The Warriors

When The Warriors came out in 1979 it was a modestly budgeted film made by an up-and-coming director named Walter Hill and featured a then-unknown cast. With its nightmarish vision of New York City, the film certainly wasn’t going to be used in any of the city’s tourism ads extolling the virtues of the metropolis. Like many films from the 1970s, New York is presented as a dirty, dangerous place filled with jaded, cynical people (see Taxi Driver and The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three). The Warriors performed decently at the box office but reports of gang-related violence at a few screenings caused the studio to panic and downplay promotional advertisements. But the film had left its mark and over the years it has quietly cultivated a loyal following thanks mainly to regular screenings on television and the occasional midnight showing at repertory theaters.

The film’s premise is pure B-movie hokum. New York City is dominated by gangs that hail from the various boroughs. One man named Cyrus (Roger Hill) dreams of uniting all of these different groups into a 60,000-strong army that will run the city and answer to no one, not the police and not organized crime. To this end, he convinces representatives from 100 gangs to gather in Van Cortlandt Park. However, much like Malcolm X before him, Cyrus’ call for revolution is shattered when he is killed by an assassin, a grinning maniac named Luther (David Patrick Kelly) from the Rogues. With their leader missing in action thanks to the ensuing chaos, Swan (Michael Beck) takes over a gang known as the Warriors. They find themselves trapped in Manhattan, framed for Cyrus’ death. They must fight their way back to their turf on Coney Island and go through several territories of other gangs out for their blood. It’s a chase movie broken up by several exciting fight scenes and commented on by a late night disc jockey (Lynne Thigpen) like a Greek chorus as she spins tunes that offer clues for what awaits the Warriors next. It is this simple yet effective set-up that makes the film work so well.

The tension between the Warriors’ stoic war chief Swan and cocky gang member Ajax (James Remar) is nicely done and gives an edgy quality to their group dynamic. Swan is the archetypal Hill protagonist: a laconic man of action and of few words, much like Ryan O’Neal’s no-nonsense wheelman in The Driver (1978) and Michael Pare’s soldier of fortune in Streets of Fire (1984). With a few notable exceptions, the Warriors are a pretty indistinguishable lot. You’ve got the inexperienced guy, the not-so smart guy, the tough guy, etc. Only Michael Beck and James Remar really stand out and it’s no surprise that they were the two actors that went on to illustrious careers, especially Remar who has had a diverse career that includes Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and Sex and the City. That being said, the actors playing the rest of the Warriors do just enough to invest you in their plight so that you care about what happens to them.

Deborah Van Valkenburgh plays Mercy, a woman the Warriors cross paths with during their run-in with the Orphans. She is tough and oozes attitude and sexual appeal. She’s one of Hill’s quintessential smart, tough-talking women, like Amy Madigan’s soldier in Streets of Fire and Annette O’Toole’s long-suffering girlfriend to Nick Nolte’s cop in 48 Hrs (1982). There’s a telling scene near the end of the film where two couples get on the subway and sit across from a tired, disheveled and bruised Swan and Mercy. They are all roughly the same age but they couldn’t be more different. The two couples have just come from a prom and are a laughing and smiling while our badass heroes look exhausted but defiant having survived a tumultuous night.

The push and pull dynamic between Swan and Ajax enhances the relentless urgency that kicks in once the Warriors are on the run, fighting their way back home. Hill is only interested in constantly propelling the narrative forward as our heroes run the gauntlet of gangs. The closer they get, the tougher the gangs are that they have to face. And they are a colorful assortment, some are rather lame, like the Orphans whose uniform consists of nothing more than a plain t-shirt and blue jeans, and some look really cool, like the Baseball Furies, a bizarre-looking gang dressed up in Yankee pinstripes and oddly-colored face-paint. You would think that they would look ridiculous but there is something about them, maybe it’s their lack of speaking, that is creepy.

Hill directs the action sequences in a clean, straight-forward style so that there is never any confusion about who’s fighting who and where. He uses editing to help convey the kinetic action in these scenes so that they’re always exciting to watch. The film’s score features ominous electronic rock music comparable to what John Carpenter was also doing at the time (see Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween). The pulsating score matches the rhythm of the editing. The music also enhances the tough, street vibe as it chugs along much like the subway that runs through the city delivering our heroes to safety.

The genesis for The Warriors came about when producer Lawrence Gordon sent director Walter Hill the screenplay along with a copy of Sol Yurick’s novel. Hill was drawn to the “extreme narrative simplicity and stripped down quality of the script.” As written, it was a realistic take on street gangs but Hill was obsessed with comic books and wanted to divide the film into chapters and then have each chapter “come to life starting with a splash panel.” Gordon and Hill were originally planning to make a western but when the financing on the project fell through, they took The Warriors to Paramount Pictures because the studio was interested in making youth films at the time.

