Newspaper Article

A DARK LENS ON AMERICA

arts., Richard B. Woodward: Richard B. Woodward writes frequently about the

1990

Overview

Talking to Lynch can be like interviewing a teen-ager. He uses words such as ''neat,'' ''thrilling'' and ''coolest,'' as in describing two of his favorite directors: ''Kubrick is the coolest, and Marty'' -Scorsese - ''is right next door.'' Lynch shies away from critical analysis, either for fear that he will jam the flow of images or because he honestly doesn't know where(Continued on Page 30) his ideas come from. ''They're based in abstraction or nature,'' he says vaguely, although a high sugar intake is another explanation. Isabella Rossellini, who played the tortured [Dorothy Vallens] in ''Blue Velvet'' and is now Lynch's romantic companion, calls him ''seraphic, blissed. Most people have strange thoughts, but they rationalize them. David doesn't translate his images logically, so they remain raw, emotional. Whenever I ask him where his ideas come from, he says it's like fishing. He never knows what he's going to catch.'' ''It's not a hardship for me. It's a hardship only if I see I'm hurting other people. But maybe they were holding me back.'' (He has remained on good terms with his former wives and his children. Next month, Jennifer Lynch, his 21-year-old daughter, will make her debut as a director with ''Boxing Helena,'' a film she wrote herself. The story of a girl whose boyfriend cuts off her arms and legs and keeps her in a box, it is, in her words, ''an obsessive modern-day love story.'' Asked about how much this plot may owe to the influence of her father, she says: ''Actually, he was quite offended by the subject matter. But he thinks I've written a hell of a script.'') ''Eraserhead'' took five years to complete because Lynch kept running out of money; it was finished with help from many people, including his parents. In 1977, it opened at the Cinema Village in New York for a midnight show and, after a slow start, became a hit on on the horror circuit in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London. That same year, Lynch married [Jack Fisk]'s sister Mary (in 1982 they had a son, Austin) and, living in Los Angeles, began what could be called his ''shed building'' or ''early Bob's Big Boy'' period. As his only job he had taken a paper route delivering The Wall Street Journal and, with wood he collected on the streets, he built L-shaped, gable-roofed, and Egyptian-style additions to the garage in which they lived. He was perfectly content; he had discovered sugar, which he calls ''granulated happiness.'' But two years later, restlessness took him back to film as one of the writers of ''The Elephant Man.'' After every studio turned down the script, [Mel Brooks] decided that his company, Brooksfilms, would produce it. When Lynch's name came up as a possible director, Brooks went to see ''Eraserhead.'' After the screening, with Lynch waiting nervously outside, Brooks came out yelling ''You're a madman, I love you, you're in.''

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Beaumont, Jeffrey / BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION / Cage, Nicolas / Fisk, Jack / Lynch, David / LYNCH, DAVID (BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH) / MacLachlan, Kyle / MOTION PICTURES / WOODWARD, RICHARD B