty dollars, so I used that money to buy the car, which cost maybe two hundred. I needed insurance and right across the street is State Farm, so I walk up these wooden steps to this nice guy on the second floor and he took care of the insurance. In a day I had a car with insurance and a house. It was unreal. Lots of people lived with us in that house on and off—Herb Cardwell was there, and Al Splet, and my brother, and Jack was with us for a while, too. It didn’t bother me having all those people living with us,
