Lost Highway

After the critical and commercial beating David Lynch took with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), his next film Lost Highway (1997) was seen as a comeback after a dry spell of five years. At the time, there was certainly a strong push in appealing to a young, hip audience with a splashy cover story in Rolling Stone magazine (Lynch even shared the cover with Trent Reznor) that drew attention to the film’s soundtrack featuring then popular musicians Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and The Smashing Pumpkins. However, this did little for the film’s potential mainstream appeal as Lynch delivered another nightmarish neo-noir tale of jealousy and murder that may or may not be taking place inside the mind of a killer. In some respects, the film anticipated Lynch’s later masterpiece Mulholland Drive (2001), it too is a mystery that appears to take place within the fevered imagination of its protagonist.


Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a musician whose wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) may be cheating on him. We’re not really sure and neither is he. One day, a videotape shows up on the steps of their front door in a plain brown envelope. When they watch it there is grainy camcorder footage of the outside of their house. They don’t think too much of it but another tape arrives and this time there is footage of the inside of their house and, most chillingly, of them asleep in bed. There is definitely some tension in their relationship judging from all the pregnant pauses in what little conversations they have. Or it could be Fred’s inability to perform adequately in bed, which she responds to with a condescending pat on the back and a, “It’s okay.”

Two police detectives investigate and in typically amusing Lynchian fashion are useless. Their ineffectual nature anticipates the equally useless cops in Mulholland Drive. Fred and Renee attend a party at Andy’s (Michael Massee), a friend of hers and someone Fred saw leaving with his wife one night while he was performing at a nightclub. At the party, Fred encounters a mysterious man (Robert Blake) dressed all in black and with Kabuki white makeup on his face. He walks right up to Fred and asks, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” Fred doesn’t recognize him but the man says that they met at the Madison’s house and, most disturbingly, he’s there right now. Of course, Fred doesn’t believe him until the man calls his house and he responds. Fred is understandably unnerved after this creepy conversation.

He and Renee return home to find no one else there but we see a light moving fast through the upper floor of their place. The first half of Lost Highway is an unsettling slow burn of uncomfortable silences and a feeling of paranoia and dread in the Madison house. Fred often disappears into darkened hallways that almost feel like the recesses of his mind. Lynch accomplishes this through very little light and a subtly disturbing soundscape of atmospheric noises. The last videotape that arrives features Fred next to the badly mutilated dead body of Renee and before he knows it he’s on death row for her murder. This is where things get really strange as at some point Fred transforms into a young man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The authorities are understandably mystified and let Pete go.

He goes back to living with his parents, going out with his girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), and working at a local auto shop. On the surface, Pete is the opposite of Fred – he’s young and virile, having sex with not only his girlfriend, but a beautiful blond woman named Alice (Arquette again). He’s also friends with local mobster Mr. Eddy (a ferocious Robert Loggia), an intimidating guy who loves his car (“This is where mechanical excellence and one thousand horsepower pays off!”) and does not tolerate people who tailgate. However, Pete also gets involved with Alice who just happens to be Eddy’s girlfriend. Over time, Fred’s world slowly seeps into Pete’s. For example, Fred’s gonzo saxophone solo from the first half of the film plays over a radio as Pete works on a car and it gives him a headache.

The first and last line spoken in Lost Highway is "Dick Laurent is dead." Initially, it seems no more important a line than a simple teaser to draw us gradually into a dark, atmospheric world. However, much like the severed ear found lying in a field in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), this phrase is the key to unlocking a mystery that lies at the heart of Lost Highway. The mystery that is central to this film seems to be a conventional one — nothing more than a man accused of killing his wife. This is only a superficial reading, however. Look a little deeper and it becomes apparent that Lynch has swathed this mystery up in layers of abstractions and contradictions that makes watching Lost Highway akin to solving a riddle. Another key line that I believe is crucial to understanding what happens to Fred is when he tells the cops, “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” So, the second half of Lost Highway could simply be him remembering things his own way.

While on death row, Fred tries to escape his fate by creating a fantasy world where he’s everything he’s not – a stylish neo-noir filled with dangerous gangsters and sexy women but this is only a temporary reprieve as the problems that he had bleed into his fantasy world. Like Fred, Pete wanders the darkened places in his home. He is Fred’s idealized image: young, strong and virile. He even has control over Renee’s doppelganger, Alice but this is fleeting and she once again exerts her dominance, this time as a dangerous femme fatale. She ropes Pete in on a dodgy job of robbing an associate of Mr. Eddy’s and predictably it goes bad but with a Lynchian spin where even his characters die in weird ways (it involves furniture). The sequence evolves into a surrealist nightmare. More importantly, this scene is where Fred and Pete’s worlds bleed together and it becomes obvious that Fred isn’t going to escape his fate.

This culminates in a scene where Alice and Pete make love in the desert while waiting for the man who will fence their stolen goods. It is one of the most beautiful and chilling moments in any Lynch film. He lights their naked bodies to the headlights of a car while the hypnotic “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil plays over the soundtrack. Lynch then turns this beautiful moment on its head when Pete passionate tells Alice over and over, “I want you,” to which she replies by whispering in his ear, “You’ll never have me.” She walks off and once again Fred has failed to control the object of his affection and frustration, even in his own created fantasy world. It is inevitable that these two worlds collide because Fred is consumed by the guilt of what he’s done. Ultimately, he is unable to escape his true nature as symbolized by the film’s rather abstract climax.

From the powerful shot of a car speeding down a darkened, deserted stretch of highway at night that begins and ends the film, Lost Highway contains many stunning visuals (courtesy of cinematographer Peter Deming) that will haunt you long after seeing the film. For example, the use of light, or rather, lack of it adds to the mysterious atmosphere that envelopes the film. Characters disappear down darkened hallways only to reappear later on. Many of the scenes in the film are lit in such a way that they almost resemble a painting that you could reach out and touch. There’s also the fantastic introduction of Alice captured in slow motion as Pete sees her climb out of Eddy’s convertible to Lou Reed’s cover of “This Magic Moment” and we can see why Pete is immediately attracted to her.

Lynch's films are also known for their rather complex soundscapes. In one way or another, the director has always taken a personal approach to the use of sound in his work and how it matches with the images on the screen. Lost Highway is no exception and may well be the best use of sound in his films since Eraserhead (1977). The film's soundscape quite often layers sound upon sound with incredible effect. It may only be the use of minimal sound effects buried in the background to suggest a feeling of ominous foreboding in a scene or a piece of music brought to the foreground, threatening to overwhelm everything else. And for the music Lynch not only continued to work with his longtime collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti, but also enlisted the help of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and British musician Barry Adamson. Together, they take Lost Highway to new levels of menace that the filmmaker was never able to achieve before. Their contributions greatly enhance the film's already impressive soundtrack.

The origins for Lost Highway started with something strange that happened to Lynch. A stranger rang the director’s doorbell, pushed the button of the intercom and told him, “Dick Laurent is dead.” When Lynch walked to the window and looked out he didn’t see anybody. This understandably troubled him for some time. On the last night of filming the Twin Peaks movie, he had a brief vision that would become roughly the first third of his next project: “It was like the first third of the picture maybe, minus some scenes we had in the final script ...This thing I had went all the way up to the fist hitting Fred in the police station – to suddenly being in another place and not knowing how he got there or what is wrong.” A few years later, Lynch read Barry Gifford’s story Night People and at the end of the first chapter two characters talk about a lost highway. Lynch loved those words and contacted Gifford who suggested they write something together.