Gordon and Hill did extensive casting in New York City. Originally, in Yurick’s book there are no white characters but, according to the director, the studio did not want an all-black cast for “commercial reasons.” Hill had screened an independent film called Madman (1978) for Sigourney Weaver whom he ended up casting in Alien (1979). The film also featured Michael Beck as the male lead. Hill was so impressed by his performance in Madman that he cast Beck in The Warriors. In order to depict the many fights in the film realistically, Hill had stunt coordinator Craig R. Baxley put the cast through stunt school.

Hill shot the entire film in New York City with some interiors done at Astoria Studios. The shooting schedule consisted of shooting from sun down to sun up. It wasn’t the easiest shoot. For example, while shooting in the Bronx, bricks were tossed at the crew. One of the cast members remembered filming a scene on Avenue A being canceled because there was a double homicide nearby. For the big gang summit at the beginning of the film, Hill wanted real gang members in the scene and they also had off-duty police officers in the crowd so that there would be no trouble. Actual gang members wanted to challenge some of the cast members but were dealt with by production security. The production fell behind schedule and went over budget.

Originally, at the climactic Coney Island confrontation at the end of the film, David Patrick Kelly wanted to use two dead pigeons for his now famous line but Hill did not think they would work. Instead, Kelly used bottles and improvised his famous line, “Waaaaarriors, come out to plaaaaaay!” This came from a man the actor knew in downtown New York that would make fun of him.

Hill was unable to realize his comic book look due to the low budget and tight post-production schedule because of a fixed release date in order to get it out in theaters before a rival gang picture called The Wanderers (1979). It opened on February 9, 1979 without advance screenings or a decent promotional campaign. People tend to forget the notorious reputation the film had back in the day. The next weekend it was linked to accounts of vandalism and three killings – two in Southern California and one in Boston. As a result, Paramount removed ads from radio and television entirely and display ads in newspapers were reduced to the film's title, rating and participating theaters. In reaction, 200 theaters in the United States added security people to curb any potential trouble. In addition, theater owners were relieved of their contractual obligations if they did not want to show the film, and amazingly Paramount offered to pay costs for additional security and damages due to vandalism.

After things calmed down somewhat, the studio expanded the display ads to take advantage of reviews from reputable critics like The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who gave it a rave review. She wrote, “The Warriors is a real moviemaker’s movie: it has in visual terms the kind of impact that ’Rock Around the Clock’ did behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle. The Warriors is like visual rock.” However, the film was panned by many critics. The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold felt that, "none of Hill's dynamism will save The Warriors from impressing most neutral observers as a ghastly folly.” In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, “another problem arises when the gang members open their mouths: their banal dialogue is jarringly at odds with Hill's hyperbolic visual scheme.” Time magazine’s Frank Rich wrote, “Unfortunately, sheer visual zip is not enough to carry the film; it drags from one scuffle to the next ... But The Warriors is not lively enough to be cheap fun or thoughtful enough to be serious". Yurick expressed his disappointment in the film version and speculated that it scared some people because "it appeals to the fear of a demonic uprising by lumpen youth", and appealed to many teenagers because it "hits a series of collective fantasies.”

I’m still on the fence about the comic book panel framing device imposed by Hill for the Ultimate Director’s Cut DVD. The new tweaks to the film are obvious right from the get-go as the director narrates an opening scrawl featuring parallels to some nonsense about what we are about to see with Greek mythology. Some of the scene transitions are now done in a more overt, comic book style a la panels featuring stylized frames from the film. I understand that this was Hill’s intention all along, acting as a homage to his love of comic books as a kid but it undercuts the nightmarish vibe of The Warriors that made it so powerful in the first place. This is glaringly apparent at the end when the triumphant Warriors stand on the beach at Coney Island as Joe Walsh’s “In the City” plays and the stylized comic book panel motif ruins the poignancy of the moment.

The Warriors is set almost entirely at night and presents the city as a dark, foreboding labyrinth fraught with danger that lurks around every corner and in every alley as the Warriors not only evade the cops but also rival gangs that hold them responsible for killing Cyrus. John Carpenter would take this dystopic vision to the next logical level with Escape from New York (1981) by re-imagining the city as a walled-in prison guarded by an army. Even though Hill claims this to be a comic book-like film, it really doesn’t feel or look like one despite his recent tinkering. The gritty setting, the ominous music and the constant danger that our heroes are in doesn’t evoke a comic book vibe at all. And this is what fans of The Warriors like about it.

Eddie and the Cruisers

When Eddie and the Cruisers came out in 1983 it was either ignored or received negatively by critics and performed poorly at the box office. However, over the years it has quietly cultivated a small but dedicated cult following. The film is primarily a mystery – what happened to musician Eddie Wilson? – and it also an unabashed love letter to rock ‘n’ roll and the New Jersey shore in the 1960s. It has been over 25 years since the film was released and it is high time for a re-evaluation of this under-appreciated gem.

