Tag Archives: David Lynch

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Song of the Day #6,138: ‘Wicked Game’ – Chris Isaak

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.”

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Song of the Day #6,137: ‘In Dreams’ – Roy Orbison

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.

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Song of the Day #6,136: ‘Main Title’ – Toto

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.

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Song of the Day #6,135: ‘The Elephant Man Theme’ – John Morris

David Lynch followed the surrealist oddness of Eraserhead with something unexpected: a stately biopic. That film was 1980’s The Elephant Man, based on the life of Englishman Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who was displayed in a sideshow act in 19th century London before coming under the care of a kindly but ambitious surgeon.

Merrick becomes a high society sensation, even socializing with members of the royal family, but continues to face ridicule and abuse.

Lynch directed the film (and reworked the script) after earning the praise of Mel Brooks, who owned the rights. Brooks, a big fan of Eraserhead, withheld his name from the production credits so the film wouldn’t be confused for a comedy.

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Song of the Day #6,134: ‘In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)’ – Lauren Near

I try to write my blog entries a week or two in advance, so this is hardly the space for breaking news. But even by my standards, I’m a little embarrassed by how late the upcoming posts are arriving.

Visionary director David Lynch died on January 16 at the age of 78. A couple of weeks later, I started watching (or re-watching) his ten feature films in order with the aim of writing about them here as a tribute to the legendary filmmaker.

It took me about a month to get them all in, and by then I was knee deep in my 2024 movie coverage. I jumped into the 1976 Decades posts after that, so I’m only now getting to Lynch. My apologies to the late master.

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