A year later, the two men sat down and began to exchange ideas they had for the film. Both men had their own notions of what the film should be and these differed quite radically – to the point where they rejected each other's ideas and eventually their own. "Then I told Barry about this series of things that came to me one night. The very last night of shooting Fire Walk With Me these things shot into my head. I was driving home with Mary Sweeney and I told her about them. What I told her sort of scared her and it sort of scared me too. And when I told them to Barry he said, 'Jeez, I really like that,' and that was the start of a brand-new direction.” Gifford and Lynch decided that at some point in the story a transformation should occur and it would result in another story but have connections with the first one. Within a month, they had written the screenplay.

Lynch always wanted to work with Bill Pullman and so when it came to casting the role of Fred Madison, he was the first actor he thought of to play the role. The director felt that Pullman had a “pretty intense side to him which wasn’t exploited in his previous roles.” Furthermore, Lynch saw in the actor’s eyes, “intelligence and a vein of madness inside them. And to force it to come out I pushed during rehearsals.” Another significant bit of casting was Robert Blake (In Cold Blood) as the Mystery Man, the creepy figure who may be a part of Fred’s imagination. The veteran actor was responsible for the look and style of the character. One day, he decided to cut his hair short, part it in the middle and apply Kabuki white make-up on his face. "And the makeup people said, 'You're going crazy, man! Nobody in this movie looks like that; everybody looks regular!' I said, 'Leave me alone; just give me some shit.' I put this black outfit on. I walked up to David, and he said, 'Wonderful!' and turned around and walked away." Blake clearly knew what he was doing as his character exudes a sinister vibe every time he appears on screen.

The first cut of Lost Highway ran just over two-and-a-half hours. After a screening with fifty people, Lynch cut out 25 minutes of footage. Not surprisingly it received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars and wrote, “I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It's just that I'd like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, and an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “More in its imagery than in its baroque plotting, Lost Highway is best at creating a sense of unease. Working with cinematographer Peter Deming and longtime composing collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch has put together some thoroughly spooky situations. In the hands of this crew, even something as straightforward as a ringing phone in an empty room can create the feeling that the most awful thing is about to happen.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “Highway, which Lynch has pretentiously dubbed ‘a 21st-century noir horror film,’ is nothing more than a 20th-century cul-de-sac. The maker of such great works as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks has finally run out of road.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “By the time the film reaches its heart of darkness (it has something to do with a porno movie), Lynch, for the first time, seems to be using avant-garde tricks to pass off as 'taboo' what looks to the naked eye like mere routine sleaze. Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.” Long-time Lynch supporter Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Despite the shopworn noir imagery and teenage notions of sex, this beautifully structured (if rigorously nonhumanist) explosion of expressionist effects has a psychological coherence that goes well beyond logical story lines, and Lynch turns it into an exhilarating roller-coaster ride.” Finally, in her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “A structure that begins and ends at the same moment in time, with a debt to the Mobius strip (or to Pulp Fiction), is another intriguing feature. But the film has more of these touches than it has explanations. Eventually it raises the overwhelming possibility that nobody is entirely in the driver's seat.” Most interesting, Lynch took Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs down verdict as a badge of honor and plastered it large on newspaper ads for his film.

So what is Lynch and Gifford’s take on what the film means? The director said in an interview, “It’s Fred’s story. It’s not a dream. It’s realistic, though according to Fred’s logic.” During filming, Deborah Wuliger, the unit publicist, came upon the idea of a psychogenic fugue, which Lynch and Gifford subsequently incorporated into the film. "The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything – they forget their past identity,” Lynch said." In addition to being a mental condition, he also discovered that a fugue was also a musical term. "A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film.” Gifford took the idea of a psychogenic fugue and ran with it. "This was something I researched with a clinical psychologist at Stanford, so we had some basis in fact here. After we found that freedom, more or less it was just a matter of creating this surreal, fantastic world that Fred Madison lives in when he becomes Peter Dayton."

Ultimately, what makes Lost Highway so good are the risks Lynch takes. After the crushing commercial and critical defeat of Fire Walk with Me, one would think that he would have take the safe route and made a conventional film. No way. As he did with Blue Velvet, Lynch decided to follow his muse and make a film on his own terms. Lost Highway is easily Lynch's darkest, bleakest film since Eraserhead. There are no happy endings in this film. No one escapes into radiator heaven. Characters that stray onto the lost highway simply stay lost with no chance of escape. While watching this film, you must be prepared to think as Lynch constantly questions how you perceive things — both people and events. What is real and what isn't? He also plays around with the notion of déjà vu by not only repeating images but also dialogue which forces you to pay close attention to what is going on. Lost Highway really is a film that you have to see more than once just to get all the little details that you missed the first time around.

Hollywoodland

On June 16, 1959, actor George Reeves died from a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide with the official police report stating that he had been depressed over his failed career. Reeves’ claim to fame had been portraying Superman on television during the 1950’s. It was a very popular show but by the time he turned 40, the actor wanted to move on with his career. However, he could not shake his association with the iconic role. His mother Helen Bessolo refused to believe her son took his own life and hired private investigator Jerry Geisler. Both died before they could prove anything.


Over the years, more and more people refused to believe that Reeves would commit suicide. Forensic evidence surfaced that cast doubts on the official cause of death. Was he killed by his fiancée Lenore Lemmon, or was he murdered by order of Toni Mannix, the wife of MGM general manager Eddie Mannix who allegedly had Mob connections? Reeves had an affair with Toni but spurned her for another woman. Or, did Eddie find out and have Reeves killed?

Hollywoodland (2006) dramatizes Reeves’ suspicious death and documents the events leading up to it. The film is structured as a detective story with a private detective investigating Reeves’ death. The film was seen as a comeback of sorts for Ben Affleck who hadn’t acted for two years after the critical and commercial flops of Gigli (2006) and Jersey Girl (2006). After headlining several high profile studio films, he had wisely laid-low and took a supporting role in this film. Affleck portrayed Reeves to critical acclaim and hasn’t looked back since.

Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) is a low-rent Jack Gittes-type private investigator that specializes in cases of infidelity. His “office” is a fleabag motel as all of his money goes to an ex-wife (Molly Parker) and young son (Zach Mills). He used to be a police detective and his ex-partner turns him onto the Reeves (Ben Affleck) case. Perhaps influenced by his son’s upset reaction over the death of his T.V. idol, Simo decides to talk to Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) who believes that her son did not commit suicide. He investigates further, interviewing people that knew him and this triggers a series of flashbacks to the events leading up to Reeves’ death.

The flashbacks give us more insight into Reeves. For example, while trying to be seen at a swanky Hollywood hangout, he meets Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), a beautiful woman married to a very powerful man, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins). Initially unaware that she’s married and to whom, Reeves has an affair with Toni – partly because he’s attracted to her and partly because he thinks she can help his career. Toni becomes his sugar mama, buying him a nice house in the suburbs for him and their trysts.

The scenes between Ben Affleck and Diane Lane are quite good. They have decent chemistry and do a good job of conveying what their characters got out of the relationship. Affleck is excellent in this meaty supporting role. The rise and fall of Reeves must’ve spoke volumes to the actor who had also experienced both. Affleck knew what it felt like to be on the top of the world one moment and then considered a joke after a couple of high profile flops. Anyone who is a student of Hollywood lore knows that it has a long history of tragic deaths. What makes Reeves’ story so interesting is that he played such a wholesome, upstanding character with Superman but had an unhappy personal life. Affleck fleshes out Reeves and digs deep, providing a nicely layered portrayal of the man. Reeves just wanted to be regarded as a serious actor but did such a good job playing Superman that he couldn’t disassociate himself from the role.

