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David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana) is an American filmmaker. Lynch's films are known for their elements of surrealism, their nightmarish and dreamlike sequences, their stark and strange images, and their meticulously crafted audio. Often his work explores the seedy underside of small-town U.S.A. (e.g. Blue Velvet and the Twin Peaks television series) or sprawling metropolises (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive). Due to his peculiar style and focus on the American psyche, comedian Mel Brooks once called Lynch "Jimmy Stewart from Mars." Over a lengthy career, Lynch has developed a consistent approach to narrative and visual style that has become instantly recognizable to audiences worldwide. Although not a box office giant, he is a consistent favorite of film critics and has maintained a strong cult following. Early days Lynch grew up an archetypal all-American boy. His father, Donald, was a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist and his mother, Sunny, a language tutor. He was raised throughout the Pacific Northwest. He attained the rank of Eagle Scout, and on his fifteenth birthday served as an usher at John F. Kennedy's Presidential inauguration. With the intention of becoming an artist, Lynch attended classes at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. while finishing high school in Alexandria, Virginia. He enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for one year before leaving for Europe with his friend and fellow artist Jack Fisk with the plan to study with German expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. Though he had planned to stay for three years, Lynch returned to the US after 15 days. Philadelphia and the short films In 1966, Lynch relocated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) and made a series of complex mosaics in geometric shapes which he called Industrial Symphonies. At this time, he also began working in film. His first short film Six Figures Getting Sick (1966), which he described as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit," was played on a loop at an art exhibit. It won the Academy’s annual film contest. This led to a commission from H. Barton Wasserman to do a film installation in his home. After a disastrous first attempt that resulted in a completely blurred, frameless print, Wasserman allowed Lynch to keep the remaining portion of the commission. Using this, he created The Alphabet. In 1970, Lynch turned his attention away from visual art and focused primarily on film. He won a $5,000 grant from the American Film Institute to produce The Grandmother, about a neglected boy who “grows” a grandmother from a seed. The 30-minute film exhibited many elements that would become Lynch trademarks, including unsettling sound and imagery and a focus on unconscious desires instead of traditional narration. Eraserhead
The Elephant Man and Dune Eraserhead brought Lynch to the attention of producer Mel Brooks who hired him to direct 1980’s The Elephant Man, a biopic of deformed Victorian era socialite Joseph Merrick. The film was a huge financial and commercial success and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch. It also established his place as a commercially viable, if somewhat dark and unconventional, Hollywood director. Afterwards, Lynch agreed to direct a big budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune for Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis’s De Laurentiis Entertainment Group on the condition that the company release a second Lynch project, over which the director would have complete creative control. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be the next Star Wars, Lynch’s Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud, costing $45 million to make and grossing a mere $27.4 million domestically. The studio released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television in which some footage was reinstated; however, the main caveat was that certain shots from elsewhere in the film were repeated throughout the story to give the impression that other footage had been added. Whatever the case, this was not representative of Lynch’s intended cut, but rather a cut that the studios felt was more comprehensible than the original theatrical cut. Lynch objected to these changes and disowned the extended cut, which has Allen Smithee credited as the director. This version has since been released on video worldwide. Blue Velvet
Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Industrial Symphonies, American Chronicles and Hotel Room
Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE In 1997, Lynch returned with the non-linear, noir-like film Lost Highway, co-written by Barry Gifford and starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. The film failed commercially and received a mixed response from critics. However, thanks in part to a soundtrack featuring Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins, it helped gain Lynch a new audience of Generation X viewers. In 1999, Lynch surprised fans and critics with the G-rated, Disney-produced The Straight Story, which was, on the surface, a simple and humble movie telling the true story of an Iowa man (played by Richard Farnsworth) who rides a lawnmower to Wisconsin to make peace with his ailing brother. The film garnered positive reviews and reached a new audience for its director. The same year, Lynch approached ABC once again with an idea for a television drama. The network gave Lynch the go-ahead to shoot a two-hour pilot for the series Mulholland Drive, but disputes over content and running time led to the project being shelved indefinitely. With seven million dollars from the French distributor Canal Plus, Lynch completed the pilot as a film. Mulholland Drive is an enigmatic tale of the dark side of Hollywood and stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux. The film performed relatively well at the box office worldwide and was a critical success earning Lynch a Best Director prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There) and a Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Association. In 2002, Lynch created a series of online shorts entitled Dumb Land. Intentionally crude both in content and execution, the eight-episode series was later released on DVD.