FROM THE VAULT: David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that gives you the little known, fascinating facts and figures
behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We
are your two guides to the deep dive. I'm Alex
Heigel and I'm Jordan Runta. And Jordan I sat in
thought for a long time about how I was going
to introduce this, but there is no introducing what we're

(00:31):
talking about today. There is no introducing David Lynch's Eraserhead,
which turned forty five this year. There are two camps
to this movie. You have seen it and are haunted
by it. And even if you can't stand this film,
it will haunt you to some degree. Or you've never
seen it and are therefore only biding your time until
you become haunted by it.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yeah, they used to sell lapel buttons that just read Eraserhead.
I saw it, and that about sums it up. Lynch
has repeatedly said that he will never reveal his intended
meeting for this what I guess I'll just call a
lucid nightmare, saying only that it's a dream of dark
and troubling things and you can say that again. Most
critics describe it as an abstract meditation on urban isolation, fatherhood,

(01:14):
and sexual repression, but Freud called it the feel good
film of the year.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
I will get into this later. I refuse to believe
that the beating of this film is as oblique as
he would like it to be. It seems pretty straightforward
to me. But we're putting the head ahead of the eraser. Now,
that was terrible. I apologize for that. Jordan. Are you
a David Lynch guy capitol d LG No?

Speaker 1 (01:39):
I just his daily YouTube weather reports and his guest
spots on Louis as the comedy coach. I went to
NYU for film, and I think that just kind of
spoiled him for me because I knew Lynch people. I
knew a guy in class who literally had the words
club Celensio from a Holland Drive tattooed on his wrists.
So I too much David Lynch in my life. Sure,

(02:01):
which is weird because I didn't watch much of it, But.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Just well, wait, what have what? What of it? Have
you watched Mulholland Drive in school? And really that was it?
I know? The worst? No? Oh, I'm so excited for this, Folks.
Let it be known that Jordan pitched this, I believe
with the intention that I would not take him up
on it, and he's regretted ever since.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, I'd never seen it, and then I watched it
for the first time about a week ago, and I
haven't slept since.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
But you know, why do you? Yeah, why do you
love David Lynch?

Speaker 1 (02:31):
I have? There are three reasons why I love David Lynch.
Like me, he's a massive Beatles fan, and he attended
their first ever concert in the United States in Washington,
d C.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
In February of nineteen sixty four, so that's cool.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
He also spent his fifteenth birthday in front of the
US Capitol watching the inauguration of JFK with his Scout
troop and heigel like you, he's an Eagle Scout.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
We don't talk about that.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
And finally, when he was in college in Boston, he
was the roommate of Jay Giles band singer Peter Wolfe
aka the guy who sang Centerfold and Freeze Frame, but
apparently Lynch kicked him out of the dorm because he
was too weird. He was too weird for David Lynch.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
I love that the popular log line with David Lynch
is Jimmy Stewart on acid right, because he's like this
midwestern you know, if you will see, if you put
me at ease enough, I might bust out the David
Lynch impression. Oh woh, but yeah, I would be hard
pressed to think of another person so genuinely avant garde

(03:32):
and bizarre who has had such an impact on mainstream
American cinema in such a short amount of time. I mean,
you think about Eraserhead. Eraser Head to Mulholland Drive is
like twenty five years in that neighborhood. I'm really bad
at that in that neighborhood. Yeah, that's wild. To coming
in within spitting distance of an oscar in a quarter

(03:53):
century of your career after this, that's nuts.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
I was shocked about how comparatively little he'd done. I mean,
for somebody who has, you know, such a legion of followers.
I was just very surprised that his cannon was not Yeah,
I was very very surprised by that.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
I didn't know that. But folks, enough banter. Yeah, we're
delaying the inevitable here, Yeah, join us now as we
take in the industrial wastelands of both Philadelphia and David
Lynch's subconscious pierce the veil of Jack Nance's haircut and
attempt on my part at least far too many Gordon
Cole impressions. Here's everything you didn't know about eraser Head Jordan.

(04:42):
In the late sixties. You might say that David Lynch
was at a crossroads. Never get sold every time, but
that crossroads was in Philadelphia. He's talked a lot about
how he had a very very happy childhood, a very
stable and happy childhood. Do we believe that, I kind
of do. I mean, we'll get into mel Brooks's what
mel Brooks thought of David Lynch later, but yeah, so's.

(05:05):
He bounced around the US a good bit. His dad
was in the USDA, and by the late sixties he's
been enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in
Philadelphia to study painting. Have you seen his paintings? His cartoons? Oh, well,
his cartoon.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
He had a cartoon in The Angriest Dog in the World, Yes,
the Los Angeles Daily Reader for like a decade, and
it's just still images of this dog, and it's always
prefaced by this thing. It's like this dog is so
angry that he can't move, he can't speak, he can't eat,
rigor mortis has set in, and it's just this still
images of this dog with like morbid thoughts, like what

(05:41):
if this is as good as it gets? It's pretty amazing.
So yes, I have seen that. Then his paintings. His
paintings are like Francis Bacon meets John Wayne Gacy.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Oh boy, I'm loving this already. Anyway, So he's there
to work on that aesthetic, and he marries a fellow student,
Peggy Reve in nineteen sixty seven, and she's the mother
of their daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer was born in nineteen sixty
eight and would go on to direct Boxing Helena, which
is a really bad movie. Anyway. This little nuclear family

(06:15):
is living in a North Philadelphia neighborhood called Fairmont, which
was not a great place to live at the time.
David Lynch's quotes about Philadelphia are their own art form.
I want to do a David Lynch style surrealist podcast
that's just me reading his quotes about Philadelphia. We lived cheap,
but the city was full of fear, he told Chris
Radley in a book called Lynch. On Lynch, a kid

(06:38):
was shot to death down the street. We were robbed twice,
had windows shot out, and a car stolen. The house
was first broken into only three days after we moved in,
and according to another Lynch site by Mike Hartman, called
the City of Absurdity, Lynch said that Erase Herhead was
born in Philadelphia, and my favorite quote, I had my

(07:00):
first thrilling thought in Philadelphia, which sounds like a Paul
Anka song.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
The less successful follow up till I left my heart
in San Francisco. I had my first thrilling thought in
Philadelphia talking about a racerhead. In later years, I think
it might have been in the Lynch and Lynch book,
he said. I call it my Philadelphia story. It just
doesn't have Jimmy Stewart in it.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
And that's for damn sure, I'm gonna get into it.
I lived at fourteenth and would right Kitty corner from
the Morgue. That's real industrial. There's my first Lynch. That
was good. That was really good. Thank you. It's a
tough one to nail too. I'm impressed you very flat
for that. It's very Western. You gotta unless it was

(07:41):
at five o'clock. There's nobody in that neighborhood, No one
lives there, And he says, I really do like that.
It's beautiful if you see it in the right way,
which is such a great thesis for so much of
his work with this industrial stuff. And it's beautiful if
you look at it in the right way. His roommate
at the time, a childhood friend named Jack Fisk, told
The New York Times in nineteen ninety that David would
dress up to visit the Morgue. Oh, I love it.

(08:06):
He was fascinated, and he would always wear at least
two ties, one for luck. Have you seen the set
photos of him around this time when he's wearing like
the big wide brimmed hat and like and three times
neck ties. Yeah. I saw a woman in the backyard
squawking like a chicken. No, it's going, it's getting away
from me. I saw a spopping that chicken. I saw

(08:31):
a grown woman grab her breast and speak like a baby,
complaining her nipples hurt. This kind of thing will set
you back. And hey, so we're hearing about it, all right,
We're gonna I gotta stop. I got a sub subjected
you to David Lynch quotes about Philadelphia. One time I
was walking around with it at night with a stick
with nails driven through it, and a squad car pulls

(08:51):
up alongside of me and he says, what have you
got there? And I showed this stick with nails driven
through it. He said, good for you, Bud, and took
off Jesus. So, now that we have the set and
setting of a raiser Head, it's important to know that
it was not his first choice for a project, based
on the strength of some early shorts that he did.
Around this time, Lynch had been accepted into the American

(09:13):
Film Institutes Center for Advanced Film Studies in nineteen seventy
in Beverly Hills, and while he was there, he studied
with the Czechoslovakian filmmaker named Frank Daniel.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, and you know, not a lot of people know this,
but Lynch actually moved to la after getting into a
fight on the basketball court with two guys who were
up to no good making trouble in his neighborhood. So
he went to live with some family members in bel Air.
He didn't I'm sure I'll cut that out if I
really committed to it.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Something had come but No, this is gets into like
David Lynch's thing about being like, that's not what the
movie's about, but it's like, obviously what the movies about.
He had a script for a film called Garden Back,
which is really bizarre obviously, but it's about infidelity because
he had cheated on Peggy, I believe repeatedly. But yeah,

(10:04):
tell us about garden Back. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
A lot of these characters were inspired by characters in
his paintings, which we touched on earlier. Is that before
he was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he
studied in Boston at the School of the Museum of
Fine Arts. So he's very accomplished painter and musician. Like
he almost sat during breaks of filming.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
He used to like play trumpet, just like for the
heck of it with Have you heard his record Crazy
Clown Time? I haven't it? Is it what I imagine?
It's weird, it's weird, imagine it's just weird. A lot
of the quotes were taken from this come from Eraserhead
comma The David Lynch Files, Volume one, the full story

(10:44):
of one of the strangest films ever made by a
guy named Kenneth George Godwin, really incredible book. But it's
funny given that Lynch became such an iconoclass because there
was a lot of interest in him at Afi at
the time. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who is Yes, Zoe's dad
and her mom is in Twin Peaks. She's Mama Heyward.