Maggie Foley (Ellen Barkin) is a journalist for Media magazine and is doing a retrospective piece on Eddie and the Cruisers, a New Jersey bar band that was a minor sensation in the 1960s with one hit record and the top song in country during the summer of 1963. The band were working on an ambitious follow-up when lead singer Eddie Wilson (Michael Pare) drove his car off a pier and met with a watery demise on March 15, 1964. Or did he? No body was found. Maggie’s hook is that maybe Eddie didn’t die. She draws a parallel between him and French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who like Eddie, pulled a disappearing act at the height of his popularity while striving for perfection in his art. Now, everyone is looking for the master tapes of A Season in Hell, the album that was to be Eddie’s magnum opus, and which also disappeared only a day after Eddie vanished.

Through a series of flashbacks from all of the surviving band members, we see the rise and fall of Eddie and the Cruisers. The film is told predominantly from the point-of-view of Frank “The Wordman” Ridgeway (Tom Berenger), the band’s piano player and lyricist. He teaches English in high school now but Maggie’s questions bring all the old memories flooding back. The first flashback takes us back to 1962, while President John F. Kennedy was still in the White House, and when the United States was still a relatively innocent and hopeful country. Eddie and the Cruisers meet Frank at a bar in the Jersey Shore. Sal Amato (Matthew Laurance), their bass player, has been writing their songs but they aren’t enough for Eddie who tells him, “it just ain’t what I was looking for.” Eddie spots Frank and asks him what he thinks. Frank impresses Eddie with his knowledge of writing when he points out that Sal’s song needs a caesura, “a timely pause, a kind of strategic silence.” This is pretty high-falootin’ stuff for a rock ‘n’ roll movie and an indicator that this film aspires to be something different.

Eddie dreams of creating music that endures and director Martin Davidson juxtaposes these almost wistful sentiments with Sal’s contemporary Cruisers revival that is pure Las Vegas cheese, bastardizing the music as a lame lounge act where he finally gets to front the band. He embodies the very thing that Eddie was against – prostituting yourself instead of remaining true to the music. Sal’s version of the Cruisers, complete with an Eddie wannabe, is like when you see Lynyrd Skynyrd with only one original member of the band left – a pale imitation of its former self.

Davidson has said that the inspiration for the film came from a desire to "get all my feelings about the music of the last 30 years of rock music into it.” He optioned P.F. Kluge’s novel of the same name with his own money and at great financial risk. He wrote the screenplay with Arlene Davidson and decided to use a Citizen Kane-style story structure. He said in an interview, “That was in my head: the search.” He made a deal with Time-Life, a company that was going into the moviemaking business. However, they quickly exited the business after making two films that were not financially successful and Davidson’s project was left high and dry. He was understandably upset and a couple days later he went out to dinner and ran into a secretary who worked on the first film he had made. Davidson told her what had happened to his film and she gave his script for Eddie and the Cruisers to her business partners. In a relatively short time a deal was struck with a company called Aurora and Davidson was given a $6 million budget. Aurora made only three films – The Secret of NIMH (1982), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), and his film.

In order to get a credible looking and sounding band for the film, Davidson hired Kenny Vance, one of the original members of Jay and the Americans. He showed Davidson his scrapbook, the places they performed, the car they drove in, and things like how they transported their instruments. Vance also told Davidson stories about his band, some of which he incorporated into the script. Vance asked Davidson to describe his fictious band and what their music sounded like. Initially, he said that the Cruisers’ sound resembled Dion and the Belmonts but when they meet Frank they had elements of Jim Morrison and The Doors. However, Davidson did not want to lose sight of the fact that the Cruisers were essentially a Jersey bar band and he thought of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Davidson told Vance to find him someone that could produce music that contained elements of those three bands. Davidson was getting close to rehearsals when Vance called him and told him that he had found the band – John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band from Providence, Rhode Island. Davidson met them and realized that they closely resembled the band as described in the script, right down to a black saxophone player, whom he actually cast in the film. Initially Cafferty was hired to write a few songs for the film but he did such a good job of capturing the feeling of the 1960s and the 1980s that Davidson asked him to score the film

Tom Berenger did not try to learn how to play the piano for the film but did practice keyboards for hours in his trailer to at least create the illusion that he could play. Matthew Laurance actually learned how to play the bass through rehearsals. Michael Pare said of his role in the film that it was "a thrill I've never experienced. It's a really weird high. For a few moments, you feel like a king, a god. It's scary, a dangerous feeling. If you take it too seriously." Davidson had the actors who played in Eddie's band rehearse as if they were getting ready for a real concert. Pare remembers, "The first time we played together – as a band – was a college concert. An odd thing happened. At first, the extras simply did what they were told. Then, as the music heated up, so did the audience. They weren't play-acting anymore. The screaming, stomping and applause became spontaneous.” Davidson recalls, "One by one, kids began standing up in their seats, screaming and raising their hands in rhythmic applause. A few girls made a dash for the stage, tearing at Michael's shirt. We certainly hadn't told them to do that. But we kept the cameras rolling.”

