A man sitting on the edge of a bed gets up to walk through a door
a year and a half later
the man walks through the door
well,
that was the shooting schedule,
how it worked out.
Two years into the shoot, the original cinematographer died of some unspecified illness.
Leading man Jack Nance kept his hair all crazy teased-up like that during the entire shoot.
Money ran out, no one knew if it would ever be finished,
everyone involved gave whatever they had: time, money, labor,
with no real profit motive or hope of breaking in to the Hollywood scene,
Five years of filming
Eraserhead's the result.
It's some weird shit.
...
I saw Eraserhead for the first time sometime in 2002 on VHS with a couple of friends in a dingy, collegiate apartment. We watched it in mostly rapt silence, all Lynch fans, a perfect screening.
None of us knew anything about the making of the film. I assumed it was a movie made like any other movie. Maybe I thought of it being something like Night of the Living Dead, shot on weekends by a dedicated group of people over five or six months.
After Eraserhead, I recall us watching Tetsuo the Iron Man but I'm not sure. That would've been a terrific double feature.
David Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard for the cast and crew of Eraserhead to put them in the mood of a black and white reality. I guess we should've watched Sunset Boulevard with Eraserhead back in 2002. Well, we didn't know any better at that time.
Maybe I'll watch Sunset Boulevard first before watching Eraserhead this time around.