(11:05):
She's Doc Heyward's wife who's in the wheelchair. So Caleb
introduces Lynch to a twentieth century Fox producer who wanted
to option Garden Back from a short into a feature,
and the process of doing this, and these negotiations and
talks exasperated Lynch so much that he quit. I mean,

(11:26):
he has in various interviews he talks about basically the
storming into the Dean's office. Yeah, I'd be like, I'm
done with this, and then getting home and Peggy being
like they can call and non stop. Yeah, like he was.
He was, they really wanted him, and she's crazy.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
I mean, but I cannot imagine a film institution doing
that now. Apparently the deed even said to him, Hey,
if you're this unhappy, we're doing something wrong here.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
What do you want? What's wrong?

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Which is I cannot imagine getting a vote of confidence
like that. It's really artistic institution. Now there's something that
I mean, you know you.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Alluded to this with the weather reports, but there is
something magnetic about him. Yeah. The fact that he was
able to get people on board with this his ridiculous
ideas is really a testament to his charisma. I don't know,
powers of persuasion anyway. Garden Back crashes and burns, Lynch
almost quits the afi and Daniels is like, whatever we

(12:21):
got to do, let's do it. And that turns out
to be Eraserhead twenty one page shooting script is where
this comes from. And there's a great documentary from two
thousand and one that is called eraser Head Stories. It's
just him talking into a mic, pretty tight close up
on his shoulders and head, and at one point the
log lady Catherine Colson, who is part of this film,
we'll talk about her. She's like conference called in and

(12:43):
half of it is just him like yelling at her,
like on speakerphone off the mic, like yeah, yeah, you
did cut his hair for that, didn't you. How many
years were you on this, Kathy? Yeahh oh oh, I
don't remember that.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
Oh, and I can't he in like very big text.
At the beginning of it, it said that this is documentary's
directed by him as well, which I think is hilarious
that it's just a tideshot of him and an old
nineties speakerphone.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
What. I can't remember when I got the idea, when
the word eraser Head or any part of the idea
came to me first, He says, I can't remember if
it was in Philadelphia or when I came to California.
Don't remember writing the script, and don't remember the ideas
coming in. It all came from Philadelphia, but I don't
remember when. And it's I mean, not only was he

(13:35):
at a crossroads, but he was at a low point
when he started filming this in seventy two with a
projected runtime of forty two minutes. Dorian Small, who's Eraserheads
production manager, there's a theme in David Lynch's movies in
which he has affairs with the women he's working on.
Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet was one of them, and

(13:55):
so he split from Peggy around this time because he
was having an affair with Dorian Small. And Jennifer was
born with clubbed feet, which is a deformity that I
guess was a lot more common back then, and you
had to wear like corrective footwear. I don't know where
I'm going with this. The point is is that this
movie is almost certainly about the dissolution of his relationship

(14:18):
and having a daughter who had medical challenges when she
was born, and his complete uninterest in being a father, disinterest,
lack of interest, I don't know, but he's you know,
if you're listening to him or Jennifer. Apparently that is
not what it's about, because she said I don't think
David credits that directly as where eraser Head comes from.

(14:39):
But then she says, it's not just that, it's a
million other things.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
So I just think that the fact that she calls
her dad David is very interesting. Yeah, I mean, I imagine,
despite what he says, that fatherhood and the anxieties surrounding
it was a major inspiration. But I've also read that
some of these other things that they mentioned could include
the Kafka novel Metamorphosis, for which I think he actually

(15:04):
wrote a script adaptation, and the Goggle short story from
eighteen thirty six, The Nose. Both of those may have
helped sow the seeds of this idea for eraser Head.
The Kapka influence is really apparent in the character of Henry,
who is just like so many of Kafka's characters, just
simultaneously bemused by the world and terrified of it and

(15:25):
extremely paranoid. And Lynch himself is copped to the Kafka thing,
and he said that in I think it was in
Lynch on Lynch that he's quote the one artist I
feel could be my brother.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, And so many of these characters are just like
caught up in institutions and machinery bigger than them. That's
actually really interesting because like so much of you think about,
like the Trial and like a lot of the other
Kofka stuff, that's just about like being stuck in some
kind of institutional machine that is far bigger than you.
And David Lynch literalizes it with people actually stuck in machine. Well,

(16:01):
I mean just.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Even the famous picture of Henry, the main character in
eraser Head, that's you know, on T shirts and posters
and dorm rooms across the globe, just that look on
his face that's completely unidentifiable. Is that mix of amusement
and paranoia and terror, which is I just think is

(16:22):
interesting because that's such a hallmark of Kafka's work. I mean,
that's not an especially groundbreaking thought for you know, you know,
for either of Lynch scholar but or a Kafa scholar,
neither of I. I was an English major, so theoretically
I should have closer I should be closer to it
than you, and I am not. David Foster Wallace was
a big David Lynch fan, and he yeah, he read

(16:43):
about I remember on of the first things I read
from him as that essay about Lost Highway. Yeah, and
I think he described Lynchi and as the unbelievably grotesque
existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
There it is speaking of Jack Nance, David went through
his spiritual crisis when he was making Eraser head Nance
told the New York Times for that article we cited
earlier from nineteen ninety and Lynch has it's become a
meme at this point of David Lynch, the thing that says,
believe it or not, Eraser is my most spiritual work.

(17:14):
And somebody that the interviewer says, elaborate on that, and he says, no.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
I don't talk about that is the thing that he
usually says in these interviews that I've seen, I don't
talk about that.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
The other thing that I heard is that he opened
a Bible randomly and was inspired by a Biblical verse,
but he says he doesn't remember which one, or even
if it was the Old or New Testament. So you know,
we've had a lot of unreliable narrators on here. I
don't think Lynch is up there with Neil Young or
Jimmy Page, who are very interested in or Robert Planet even,

(17:45):
who are all very interested in their own hagiography. But
Lynch just does not seem to remember things or wants
to consciously obfuse skate anyway. The shoestring this thing is
made on is so fascinating to me. AFI gave him
ten thousand dollars to make this, but everything else on

(18:07):
this was done so close to the bone. He was
living at a property in Beverly Hills called Graystone Mansion
that was owned by the AFI and this this place
is its own weird vibe. It was built by the
oil tycoon Edward Doeny or Doheiney, I don't know. He
was the inspiration from Daniel Plainview in there will be blood,
and he gave it to his son ned who in

(18:29):
nineteen twenty nine died in a guest bedroom in a
murder suicide alongside his secretary Hugh Plunkett. And this thing
has been in everything. It would take less time for
us to name what it hasn't been in.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
I preferred to zero in on two in particular, that
this property has been featured in It's in The Big Lebowski.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
It's the other Jeffrey Lebowski's house. Mistere Lebowski is in
seclusion in the in the in the West Wings.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
I think all the interiors were filmed there for that,
and it was also used in the video for meatloafs.
I would do anything for love. I just love the
fact that David Lynch lived at this place. It costs
the equivalent of sixty three million dollars when it was built,
making it the most expensive home in California at the time,
and certainly one of the biggest. It's forty six thousand

(19:18):
square feet fifty five rooms. Thinking about where Lynch was
living in Philadelphia, and it's just an insane jump, but
you know, predicting the stinky cologne of death that would
follow this film for the next few years. Several people
associated with the eraser Head production, including star Jack Nance,

(19:39):
claimed to have seen the ghost of Ned Doheny while
they were filming. I think it's Doheny because I think
Doheiny the street in la is named.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
After him or to the family. I think, you know,
this is a crazy connection. My mind just made. David
Lynch loves milkshakes. What's the famous line from there will be?