The filmmakers do a pretty good job recreating the period details on a modest budget at best. There’s the cool cars, the clothes, and so on, but more importantly there is a tangible atmosphere of simpler times and nostalgia. This is encapsulated in the straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll music of the Cruisers that sounds a lot like early Springsteen. There is also a little bit of period music, most notably Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” that is used to immediately transport you back to that time. As soon you hear that distinctive song it instantly invokes that period and there is no question where we are.

What Eddie and the Cruisers nails so well is the dynamic between the members in the band, like how Sal gets on Eddie’s nerves, or how a romance develops between Frank and Joann Carlino (Helen Schneider), the band’s back-up singer. Davidson’s film shows how the band members bicker among each other but come together when it counts – playing live, where they know how to energize an audience. The film presents several band archetypes – the charismatic lead singer, the junkie band mate, the arrogant one, the laid back one, and the thoughtful one – but without being too obvious about it. Joann is the Patti Scialfa to Eddie’s Bruce Springsteen but Frank falls for her the first time they meet in ’62. There are certainly sparks between them but as anyone who’s been in a band knows, the fastest way to break one up is getting romantically involved with a fellow bandmate.

One of the best scenes in the film that illustrates the band’s dynamic is the flashback showing how their biggest hit, “On the Dark Side,” evolved. Eddie takes Frank’s slow ballad and spruces it up with a catchy up-tempo keyboard melody. Pretty soon the rest of the band joins and a hit is born. This scene shows what a great team Eddie and Frank are – the former supplies the music and the latter supplies the words. It also shows Eddie’s uncanny ear for what works in a song.

Michael Pare really sells the music well and delivers just the right amount of energy and charisma. It helps that the vocals he’s lip-synching to fit him well. You almost believe that he’s really singing. Pare also portrays Eddie as tantalizingly elusive and enigmatic. You are never quite sure what he’s thinking and he’s a man of few words but clearly has ambitions above and beyond entertaining an audience. With the album A Season in Hell, Eddie wanted to create something different and when the powers that be tried to deny him, he disappeared. Along with Streets of Fire (1984), Eddie and the Cruisers was supposed to make Pare a big movie star but both films tanked commercially and critically. Now, he’s relegated mostly to direct-to-home-video fare.

Tom Berenger conveys a slightly sad, wistful vibe as Frank clearly misses the times he had with the band. He has made peace with his lot in life. He’s no longer a musician and his ambitions died alongside Eddie. I always liked Berenger and he’s wonderfully understated in this film. He would go on to the role of a lifetime in Platoon (1986), which was the antithesis to his role in Eddie and the Cruisers and showcased his versatility as an actor. Prior to this film, he also had a memorable turn in The Big Chill (1983). For awhile it looked like he would be leading man material but he has settled rather nicely into character actor roles.

A young Ellen Barkin plays the persistent reporter who tries to unravel the mystery of Eddie’s death. She looks so young and beautiful in this film but isn’t given too much screen time. Looking back, she had a pretty fantastic run in the 1980s with this film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), The Big Easy (1987), and ended the decade in style with Sea of Love (1989). Joe Pantoliano plays the Cruisers’ manager with the same kind of enthusiasm that he would display in other memorable roles in the 1980s, like Risky Business (1983), The Mean Season (1985), and Midnight Run (1988).

Eddie and the Cruisers was originally intended to open during the summer but a scheduling error resulted in a September release when its target audience – teenagers – were back in school. It was released on September 23, 1983 and grossed $1.4 million on its opening weekend. The film was pulled from theaters after three weeks and all of the ads were pulled after one week. It would go on to make a disappointing $4.7 million in North America.

Eddie and the Cruisers received largely mixed to negative reviews. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and found the ending “so frustrating, so dumb, so unsatisfactory, that it gives a bad reputation to the whole movie.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Some of the details ring uncannily true, like the slick oldies nightclub act that one of the Cruisers is still doing nearly 20 years after Eddie's supposed death. Other aspects of the movie are inexplicably wrong. Eddie's music sounds good, but it also sounds a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s, and it would not have been the rage in 1963.” However, she did praise Pare's performance: "Mr. Pare makes a fine debut; he captures the manner of a hot-blooded young rocker with great conviction, and his lip-synching is almost perfect.” Gary Arnold, in the Washington Post, wrote, "At any rate, it seemed to me that what Eddie and the Cruisers aspired to do was certainly worth doing. The problem is that it finally lacks the storytelling resources to tell enough of an intriguing story about a musical mystery man.”