Adrien Brody delivers a decent enough performance but his invented character feels like just that and seems out of sorts with all the actual historical figures he interacts with and investigates. Simo’s backstory and motivation is just not as compelling as say Jack Gittes in Chinatown (1974), a film whose legacy casts a long shadow over Hollywoodland. Brody is supposed to be a jaded investigator who thinks he’s seen it all but the actor comes off as a little too aloof. As a result, his character feels like a tacked on afterthought.

Diane Lane doesn’t have a lot of screen time but she makes the most of it. Toni is a powerful woman who gets what she wants and Lane plays her as a charming individual so long as Reeves makes her happy. It’s when he no longer does this that her true nature reveals itself. Watching the actress in this film makes me wonder how she would have done in L.A. Confidential (1997) if she had been cast in Kim Basinger’s role. In some respects, Toni is not a typical femme fatale and Lane does her best to flesh out her character and shed some light on her motivations.

Producer Glenn Williamson, at the time head of production at USA Films, bought Paul Bernbaum’s screenplay, Truth, Justice and the American Way in 2001. Williamson was drawn to the way the script “guides the audience toward a conclusion, but there is no definitive answer.” The project moved to Miramax Films for a short time with filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho) attached to direct. At one point, they screen-tested Kyle MacLachlan to play George Reeves. Williamson wanted the film to have a more mainstream appeal – something that the directors, known for their dark, atmospheric films, weren’t interested in and so they decided part ways.

The project moved to Focus Features where veteran T.V. director Allen Coulter signed on. When his agent gave him Bernbaum’s script he wanted to do it after reading the first five pages. The director was drawn to the “great Hollywood noir milieu” and the complexity of Reeves’ life. He heard that Ben Affleck was interested in the role and ended up casting him as Reeves. To resemble the actor, Affleck put on upwards of 28 lbs., changed the shape of his nose with a prosthetic, altered his hairline, and changed the color of his eyes. If that wasn’t enough, during filming, he listened to several clips of Reeves’ voice between takes and also watched every episode of the Superman T.V. show.

Hollywoodland shot for six weeks in Toronto and two in Los Angeles. At some point, Warner Brothers, which produced the Superman films, applied legal pressure to have the name changed from Truth, Justice and the American Way to the current title because they wanted to disassociate themselves from the sordid details of Reeves’ demise with their vested interest in rebooting the Superman franchise.

Hollywoodland received mixed to negative reviews as most praised Affleck’s performance but had problems with the way the script juggled the two storylines. In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Hollywoodland gets a few laughs from the show’s cheesy Ed Wood–like production effects, but the dignity and sobriety that Mr. Affleck projects as Reeves keeps the sheer ridiculousness of his limited career options from ever becoming too campy.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis also praised Affleck’s performance: “Later, as defeat takes its grinding toll, Mr. Affleck lets weariness creep into his face, pulling his features down until it becomes difficult smile.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “There's something simultaneously heartfelt, wised-up, playful, and fierce about the way the onetime Daredevil acknowledges that he knows that we know that he knows that we're bound to read something of the actor's own skids with fame in his expiatory portrayal of a star who couldn't quite steer his own image.”

However, New York magazine’s David Edelstein wrote, “the back-and-forth cutting between past and present would be clunky even if it weren’t so arbitrary, and it doesn’t help that Adrien Brody—as the film’s ­other protagonist, a burnt-out gumshoe—is more actorish than the supposed actor.” USA Today gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and Claudia Puig wrote, “But then the narrative bogs down with a misbegotten subplot about Simo's personal life … Director Allen Coulter … missteps with this secondary story line. He flounders in his attempts to find parallels between Simo's life and Reeves' iconic place in Hollywood at that time.” In his review for the Washington Post, Stephen Hunter wrote, “For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the material. They break the narrative into two strands, and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, “For despite its virtues, Hollywoodland never fully succeeds due to the unfortunate air of artificiality that hangs over it. Caught in a netherworld between re-creation and reality, it only sporadically feels like it is actually happening.” Finally, in his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals … it's an unexpectedly touching performance. In fact, Hollywoodland turns turgid whenever it switches to the gritty Louis Simo story.”

The attention to period detail is very good, from the vintage cars to the Coke bottle Simo drinks from in a scene. The filmmakers effortlessly transport us back to that time. Allen Coulter’s direction is solid but does little to differentiate it from other films of the genre. L.A. Confidential this is not. Maybe it’s just as well as the story is engrossing enough and Affleck’s performance keeps our interest. Ultimately, Hollywoodland lies somewhere between the ambitious but flawed Mulholland Falls (1996) and the masterful L.A Confidential. What it does do is paint a compelling and sympathetic portrait of George Reeves. His career serves as a sobering reminder of the dangers of being closely identified with an iconic film role and how it can affect the rest of your career. Some people embrace it while others spend the rest of their lives trying to get away from it.

Jack's Back

By 1988, James Spader was probably tired of playing countless Preppie douchebags and Yuppie slimeballs in films like Pretty in Pink (1986), Baby Boom (1987), and Less Than Zero (1987). If you needed someone to play a materialistic scumbag with no morals, Spader was your man. Before sex, lies, and videotape (1989) changed his career forever, he did a little seen thriller called Jack’s Back (1988), about a series of Jack the Ripper copycat murders. The film was quite a departure for Spader who ended up playing identical twins – a young, altruistic doctor and his ne’er-do-well sibling. The film also marked the auspicious directorial debut of one Rowdy Herrington, the “auteur” behind such meat and potato action films as Road House (1989) and Striking Distance (1993). Sadly, Jack’s Back was barely released and hardly reviewed, languishing in obscurity (it is currently unavailable on DVD in North America), which is too bad because it is an oddly affecting thriller with quite a decent performance by Spader who seems to be relishing the fact that he doesn’t have to wear a Polo shirt.

The police are baffled by a series of murders each committed 100 years to the day from the original Jack the Ripper killings. They have one more night and one last killing but have no leads or suspects. John Wesford (James Spader) is a young Los Angeles doctor who is active in the community, much to the chagrin of the head doctor (Rod Loomis) at the free clinic he works at. He’s a good physician and seems genuinely concerned about the people he treats and Spader does a nice job conveying his character’s caring beside manner even if the film lays his crusading doc status on a little thick.

However, Jack’s Back succeeds in doing what few if any of Spader’s film had done before – allow us to sympathize with his character. Director Herrington helps out by successfully establishing the clinic where John works at and the people he works with so that we become invested in their lives, like the playful flirting between John and fellow doctor Christine Moscari (Cynthia Gibb). That is why it comes as such a shock when he is murdered 25 minutes into the film by someone who appears to be the Jack the Ripper copycat murderer.

Within moments of his brother dying, Richard Wesford (Spader again) awakes from a nightmare where he saw John murdered. He goes to the police but they are understandably skeptical (one of the detectives is memorably played by the always watchable Chris Mulkey). John’s death looks like a suicide and he’s a medical student so all the evidence points to him. As a result, they think that they’ve found their murderer. Rick knows otherwise and proceeds to prove it with the help of Chris.