Speaker 1 (19:55):
Oh my god, I drink your milk tree, Wow, drink
it run and I have a straw that reaches all.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
God. I love that movie. When he says this is
gonna be my gravestone when he goes, I don't know
how much longer I can keep doing it with these people.
He puts people. You hear the verbal air quotes around people.
I love it so much. It's bad. I see myself

(20:27):
and all these terrible characters, isn't it, Jordan, I'm the dad.
I'm the dad in a racer head. We don't talk
too much about the dinner scene, but I this is
the thing about this movie. Man. People were like, oh,
it's a surrealis well, it's a comedy, so much of
it until it gets really horrifying, and the baby. The
baby is the only thing that undercuts the comedy. But
that dinner scene is so funny. It's like Alish comedy

(20:49):
of manners or something. She has that weird seizure and
runs out of the room and he goes, she'll be
fine in a minute. It's very English. It's very like
a Joe Orton player or something. Yeah, all right, anyway,
so David Lynch is living in though there will be bloodhouse,
he's squatting, essentially, their blankets taped over the windows, and

(21:13):
it's this extended sort of subterranean part of the property
that stables, garages, staffed quarters, a hayloft, a greenhouse, and
he kind of commandeered it. He said, we had about
five or six rooms in this giant loft where all
of the sets were built, a minture soundstage, and a studio.
But there are some exteriors on.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
This Yeah, probably the most famous one at the beginning,
when he's kind of walking through this urban, white industrial wasteland.
It was filmed in a muddy lot which is now
the Beverly Center mall in Los Angeles, which is a
very very upscale establishment. So it's really funny that it
has this historical pedigree. It's even funnier considering how cheaply

(21:53):
this movie was shot. I mean they were literally it
was like the classic like they were they were wily
e coyote pulling the track up behind them and putting
it down in front of them, only run in reverse.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Because they would build this stuff. They would buy equipment,
tear the sets down, reconfigure the sets into other stuff,
and then whenever they were done using it, sell it.
Like Lynch talked about, he got this what's the big
editing bay thing called a movie movieola Moviola. Yeah, you
got the and then sold it when they were done,
so much of it. Catherine Colson we talked about this,

(22:23):
the log lady from Twin Peaks. She was married to
Jack Nance while the star of the movie. Yeah, and
she was a production manager on this, and so she
had done so much of this logwork or legwork, log work,
and she said, all of these rooms with the same
space with different sets built in. David really pretty much

(22:45):
did everything himself.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
And I guess he would later reuse a lot of
the chunks of the set for Twin Peaks in later years,
like the zigzag floor in the lobby of Henry's apartment
building or hotel, whatever the hell it is was the
same set piece that was used for the Red Room
in Twin Peaks. But yeah, Kevin Colson is kind of
the MVP of this production. In addition to working as
a waitress, which I think she gave like all of

(23:08):
her paychecks to the production, she held the mic boom,
she operated the cameras, she took on set photos, and
she catered.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
And she cut Jack Nance's hair, and she took over
David Lynch's paper route for him, which is the most
you're talking about. Jimmy Stewart on acid, David Lynch driving
around LA at four in the morning delivering papers. Wait,
we got more to say on that. Yeah, but I
love that he insisted on paying the actors. I think
that's so touching.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
I guess he gave him I think it was twenty
five dollars a week, and then when he ran out
of money, he insisted on giving them all a piece
of the film. And they worked out this deal on
Napkins during one of their trips to Bob's Big Boys
Diner from Milkshakes, which has a tie to Austin Powers.
Oh that previous episodes oh explain, Oh yeah, well explained

(24:00):
for the listeners. The Bob's Big Boy figurine is what
it's like a space It's like Doctor Evil spaceship or something.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
No, I'm trying to remember what it was used as. Yeah,
so they furnished this film. They did wardrobe from you know,
flea market Swap meets the Salvation Army Goodwill and Jack
Nansen Catherine Coleson gave their living room furniture up as
a set, so they went without it for months, five
years to shoot. Did they just not have living room

(24:27):
furniture for Yeah, I guess. The warehouse only costs about
thirty five or fifty dollars to build, but a lot
of other things cost money. Lynch said, So the front
of Mister and Missus X House, the which is not
even in the movie that much. It's like one establishing
shot of this house. The steps are styrofoam. There is
no porch at all, and when Henry walks up on that,

(24:48):
he is standing on a plane. And Lynch said, the
whole thing was barely held together.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah, I mean some of the flats, which are like
the walls that are used in sound stages to construct
you know, interior rooms. They Lynch would repair them with
paper mache, using newspapers from his paper root day job,
and a lot of like the art deco detailing on
the elevator and in Henry's lobby, like the apartment lobby
is all made out of wax.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
It's all stuff that David Lynch made out of wax.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
And also that it was really interesting they dip the
white sheets into tea to make it so that, you know,
in black and white, it wouldn't be this brilliant white
on film, but this kind of more dull gray, which
kind of like what they do with newspapers to make
it look old, like when you're making treasure maps and stuff.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
They dip it in tea. I was gonna say, all
my childhood craft books told me to do that. Unsurprisingly,
his parents, Peggy's parents pitched in. But my favorite part
about this is his paper route delivering the Wall Street Journal.
He made forty eight to fifty a week on his
two hundred and ten paper route. Wow. His very first

(25:52):
night the run took him six hours, but he eventually
narrowed it down to an hour. How I've beating Gus
Catherine Coleson, like we said, took it over at one point,
because he would do these marathon shoots and then sometimes
not be left with enough time to do the route,
so she would dip out and do it for him,
and she would have these directions that he gave her

(26:13):
on a tape recorder, so which probably means I was
gonna say somewhere there's a tape of him being like,
when you get to the Orange House, turn right, Catherine,
and you know the angel what we call in the
stortup culture, an angel investor Lynch's buddies, Jack Fisk's girlfriend
and eventually wife, Sissy Spasic.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
That is crazy, but also it makes a certain amount
of spiritual sense because the sight of her in a
bloody prom dress is probably one of the most haunting
cinematic images of the seventies, so it does make sense
that she would be mixed up with something equally disturbing.
She apparently would come on the set and help out
and hold the slate when Jack Fisk was in the shot,
which earned her a thanks in the credits.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, I love that she's credited in this. My other
favorite David Lynch odd job is plumbing. His pool. Quote
on that is that there's something deeply satisfying about directing
the flow of water, which you know there is he's
onto something there.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
You know, Jack Nance had a day job too, delivering flowers.
Can you imagine it's Mother's Day and the doorbell rings,
and Henry with the hair because he kept the hair
for all the years in production, so presumably he looked
just like the guy on the eraserhead poster answered the door.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
In there he is with a bouquet of flowers. No
nuts to me, no thank you, just like we don't
want them they get. He says that we got kicked
out of AFI after about two or three years of
being down there, which yes, they were squatting and shooting
a film more or less illegally there, and so it
got down to the wire. They finished initial shots on

(27:52):
this thirty hours straight. They shot huh wow, overnight shoot. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
They used to do a lot of shoots at night
because I guess during the day there were a lot
of gardeners on the property and it just they made
too much noise and also probably maybe they didn't want
the witnesses to all the stuff. They were sure, and
they would shoot until dawn until the birds came out,
and I guess there would be this call of birds
that went around, which was like the unofficial sign.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
That the shoot was over for the night. Yeah, I
mentioned earlier, there's these great on set photos from there.
So like him in this not in keeping with our
later image of him. This like wide brimmed hat at
the three ties we've talked about. He loves coffee, which
we've talked about. It's obvious from Twin Peaks and everything,

(28:39):
but like twenty cups a day at some point, right
shitload of coffee. And he was a chainsmoker when he
started working on this film, but he took up transcendental meditation,
which he is a big proponent of. There's a David
Lynch Transcendental Meditation foundation. He took that up during the
shoot and went vegetarian. And so he would he talks

(29:00):
about like it's important, it's important to give yourself a treat. Ah,
it's getting worse. I know, I disagree. I think, okay,
commit to them dialing it in. So yeah, he would
say it's important to get yourself a treat after a
long day of filming, and it started. His treat started
as grilled cheese sandwiches. He would go into diners in
the restaurant where Colson worked in order grilled cheeses in

(29:21):
the afternoon. But he now his big thing since then
has been Bob's Big Boy milkshakes, and he talks about like, yeah,
I just get him and pour sugar into him and
drink him up and get all kinds of neat ideas.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
And he went there every day for like eight years, right,
something like that, And then he had to not because
he was gonna miss like the editing due date to
get a film submitted to like con or something. And
he was like, yeah, killed me, like almost killed me
not to make it.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
Jack Nance real Weirdoh love jack Nance. But you know
he's the iconic image from the film. He's he's Pete
in Twin Peaks. He's a just a delight. Lynch called
one of my best friends to the Criterion collection in
twenty fourteen, but they did not have a particularly good interview.
Nance was married to Colson at the time, and I
think he actually got her involved. But their bonding point,

(30:12):
which solidified this great friendship for the Ages was David
Lynch's Volkswagen, which he had jury rigged with a like
a wooden rack to like a luggage rack kind of
thing to help him haul crap around, and I guess
this was out in the parking lot or something. Jack
Nance looked at it and said, boy, whoever built that
thing must be on the ball. So David Lynch then said,

(30:35):
thank you, Jack, I did that, and you're hired. That
was his audition to get into a Razorhead was complimenting
his tricked out VW beatalize him. I hope it was
a Probably it might have been one of their weird
truck things. But yeah, that thing, I mean, between that
and the paper rude, that thing did the That was
the real unsung hero over razor Head, David Lynch's Volkswagen.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Well, man, you know what they say, flattery will get
you a mutated calf carcass.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
Oh boy, where do we get to the baby? Oh yeah,
that's fair. We'll talk about the baby later. I mean, yeah,
that's Hold your horses, hold your babies, hold your calf fetuses.
We'll get there.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
I love that we're taping this on Mother's Day. By
the way, there's something Oh yeah, that's so weird. We're
going to take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more. Too much information in just a moment