In 1984, Eddie and the Cruisers found new life on HBO. After the soundtrack album suddenly climbed the charts, the studio re-released it in the fall of 1984. During its play dates on HBO, the album sold three million copies. Nine months after the film opened, “On the Dark Side,” the Cruisers big hit in the film, was the number one song in the country. Embassy Pictures re-released the film for one-week based on successful summer cable screenings and popular radio single but it failed to perform at the box office. The film and the album eventually did well enough to make way for a sequel – Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives (1989) – that saw Eddie as a construction worker in Montreal (?!). Davidson was offered the sequel but was not crazy about the idea and wanted no part of it. With the exception of Pare, Laurance and Cafferty, nobody from the first film had anything to do with it and the less said about this awful film the better. After the commercial failure of the first film, Davidson has continued to work steadily, mostly in television, directing episodes of Law & Order, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope and Judging Amy but has been inactive since 2002.

It’s interesting that the initial rise and fall of Eddie and the Cruisers mirrors the arc of President Kennedy. The band peaks during his presidency and Eddie disappears and his band breaks up after Kennedy is assassinated and the country was thrown into turmoil and disillusionment. This parallel seems more than just a coincidence so I’m sure Davidson had it mind when he wrote the screenplay. What is so endearing about Eddie and the Cruisers is the idealism that permeates the film as embodied by Eddie’s desire to create songs that will allow him “to fold ourselves up in them forever,” as he tells Frank at one point. The film has an internal conscience and celebrates the notion that music can take you to another place and make you forget about your daily problems for a few minutes. This is tempered by a melancholic tone that permeates all of the scenes that take place in the present. Eddie’s death and the end of the Cruisers hangs like a heavy cloud over the surviving members and all of the old feelings and memories are dredged up thanks to Maggie’s inquiries.

Eddie and the Cruisers celebrates getting lost in the music and how it makes you feel. This is pretty ambitious stuff for a little a film about a reclusive singer for a bar band. And, for the most part, the film pulls it off. Along with Almost Famous (2000) and Hard Core Logo (1996), it is definitely one of my favorite films about a fictious band. Davidson is still proud of his film but is bitter about how it was handled. “That picture should have been a theatrical success. There was an audience for it. People still watch it and still tell me about it.” Eddie and the Cruisers has aged surprisingly well and over time all the good notes are intact.

I would be remiss without giving a shout-out to John Kenneth Muir's book, The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia for providing the bulk of the production information contained in this article.

Here's the trailer:

Eraserhead

"Eraserhead's not a movie I'd drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars."

- J. Hoberman, Village Voice, October 24, 1977.

The arrival of 1977 saw the release of two important films – Eraserhead and Star Wars. Both films couldn't be more different visually or thematically, and yet they share a common bond in the sense that each feature a filmmaker with a unique vision. Hoberman's quote points out the respective ends of the spectrum that Star Wars' director, George Lucas and Eraserhead's director, David Lynch occupy. Lucas made a wildly popular film that appealed to a mass audience, while Lynch created an intensely personal film that attracted a small, but devoted group of admirers. Interestingly enough, these two films were so captivating and distinctive that they would entice people to watch them repeatedly but for entirely different reasons. However, where Lucas' film is essentially a homage to the works of other filmmakers and films that he admired – albeit given a unique spin to make it his own, Lynch's film remains truly original and as fresh and innovative as it did when it first appeared at its midnight screening premiere at the Filmex in Los Angeles.

Many writers have tried to sum up the story of Eraserhead, but few have been able to accurately convey what exactly is happening. It is no secret that Eraserhead is a film that defies an easy synopsis. You don't watch the film per se, but rather experience it. However, one of the best attempts to describe it comes from the director himself who once summarized the film as "a dream of dark and troubling things.”

Eraserhead is an urban nightmare set in an industrial wasteland "reminiscent of the paintings of the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger” whose works contain images of decaying biological matter and people trapped in machinery, becoming one with industry, much like Lynch's film with its bleak landscapes of buildings and factories with no signs of nature present. The motion picture's protagonist, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a rather odd fellow who wears a black suit with a white pocket protector and white socks to match, his hair styled like some sort of electrified pompadour a la the Bride of Frankenstein (1935). As the film opens, we gradually learn that Henry is on vacation from La Pelle's factory and after a particularly gruesome and rather humorous dinner with his girlfriend Mary X and her strange family, he learns that she has given birth to a premature baby. The rest of the film shows how Henry comes to terms with this situation and copes with all of the problems inherit in rearing a child in an area that can only be referred to as an urban hell.