* The same year, Lynch treated his fans to his own version of a sitcom via his website - Rabbits, eight episodes of surrealism in a rabbit suit. Later, he showed his experiments with Digital Video (DV) in the form of the Japanese style horror short Darkened Room. At the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Lynch announced that he had spent over a year shooting his new film digitally in Poland. The film, titled INLAND EMPIRE (in capitals), included Lynch regulars such as Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, and Justin Theroux, as well as Jeremy Irons. Lynch described the film as "a mystery about a woman in trouble". It is scheduled to be released in 2006 and will be Lynch's first feature shot entirely on DV. A recent DVD from Digidesign featured Lynch in interview and apparently showcasing a scene from INLAND EMPIRE. A detailed review of the scene appeared on the film ick website but it was not at all positive, particularly critical of Lynch's decision to use digital video for the project. Many details of the scene that were given did, however, seem like the David Lynch his fans know and love. Awards and honors Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film and served as President of the jury at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where he had previously won the Palme d'Or in 1990. He was also honored in 2002 by the French government with the Legion of Honor. On September 6, 2006 Lynch received a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. He also premiered his latest film, INLAND EMPIRE, at the festival. * To date he has received four Academy Award nominations: Best Director for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), as well as Best Adapted Screenplay for The Elephant Man (1980). He has yet to win. Frequent collaborators Lynch often uses the same actors in his productions: Many of Lynch's films have bit parts played by musicians who have various degrees of acting experience: Sting in Dune, Chris Isaak in Fire Walk With Me, David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me, Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me, John Lurie in Wild at Heart, Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez in Lost Highway, Henry Rollins in Lost Highway, and Billy Ray Cyrus in Mullholland Drive. Lynch himself appears in The Amputee, Dune, Twin Peaks and . He is also in a deleted scene from Lost Highway. Influences Lynch admires filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, writer Franz Kafka, and artist Francis Bacon. He states that the majority of Kubrick films are in his top ten, that he really loves Kafka, and that Bacon paints images that are both visually stunning, and emotionally touching. He has also cited the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka as an inspiration for his works. Lynch has a love for the film The Wizard of Oz and frequently makes reference to it in his films, the most obvious being Wild at Heart. An early influence on Lynch was the book The Art Spirit by American turn-of-the-century artist and teacher Robert Henri. When he was in high school, Bushnell Keeler, an artist who was the stepfather of one of his friends, introduced Lynch to Henri's book, which became his bible. As Lynch said in Chris Rodley's book Lynch on Lynch, "it helped me decide my course for painting – 100 percent right there." Lynch, like Henri, moved from rural America to an urban environment to pursue an artistic career. Henri was an urban realist painter, legitimizing every day city life as the subject of his work, much in the same way that Lynch first drew street scenes. Henri's work also bridged changing centuries, from America's agricultural 19th century into the industrial 20th century, much in the same fashion as Lynch's films blend the nostalgic happiness of the fifties to the twisted weirdness of the eighties and nineties. Private life Lynch has been married three times: Trivia Transcendental meditation In December 2005, Lynch told the Washington Post that he had been practicing transcendental meditation twice a day, for 20 minutes each time, for 32 years. *. He advocates its use in bringing peace to the world. He has launched the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and Peace to fund research about TM's positive effects, and he promotes the technique and his vision by an ongoing tour of college campuses that began in September 2005. * A streaming video of one of Lynch's public performances is available at his foundation's website. Lynch is working for the establishment of seven "peace factories," each with 8000 salaried people practicing advanced techniques of TM, "pumping peace for the world". He estimates the cost at $7 billion; as of December 2005 he had spent $400,000 of his own money and raised $1 million in donations from a handful of wealthy individuals and organizations. * Unfinished/unrealized projects Cinematographer/director Caleb Deschanel, who was also at the AFI at the time and wanted to shoot the film, introduced Lynch to a producer at 20th Century Fox. The studio was interested in making a series of low-budget horror films and wanted to expand "Gardenback" into a feature film. The studio was willing to give Lynch $50,000 to make it but wanted the 45-page script to be expanded. This involved writing dialogue -- something Lynch had never tried before. Lynch said in Lynch on Lynch, "What I wrote was pretty much worthless, but something happened inside me about structure, about scenes. And I don't even know what it was, but it sort of percolated down and became part of me. But the script was pretty much worthless. I knew I'd just watered it down." Consequently, Lynch became disenchanted with the project. Some of the elements in "Gardenback" would later surface in Eraserhead, like its main characters Henry and Mary X. Other interests Lynch maintains an interest in other art forms. He described the twentieth century artist Francis Bacon as "to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter". He continues to present art installations and stage designs. In his spare time, he also designs and builds furniture. He started building furniture from his own designs as far back as his art school days. He built sheds during the making of Eraserhead, and many of the sets and furniture used in that movie are made by Lynch. In addition, he also made some of the furniture for Fred Madison's house in Lost Highway. Between the years of 1983 and 1992, Lynch wrote and drew a weekly comic strip called The Angriest Dog in the World for the L.A. Reader. The drawings in the panels never change -- just the captions. The comic strip originated from a time in Lynch's life when he was filled with anger. Lynch is a big fan of Bob's Big Boy restaurants, an Americana restaurant chain whose chief icon is a chubby cartoon male with a tray of dinner plates. Lynch has said that early on in his career he got a chocolate milkshake at one restaurant near his house almost every day for seven years in a row, along with "four, five, six, seven cups of coffee--with lots of sugar" *. Although he doesn't eat sugar anymore *, the director attributes the inspiration for many of his films and ideas to his daily sugar rushes in this period. Lynch also designed davidlynch.com, a site exclusive to paying members, where he posts short films and his absurdist series "Dumb Land", plus interviews and other items. The site also features a daily weather report, where Lynch gives a brief description of the weather in Los Angeles, where he resides. As director As an actor See also | |||||||||||||
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