(31:37):
Jack Nance's hair. Where do we begin.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
Jack had a particular type of hair that when you
tease it and comb it, it just stays. It was
the most fantastic head of hair. And when we first
saw what happened for the tall look and how tall
it was, we were shocked. After a few minutes, I said,
this is it. He said, he doesn't remember if it
was Jack Nance who did it the first time, whether

(32:03):
it was by a woman named Charlotte Stewart or Coulson,
but Colson wound up dragooned into maintaining it. We mentioned earlier.
She also cooked because they were feeding everyone on takeout,
and then they were like, the takeout budget's been slashed, Catherine,
can you cook egg salad, grilled cheese. Yeah. So she
ends up the person in charge of doing the hair,
and she said, I took a kind of maniacal pleasure

(32:26):
from backcombing his hair, and it apparently made the entire
crew burst out laughing the first time they saw him.
And you said earlier that he wore this hairstyle for
the entire duration of the shoot, which is not strictly
speaking true. What happened was his hair was on call
for this, so they would, I know. So I don't
know if we mentioned this up talk up top five

(32:48):
years to shoot this, to finish this movie because they
had no money.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
It was just like like as soon as they had
a little bit of money to literally just buy like
film stock, that they would go.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
It was.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
I mean, it wasn't like they were using that to
build anything, elab it or even necessarily about the end anybody.
It was literally to get film stock to shoot on,
and half the time they would get it donated or used.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
Well, because the soundtrack is old film soundstock that had
been thrown out, they drove his VW there.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Some of the film stock too, because Peter Bugdanovitch was
making paper Moon on black and white film, and some
of the leftover stuff that he didn't use they got
donated too.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
Oh, Peter Bugdanovitch, I should be wearing a necker chief
right now. Colson. On jack Nance's hair, she said, when
he wasn't shooting for a long time, he would let
it go, but then he would have to have another
haircut before we started to shoot again. My family didn't
know him any other way except for that goofy hair.
We have a lot of family pictures at Christmas time

(33:44):
with Jack with this haircut, which is amazing because somewhere
in the world there are Christmas portraits of Jack Nance
and the log Lady from Twin Peak with his hair
in the razorhead, and their parents that it was partially
responsible for them getting divorced, but they also work together
on Twin Peaks. They remained friends. Nance who is responsible

(34:08):
for another great bit of the eraser head lore, which
is that the baby who we're gonna get to, we
keep teasing this baby. This is like Chekhov's gun. We
mentioned it in the first act and now someone's gonna
have to get shot with it. In the third act.
That baby is named Spike, and someone asked asked Nance
where he got that, and he said, I think it
was on the birth certificate. And he has a positively

(34:33):
kafka esque a bit of what they asked him. Yeah,
his rider. Essentially it was a room and a chair.

Speaker 1 (34:41):
That's all he wanted for accommodations, for which I mean,
given the budget and how long this.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Time, say, that might have been a stretch, they'd probably
try to argue him down to a stool. All right,
So we haven't talked about the other side of the family.
We haven't talked about Mary X.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Yes, Mary X is Henry's Girlfriend's long stuff forring girlfriend.
In this She's played by Charlotte Stewart, and I love
this connection. She would often come to the eraser Head
set straight from her day job shooting The Little House
on the Prairie, where she had a starring role as
Miss Beatle. I just I love that she would go

(35:18):
from the most Hallmarky show.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
In existence to eraser Head off and on the same day.
I mean, I can't believe she made it out alive.
I like the idea of her confusing her lines from
like sleep deprivation, Like she's on a little House on
the prairie and she's like, they're not even sure it
is a baby. This film was only supposed to take
six weeks. Twenty white pages projected forty two minute runtime. False. No,

(35:45):
that was long.

Speaker 1 (35:46):
They initially said twenty one the dean if I was
like twenty one minutes, and it's like it might be
a hair longer, okay, four because like script pages usually
equate to one page a minute, so I thought forty
two minutes max.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Come on, Like, what are we thinking here? Yeah? I
mean they yeah, I mean Lynch was who's squatting. He
lived in Henry's actual room. But yeah, please tell us
about Lynch's living situation further.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
I mean, because it was illegal, they had to make
it look like he wasn't there, So he was living
in Henry's room. That just absolutely claustrophobic, cubby hole that is.
You know, it's got a great radiator. It's got a
great radiator, it does. That's where David Lynch actually lived
for I would assume years during this production. But because
it was illegal, day to make it look like he

(36:32):
wasn't there, So they achieved this by bolting him in
with one door and padlocking the other from the outside
so as not to arouse suspicion. So he's locked in
this room, which is which adds a whole other level
of terrifying. It's also a very Bushwick thing.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
I was gonna say, what's your personal experience with this
living arrangement?

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Yeah, my dear friend did something similar. He was living
in the furnace room of his art gallery in Bushwick,
and the room was hidden behind a movable tool shelf
that was just on hinges. But you know, when it
was in place, it looked just like a regular shelf,
and as a sort of makeshift handle, he bolted a
shovel that just looked like it was just hanging there,
but it was just bolted there, didn't go anywhere.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
So yeah, Yeah, Probably the most exemplary part of this
shooting schedule is there's a shot in this film. There's
a cut in which the first part of the shot
and the second part occurred eighteen months apart.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, Henry opens up the door to his apartment and
he's seen entering from the other side, and the next
shot a year and.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
A half late, he had aged eighteen months. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
I mean the filming took so long for this that
several years in Lynch's own family tried to talk him
out of the project, and he's talked about this in
a couple different interviews. Recalled his parents and his younger
brother saying to him, you know, you've been on this
erazorhead for many years. You have a wife and a
daughter to think about. We think it's time you get
a regular job, take responsibility. And he said this was

(38:08):
devastating to me, as you know, I assume it would
be after sinking years into this, And there was even
a time when he briefly considered finishing the movie with
an animated Henry to just fill in the gaps in
the movie.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
I wish for everyone attempting any kind of creative life,
I wish you the iron will that propelled David Lynch
to finish your raiser headh Segue. A lot of people died.
So many people died, not really so many people, but

(38:42):
we mentioned that enough enough people died to make this movie.
There's that weird murder suicide of Greystone, so that's ding
Ding one and two. The film's original director of photography,
Herbert Cardwell, died in his sleep two months in Ding.
Peter Ivers, the musician who wrote the film's theme in Heaven,

(39:04):
which we will talk about later, was found bludgeoned to
death by a hammer in his apartment in nineteen eighty
three Ding, a crime that remains unsolved. And lastly, Jack
Nance got into a fight outside of Winchel's Donuts in
nineteen ninety six and he told his friends, I guess
I got what I deserved after that, and then he
went home and died of a subdural hematoma, which is

(39:26):
a fairly common way of dying in a fight. You
get your head knocked, you think you're fine, you go home,
and you have an internal hemorrhage. Essentially, good Lord.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
For those of you keeping track at home, the subdural
hemorrhage count in this episode is at one stands at one.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Uh. It might not seem like it based on the
finished project, but Eraserhead was tightly rehearsed and shot within
an inch of its life. Every reaction and every look
and everything that was happening inside Henry's head. We had
to get into that in great detail. Nance said, I
remember one partic shot, a very simple quick shot. I

(40:02):
was supposed to say no kidding or something like that,
and turn and walk away. And we worked on take
after take after take, a whole reel of film, and
you'll remember they were picking this out of trash cans
and driving it around La Cardwell, he said, just opened
up the magazine and started throwing the film out on
the floor, saying, well, at least we won't have to

(40:23):
look at that in the screening room, which is just
what you want your DP to say. Ah. There is
a period of time when we would rehearse just me
and Jack in that room, Sorry I'm doing it again,
and work things out this is David Lynch, obviously, and
those rehearsals took a long long time. Every little thing

(40:45):
would be planned. The film's first shot one take, Wow,
drops Mike Damn.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
And now enough about the visuals, let's talk about the audio.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, we now come to the real meat of this episode,
which is Alan Split, Alan Split everyone. This is kind
of messed up. Alan Splett, who was also a Philly guy,
Lynch's long term sound designer. I think we should say
he has also referred to him as a best friend.
He famously became a punchline when he was nominated for
the sound design for Black Stallion at the Oscars, and

(41:19):
he won, but he was not at the ceremony because
he was working on Elephant Man in London with Lynch
and Johnny Carson turned it into a running punchline on
the show. And you love Johnny Carson, so I want
you to do this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
He was hosting the Oscars that night and he kept
doing Alan's split updates because nobody could believe that. Like,
you know, it's like, this is one thing if you
have like Marlon Brando or George c. Scott skipping the
Oscars to make a political point or because they're filming some.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Other movie or something.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
But this was just, you know, you don't expect the
kind of anonymous tech guy skip the biggest night in
the professional live. So he just made this ongoing joke
about it and kept doing these recurring Alan split updates
all night and Johnny at him.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Oh he missed his freeway turn off.