Herrington establishes the differences between the twins visually by what they wear – John wears a white sports jacket and pastel colors while Rick wears a black leather jacket and blue jeans (because, you know, he’s a rebel). Spader does all the heavy lifting by creating different behavior for each sibling. John is kind and caring while Rick is a brooding loner. Spader has a tougher job portraying John because he has very little time to introduce him and get us to empathize with him. With Rick, he ups the brooding intensity which makes it a little harder to like him but Spader’s unique charisma helps considerably and over the course of the rest of the film the actor gradually peels back Rick’s tough exterior.

Cynthia Gibb conveys an adorable Nancy Drew vibe with Chris. I always liked the cute girl-next-door thing she had going on in the 1980s and how she appeared in films as diverse as the Rob Lowe hockey drama Youngblood (1986) and Oliver Stone’s hard-hitting political thriller Salvador (1986). She isn’t the strongest actress in the world, which may explain why she never made more of an impact in Hollywood, but she has an engaging personality and nice chemistry with Spader. There are even hints of a sexual tension thing going on between their characters that lurks under the surface and never feels forced.

Herrington keeps things moving while still taking the time to let us get to know Spader’s characters, even giving time for Rick to reflect over how the death of John affects him. This is something that is missing from his subsequent thrillers. Maybe he figured that was why Jack’s Back failed commercially and moved on to no-nonsense action films like Road House and thrillers like Striking Distance, which are competent guilty pleasures but feature pretty conventional protagonists that are no where near as compelling as what Spader does in Jack’s Back. Herrington knows his way around the conventions of the thriller genre, and is able to build suspense at the right moment and where to punctuate the film with an action sequence, even if the climax seems to borrow heavily from the one in Manhunter (1986).

Jack’s Back was shot in September 1987 on a budget of $1.5 million. Cinema Group, a small film company that changed its name to Pallisades Entertainment, financed the film. They pre-sold the rights via cable and home video sales in lieu of proper promotion and a wide theatrical release. What reviews Jack’s Back did get were mixed. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised Herrington’s work: “He has taken the trouble to make three-dimensional characters, and paused here and there to provide scenes that make the characters seem real and complicated, instead of just pawns in a movie formula.” However, The New York Times’ Caryn James felt that the film was “so dull it leaves you plenty of time to marvel at how a plot can be this rickety, how a production can look this shabby, and how the first-time writer and director Rowdy Herrington could borrow a story with so relentless a grip on our imaginations and in no time at all declaw it.”

Herrington does a decent job at keeping us guessing as to the killer’s identity. Is it the hulking intern (Rex Ryon) who works at the free clinic? Is it the oddly detached police psychiatrist (nicely played by Robert Picardo)? Or, is it Rick, a man with a checkered past and medical training? Let’s be honest, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out but the film is still an enjoyable ride – the cinematic equivalent of an engrossing page-turner you read on the way into work on a given day and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

DVD of the Week: The Missing Person

With an Academy Award nomination for his scene-stealing role in Revolutionary Road (2008), Michael Shannon’s career was given a considerable boost. For years, he’s plugged away in small roles in big films like Pearl Harbor (2001) and more substantial parts in independent films like Grand Theft Parsons (2003). He’s one of those character actors that can bring an extra special something to the table with his unconventional looks and quirky acting style, much like Steve Buscemi did in the 1990s. So, when Shannon gets the chance to headline a film, as he does with The Missing Person (2009), it is definitely worth a look.

“I coulda lied there forever, but the phone rang.” And with that bit of hard-boiled narration we are introduced to the world of private investigator John Rosow (Michael Shannon), a rumpled burn out cut from the same cloth as Elliott Gould’s gumshoe in The Long Goodbye (1973). Rosow is hired by an attorney over the phone to tail a man (Frank Wood) from Chicago to Los Angeles by train. Rosow may come across as a burn out but when it’s called for, he displays the necessary private eye skills: paying off a taxi cab driver to tail his target, pulling a fast one on the hotel clerk where the man is staying at, and listening in on the man’s room.

Rosow eventually finds out that there is much more to this mystery man than meets the eye and that there is much more to the job than he was initially led to believe. Halfway through the film, the story veers off in an unexpected direction that gives the film noir genre an interesting spin as we gain significant insight into both Rosow and the man he is following. Without giving too much away, we begin to realize that the film’s title applies not only to Rosow’s target but to the private eye himself.

Writer/director Noah Buschel makes good use of Michael Shannon’s world-weary face. Rosow seems to sport a permanent grimace as if every action were a painful chore. It doesn’t help that he appears to be a barely functioning alcoholic. Over the course of the film, it becomes apparent that he is haunted by memories of his past that come to him in his dreams. Through several flashbacks, Buschel hints at a happier time for Rosow when he was involved with a beautiful woman that was probably his wife. Shannon doesn’t overplay his character’s affectations but does make one aware of them by the way he carries himself and through body language.

Buschel has a good ear for snappy film noir dialogue, like when Rosow trades barbs with two FBI agents that are tailing him. It evokes a bygone era which juxtaposes rather nicely with the contemporary setting. For example, Rosow is approached by a dishy, femme fatale (Margaret Colin) type and asks her, “You’re not one of those gals that uses sex as a weapon, are ya?” to which she replies, “No. I don’t like violence.”

While Chicago is photographed by cinematographer Ryan Samul to look drab and drained of color, L.A. is sunny and vibrant so that Rosow, with his plain brown suit, looks out of place. Like Gould’s P.I. in The Long Goodbye, Rosow is a man out of time. He listens to music from the 1950s and dresses like a gumshoe from the 1940s which is rather fitting seeing as how Shannon looks like an actor who could’ve had a pretty good career appearing in film noirs from that era. Shannon is fascinating to watch and is an actor that makes interesting choices when it comes to a given scene. The world weary private eye genre has been done to death but Shannon, along with Buschel’s excellent writing, keeps us engaged for the entire running time of The Missing Person.

Special Features:

None.

Twin Peaks Tribute Week: April 4 - April 10th, 2010

Twin Peaks holds a special place in my heart because it was responsible for getting me seriously into film. I had always enjoyed watching them but once I saw the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, directed by none other than David Lynch, I had to track down and watch everything else he had made. This led to Blue Velvet (1986) which immediately became my favorite film of all-time and made me realize, for the first time, that a film could be so much more than just entertainment. What struck me about Twin Peaks is that Lynch took a lot of the themes from Blue Velvet (evil hiding under the facade of small-town innocence, voyeurism, a woman in trouble, etc.) and brought them into mainstream television, changing the medium forever. The show began with the murder of Laura Palmer and explored the ramifications of this incident over 16 subsequent episodes. As a result, Twin Peaks demanded much more of the viewer than the average weekly drama. One could not simply watch the occasional episode and expect to understand what was going on. Many details and clues to who killed Laura were buried throughout the 17 episode story arc so that watching every one was crucial to following the narrative.

What Lynch and his collaborators did was create mini-movies that lasted just under an hour every week, drawing us into a strange and engaging world that nobody had ever seen before. The show debuted on April 8, 1990 with an estimated 35 million audience. ABC helped fuel a media blitzkrieg promoting the pilot episode as a television event and trumpeting the show as a hit with advanced praise from the critics. Twin Peaks became one of the first pop culture events of the 1990s. Intense interest around who killed Laura reached a fevered pitch with articles appearing in major periodicals like Time and Newsweek while Lynch made appearances on The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. Unfortunately, the quality of Twin Peaks declined rapidly after the Laura Palmer storyline achieved closure. The show was never able to regain momentum and the series was cancelled after its second season. For a brief while it became a pop culture phenomenon and marked one of Lynch’s most prolific periods of his artistic career where he managed to bring his unique worldview into the mainstream.

