World of Blue - Archived Forum 2007-2022

Weird thing I came across while flipping around in the book: DKL takes credit for playing Tom Pinkle on the Tim & Tom’s Taxi-dermy photoshoot. However, the Access Guide credits Gregg Feinberg with this role (and Richard Saul Wurman has said that DKL was the photographer). Curiouser and curiouser...

Fun fact I don’t recall reading before: His dad’s boss in the forestry service was Mr. Packard!

Mr. Reindeer wrote:Weird thing I came across while flipping around in the book: DKL takes credit for playing Tom Pinkle on the Tim & Tom’s Taxi-dermy photoshoot. However, the Access Guide credits Gregg Feinberg with this role (and Richard Saul Wurman has said that DKL was the photographer). Curiouser and curiouser...

Hmm. We don't see much of Tom Pinkle in the Access Guide due to the size of his hood, but the nose and top lip look more like Fienberg than Lynch to my eyes.

Looking forward to reading Room To Dream.

Towards the end, it's revealed Lynch wrote a new screenplay in 2010 called "Antelope Don't Run No More" that everyone who's read it says is one of the best scripts he's ever written. Nobody offered him the money he felt he needed to produce it, but I suspect this is the one he mentions to Beymer in Beymer's India documentary and that Jennifer Lynch raved about. It's revealed that it "braids threads from Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE into a narrative fantasia..."

that incorporates space aliens, talking animals, and a beleaguered musician named Pinky;

Woah, that sounds incredible.

A 'trilogy' of Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE, and Antelope Don't Run No More? I wish we could have seen that come to be.

I won't spoil the details for people who are still reading, but there are a couple of really hilarious stories of Lynch's meetings and conversations with Marlon Brando in the 90s. Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton unsuccessfully tried to get Marlon Brando to play one of the cow/people in "Dream of the Bovine." Haha.

"The Elephant Man is a film that should come out every four years, because it helps the world for people to see it. It's a beautiful story and a beautiful experience and it's timeless." - Lynch, page 168.

It’s a sidebar to a sidebar in DKL’s career, but I’ve always been curious about In Pursuit of Treasure, the failed AFI feature that DKL painted gold bricks on (and Fisk and Deschanel worked on as well). I found this interesting 2008 article about the director Stanton Kaye, who ultimately went into the tech industry, with some apparent success. The article details the In Pursuit of Treasure debacle from Kaye’s perspective and others’, including Deschanel (it would be interesting to see the film if only because it starred a young Scott Glenn!): http://www.laweekly.com/2008-03-06/news ... invention/

Hilariously, George Stevens, upon being presented with a film involving robots and climaxing with an imminent “apocalyptic standoff” between Native Americans and US militia, said he though he was getting a movie about a boy who fell in love with nature.

Stuart Cornfeld to Mel Brooks, re: Lynch: “He’s the guy.”

Brooks, after meeting Lynch: “That’s the guy.”

Anybody know if he is doing any other appearances to promote this, like in NYC?

Interesting to read that DKL did an additional pass on The Elephant Man script for the sole purpose of adding depth to Bytes, to get Freddie Jones on board. I think the character in the final script is still fairly one-dimensional, but Jones obviously found some inspiration to add layers of humanity in the performance, with his sort of disheveled drunken dignity laced with bitterness.

It was also nice to have the famed on-set “difficulty” with Tony Hopkins, which is always whispered about, spelled out in some concrete incidents. I wish Hopkins had been interviewed for the book (he has admitted he regrets how he acted toward DKL). Hopkins is a very technical actor and likes minimal, practical direction (hit your mark here and look at this person), so you can certainly imagine that DKL (who tends to whisper things like “a wind, but pink, with some Elvis”) would get on his nerves. Also interesting to note that DKL claims Hopkins asked Mel Brooks to fire DKL, whereas Mel specifically denies this.

EDIT: Here’s an old post with some interesting quotes on Hopkins’s perspective: viewtopic.php?t=1898#p20761

Lifelong Dune fan Kyle MacLachlan, on the film: “Ultimately, there was no way to flesh out the intricacy of the world Frank Herbert created, because there are just too many things going on in the book. [...] The Harkonnens, the train car coming into the palace—my God, it’s genius. I call it a flawed masterpiece.”

So based on prior information, I guess we can infer that the Eraserhead deleted scenes were lost during Mary Fisk’s move from LA to Virginia while Lynch was in Mexico on Dune (he’s previously said that Fisk threw the film out while he was out of the country shooting either The Elephant Man or Dune, and elsewhere said that it was lost during a move). Such a shame. I like the Dune film for what it is, although it’s easily my least favorite of his “major” works by a large margin, and I get his perspective that Dune was a predestined part of his Bildungsroman arc as a director on the path toward Blue Velvet and mainstream success. But the fact that on some level DKL leaving the country to make Dune, of all things, caused 20 minutes of the world of Eraserhead to be forever lost is such a depressing thought.

While I’m overall loving the book so far, the “objective” chapter on the original TP series is not very insightful. The quotes and anecdotes are nice (particularly thoughts Ontkean contributed in October 2016, a year after he had opted out of S3). But there is remarkably little new insight (perhaps inevitably, given how well Brad Dukes picked this ground over). It skips around the show’s production randomly, and barely grazes the surface of DKL’s involvement with the show post-Pilot (it barely even touches on the production of Episode 29, which must be loaded with great stories!). It also has some careless misinformation, and one gets the sense that McKenna doesn’t know the show super well: she says parts of the Pilot were shot in the Malibu woods and in a San Fernando Valley warehouse (untrue—that’s where the SERIES was shot); she provides a laundry list of merchandise that was part of the initial “zeitgeist” (bow ties, jewelry, coffee-scented shirt, action figures), when in fact most of the items she mentions were produced not in the 1990s but in the mid-2010s; and she says the series went on hiatus on 6/10/91 (it was 2/16/91—6/10 was the finale airdate). While McKenna thankfully places DKL’s W@H-related absence where it belongs, in S1, she also quotes Mark propagating the “David was making W@H during S2” nonsense. She also oddly says the “European version” of the Pilot was released direct to video in the UK five months before the Pilot aired on ABC. Can anyone definitively confirm or refute this? I’ve never heard this before, and I’m fairly certain the “direct to video movie” market barely existed in 1989. I’ve always been curious exactly when the “European edit” became available, and whether fans became aware of the idea of Bob as the killer before it was officially hinted/revealed in TSDoLP and Episode 8 as a result of the extended Pilot.

Anyway, overall, I found that chapter of the book a real missed opportunity to meaningfully explore DKL’s complicated relationship with the series and the factors behind his absence in S2. The L/F rift is only addressed in a passage where Tony Krantz blames Mark’s ego, and in the scant few pages that deal with the rise and fall of the show, DKL (perhaps appropriately?) feels like a mysteriously absent character in his own biography.

^ they also mess up David Bowie's death date...