Speaker 1 (42:02):
Oh he's at a gas station with carburetor trouble outside
a band in California.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
He kept like having like all through the night. It was.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
It was medium funny, but Split totally deserved that Oscar.
Because for Black Stallion, which was I think his first
full length feature aside from Eraserhead, he strapped a special
microphone to the underbelly of a race horse to capture
the sound of galloping hoof beats, and he also attached
a mic to the horse's head to catch its breathing

(42:31):
while it was running. He did all these really innovative
ways of getting the horse sounds.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Horse sounds. The lesser loved follow up to pet Sound
of horse Sounds. Yeah, he really is the other part
of this movie. I mean, there's been all this stuff
at Pitchfork and a lot of the music sites about
how the soundtrack of this movie. The sound of this
movie is so influential as far as sound design and

(43:00):
ambient and industrial and all those sort of grimy out
there music genres. Split was head of AFI's sound department
at the time, and he is responsible for one of
the ultimate hallmarks of David Lynch, which is the room tone,
which is this sort of ambient buzzing of evil, which

(43:20):
you could, I guess it probably comes from like trying
to make fluorescent lights sound meaner because it's you think
of all those shots in twin peaks of like a
ceiling fan and there's this like thrumbing kind of under it.

Speaker 1 (43:34):
And he's very interested in electricity. He's talked about that
in a lot of interviews. Electricity working and also failing
and getting all that like crackling stuff.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
That's always been a hallmark for him. But you know,
by doing this for pennies a day, they were forced
to get creative with some of the sound design, and
they got one of these by they put a big
gallon water jug in a bathtub and floated it and
then they put the microphone in that. So there's a
microphone hanging inside of a big glass gallon jug. Floating

(44:08):
in a bathtub and it would blow across that microphone.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
I just want to say that it was a Sparklet's
water jug, which was the same brand that they used
in pet Sounds to make on Caroline Know that weird?

Speaker 2 (44:22):
That weird. So sorry, just you mentioned pet Sounds earlier.
I have to throw that back in. That is some
galaxy brain. Do you know if it's the jug that
is on the thirteenth floor elevator song that I don't know?
You know what I'm saying. They amplified jug band. Yeah,
they worked on the score for this for like nine

(44:43):
hours a day over the course of two months. Colson.
Another great Catherine Colson quote, as she said she got
a call from them. I think it was like in
the middle of the night and they were like, we
need we need Catherine, Catherine, we need the sound of
a radiator. She's like, what do you need? You need
like he said, no, they wanted the sound of someone

(45:04):
jumping off the radiator and landing in the room. And yeah,
we mentioned earlier that they learned that a film studio
was throwing out soundstock, so they just threw it in
the back of this jury RIGGEDVW and high tailed it
on out of there. My favorite Alan split bit other
than all of this is the uh is the fact
that apparently he was out of pocket for a while

(45:25):
because he was in Findhorn in Northern Scotland recording wind,
recording wind?

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Didn't they also split? Everyone couldn't make the oscars?

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Was recording Wind?

Speaker 1 (45:41):
Speaking of David's sound design, so much has been made
of his famous room tone, but how about his ringtones?
Are you aware that in two thousand and six, David
Lynch debuted his own set of cell phone ring tones
featuring recorded phrases such as I like to kill deer,
my teeth are bleeding and what the hell? Damn, what

(46:05):
the hell they're Unfortunately, sorry, I ruined this whole.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
I'm sorry. This is something that's send me crack up
the most. Just you segueing from her room tones to
ring tones and say I want to kill deer. Jordan
just brought me to tears with his recitation of davidlyn

(46:34):
She's ringtones. Did we find them? No?

Speaker 1 (46:38):
Well, wait a minute, I there. They're really hard to find.
They're no longer available for download. There's supposedly on some
fan websites. I can't tell what I'm hearing because it's
not him saying them, which kind of makes it not
as good. But at least the ones I've been able
to find, but I can't tell fans have made them

(46:59):
and they're just like right because of it or something.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, damn it.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
Well get that last laughter in Heigel goes, We're about
to go in.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
To a little segment I like to call it's the
baby Gotta love it. Oh, so we mentioned earlier that
this show needs tone. In the early part can kind
of be described as like a surrealistic comedy. There's there's
that bit where they're in the where they're waiting the
lobby and the elevator doors are open for like a

(47:29):
disconcertingly long time and they finally close like the timing
of this of those cuts, and you compared it to
British comedy earlier. But it quickly stops being funny when
that baby shows up. Man, it is the worst thing
in the world. And you were able to find a

(47:50):
description of this for listeners who have not seen this movie.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Yes, the writer Peter Slovinski for writing for Roger Ebert
dot com. He's basically described it as imagine a cross
between a fetal version of et and some form of
a skinned ruminant that has been plagued with an eternal
cold that causes it to cry, whine, and spit up
various forms of goo practically around the clock.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
That's as good a description as Anny for audio. Ah,
oh God, it's disgusting. Lynch has repeatedly denied that the
film is about his anxieties about fatherhood. But the fact
that this thing allegedly uses Jennifer's actual cries, his own
daughter's actual daughter's cries, albeit manipulated in some degree, that

(48:40):
is horrifying. And it feels like a bit of a
cheat to hype this thing up so much and then
not tell people how it's made. But the fact of
the matter is no one knows. This is like the
biggest secret around Eraserhead. People have been asking him about
this for forty five years, and he refuses to talk
about it. Jennifer knows, but she will not tell her

(49:02):
own daughter. Her own daughter is apparently mad. She told
Vice that, And he went so far to disguise what
this thing is that he blindfolded the projectionist doing dailies
on this film. For for non industry people, you shoot something,
you shoot a whole day of film, and then you
screen that for yourself and your editor and if you're

(49:24):
really unlucky, the studio heads so that they can give
feedback on it and you can kind of see how
the day went. And Lynch blindfolded the guy doing that
so he wouldn't see He Even the AFI heads came
there and we're like, what are we spending our money on?
And they were like, don't worry about it. Yeah, no, yeah.

(49:47):
The speculation from people who are more invested in this
than I am is that it's some kind of fetus
from an anatomy class, like either a sheep cat or
a cat, and they that they had to take it
apart and like articulate it. It's you know, probably the

(50:09):
most stirring argument in favor of that is Lynch himself,
who has gone on record as confessing that he dissected
a cat during the course of this film's production, which presumably,
you know, high school biology classes do that stuff. That's
probably how he got it. He said. I examined its parts,
the membranes, the hair, the skin, and there are so

(50:33):
many textures which may be gross on one side, but
when you isolate them and consider them more abstractly, they
are totally beautiful. So think about that, and then think
about his next quote, which is, I don't know what
good it did me, really, Jordan talk us through cat dissection.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
David Lynch has waxed poetics so much about dissecting this
cat that it makes me think that that has actually
really nothing to do the baby in a racer Head,
because he wouldn't keep mentioning it. He's talked about it
so many times in different interviews. In that two thousand
and one documentary Racerhead Stories that we talked about earlier,
he discussed it extensively, with an almost ecstatic fervor. He

(51:16):
compared the organs to the Fellini film Roma, which I'm
not sure if I follow, but he said it was unbelievable.
The organs in the cat were brilliant colors, and he
later buried it in the urban wasteland that we see
at the start of the film, and I think in
a deleted scene Henry actually like trips on it or something,

(51:37):
and he buried it there, and then he excavated it
some time later, which brought David Lynch even further delights.
He said it was the perfect marriage of cat and earth,
before adding that he took a photo of it.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
I genuinely I tend to think of him as a
pretty innocuous guy, all things considered. But that's that's Stahmer
level him. Uh yeah. Other unverifiable details about the baby
Lynch made the cast sign NDA's that were specifically tied
to how he made the thing. You could not use

(52:14):
photos of it in promotional efforts for the film. Why
would you? Yeah, exactly, here's that. Come see this. And
he buried it when they were done, and they eulogized it.
The rap party doubled as this thing's funeral. His quotes
about this have remained admirably consistent. He says, maybe it

(52:35):
was born nearby, or maybe it was found. God, it's
buried it. Do some like film freaks like go and
excavate it. And it was in the Winchell's Donuts. That's
what jack Nance was there for. That was what he was.
He's protecting the secret of the Eraser had baby and

(52:55):
the Illuminati killed him. Wake Up Sheep. The film's production manager,
Dorian Small, was the hands behind the baby that had Yah.
That's interesting that she got the honor of Yeah, put

(53:16):
your hands in this sheep calf Dorane what I don't
know when you pulleys wires. Oh god, it's so gross.
But when during scenes when it actually had to do
a lot more, it was Alan split working it and
she said, Dorian Small said, because he plays the cello

(53:38):
and he has a certain kind of touch. Oh, moving
right on down the line for this weird, gross thing
that I'm already feeling bad about subjecting. You find people
so much too. Colson was tasked with its death scene
and spoilers. Henry gets morbidly curious about what's happening in there,
and the baby is wrapped up like mummified, and he
cuts the bandages open and they're they essentially were keeping

(54:01):
the thing together because it just, oh god, it's so
messed up. But she I just love this quote. I
had to put this on there. She talks about special
effects departments at the time, where like kind of a
loose community, so different people working on different things kind
of knew that they could kind of call each other
and be like, hey, how do you do this? How
do you do that? I have to shoot such and
such a scene. What should I do? And she said,

(54:21):
do you remember calling the special effects department? At Universal
and saying, do you have any suggestion as to how
to fill a room full of mush? This is funny.
My wife and ever watching this and she was like,
that baby is disgusting and incredible and real. And then
when the head gets really really big and fills up
the whole room, she was like, that doesn't look as good.