Now this all sounds pretty straight forward right? Well, Eraserhead doesn't quite play out in this linear fashion. The film follows its own leisurely pace in order to let the rather nightmarish mood and creepy atmosphere slowly work its magic on the viewer. And this is where the film loses or keeps its audience. You are either captivated by its often disturbing, yet somewhat beautiful images, or repulsed by its rather negative and pessimistic worldview. Either way, Eraserhead is an unforgettable film guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction, which is what a good film should do.

David Lynch first conceived of Eraserhead as a black and white film. "Black and white takes you kind of far away. Some things are said better in it, some feelings come across better.” He wanted to capture the feeling of fear and alienation that he had felt while living in Philadelphia and using black and white film stock would convey this mood effectively. The first image that appeared to Lynch was that of a factory where the insides of someone's head would be used to make pencil erasers – an image that would later survive to the final cut and provide the title for his film.

And yet, in later years whenever an interviewer would ask Lynch what was the main influence or inspiration for Eraserhead he would almost immediately reply, Philadelphia. Lynch and his first wife, Peggy had lived in the city from 1966 to 1970, buying a 12-room house for $3,500 in an industrial district across from an old city morgue. Lynch experienced first hand the feeling of urban decay and the evil nature that man was capable of as violence, danger, and fear surrounded him on a daily basis. Their house was broken into three times, twice when he and Peggy were at home. Lynch remembers one such eye opening event that stayed with him for some time, an event that led to him writing and filming Eraserhead.

“And a large family was going to a christening of this small baby. And a gang came swooping down on the other side of the street, and attacked the family. And in the family there was a teenage son who tried to defend the whole bunch, and they beat him down, and they shot him in the back of the head.”

For all of its negative aspects, Philadelphia was a positive experience for Lynch. “I never had an original idea until I came to Philadelphia.” His stay there marked an intellectual awakening of sorts. Lynch became even more fascinated and in tune with the philosophy of light and dark, good vs. evil that would later become the focal point of his films.

Lynch moved to California soon after he had enrolled at the American Film Institute under the Center for Advanced Film Studies in 1970. He had achieved this scholarship thanks to a string of strange, unclassifiable film shorts that had won him all sorts of accolades and awards. Initially, Lynch wasn’t even planning to make Eraserhead but had originally submitted an idea for a film short called Gardenback, which he described as “a story about adultery, really, but it had a lot to do with gardens and insects.” However, the Center wasn’t exactly keen on the idea and didn’t really understand what he wanted to do, so Lynch ultimately abandoned it. This left the filmmaker frustrated, heartbroken, and on the verge of quitting the AFI. Instead, Lynch began studying the structure of film by attending conferences and a film analysis class taught by Frank Daniel, former dean of a Czech film school. This in turn provided the technical groundwork for his most ambitious project yet: Eraserhead.

By the next year, the Institute gave him $10,000 and so Lynch began the pre-production stage of Eraserhead, working with a 21-page script that he had written in a compressed style that relied heavily on images. "He showed me this little script he had written for Eraserhead. It was only a few pages with this weird imagery and not much dialogue and this baby kind of thing,” remembers Jack Nance, the man who ended up playing Henry Spencer. When truly inspired, Lynch worked fast on the screenplay. For example, the infamous family dinner scene was written mainly in a single night, while some ideas, like the Lady in the Radiator, developed gradually over time. This rather spontaneous method evolved from Lynch's practice as a painter. He was used to collecting and accumulating images and ideas that were similar or could be linked together via his imagination.

The script for Eraserhead did not take shape in terms of a plot, but rather in terms of textures. Lynch loved to study textures of all various kinds, from the organic sort to ones of an industrial or urban nature. Before and while working on Eraserhead, the filmmaker conducted all sorts of experiments with textures. He discussed one such experiment in an 1980 interview with Wet magazine: "I'm obsessed with textures. We're surrounded by so much vinyl that I find myself constantly in pursuit of other textures. One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair-Hair just to see what it looked like. And it looked beautiful." Lynch was also fascinated by the textures of factories and cities, in particular, the buildings of downtown Los Angeles and the "industrial/agricultural feel" of the L.A. River. This famous metropolis, for Lynch, had a great black and white mood to it, like something out of a Raymond Chandler novel or a film noir like Double Indemnity (1944) made by his favorite director, Billy Wilder. To this end, Lynch captured the dark, forbidding mood synonymous with all film noirs, and evoked in it his own film by actually shooting some the exteriors in downtown L.A. Eraserhead has that look of the old film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, with the only difference being that Lynch goes one step further by staging the entire film at night with some scenes taking place in an almost completely darkened landscape. In this respect, Eraserhead takes the film noir to its stylistic limits.

