CHARLEY BRADY
David Lynch has the most extraordinary hair. I’m not kidding. The movie director has hair as weird, vivid, and memorable as any of his films. And this is the guy who gave us Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and INLAND EMPIRE, so that’s pretty weird, memorable, and vivid.
His hair is so majestic, luxurious, and full of life that I’m honestly surprised that he hasn’t been kidnapped by a shady pharmaceutical company and experimented on, to give hope to bald men everywhere.
I once had a dream – and yes, it was a Lynchian dream – in which David Lynch’s hair met and fell madly in love with Melvyn Bragg’s equally extraordinary follicles; they mated; and their offspring led to the downfall of civilization as we know it, Jim.
I woke up in quite the sweat, clutching frantically at my own luscious glory and heaving sighs of relief at it only being a dream. Or was it?
Anyway, I’m a big fan of Lynch’s movies, but it was only when reading Room to Dream that I learned that in 1995 he was asked to partake in Lumière and Company, an interesting experiment in which forty directors were asked to make a fifty-five-second film made up of one continuous shot, using the original Lumière Brothers camera. And to simulate turn-of-the-twentieth-century conditions, they were allowed only three takes, couldn’t use artificial light, and had to do a single fifty-five-second shot.
Over to you, producer Neal Edelstein:
“The Lumière project is bite-size David Lynch, but it’s as satisfying to watch as any of his feature films. Gary D’Amico is a practical-effects guy and a wonderful human being who lives in La Tuna Canyon on a huge piece of property so we built a set in Gary’s front yard. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. David was massaging four or five segments at once, each had to go off perfectly, and it was high-risk filmmaking. We were all laughing like kids that we were managing to pull this cool thing off.”
The short film was called Premonition Following an Evil Deed and of the forty films made – and the directors included Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Arthur Penn, and John Boorman -- Lynch’s was generally agreed to be the best and most ambitious.
Just one more reason to love David Lynch.
And his hair.
Room to Dream is by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna.
charleybrady@gmail.com