David Lynch was "Jimmy Stewart from Mars," to hear Mel Brooks describe the sometimes polarizing, often confusing, and always intriguing writer-director, dead today at 78.
Brooks launched the young Lynch's career into the mainstream by hiring him to helm 1980's "The Elephant Man," starring the late John Hurt as title character Joseph Merrick, Anthony Hopkins, and Anne Bancroft. An 11-year-old me went to see it out of morbid curiosity about Merrick and elephantiasis and left the theater blown away. I wasn't the only one. While "The Elephant Man" failed to win any Oscars, it was nominated for eight, including four of the biggies — Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay.
If Brooks seemed like an unlikely choice to produce a period drama, don't think he didn't know it. Brooks removed his name from the credits and allowed Lynch's to shine. Brooks is 20 years older than Lynch, closing in on 100, and still working. Wild.
Brooks wasn't the only unlikely celebrity to give Lynch a helping hand. His first full-length feature, "Eraserhead," was financed in part by Sissy Spacek and her husband, Jack Fisk. The movie took five years to film, largely due to lack of money and for a while (IIRC), Lynch was living in a rental storage unit — locked in by a friend at night and let back out in the morning.
"Erasehead" is the best movie I've only ever watched one time. Set in a world that's part "1984," part 19th-century industrial hellscape, the film deals with madness and fear of fatherhood in ways — sometimes almost comic — that only Lynch could. It isn't for everybody and even for someone like me who dives deep into dark and/or experimental movies, "Eraserhead" was almost too much.
If "The Elephant Man" took Lynch out of arthouse flick obscurity and into the Oscar spotlight, his next project nearly doomed him.
"Dune" was a $40 million mess. One of the most expensive movies made in the '80s, Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction masterpiece was a commercial and critical failure. The film was visually unique and often stunning — and featured some inspired casting choices like Sting as villain Feyd Rautha. Other casting choices were comically awful, like Kyle McLachlan as Paul Atriedes. McLachlan's goofy, Lynch-like charm was a terrible fit for the son of a duke and desert messiah.
But then Lynch came back just two years later with "Blue Velvet," starring McLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper. Disturbing, funny, and disturbingly funny, "Blue Velvet" is this amateur critic's pick as the best movie of the '80s.
By the time Lynch wrapped up the '80s and entered the '90s with "Wild at Heart" and "Twin Peaks," he was among the oddest hybrids in entertainment history: a cult director of popular entertainment. While his output from then on had its ups and downs (let's not talk about "Inland Empire"), he remained as weird and weirdly approachable as ever. Lynch was both an earnest Eagle Scout from Missoula and the man who gave us Sailor and Lula's surrealistic road trip to hell.
"Jimmy Stewart from Mars," indeed.
For reasons known only to him, Lynch took to X on random Fridays to celebrate that it was "Friday once again!" in videos like this one.
While David Lynch continues to enjoy his holiday break, today let's enjoy last year's last Friday video pic.twitter.com/PCEg1HDRRB
— David Lynch Saying It's A Friday Once Again (@DLEveryFriday) December 30, 2022
The videos stopped after his health went into rapid decline last summer, but tomorrow will be Friday once again, my first in a very long time without David Lynch.
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