Actual filming began on May 29, 1972 in the abandoned AFI stables, located at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Henry’s apartment was a deserted garage where filming took place between one am and dawn for a whole year. All of the soundstages that were used in Eraserhead Lynch and his small, but dedicated crew of five or six people had built themselves. The AFI money soon ran out and the young filmmaker was so poor that he ended up living on the set, building sheds, replacing hot water heaters, and delivering the Wall Street Journal for extra money.

“I was a paperboy. I had a route that started at 11:30 at night and the first night I got my route it took seven hours to complete it. And I worked very hard, and one day I got an overview, suddenly, mentally of my route and that was two or three weeks later and I was able to reduce my route down to one hour. So fast I went that one night I had the stomach flu and before the route I was sick and after the thing was done I had worked such a sweat up doing the route, that I was healed.”

This is a great example of Lynch’s wry, subtle sense of humor. Clearly, there is some truth to this anecdote. Lynch did deliver the Wall Street Journal, using a 1959 Volkswagen, and no doubt worked very hard at it, but he is also having a bit of fun at the interviewer’s expense by also mentioning the flu that was miraculously healed in one hour.

Despite living poverty, Lynch’s time spent working on Eraserhead was one of the best times of his life. He was obviously a man in his element that had made a personal connection with his material.

“I really liked living the way I did during Eraserhead. I had a TV, a shop with enough wood to build things, a radio, a house, a washing machine. No dryer – the sun dried my clothes, which was amazing. Now I go onto the set with 60 people, and it’s just not the same. It’s harder to feel the mood and settle into it.”

For Lynch, this was the perfect environment to develop the right mood and start capturing ideas. At the same time he was fulfilling his dream of living the life of an artist – smoking cigarettes, working late into the night on his film, and building sheds. The plans for these structures originated at Lynch’s favorite restaurant, Bob’s Big Boy Coffee Shop, where he went nearly every day at 2:30 in the afternoon to soak up the atmosphere and drink chocolate milkshakes accompanied by a hot cup of coffee. Amidst all the discouraging struggles to make ends meet, Lynch could always find respite at Bob’s Big Boy where he “would be almost in heaven with happiness.”

Every aspect of Eraserhead was constructed with painstaking care and detail by Lynch and his crew. This not only included building all of the film’s sets but the complex soundtrack as well. The film’s sounds came courtesy of Lynch and his sound editor Alan R. Splet who had cut his teeth at a small production company mixing sound on industrial films. This would provide the ideal background for Eraserhead’s urban soundscape. Splet had been recommended by a friend of Lynch’s who had done the sound on the filmmaker’s first student short film, The Alphabet. The two men subsequently collaborated on Lynch’s next short entitled The Grandmother. The experience proved to be so enjoyable that Splet joined Lynch on creating Eraserhead’s soundtrack.

Lynch and Splet worked on the soundtrack in another empty garage room in the deserted AFI stables. They designed, built, and then hung sound-deadening blankets over the walls to get the cleanest, purist sound possible. Lynch and Splet started with natural sounds and then altered them. The two men used a variety of machinery, from one that could vary the pitch of sounds, but not the speed to “a graphic equalizer, reverb, a little Dipper filter set for peaking certain frequencies and dipping out things or reversing things or cutting things together.” It was the perfect environment for Lynch and Splet to create the ideal soundtrack for Eraserhead as Lynch said in an interview, “we could make sounds the way we wanted them to be. It took several months to do it, and six months to a year to edit it.” At times, the two men had 15 separate sounds going at the same time on different reels. The effect is a truly unsettling collage of noises: grinding gears, factory whistles, and other eerie sounds of a city on the verge of decay, bombarding the viewer, threatening to overload the senses. As critic Henry Bromwell observed, “the sounds, mostly industrial noise never cease; in fact, they increase when Henry is alone, the city filling his head, literally, and turning him into a kind of mechanical zombie.”

Eraserhead not only continued a long working relationship between Splet and Lynch but also marked the beginning of many long term, creative relationships with others. The film marked the first appearance of soon-to-be Lynch regular, John Nance (known as Jack), an actor who had done some theater work in San Francisco. Nance had recently arrived in L.A. to look for film work and apart from some small parts in low-budget AIP programmers, Eraserhead was his first film. Lynch transformed Nance into Henry, who was actually based on Lynch himself. Nance had to live with his rather bizarre haircut for five years, and began to even act like the director, adopting many of his mannerisms. Lynch consoled him by saying that “one of these days, guys are going to be wearing their hair like that,” but Nance was unconvinced, remarking, “making a film with you, Lynch, is one frame at a time.” However, the experience must not have been all that bad for the actor who has gone on to appear in many of Lynch’s films. Perhaps it was Lynch’s personal approach to directing his actors that Nance enjoyed so much. “David will use that moment and start talking to you and give you verbal cues to the scene like “wrapped in plastic” and you’ll be reacting to what he’s saying and do it on the spot. He has caught you, caught you unawares. It’s really neat and it’s really personal, a kind of intimate thing.” It is this style of more actor-oriented directing that has attracted a lot of actors to Lynch and may account for the steady use of certain people like Nance. This has also crossed over to the people working behind the camera who have remained with the director over several of his films. This not only included Splet but cinematographer Frederick Elmes who began working with Lynch on Eraserhead, operating one of the two cameras used in the film (the other operated by Herbert Caldwell). Elmes’ contribution to the film is very crucial. His use of lighting (or the lack thereof) and shadows is important in creating a real feeling of dread and menace. He also mixes many of the stylistic elements of film noir with surrealism to create the sensation of watching a waking nightmare. Elmes would go on to work with Lynch on some of the filmmaker’s most important work – Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1991), helping to define the distinctive cinematic look of these films.