(54:42):
It's not as she goes, it's not as moist. It
doesn't so that the baby's head fills up the whole
room during the climax, And apparently they had moved to
a different neighborhood in LA at this point and they
just built it in their backyard. So imagine at some
point in the mid seventies in LA, you look out
your window, beautiful La day, and there's giant, weird egg

(55:04):
baby head in your backyard and you look down and
there's David Lynch in three ties and a straw hat
and he's waving to you.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Oht know, in the mid seventies in LA. That seems
just kind of part for the chorus ha ha hey.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
And having said all that, we'll be right back with
more too much information right after this, wow, wow, all
right in everything we should get new has Neil Young

(55:40):
ever covered that. I was a state of cover versions
of this earlier, and the Pixies one, the Black Francis one,
is probably the he has the closest to that woman's voice,
I think anyway. The Lady and the Radiator the theme
song to this movie in Heaven Ah, It's probably the
second most famous David Lynch musical cue after the end
Low Bottle Lamentee theme song to Twin Peaks or Little

(56:04):
Jimmy Scott singing Sycamore Trees from the season two finale.
But you differ to me on this well. Also, I'm
not a huge lynchhead, but I still love the this
is the Girl scene from Maholland Drive with I've told
every little star that was always pretty. But I'm also
a giant sixties nerd too. But uh yeah, that in
Heaven song is haunting, and I know Divo were big

(56:27):
fans of it, and they loved it so much that
they actually asked David Lynch if they could play it live.
But also Bauhaus Comedy two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this
is nuts. Man. Do you know about Peter Rivers? I
know you're like a national lampoon guy. Is this the
first year hearing of him. I know Doug Kenny and
all the people who's connected to I'd never heard of
him though, I again a whole podcast. We could do

(56:49):
a whole episode on him, but I'll just give you
the even the just the two graphs of his Wikipedia
article are insane. His biographer Josh Frank described him as
being connected by a second degree to every major pop
culture event of the last thirty years. So he was Yeah,
I know. He was a musician first and foremost. His

(57:09):
first instrument was the harmonica. He played with Muddy Waters
at one point, and in nineteen sixty eight, Buddy Waters
called him the greatest harp player alive when he was
in Laws. I'm just gonna keep saying these with question marks.
They're not actually question marks, but it's just insane. In
La he was signed to Warner Brothers by Van Dyke,
Parks and Lenny Waronker to one hundred grand contract. It's

(57:33):
a solo artist back when that made something. Yeah, yeah,
well he made it. And then he made his live
debut opening for the New York Dolls. He was on
bills with Fleetwood, Mac and John Kale. David Lynch asks
him to write this song for Razor Ed he does.
Then he goes on to score a Ron Howard movie,
Grand Theft Auto, and then an episode of BJ the Bear,

(57:57):
and then he becomes a ghost raw songwright. He wrote
songs for the Pointer Sisters, Jefferson Airplanes, Marty Ballen, Balen
on his solo career, Diana Ross, and as you mentioned,
you know about Doug Kenny, who founded the National Lampoon
that was Peter Ivers's best friend. We are also not

(58:17):
even talking about the Los Angeles area UAHF show that
he hosted called New Wave Theater, which was this early
day's not quite public access, but for yeah, they were
responsible for bringing huge parts of the La punk subculture
into the mainstream or as mainstream as a UAHF channel, Cockpit,
Bad Religion, Fear the Dead, Kennedy's The Circle Jerks. Guests

(58:42):
on this show included Deborah Winger, Beverly di'angelo from National
Lampion's Vacation, and Elvira and So. In that Pitchfork interview
from twenty twelve, Lynch said, I don't know how I
heard about Petere RVers, but this I love this story
so much. Alan and I went up to Pete's house

(59:04):
and we asked him if he could write the music
and sing these lyrics in the Spirits of Fats Waller.
Alan Split had played David Lynch these Fats Waller recordings
of Fats Waller playing pipe organ and he had gotten
them off an out of print LP. So he was
playing them to David Lynch on two inch tape or
quarter inch tape, excuse me, and so he said, David, like,

(59:27):
this album is out of print. All I have are
these bootleg tapes. And so they went to Peter Iver's
house and said, hey, can you play us like a
facsimile of these bootleg Fats Waller recordings? And Peter Ivers
goes over to his album stack and pulls out the
out of print Fats Waller album is like, you mean
this one? And he does it. He records the organ part.

(59:50):
It's like the only non ambient industrial stuff on the soundtrack.
And so David Lynch has the lyrics in heaven does
he write the lyrics? He write that? Yeah, David Lynch
wrote the lyrics and he took them over to Ivers
house and he said he's been laying on this Chez
lounge and he's got a microphone dangling over him. And
he sang it right in front of me, sang the

(01:00:11):
whole song that was used in this film, in this
falsetto voice, and he loved the lyrics, which made me
feel really good. And Fats Waller actually does appear in
the film because when Henry goes in and puts his
turntable on, that's the Fats Waller record. And David Lynch
has confirmed that Henry is a Fats Waller fan, says
he loves him. While we're on the topic of radiators, Segue, I.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
Just want to say that Heigel titled this section what
we talk about when we talk about radiators.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
You're welcome, Thank you. Mentioned earlier, David Lynch has a
thing about light bulbs, the sound of electricity, the kind
of ambient tones in a room that machinery generates, radiators
big thing split. Talking to Terry Gross in nineteen ninety
four on Fresh Air, he says, we had a big
gas heater in the editing room where I was working,

(01:01:02):
which had a big metal case on it, and so
one day we stuck a tiny little microphone in the
bottom of this thing, and David was blowing on the
top of it, and we got a lot of sounds
this way, so that's bing radiator number one. The lady
in the Radiator wasn't even in the film's original draft.
In another interview from nineteen seventy nine, Lynch said, we'd

(01:01:22):
already shot scenes of the radiator, so he was already
using establishing shots of this radiator. And he said it
was just natural. But it was a certain kind of
radiator that had a little compartment in there. And I
had done a little drawing of a lady and I
looked at this drawing and an idea came in. I
felt this lady lived in the radiator, and I thought,

(01:01:44):
is that a place where she could live? And I
went running into Henry's room and looked at the radiator.
And I got this radiator from an old studio that
was closing, and this particular radiator had a little place
that she could live in. You got to just do
a sound effect for every time I say radiator in there.
I love it. I mean, I'm I find it touching
how concerned he is that there's a place for this
fictitious figure to live in the radiator, despite the fact

(01:02:07):
that you would have to be two inches tall and
not get burned up by the heat and the radiator.
He's really like concerned that there's not like a little box. Again,
I'm not a Lynch guy, but I love the love
that he has for these terrible, weird characters. Yeah, you know,
he has like a genuine empathy and affection for these people.

(01:02:28):
And then the characters that he creates, there's never like
a contempt with any of them. You know. It's a
good point. Yeah, even like the villains in Twin Peaks,
ostensibly he still like finds fascinating and gives them space.
And anyway, you're gonna have to cut out all my
David Lynch guy stuff. In twenty fourteen, he gave an
interviewed A Vulture where he says she first came along

(01:02:51):
as a drawing, but then in that same interview, he
says that she came along about a year after they
started shooting, when he started doing transcendental meditation. Have you
ever heard of his book Catching the Big Fish. It's
this whole book about transitant meditation. He talks about the
idea that ideas are like fish, and your mind is
like a thing that you fish in, and so for

(01:03:14):
the small ideas come when you're fishing in the shallow
water and the big fish come from the deeper water
and transit meditation lets you get really deep into your subconscious.
It's really interesting because he talks about doing this. Is
it Mulholland Dry or Lost Highway with the jump scare
the thing that comes out of the domsty. Yeah, I
think it's either that or something in Mulholland Dry that

(01:03:36):
he talks about in that book. He was like meditating
in his trailer and he walked outside and it's afternoon
in La and he puts his hand on the hood
of a car and the car is really hot, and
the shock when he pulled his hand off. He says,
that entire sequence suddenly came to him. Wow, it's so interesting, right,

(01:04:01):
Like Yeah, when you think about all of his stuff,
people are like, ah, he's completely random and he does
these like you know, it's the Simpsons bit or the
Saturday Night Live bit making fun of twin Peaks, where
it's like, I have no idea, brilliant, I have no
idea what this means. If you just think about all
of these visuals as just like the dross and detritus
of your subconscious or your dream world, that gets dredged up,

(01:04:24):
it suddenly becomes like I don't know a lot clearer anyway.
So the woman who played the Lady in The Radiator,
Laurel Near, she was in a singing trio with her
two sisters, one of whom was a friend of Catherine Colson's,
and that was how she got pulled into the film.
She'd never worked in a film before. I don't think
she has since. I think this is like one of
her two IMDb credits. And she just said, David Lynch

(01:04:47):
liked my smile. I thought I was going to just
go and dance across the stage, she said. And in
a rare lack of foresight, they built the stage for
her months before they shot it, and I guess that
just sat around one of the few things they didn't
tear down and sell. And she talks about those cheek,

(01:05:08):
the chipmunk cheek makeup that they had to do for her,
and she said it kind of peeled your skin off
when they took it off. And David Lynch has said
to me, the Lady in the Radiator is sort of
a beacon of light. Henry's world was really dark without her,
and she represents some hope there for old Henry. She's
a very strange looking woman. For sure. She's got skin

(01:05:31):
problems that she's trying to cover up with pancake makeup.