The show was kick-started by the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the beautiful teenage high school girl and homecoming queen found washed up on a beach, naked and wrapped in plastic. The outpouring of grief throughout the town is emotionally gut-wrenching as we see how news of her death affects her family, her friends, and even those who barely knew her. In some way, she touched everyone’s lives – good or bad. To save on money, Lynch intended to cast a local girl from Seattle "just to play a dead girl.” The local girl ended up being Sheryl Lee. "But no one – not Mark, me, anyone – had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead," Lynch said in an interview. Indeed, the image of Lee wrapped in plastic became one of the show's most enduring and memorable images. And then, while Lynch shot the home movie that  Laura’s best friends James Hurley (James Marshall ) takes of Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Laura, he realized that Lee had something special. "She did do another scene – the video with Donna on the picnic – and it was that scene that did it." As a result, Lee became a semi-regular addition to the cast appearing in flashbacks as Laura and becoming a re-occurring character – Maddie, Laura's cousin who also becomes another victim of BOB (Frank Silva), the demonic presence from another dimension.

When another girl from her school, Ronette Polaski (Phoebe Augustine), is found wandering along a deserted stretch of railway tracks, beaten and raped, the FBI is called in to investigate. Enter Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), an eccentric fellow who records his every thought and the minutest details into a tape recorder to his unseen assistant Diane. He meets with Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), a plain-spoken man who begins to feel a little like Dr. Watson to Cooper’s Sherlock Holmes. The FBI agent relies on his intuition and most intriguingly, his dreams to provide clues into the possible identity of the killer.

This culminates in a fantastic episode (directed by Lynch) where Cooper dreams of meeting Laura in an otherworldly dimension known as the Red Room where she whispers the killer’s identity into his ear while a backwards talking dwarf (Michael Anderson) dances to groovy jazz music. While making Eraserhead in 1971, sound designer Alan Splet taught Lynch how to say words phonetically backwards. Lynch planned to record some dialogue this way and then reverse it in a scene that was never shot. "When I got the Red Room idea this must have been coming back to me. Then the idea followed that the visual would all have to be done backwards as well." When this episode aired it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen on T.V. Lynch’s avant garde sensibilities were harnessed by co-creator Mark Frost’s sense of structure and storytelling and the result was some of the most compelling television as the nation became swept up in the mysteries of the show.

A producer at Warner Brothers wanted Lynch to direct a film on Marilyn Monroe based on the book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers. Lynch remembers that he was "sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story.” Veteran television producer/writer Mark Frost was hired to write the screenplay. Lynch's agent at the time, Tony Krantz suggested that he work with Frost. Even though this project was dropped by the studio, Lynch and Frost became good friends and wrote a screenplay entitled, One Saliva Bubble with Steve Martin starring in it. However, this film was not made either.

Krantz had been trying to get Lynch to work on T.V. since Blue Velvet but the filmmaker was never really that interested in the idea. One day, they met at a Los Angeles restaurant and Krantz told Lynch that he should do a show “about real life in America – your vision of America the same way you demonstrated in Blue Velvet.” Lynch got an idea of a “small-town thing” but he and Frost were not too keen on it but decided to humor Krantz. Lynch remembers, "so one day Mark and I were talking at Du Pars, the coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, and, all of a sudden, Mark and I had this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake." Frost wanted to tell “a sort of Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area that could sort of go on perpetually.” Frost, Krantz and Lynch rented a screening room in Beverly Hills and screened Peyton Place (1957) as a source of inspiration for the kind of town they wanted to create.

They pitched the idea to ABC in a ten-minute meeting with the network's drama head, Chad Hoffman with nothing more than this image and a concept: "The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was the foreground, but this would recede slightly as you got to know the other people in the town and the problems they were having ... The project was to mix a police investigation with the ordinary lives of the characters," said Lynch. At the time, ABC was in last place among the T.V. networks and were looking for something that would get them out of the basement. ABC liked the idea and asked Lynch and Frost to write a screenplay for the pilot episode. Originally, the network didn’t think Twin Peaks would be made into a series and might run as a seven-hour mini-series that would appeal to college students.

The first thing Frost and Lynch did was draw a map of the town. According to Frost, “we knew the town had a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.” They talked about it for three months and then wrote the script in ten days. Frost wrote the more verbal characters like Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer) while Lynch was responsible for Agent Cooper, writing most of his monologues. Originally, the show was entitled Northwest Passage and set in North Dakota, but the fact that a town called Twin Peaks really existed (much like Lumberton in Blue Velvet), prompted a revision in the script. Frost and Lynch went on a location scout to Washington state and a friend of Frost’s recommended Snoqualmie Falls. They drove there and found all of the things they had written about in the pilot. ABC Entertainment president Brandon Stoddard ordered the two-hour pilot for a possible fall 1989 series. He soon left the position in March 1989 as Lynch went into production. The director shot the pilot on location near Seattle in 24 days and on a budget of $4 million (subsequent episodes averaged $1 million and took a week each to shoot). Robert A. Iger and his creative team took over, saw dailies and met with Frost and Lynch to get the “arc” of the stories and characters. Iger saw a rough cut of the pilot by late May and ordered seven episodes.

However, even though Iger liked the pilot, he had a tough time persuading the rest of the network brass. "I was baffled by it," admitted then ABC president Mark Mandala, "but we were all 50-plus white males." Iger suggested showing it to a more diverse, younger group. "Unanimously, they loved it," Mandala remembers. Some executives figured that the show would never get on the air. However, Iger planned to schedule it for the spring. The final showdown occurred during a bi-coastal conference call between Iger and a room full of New York executives – Iger won and Twin Peaks was on the air.

Frost and Lynch wanted to create a timeless quality and achieved this by mixing styles from several different eras. Lynch said, “this started happening on Twin Peaks when we were shooting in the school which was built in the fifties. Something from the era just started floating around in the present day and influenced a lot of things that took place on the set.” Surprisingly, Lynch encountered very little interference from the network. Standards-and-practices only had a problem with one scene from the first season: an extreme close-up in the pilot of Cooper’s hand as he slides tweezers under Laura’s fingernail and removes a tiny “R.” They wanted the scene to be shorter because it made them uncomfortable but Frost and Lynch refused and the scene remained.

Before the pilot episode premiered on T.V., a screening was held at the Museum of Broadcasting in Hollywood. Media analyst and advertising executive Paul Schulman said, “I don’t think it has a chance of succeeding. It is not commercial, it is radically different from  what we as viewers are accustomed to seeing, there’s no one in the show to root for.” The two-hour pilot was the highest-rated film for the 1989-1990 season. Initial episodes were well-received by T.V. critics. The Washington Post’s Tom Shale wrote, “Twin Peaks isn’t just a visit to another town. It’s a visit to another planet. Maybe it will go down in history as a brief and brave experiment.” In his review for The New York Times, John J. O’Connor wrote, “Twin Peaks is not a sendup of the form. Mr. Lynch clearly savors the standard ingredients ... but then the director adds his own peculiar touches, small passing details that suddenly, and often hilariously, thrust the commonplace out of kilter.” Entertainment Weekly gave the show an "A+" rating and Ken Tucker wrote, "Plot is irrelevant; moments are everything. Lynch and Frost have mastered a way to make a weekly series endlessly interesting." Time magazine said that it, "may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV.”