Eraserhead took a critical beating when it debuted at the Los Angeles Filmex on Saturday, March 19, 1977. Comments like, “dismal American Film Institute exercise in gore,” and “commercial prospects nil,” did not hold much promise for the film’s future. As a result, Lynch reluctantly cut approximately 20 minutes from the film. Eraserhead might well have faded into obscurity if it weren’t for the appearance of exhibitor turned distributor, Ben Barenholtz, a fascinating, often overlooked figure in the world of independent film who was responsible for giving many uncommercial films a chance. Most notably, he made Alexandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1971) a huge cult hit and backed several of the Coen brothers’ films.

After viewing Eraserhead, Barenholtz deemed it a “film of the eighties,” realizing that its bleak worldview would appeal to audiences in urban areas because it successfully captured the way people felt about living in such places.

“The bleakness of the landscape is coming true. There’s a strong feeling of helplessness, of being controlled by forces that you don’t know. Henry is the innocent; he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I think it’s a general feeling that younger people have been coming to over the past few years. Eraserhead couldn’t have done anything in the late sixties or early seventies. It’s not an optimistic film.”

Barenholtz’s faith in Eraserhead as some sort of watershed film, prompted him to talk Lynch into moving to New York City in the summer of 1977 where they would assemble a print of the film for an East Coast premiere. Lynch and his second wife ended up staying in a room in Barenholtz’s apartment because they couldn’t afford to stay anywhere else. Lynch worked constantly in the lab to get a good 35mm print of the film for the New York opening. What was to initially take only a couple of weeks, ended up being a couple of months before an acceptable print was ready. Barenholtz proceeded to hold two invitational screenings for two hundred people before it opened at the Cinema Village in the fall of 1977.

Eraserhead’s debut at the Cinema Village is hardly what one would call impressive. Twenty-five people showed up the first night and twenty-four the following night, which depressed Lynch to no end. However, the twenty-four people who showed up the second night were the same twenty-four from the previous evening. Barenholtz persuaded Cinema Village to keep the film on as a midnight attraction and it went on to run for nearly a year through to the summer of 1978. It reappeared at the Waverly where it lasted 99 weekends before enjoying lengthy stints at NuArt in L.A. for over three and half years and just over a year at the Roxy in San Francisco. By 1982, Barenholtz had thirty prints of Lynch’s film in constant use with the film being shown in England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.

Word of mouth transformed Eraserhead into a midnight cult film success that has been rivaled only by The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). But where Rocky Horror lends itself to a collective experience, Eraserhead is rather an “intensely personal” one, which makes its success that much more impressive. All of the images and themes presented in Eraserhead are of an introverted nature, aimed at the individual, and not towards a group of people like the active participation of Rocky Horror. Eraserhead contains all sorts of bizarre, often complex images whose meanings aren’t readily apparent, thus leaving it up to the viewer to decipher and makes sense of what they have seen.

So what is Eraserhead’s legacy? Well, for one thing it launched David Lynch’s career. Mel Brooks saw Eraserhead a few years after its debut and tagged Lynch with that famous moniker, “Jimmy Stewart From Mars.” Brooks was so impressed with Lynch’s film that he met the filmmaker and offered him a chance to direct The Elephant Man (1980). Lynch hasn’t looked back since, continuing to release one intriguing film after another. Yet, none of them, with the possible exception of Blue Velvet, have been able to surpass the originality and sui generis of Eraserhead. All of Lynch’s subsequent work contain echoes of this film, from the unsettling, dimly-lit hallways of Dorothy Vallens’ apartment building in Blue Velvet, to the famous dream sequence in Twin Peaks. All of these moments of surreal brilliance and creepy dread can be traced back to Lynch’s first feature film. Perhaps it is the lack of intimacy on his film sets that he once enjoyed while living on the soundstages of Eraserhead. However, with the technical innovations and cost-effective benefits of digital cameras, Lynch has been able to return to more personal, intimate works and bypass the studios altogether as evident with his last feature film Inland Empire (2006).