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
And that song in Heaven is available on the soundtrack
that was released on the Dead Kennedy's record label, Alternative Tentacles.
And the funny part to me is that the whole
record is mostly clanks and rumbles and room tone.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
Yeah, room tone. It's basically like a John Cage or
Stockhausen album. I listened to it a lot. I'm going
to get back.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
To something you said earlier about just like sort of
Lynch's scenes being you know, the detritus of your subconscious
I mean something. One of the shows I host is
a show where I interview musicians, and I'm somebody who
loves music with all of his heart but has never
been able to write.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
A song ever.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
And I'm so curious about what compels people to do.
So one of my favorite questions to ask people is
do you ever listen to your songs back and learn
something about yourself? Almost like a dream reading, you know,
you hear it back and you know, were able to
get some kind of perspective on it. Or parse it
apart like you do when you dissect the dream. And

(01:06:38):
I don't know, I think that's interesting, just and I
want to hear more about you know, what you have
to say about?

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
Well, what if people said very different? Some people say no,
not at all.

Speaker 1 (01:06:52):
Sometimes people usually from the vantage point of several years
on when they're singing, like you know, for their big hits,
for example, it's been a couple of years later, and
they kind of have to keep revisiting them. They say like, oh, yeah,
I see what I was doing at that time a
lot more clearly than I did at the time. All Right, So, folks,
we just cut about fifteen minutes of Jordan and I

(01:07:13):
talking about our dreams and our childhood traumas Lynch cut
about twenty minutes worth of this film from the final footage.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
So there you go. That's a great segue. That's a
great segue. Just as we cut moments of oversharing between
two dear friends, Lynch cut twenty minutes worth of footage
from this film. Jordan, why don't you tell us about that?
And also your fears? Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
These lost scenes include a sequence of Catherine Colson finally
getting her part in this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
But it was ultimately cut.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
She's playing the baby's midwife. There's a scene of Henry
playing with the with David Lynch's beloved dead cat, and
then there's another scene of a man abusing two women
in strapped to a bed with a car battery, which
David Lynch has said he cut because it was too disturbing, which, yeah,

(01:08:09):
given what he felt was totally fine for us to.

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
See Wolf, Yeah, well you don't want to see the stuff.
Lynch is like, that was a bridge too far.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
Yeah, And he's later said I loved them as little scenes,
but they didn't belong in the film, and he cut
them from the composite print, which is like the master
version of the film, And Catherine Colson is quoted as saying,
we didn't have any money to cut negatives, so we
just cut the entire scenes from this master version. That
was what happened to my scene when I'm tied to

(01:08:40):
the bed with pattery cables. That's probably in a landfill somewhere.
And many fans of Hope that they, you know, include
these deleted scenes and the criterion release or some kind
of expanded version, but it really seems like these scenes
are lost forever. And in the documentary we've mentioned many
times so far Racer heead stories, Lynch gets weirdly emotional

(01:09:02):
talking about all this stuff that he wished he'd saved
from the production, which is kind of weirdly touching. And
all this left of these scenes are the memories of
the cast that were in them and a few production photos.
There's a scene of these people strapped to the bed
with a car battery a jumper cables nearby, and that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
It just goes back to what I was saying, man, Like,
even the grotesque, messed up stuff in his movies he cherishes. Yeah. Yeah,
because it's there, you know, because it's he made it.
I really, it's in all of us. Yeah, Man, I
don't know I got him. I had David Lynch guy.
Is that the sad realization I'm coming to with this?
Are we all are David Lynch guys? Really? If you're

(01:09:52):
texted or if you tweeted us with a hashtag jack
Nance's Winchles Donuts order, we will send you an hour
and a half of Alex doing David Lynch room tones
into the microphone and our twenty minutes of dream analysis. Yeah,
that's another bonus feature Patreon.

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
Yep, all right, so he cut these scenes out after
the first couple screenings of eraser Head, the very first,
I think the premiere of Eraserhead, well you can't really
call it that, but the earliest screening of Eraserhead was
held at the screening room at the AFI Graystone Mansion
where it was filmed, and Lynch invited his parents, which
is amazing, And when it was over, someone seated next to.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):
His mom overheard her say, Oh, I wouldn't want to
have a dream like that, which makes you wonder how
he sold Like what are we son, what are we
giving this money to? And he's like, oh, it's a
movie about a dream I had.

Speaker 1 (01:10:46):
Yeah, it's cute though he Lynch later paid his father
back all the money that he kept, like meticulous log
of how much money his father gave him, and then
when he was successful, he paid it all back and
which he said was a totally on this necessary jester.
His dad did not expect to get it back, but
he paid him, and Lynch said that was one of
the happiest days was life. So even if they didn't

(01:11:07):
get his movies, they lived to see him reap the rewards.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
Which is sweet. What a sweet boy he is. Yeah,
Ugh Eraserhead was perhaps needless to say Erassahead was ejected
from Can. Rejected from Can, although they've put like Lars
von Trier and on Can. So he think he just
missed it. I think he just missed the entry probably

(01:11:31):
and the New York Film Festival, although he's said he
was rejected from Yeah, he says he brought all twenty
four reels of the film to the New York Film
Festival in a shopping cart that he took from his
nearby farmer's market and the third third Times a charm Baby.
He was accepted into the Los Angeles International Film Exposition
aka film X in nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
And in anticipation of the years of midnight screenings that
would ultimately bolster the film's repe this Film XS premiere
did indeed take place at midnight, very fitting, and the
writer Danny Lee wrote a great piece about Eraserhead's premiere
for The Guardian a few years back, and he features
this amazing lead. On March nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven, the
world changed, after which there was a long, uncomfortable silence.

(01:12:20):
The occasion was the first public screening of Eraserhead, the
feature debut of David Lynch, at the Film X Festival
in Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (01:12:27):
It was not a hot ticket.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
The film arrived with little advanced publicity at the only
festival to accept it. The screening took place at midnight,
drawing a modest crowd who dutifully watched for the next
two hours. The film was then longer than the eighty
nine minutes it became. When it ended, nothing but no
one left either, just silence, then finally applause en scene.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
Yeah exactly, but so someone who is there passed word
of the film along to Ben Barrenholtz of New York's
Libra Films. This guy is probably one of the most
influential figures in twentieth century cinema. I own the song, certainly,
yeah exactly, just not a name, but you know, he

(01:13:12):
basically pioneered the concept of a midnight movie at his theater,
which is the Elgin in Chelsea and New York and
stuff like Pink Flamingos El Topo by yor Rowski, The
Harder They Come, the Jimmy Cliff film, and he slotted
eraser Head.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
In, and his invitation to it was priceless and keeping
with the whole baby theme, he made it look like
a birth announcement, which read We'd like you to meet
the sweet little girl who has brought so much sunshine
and joy to our world. Name Eraserhead, Birthday, Midnight weight, heavy,
dot dot dot in quotation marks parents David k Lynch,

(01:13:52):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
Imagine being on top of the world in nineteen eighty
and just it world is your oyster and you're like, oh,
let's go to a midnight movie and you markey horrors
last week. Let's see what Yeah, what a fun whimsical
time that was, Like let's go to let's get a
little zouited or whatever, and Saturday Night Fever has just
come out. There's nowhere to go but up, let's go

(01:14:17):
see I don't know, Eraserhead. This looks fun anyway. This
movie unsurprisingly in retrospect, but got a lot of really
heavy endorsements, one of whom John Waters. Desperate Living was
screening in New York around the same time, and John
Waters called Eraserhead his favorite moving at a press event
for his own film and encouraged everyone in the audience

(01:14:38):
to see it. Stanley Kubrick, while he was making the shining.
A few years later, he screened Eraserhead to his cast
and crew, which makes a lot of sense. All of
those eerie shots of the hallways at God. I don't
really think I ever thought of this before.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
But even the floor isn't there like the crazy pattern? Yeah,
and then the lobby and eraser He's got tho zigzag.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
Wow. I never thought of that. And as you mentioned,
Lynch screened Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

Speaker 1 (01:15:09):
Oh yeah, but when they first started filming Eraserhead seventy
years before. Yeah, he sat down and watched Sunset Boulevard
with the cast and crew, clearly trying to evoke some
kind of haunting presence of some kind.