What makes the first season so strong is the strength of Frost and Lynch’s vision for the show. They hand-picked every director and writer for the episodes they didn’t do themselves and this resulted in a solid consistency. Many of them were directors that Lynch had known from his days at the American Film Institute (i.e. Caleb Deschanel and Tim Hunter) or referrals from someone he knew. Lynch and Frost maintained tight control over the first season, handpicking all the directors. "They have a script and they chat with one or both of us and away they go. And then I'd see their shows at the sound mix. If something was completely wrong there would be time to fix it. But I can't even say that that ever happened," Frost said in an interview. After directing the second episode, Lynch went off to complete Wild at Heart (1990) while Frost wrote the remaining segments. The Lynch-directed pilot episode was the series blueprint in terms of style and tone that everyone else adhered to. It’s not surprising that the weakest episodes are the ones that diverge too far from this template.

One can’t talk about Twin Peaks without mentioning the unforgettable music by Angelo Badalamenti. He had worked previously with Lynch on Blue Velvet and really stepped it up on the show to provide rich, atmospheric music that enhanced every scene it was used. The music is so distinctive that is almost another character on the show. Who can forget the haunting theme for Laura Palmer or the jazzy score for the Red Room? And, of course, there is the show’s theme song that is instantly recognizable. Every time I hear the opening strains, it gets me every time. In the fall of 1989, Badalamenti and Lynch created the score. Lynch would often describe the mood or emotion he wanted the music to evoke and then Badalamenti would begin to play the piano. In 20 minutes, they produced the signature theme for the series. Badalamenti called it the “Love Theme from Twin Peaks.” Lynch told him, “you just wrote 75% of the score. It’s the mood of the whole piece. It is Twin Peaks.” Truer words were never spoken.

The show featured a fantastic cast of actors that ranged from Lynch regulars like Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet) and Jack Nance (Eraserhead, Dune, Blue Velvet), to Hollywood veterans like Piper Laurie (The Hustler) and Richard Beymer (West Side Story), to newcomers like Sherilyn Fenn (Two-Moon Junction) and Madchen Amick. They inhabit their eccentric characters so well and really make you care about them, like the pure of heart Agent Cooper, or hate them, like the wife-beating truck driver Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re). While these characters are either on the side of good or evil, they have plenty of layers (and secrets) that are fleshed out over the course of two seasons.

The problem with the second season is that after the murder of Laura was solved, the show lost its way for a spell as the writers struggled to create a storyline just as compelling. This is evident in brooding teenager James Hurley’s clunky film noir storyline or Nadine’s (Wendy Robie) bizarro regression to her teenage years albeit with a steady supply of adrenaline. Cooper even started wearing flannel shirts – a flagrant betrayal of the spirit of his character and symptomatic of how the show faltered with the absence of Frost and Lynch’s guiding influence. Twin Peaks improved significantly once Cooper’s ex-partner Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh) arrived in town to play a deadly game of cat and mouse (and an actual game of chess) with Cooper that builds to an unforgettable final episode that infuriated many viewers but remains one of the most exciting and unpredictable swan songs for a series in television history.

Several problems plagued Twin Peaks that became readily apparent during the second season. There were the restrictions of the medium of T.V. According to Lynch, "the power of most movies is in the bigness of the image and the sound and the romance. On TV the sound suffers and the impact suffers." The network was also an issue for Lynch who said, “there were a lot of good people at ABC, but I really still got the feeling that what motivated their decisions had nothing to do with the show. And that's where I think they go wrong. The show is the least important part of their plan." The change from Thursday to Saturday night really hurt the show by diminishing its viewer audience. Lynch said, “I don't think the TV executives are as loyal to any one show as they are to an overall thing against the other networks. There's no way I can talk about what they did because it made zero sense to me. All I know is that they killed it by changing nights and then forcing the solving of 'who killed Laura Palmer.'"

As a result in the change from one day of the week to another, they lost a large chunk of their audience. "It's nice when people like something that you've done but it's sort of like love that seems inevitable that the people reach the point when they've had enough of you, and they fall for the next thing. You're helpless to control that process and awareness of it is like a dull ache,” Lynch said in an interview. There was also the public's desire to know who killed Laura Palmer. "And one thing led to another, and the pressure was just so great that the murder mystery couldn't be just a background thing any more." Once the murder was solved, the show lost its focus and struggled through several sub-plots and declining ratings. Lynch also didn’t like what happened to Agent Cooper over the second season: "Cooper ceased to be 100 per cent Cooperesque for me. He got these flannel shirts and stuff! Some people maybe liked it. So you say, ‘Yes, I'm glad in a way, and in another way I'm really sorry because a guy that's too much like me cannot sustain that intense interest or dream.’ He's got to be specific. Cooper is a certain way. It's necessary."

During the course of the second season Lynch and Frost had a falling out. While they worked closely together during the first season of the show, when Lynch went off to do Wild at Heart, Frost says that, "David left me alone." Frost elaborates further in an interview: "When he [Lynch] got on the set, very often he threw out the script – which didn't please me all that much. But he would go off and do his own thing. He wasn't showing up all that often. He'd come in and direct an episode every once in a while. He wasn't really involved with the scripts. Then he'd go off on his own thing and leave us hanging." Clearly, Frost did not like or approve of Lynch's methods on the set but it is abundantly clear that Frost has his own agenda. In a 1991 interview, he said that he and Lynch worked closely on the first seven episodes but in a Wrapped in Plastic interview he says, "David's not really a writer by nature. He's a wonderful director and a great visual stylist, and he can write in collaboration with somebody. But it's good if the person he's working with has a strong sense of narrative and story, because those honestly aren't David's strengths." It seems that Frost was quite resentful of the amount of attention Lynch received about the show, while he did not get nearly the amount of press or recognition for his contribution.

Looking back, Frost wished they had “worked out a smooth transition” and that the Laura Palmer storyline was a “tough act to follow.” In regards to the second season, Frost felt that “perhaps the storytelling wasn’t quite as taut or as fraught with emotion.” At its best, Twin Peaks surpassed the safe confines of generic T.V. The first appearance of the Black Lodge, an otherworldly dimension populated by cryptic supernatural figures, in the third episode is a prime example of when the series defied genre categorization. Agent Cooper has a dream where he finds himself in the Red Room, a place within the Lodge populated with backwards-talking dwarves, op-art floor design, and distorted spatial relationships. Lynch described the Black Lodge as a place where "there is no problem with time. And anything can happen. It's a free zone, completely unpredictable and therefore pretty exciting but also scary.” Cooper's dream is a brilliantly constructed sequence that echoes Lynch's experimental debut feature film, Eraserhead (1977).

Lynch went one step further when he revisited the Black Lodge in the final episode of the show. At this point, Twin Peaks was on the verge of cancellation. Lynch had returned from working on other projects and was surprised at what had happened to the show. Instead of only offering a tantalizing glimpse of the Black Lodge, as he did in episode three, he adopted a go-for-broke attitude by re-writing the script as he shot the episode and proceeded to set almost half of the show in this environment. As Agent Cooper wandered through various rooms searching for his true love, Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), the conventions of generic T.V. disappeared. Cooper's actions followed a dream logic that seems confusing at first, but makes sense if you remember what was said about this place in previous episodes. The final result is a wonderfully surreal exercise as Lynch regained creative control to end the series with a shocking conclusion – good does not triumph over evil as Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge while BOB takes possession of his body in the real world. Lynch brings Twin Peaks full circle by thumbing his nose at convention and once again subverting our expectations.

