David Lynch Appreciation: A Visionary For All Time

I never really got the chance to interview David Lynch, but I can vividly recall the one time I actually talked to him, something I recounted in my Deadline coverage of the American Film Institute’s celebration of its 50th anniversary of the AFI Conservatory at its fabled Greystone Mansion where it all began in 1969 and was housed there until 1981 when it moved. The date was September 19, 2019 and many graduates of those 50 years were gathered together for the party. One of them was Lynch from the class of 1970 (the second AFI class), who I spotted wandering alone through the hallowed halls of this mansion, clearly in a nostalgic moment for a filmmaker who I always thought of as never looking back. This day he was looking back, revisiting his cinematic beginnings and telling me he hadn’t been to Greystone in at least 25 years “or ever”, he couldn’t recall. However he perfectly described to me just exactly where the projection booth was, and all the equipment it had from 16MM to 70MM. As I wrote then Lynch famously slept down the hill in the Greystone Stables while he was making his first feature, the cult classic Eraserhead under the auspices of AFI (new AFI head Jean Firstenberg joked that night when she saw Eraserhead she “didn’t know what we had gotten into!”) Lynch was a renaissance man of many talents and for this celebration he showed up in a shirt full of paint, having spent the day doing one of his many passions as a painter. That was David Lynch. He died today at age 78.

His acceptance speech for a long deserved Honorary Oscar just a month later was also very David Lynch. Sure he wore a tux with no visible paint for the occasion, but his speech was the shortest in the history of the Governors Awards, and probably one of the shortest for any Oscar acceptance: “Thank you very much to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Thank you for this honor. And to all the people who helped me along the road. Congratulations to the other honorees tonight. Everyone have a great night, ” and pointing to the Oscar statuette on his arm he added, “You have a very interesting figure. Goodnight.”

Lynch kept the mystery of all the work that led to this moment intact with that succinct thank you after receiving a massive standing ovation. In a career that included only 10 features, and a landmark TV series, Twin Peaks (1990-91 and a reboot in 2017), somehow this highest award from the industry seemed way overdue. Lynch was always admired by the Academy’s directors branch having nominated him three times including The Elephant Man in 1980, Blue Velvet in 1986, and Mulholland Drive in 2001, the latter two receiving only a directing nomination and nothing else. It is not surprising since Lynch was an innovator, a filmmaker who chose dark, dreamy, not always comprehensible paths to tell his often surreal tales and that can have some people scratching their heads. I always thought Alfred Hitchcock who died in 1980, just as Lynch was getting rolling, would be his biggest fan. Both will live on throughout cinema history known for a certain style whether it is “Hitchcockian” or “Lynchian” , distinctive and apart from everyone else to the point their work is, for the most part, instantly recognizable and for all time.

I will never forget seeing Blue Velvet at a press screening in 1986 when I was the movie segment producer at Entertainment Tonight. It was at what was known as the DEG Screening Room in Beverly Hills at the offices of Dino De Laurentiis the producer (it is now the Wilshire Screening Room at what is otherwise turned into a medical building). I walked out into blazing sunlight on Wilshire Blvd after the credits rolled and was immediately approached by one of the film’s publicists, Roger Armstrong, who eagerly asked what I thought. PR people often do this after screenings and I am usually not speechless, but this time I was. I couldn’t really talk. What I had seen was unlike anything. It was a film for days I couldn’t get out of my head like a weird dream I kept reliving, a dark mystery like no other which is why almost 40 years later, that first screening is so vivid for me.

Seeing Mulholland Drive at its 10:30 pm premiere in Cannes in 2001 was another Lynchian memory and he wound up taking the Best Director prize at the fest that year for a movie he rightfully never chose to interpret or discuss its meaning(s). So MGM dancing star Ann Miller shows up out of the blue with dog poop, no worries. But when I can forget entire movies hours after seeing them these days, I still remember scenes like that that come out of nowhere and are still with me like I am still sitting in the palais watching it for the first time. Seen now Mulholland Drive stands as one of the great L. A. movies, and turns up on Sight And Sound surveys regularly in the top ten of the greatest films ever made. Not sure about that, but like Lynch in his zone it will be interpreted and reinterpreted forever.

It is somehow ironic that Lynch would die at a time when Denis Villeneuve continues to win high praise for his Dune movies. Lynch’s 1984 stab at Frank Herbert’s sci fi novel was an unmitaged disaster, one where he didn’t have final cut and much of his footage removed before it got released and became a box office and critical flop. The light at the end of that sad tunnel was that Lynch’s deal including two other films for producer Dino De Laurentiis and one of them became the aforementioned Blue Velvet two years later. It is odd we have the sad journey of Lynch’s Dune to thank for that but a good thing indeed.

I also have to say I got great joy out of seeing Lynch as an actor when Steven Spielberg convinced the reluctant director to actually play one of the greatest directors of all, John Ford, in a scene at the end of Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fablemans. He was pitch perfect.

That Lynch could also take his distinctive style to network television with Twin Peaks in an era well before streaming where it would land today, is also a tribute to a filmmaker with a vision like few others. In fact to only call him a filmmaker is ridiculous. He was a painter from the beginning, a visual artist, a musician, a designer, an author, and a major proponent of transcendental meditation, among other things that will let his legacy live on many avenues.

It is hopeful to say that the industry will continue to welcome visionaries like David Lynch, but it is also safe to say there will never be another David Lynch.