Speaker 2 (01:15:24):
Because that's interesting. Yeah, such an interesting through line of
the whole thread of Hollywood history is this movie. I
this is one of those things that gets passed around
on the internet. I have not been able to find
this original interview, but Charles Bukowski of being Head Fame

(01:15:47):
just one of the most simultaneously influential authors, poets, and
worst people in the world. He claimed it the first
thing he ever saw when he got cable was Eraserhead,
which subsequently ruined all other television for him. Lastly, mel
Brooks we mentioned earlier mel Brooks, of all people, was
a fan of this film and got Lynch. Basically launched

(01:16:09):
Lynch's career because this is not a student film, but
this is more or less a student film. Mel Brooks
sees it and he's producing Elephant. Man. He's he's already
in pre pro for this movie and pushes Lynch to
work on it, and that launches, you know, from there,
he does Dune. He famously turned down Return of the
Jedi around this time. And then it's a short hop

(01:16:32):
skimp at a jump to blue velvet, twin peaks and
mahalland drive. So mel Brooks, man, I love it. He
hadn't heard of Lynch before. He hadn't heard it. Well,
who would have? Yeah, he goes to see a Razorhead
and he comes out of the screening yelling at David's there.
He says, you're a mad man. I love you. You're
in and this is my favorite like the producers, Yeah, exactly.

(01:16:56):
Maybe that's what he thought, that they would lose money
on Elephant instead of winning Oscars. Oh, man, I gotta
bust out my John hurt for you at some point. Hi,
I'm not hold at them all. Hi. How a human? Uh?
That was all right and a half, he said, despite

(01:17:18):
expecting Lynch to be quote a grotesque, a fat little
german with fat stains running down his chin, just eating pork.
But he thought, he said, he was flabbergasted by an Eraserhead.
It's beautiful and it's very clear. It's like Beckett, which

(01:17:38):
I get, Samuel Beckett. It's like ion Esco, not a reference.
I understand you're a film student anything anything. He's like
a he's like a theater of the absurd type. Yes, oh, okay,
all right, Well you pulled some reviews for this, which
I think are great. Yeah. I mean, and it's kind

(01:18:00):
of a theme in pretty much every movie that we've
talked about on here that went on to.

Speaker 1 (01:18:04):
Become a beloved classic. Not loved at the time, but
doubly so in this case. Variety called Eraserhead a sickening,
bad taste exercise, and Tom Buckley at the New York
Times I think in nineteen eighty so, a few years
after this had been making the rounds in the midnight
movie circuit called it a murkily potentious shocker with an

(01:18:28):
excruciatingly slow pace.

Speaker 2 (01:18:33):
I mean great. Yeah, we mentioned before this movie was
made for like, I don't know, ten thousand from a
five plus, Like what do you thinking of David Lynch's dad? Yeah,
another ten fifteen from friends and family if that? Yeah, yeah,
I'm seeing figures seven million groast with re releases.

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
And Catherine Colson would later say that the percentage points
she got on this movie h put her daughter through college.

Speaker 2 (01:19:05):
So I mean it made something good? Lord, Yeah, I
mean is this is probably Halloween. Halloween for a long
time was the most profitable independent film of all time.
It's gonna be up there with blair Witch, right in
terms of like, hey, well it was Halloween until was
blair Witch. Oh okay, and then I mean just a
total likecase.

Speaker 1 (01:19:25):
Probably for inflation, blair Witch and Eraser had probably around
the same amount. How little it was, I think you
know what it was is probably the special effects on
the Eraser head that made it less profitable. I mean,
you think about the actual VFX in that movie, heavy
quotation marks vfx. We didn't get into this, but the
lady across the hall, who's like the prostitute character or whatever,

(01:19:48):
you know, the last place she popped up in is
Orange is the New Black?

Speaker 2 (01:19:53):
Oh, that's Russian. She's one of the like Russia, like
the old woman that's kind of like peripherally in Red's circle.
She's got like white hair down to her shoulders, but
she's got that same very She's super cool again. Yeah, yeah, man,
I thought it was an Bancroft when she first came
on the screen. Speaking of mel Brooks, Oh yeah, that

(01:20:16):
would have been great. Maybe that's why he liked it.
He was was Mary Dan Bancroft. For anyone who doesn't
have Mail Brooks's personal history on lock, for some reason,
I want to do. I mean, I wonder if Orson
we watched all those orson Wales interviews. I wanted to
find if Orson Welles ever said anything about David Lynch, Well,

(01:20:36):
did you watch the Dick Habot ones? It was in
that Twitter threat I send you to him insulting various people.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
He he was on Dick Habot at least twice, if
not three times, and they're on Prime and maybe even
just on YouTube and they're so good. Actually, speaking of
I looked up because I imagine that you know, the
five year filming period, production period of Eraserhead must certainly
make it on a list of movies it's the longest
time to produce, Oh sure. And there is a Wikipedia

(01:21:05):
list and the top of the list is the Orson
Wells movie that just came out, was finished off a
few years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:21:12):
Oh, he's a great unfinished thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:14):
What was it, The The Other Side of the Wind
that came out in twenty eighteen. I think he started
producing it in nineteen seventy. Yeah, so it's a forty
eight year production period, although I don't know, I feel
weird counting that. Considering yeah, I'm sure for a good
thirty years nothing was done. But still, but at the
end of the day, what the hell else do you

(01:21:35):
say about Eraserhead? I mean I mentioned earlier, I cannot
think of another filmmaker, and I'm sure film Twitter or
David Lynch Twitter will get after me with this. I
can't think of another filmmaker who, in twenty five years,
which is not a big span of time for a
director's career, twenty five years, went from making something like
Eraserhead to coming within a hair's distance of an oscar

(01:21:58):
from a hall in drive. You know, he did Elephant
Man after Eraserhead, and then he turned down Return of
the Jedi, and with the exception of Dune, which is
the movie why largely thanks to Dilarentis, he has final cut.

Speaker 2 (01:22:12):
On all of his stuff. So then I said this before,
but Blue Velvet, twin Peaks, mullholland drive boom boom boom.
I love that story about him turning down Return of
the Jedi. Apparently he was personally asked by George Lucas
but turned him down in part because he hated the Wookies,
which I mean, to be fair, is probably the least
Lynchian creature to ever exist. Wookies are the ewoks or

(01:22:34):
sorry the ewoks? Yes, the ewoks.

Speaker 1 (01:22:38):
And he was quoted as saying, I had next door
to zero interest in doing Return of the Jedi, but
I've always admired George. George is a guy who does
what he loves and I do what I love. The
differences what George does makes hundreds of billions of dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:22:53):
Ain't that the truth?

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
Man?

Speaker 2 (01:22:54):
That's what I'm saying again, Like, oh man, I don't know.
I think I'm a David Lynch guy. Jordan, what does
the razorhead mean? What does it all mean.

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
As with the infant prop David Lynch has remained extremely
tight lipped about the actual meaning of a raserhead. He
gave the opposite of an answer when speaking the Vulture
a few years ago. This doesn't answer the question, but
it's an interesting take. Nonetheless, he said, every viewer is different.
People go into a world and they have an experience,
and they bring so much of what makes them react.

(01:23:26):
It's already inside of them. Each viewer gets a different
thing from every film. So there are some people where
a racerhead speaks to them, and others it doesn't speak
to them at all. It's just the way it goes.
But no one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the
film the way I see it. The interpretation of what
it's all about has never been my interpretation. So, as
with most art, perhaps it's best to not seek a

(01:23:48):
literal answer. Getting back to Subsinski's piece for Rogeribert dot
Com that I mentioned earlier, he wrote to quote explain,
a raserhead would be like cut a drum open to
see what makes the noise. You may get your answer,
but you tend to ruin the drum in the process.
That's a cool analogy.

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
Similarly, Yeah, I two thousand and four. It goes into
the Library of Congress. I again filmed. Man, I'm making
enemies out of film Twitter. I think this is the
most influential surrealist film of all time, regardless of whatever
film Twitter thinks. I'm calling it easily the most liked.

(01:24:29):
We talked about seven million. I couldn't verify that with
any real hard data, but on aw we said it
was twenty five thousand, probably ten thousand from a five
plus whatever he was able to finagle. That's more than
it deserves. Yeah, and I mean that in the nicest way.
But yeah, man, it hasn't eighty from again for a

(01:24:49):
movie like this, for something this bizarre, hasn't eighty seven
on Metacritic, has a ninety and rotten Tomatoes. Wow, that's wild,
even taking in every Tom Dick and hair. I don't
know what it is in letter but I'm not on
a letterbox yet, but even taking in every guy who
just hears this is a good movie to like, rip
a bong to and watch it. That is an astoundingly

(01:25:10):
good record. I mean, how much of it you think
It's like an Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing, too. Though,
after so many years of I Kubrick's favorite movie, yeah,
people be unwilling to call it out. I don't know.
Maybe you're signing the trumpet on a new charge, a
new dawn on of calling out a racer heead for
being orsh. You know, Jordan, As the song goes in heaven,

(01:25:32):
everything is fine. You've got your good thing and I've
got mine. You're a good thing is a racer head,
and mine is in like Flint, Austin Power's favorite movie. Folks.
As always, thank you for listening. This has been too
much information. I'm Alex Heigel and.

Speaker 1 (01:25:51):
I'm Jordan run Tagg. Thanks so much for spending this
time with us, you poor pastors. What too much Information
was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive.

Speaker 2 (01:26:06):
Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The supervising producer
is Mike Johns. The show was researched, written and hosted
by Jordan Runtalk and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:26:15):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe.

Speaker 2 (01:26:20):
And leave us a review.

Speaker 1 (01:26:22):
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