Twin Peaks paved the way for quirky, unusual fare like Northern Exposure, American Gothic, The X Files in the ‘90s and continues to do so with shows like Wonderfalls and Lost. It has been 20 years since the pilot episode aired on T.V. and the show has lost none of its power or ability to enthrall with its intriguing mysteries and engaging characters. Lynch and Frost’s show broke through and proved that challenging, cinematic, serialized T.V. could find a mainstream audience if even for only a brief time.


For more Twin Peaks, check out the Twin Peaks Archive blog which is also celebrating the show's 20th anniversary. Jeremy Richey also paid tribute to the show at his wonderful Moon in the Gutter blog. There's also the episode guide blog, props blog, and exhaustive In Twin Peaks site. Joining the fun is Edward Copeland's in-depth look back at the show over at his blog and Christine Hadden's excellent celebration of the show over at her Fascination with Fear blog.

Blue Velvet

By 1984, director David Lynch was on top of the world. He had received critical acclaim and eight Academy Award nominations for The Elephant Man in 1980 and was on the verge of releasing his next film, Dune (1984), an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel. Many speculated on how this young auteur would be able to translate such a complex text to film. Dino De Laurentiis, who poured over $50 million into the project, was hoping that it would become the next Star Wars (1977). If anyone could pull it off, it was the man who brought us that cult classic, Eraserhead in 1977. Dune promptly flopped. Critics despised it and crowds stayed away in droves. To his credit, it was not all Lynch's fault. Studio executives moved in, took away final cut privileges from Lynch, and tried to condense over four hours of footage into a barely watchable two-hour film. The result was an unorganized, if not visually stunning motion picture that seemed like the highlights of Herbert’s book.

Drained from such a harrowing ordeal and frustrated over the whole mess, Lynch took some time off to develop a more personal project that he had been working on while filming Dune. Surprisingly, De Laurentiis decided to give Lynch another chance, but only with the stipulation that he take a cut in his salary and work with a reduced budget of only $6 million. In return, the young director could have total artistic freedom and control over the final cut. Lynch surprised everyone with his hauntingly beautiful ode to small-town America, Blue Velvet (1986).

"In a way, this is still a fantasy film. It's like a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story. It's what could happen if you ran out of fantasy."
-- David Lynch

The brilliance of this film is apparent right from the opening montage that begins with the image of blood red roses in front of a stark white picket fence and continues with a fireman waving from his truck, to a crossing guard motioning children across a street. Everything is heightened in color and slowed down to an almost surreal level which invokes the feeling of being trapped, as one critic observed, in a "nightmarish image of small-town life in America." Lynch reinforces these romantic images of 1950's Americana with Bobby Vinton's classic version of "Blue Velvet" playing on the soundtrack. By using colors and music to create a dreamy, nostalgic mood, Lynch draws us into his strange world.

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) has returned home from college after his father suffers a stroke. While walking home from the hospital one day, he finds a severed ear lying in a field. The ear, for Lynch was like "finding a ticket to another world you know, it would change your life." The ear draws Jeffrey into a mysterious world of intrigue and dangerous characters. There is Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), an exotic looking singer who is involved in a bizarre, sadomasochistic relationship with local psycho, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a man of truly frightening proportions. To aid Jeffrey in his adventure, he enlists the help of Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), the beautiful girl next door, whose father just happens to be the detective in charge of investigating the severed ear. As the film progresses, Jeffrey is torn between the dark, seductive world of Dorothy and the safe, wholesome world that Sandy represents. The mystery culminates when these two worlds inevitably collide.

Blue Velvet's origins ultimately lie in Lynch's childhood a period of his life spent deep in the forests of Spokane, Washington. For Lynch, there was a definite "autobiographical level to the movie. Kyle is dressed like me. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture in Washington. We were in the woods all the time. I'd sorta had enough of the woods by the time I left, but still, lumber and lumberjacks, all this kinda thing, that's America to me like the picket fences and the roses in the opening shot. It's so burned in, that image, and it makes me feel so happy." Clearly this fascination with wood translates over into the film with not only the name of the town Lumberton, but also a scene where a truck transporting huge logs goes by the camera to gorgeous shots of tree-lined streets that all contain echoes of Lynch's childhood memories. The director would delve even deeper into the forests of his childhood with Twin Peaks which also contained numerous references to wood and trees.

If Lynch's childhood memories inspired the setting of Blue Velvet, the actual story of the film originated from three ideas that crystallized in the filmmaker's mind over a period of time. Ideas for Blue Velvet had begun to form in Lynch's head as early as 1973 but at that time he "only had a feeling and a title." After finishing The Elephant Man, he met producer Richard Roth over coffee. Roth had read and enjoyed Lynch's Ronnie Rocket script but did not think it was something he wanted to produce. He asked Lynch if the filmmaker had any other scripts but the director only had ideas. "I told him I had always wanted to sneak into a girl's room to watch her into the night and that, maybe, at one point or another, I would see something that would be the clue to a murder mystery. Roth loved the idea and asked me to write a treatment. I went home and thought of the ear in the field." The idea of sneaking into a girl's room survived the many drafts and changes to appear in a scene where Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy's apartment one night. However, Lynch took the idea one step further and Jeffrey evolves from being more than just a voyeur to an actual participant in the very mystery that he is fascinated by.

The image of a severed, human ear lying in a field has since become one of the most striking visuals of the film. "I don't know why it had to be an ear. Except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body a hole into something else...The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind so it felt perfect," Lynch remarked in an interview. For the filmmaker, the severed ear was the perfect way to draw Jeffrey into a secret world that lies at the heart of Blue Velvet.

The third idea that came to Lynch was Bobby Vinton's classic rendition of the song "Blue Velvet" and "the mood that came with that song a mood, a time, and things that were of that time." This song proved to be such a favorite with Lynch that he not only has Vinton's version in the film but Dorothy also sings it during one of her performances at the Slow Club. The song continues the blue velvet motif that appears throughout the film from the curtain or robe of velvet in the opening credits to the piece of material that Frank carries with him. There is something unsettling, yet also beautiful about the texture of velvet that Lynch's film uses quite effectively.

Once these three ideas came to Lynch, he and Roth pitched it at Warner Brothers who showed interest in the project. So, Lynch spent two years writing two drafts which, by his own admission, "were horrible!" The problem with them was that "there was maybe all the unpleasantness in the film but nothing else. A lot was not there. And so it went away for a while." After his experiences with Dune, Lynch returned to Blue Velvet and much to his surprise, "all the right ideas came to me right away, as if they had been on my mind all that time." He wrote two more drafts before he was satisfied with the script. Conditions at this point were ideal for Lynch's film: he had cut a deal with De Laurentiis that gave him complete artistic freedom and final cut privileges. Blue Velvet was also the smallest film on the De Laurentiis' roster and so Lynch was left alone for the most part. "After Dune I was down so far that anything was up! So it was just a euphoria. And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment."

Blue Velvet clearly demonstrates Lynch as an artist at the top of his form. This is due in large part to the exceptional crew he assembled for this film. Long time collaborator, Alan Splet (who had worked with Lynch ever since Eraserhead) contributed the complex sound scheme that ingeniously complements Lynch's images. This is evident in the unsettling "moaning hallways" of Dorothy Vallens' apartment building that seem almost organic in nature due in large part to Splet's disturbing soundscape. Splet also shines in the film's surrealistic montages where sound and image are distorted to a nightmarish level.

