The week of April 27, 1985, found charity single ‘We Are the World‘ holding on to its #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, with Madonna’s ‘Crazy For You’ right on its heels at #2.
In the third spot was R&B group DeBarge with their most successful song, ‘Rhythm of the Night.’ It peaked in that position, unable to overtake the formidable duo above it.
Throwing back to the week of April 26, 1975, we find country crooner B.J. Thomas atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.’
This was Thomas’ second #1 hit on this chart, following his recording of ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On MY Head,’ which appeared in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
After Blue Velvet, David Lynch had his greatest success to date in a different medium: television. His show Twin Peaks, a quirky mystery series, became an unlikely hit.
Riding high on that triumph, he chose as his next film as adaptation of a crime novel by Barry Gifford. Lynch was initially asked to produce the film for his friend Monty Montgomery to direct, but once he read the material he claimed it for himself.
The result, Wild at Heart, is a violent, erotic, sometimes goofily earnest thrill ride — a Wizard of Oz homage that Lynch described as “a picture about finding love in Hell.”
The failure of Dune knocked David Lynch down quite a few pegs, and the budget of his next film was a meager $6 million, a far cry from the $40 million he spent on the sci-fi bomb.
“I was down so far that anything was up,” he said about his time in the cinematic doghouse. “So it was just a euphoria. And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment.”
That experiment took the form of a story that had been percolating in Lynch’s brain for more than a decade, a seedy tale of suburban America’s dark underbelly. And with 1986’s Blue Velvet, he delivered an unsettling triumph that embodied the term Lynchian.
After the avant garde Eraserhead and the Oscar-nominated drama The Elephant Man, the next logical step for David Lynch was obviously… a space opera?
Lynch was offered the reins of The Return of the Jedi but instead opted to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, a famously dense book that previous directors David Lean, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Ridley Scott had failed to get off the ground.
Lynch initially conceived of a story spanning two films but eventually delivered a rough cut of a single film running more than four hours. He planned to pare it down to three, but producer Dino De Laurentiis insisted on a final cut closer to two.
Meet Me In Montauk 