Frederick Elmes' lush cinematography is also a crucial element to the unique look that permeates Lynch's films. As film critic Pauline Kael observed in her review of the film, Elmes' photography gives Blue Velvet "a comparable tactility; real streets look like paintings you could touch." This look is Lynch's trademark style and harkens back to his other fascination: painting. Lynch's background lies in the fine art of painting and as a result Blue Velvet contains scenes that have a still life quality to them. In contrast, Elmes' technique evokes classical Hollywood cinema in the way scenes are lit and staged and yet they effortlessly slip into surrealism with the aid of Lynch's often absurd situations. The perfect example of this blend is the famous "joyride" sequence where Frank takes an unwilling Jeffrey and Dorothy to Ben's (Dean Stockwell), a place where obese women sit passively while Ben, complete with Kabuki white make-up and "suave" demeanor, lip-synchs to Roy Orbison's "In Dreams." In this scene, Elmes combines film noir lighting with a dark color scheme that enhances and establishes the eerie, dream-like mood synonymous to all of Lynch's films.

Lynch got the idea to use “In Dreams” while he was rehearsing scenes from the film with Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini in New York City. Lynch heard Roy Orbison's "Crying" while on a cab ride through the city. He had originally planned to use Orbison's "Crying" for the scene at Ben's with Dennis Hopper singing along with it – not Dean Stockwell. Lynch bought a Greatest Hits album of Orbison's and after hearing "In Dreams" decided to use that song instead.

Hopper kept putting off memorizing the song and so Lynch got Dean Stockwell (who had been good friends with Dennis Hopper from way back) to help Hopper work out the song and memorize the lyrics. On the day they shot the scene Hopper still hadn't memorized the song. Lynch remembers that, "we were rehearsing and Dean said, 'I'll stand here and kind of help Dennis if he needs it.' So we started playing the music and both Dennis and Dean began to sing 'In Dreams.' All of a sudden Dennis stops singing and looks at Dean – who's continuing to sing. Dennis is solidly in character and he is moved by Dean's (Ben's) singing. There was the scene in front of me. It was so perfect."

This bit of improvisation also led to another memorable moment – the "microphone" that Ben uses when he sings "In Dreams." Originally, Stockwell was going to use "a small candle-style table lamp," but when he rehearsed the scene, Lynch remembers that, "he picked up a work light that was hanging on a nail on the wall. He turned it on and flipped the long cord like a microphone cord and obviously it couldn't have been more perfect."

Blue Velvet also marked the first time Lynch worked with composer Angelo Badalamenti who provides a seductively lavish score. To complement Elmes' classical Hollywood look, Badalamenti's score mimics the melodramatic soundtracks of Douglas Sirk's films with its dramatic swells during intense moments and calm lulls with romantic interludes. Blue Velvet would mark the beginning of a long-lasting partnership with Badalamenti who has since composed the music for every subsequent project that Lynch has done.

The film's excellent ensemble cast is another area that the film excels in. Lynch has a real knack for reviving the careers of seasoned actors and Blue Velvet is no exception. Who could forget Dennis Hopper's memorable role as the helium-inhaling, demented criminal, Frank Booth? You never know what is going to happen when Hopper appears on screen and it is this unpredictability that really separates Frank from other screen villains. However, Lynch was not sure he wanted Hopper to play the role (future Lynch film psycho Robert Loggia auditioned for the role). Lynch remembers, "Dennis Hopper's name had come up in meetings before, but as soon as it did, it was shot down because of his reputation. Not because he wasn't right, but because his reputation was so strong that it was just out of the question. And that was sad, because he had been off everything for over a year and a half and no one really knew that. So his manager told me that Dennis was totally different and that we could phone the producers whom he had just worked with to check.” In fact, Hopper was so set on this role that Lynch remembers getting a call from the actor who said, "I have to play Frank because I am Frank." Well that almost blew the deal right there. But he was truly great to work with." It is interesting to note the effect that this role has had on Hopper's career whose villainous roles have been patterned after his classic turn in Blue Velvet.

Lynch also revived the career of Dean Stockwell who appears in a scene stealing cameo as Ben, Frank's "suave" partner in crime. The "joyride" scene where Frank and company visit Ben is a classic moment where Stockwell's effeminate character and Hopper's macho psycho meet. The two veteran actors clearly enjoy their characters and it shows in their performances as they play their roles to the hilt. "I loved that role, but I knew going in that it was going to be a risk because it was so strange a film and everybody in it automatically got caught up in the strangeness." Stockwell remembers. The result is a truly unsettling, yet somewhat humorous scene as we are never sure what is going to happen next due to Hopper and Stockwell's unpredictable behavior. This uncertainty only heightens the terror of the scene as we wonder if Jeffrey will live to see its conclusion.

Lynch not only has the ability to resurrect the careers of veteran actors, but discover new talent as well. Fresh from his role in Dune, Kyle MacLachlan is a dead ringer for the director, adding an interesting autobiographical twist to the film. MacLachlan expertly captures the inner turmoil that Jeffrey struggles with throughout the film and manages to hold his own against such great actors as Dennis Hopper. This role would cement the young actor's place as a Lynch regular, most notably appearing as the beloved Special Agent Dale Cooper in the Twin Peaks show and feature film. Laura Dern also turns in an excellent performance in what could have been a one-dimensional girlfriend role. Dern's performance has a depth that suggests, much like all the other characters, that she harbors some deep, dark secret, kept in check by her all-American purity. She is the perfect contrast to Isabella Rossellini's mysterious, femme fatale character.

Lynch admits that, at the time, he "didn't even know Isabella Rossellini was an actress. I just happened to meet her in a restaurant in New York and we discussed the movie. I told her I was casting it, not even realizing she was an actress. Then a week later I was looking at a copy of Screen World and I found a picture of her from a film she did with the Taviani brothers, and I said. "Good night! She's an actress!" So I got a script to her that afternoon, and she loved it instantly. She felt that she knew Dorothy and that she knew the part. So, because of her attitude and because I felt she was right in every way, it happened."

The film was supposed to have a limited release, playing predominantly in film festivals all over the world. However, after several successful screenings in Europe, De Laurentiis told Lynch that "maybe a wider audience will like this film." And so, a sneak preview was organized in the United States, at a theater that was supposed to be showing Top Gun (1986). It did not go well. In retrospect, Lynch thought that this screening was "actually a good thing because he (De Laurentiis) didn't have high expectations after that. So whatever came was frosting on the cake. And it was one of his most successful films that year."

It has been more than 20 years since Blue Velvet shocked and divided audiences with its peculiar vision of America. Many critics loved the film, some declaring it one of the best films of the 1980's. Almost the same number hated it. For every Pauline Kael who gave it a favorable review, there was a Rex Reed who thought it to be "one of the sickest films ever made." Critic John Simon even went so far as claiming the film to be pornography which, as he put it, "pretends to be art, and is taken for it by most critics, has dishonesty and stupidity as well as grossness on its conscience." Yet for such vehemence, Blue Velvet has endured. Its legacy is widespread. Many articles and essays have been written about Lynch's film since its release in an attempt to unlock many of the film's mysteries and symbols that are buried throughout. Its look and mood has influenced many films since. One only has to look at Lynch’s own career with Twin Peaks, a tamer, televised version of Blue Velvet, to see that the auteur has had a difficult time surpassing this watershed film, but in recent years he’s come very close with films like Mulholland Drive (2001). He proved with Blue Velvet that just when everyone had him pegged, he released a film that established him as a director with real talent and the ability to create a world with fascinating characters that eerily mirrors our own.

Here's a fascinating article about the search for deleted footage from the film with all kinds of stills from these scenes.