The City of Absurdity Papers & Essayes
David Lynch Keeps His Head  by David Foster Wallace

9. ONE OF THE RELATIVELY PICAYUNE 'LOST HIGHWAY' SCENES I GOT TO BE ON THE SET OF

GIVEN HIS movies' penchant for creepy small towns, Los Angeles might seem an unlikely place for Lynch to set Lost Highway. Los Angeles in January, though, turns out to be plenty Lynchian in its own right. Surreal-banal interpenetrations are every place you look. The cab from LAX has a machine attached to the meter so you can pay the fare by major credit card. Or see my hotel lobby, which is filled with beautiful Steinway piano music, except when you go over to put a buck in the piano player's snifter or whatever it turns out there's nobody playing, the piano's playing itself, but it's not a player piano, it's a regular Steinway with a weird computerized box attached to the underside of its keyboard; the piano plays 24 hours a day and never once repeats a song. My hotel's in what's either West Hollywood or the downscale part of Beverly Hills; two clerks at the registration desk start arguing the point when I ask where exactly in L.A. we are. They go on for a Lynchianly long time.

The location also helps make this movie "personal" in a new way, because L.A. is where Lynch and his S.O., Ms. Mary Sweeney,12 both live. Corporate and technical headquarters for Asymmetrical Productions is a house right near his. Two houses down on the same street is the house Lynch has chosen to use for the home of Bill Pullman and brunet Patricia Arquette in the movie's first act; it's a house that looks rather a lot like Lynch's own, a home whose architecture could be called Spanish in roughly the same way Goya could be called Spanish.

A film's director usually has a number of assistant directors, whose responsibilities are different and firmly established by Hollywood convention. The first assistant director is in charge of coordinating details, shouting for quiet on the set, worrying, and yelling at people and being disliked for it. This allows the director himself to be kind of a benign and unhassled monarch, occupied mostly with high-level creative concerns and popular with the crew in a kind of grandfatherly way. Lost Highway's first assistant director is a veteran named Scott Cameron who wears khaki shorts and has stubble and is good-looking in a kind of beleaguered way; he looks like a person who takes a lot of Tagamet.13 The second assistant director is in charge of scheduling and is the person who makes up the daily call sheet, which outlines the day's production schedule and says who has to show up where and when. There's also a second second assistant director,14 who's in charge of interfacing with the actors and actresses and making sure their makeup and costumes are okay and going to summon them from their trailers when the stand-ins are done blocking off the positions and angles for a scene and everything's ready for the first string to come on.

Part of the daily call sheet is a kind of charty-looking précis of the scenes to be shot that day; it's called a "one-line schedule" or "one-finer." Here is what January 8's one-liner looks like:

(1) SCS 112 INT MR. EDDY'S MERCEDES /DAY/ I PGS MR. EDDY15 DRIVES MERCEDES, PETE16 LISTENS FOR CAR TROUBLE.

(2) SCS 113 EXT MULHQLLAND DRIVE /DAY/ 1/8 PGS MR. EDDY TAKES THE CAR FOR A CRUISE, INFINITI MOVES UP FAST BEHIND THEM

(3) SCS 114 EXT MR. EDDY'S MERCEDES /DAY/ 1/8 PGS MR. EDDY LETS INFINITI PASS AND FORCES IT OFF THE ROAD

These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Griffith Park, a roughly Delaware-size expanse out in the foothills of the Santa Monicas, kind of a semiarid Yellowstone, full of ridges and buttes and spontaneous little landslides of dirt and gravel. Asymmetrical's advance team has established a "base camp" of about a dozen trailers along a little road in the park17 and security has blocked off areas of several other streets for the driving scenes, burly guys with walkie-talkies and roadie-black T-shirts forming barricades at various places to keep joggers and civilian drivers from intruding into the driving shots or exposing the production to insurance liability during stunts. L.A. civilians are easygoing about being turned back from the barricades and seem as blasé as New Yorkers about movies being filmed.

Griffith Park, though lovely in a kind of desiccated, lunar way, turns out itself to be a kind of Lynchian filming environment, with perfusive sunshine and imported beer-colored light, but a weird kind of subliminal ominousness about it. This ominousness is hard to put a finger on or describe in any sensuous way. It turns out that there's a warning out today for a Santa Ana Wind, a strange weather phenomenon that causes fire hazards18 and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion anxiety in man and beast alike.

L.A.'s murder rate is apparently higher during Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it's easy to confirm that there's something Lynchian in the air today: Sounds sound harsher, breathing tastes funny, and the sunlight has a way of diffracting into knives that penetrate all the way to the back of the skull. The air smells of sage and pine and dust and distant creosote. Wild mustard, yucca, sumac, and various grasses form a kind of five o'clock shadow on the hillsides, and scrub oak and pine jut at unlikely angles, and some of the trees' trunks are creepily curved and deformed, and there are also a lot of obstreperous weeds and things with thorns that discourage much hiking around. The road where the set is is like a kind of small canyon between a butte on one side and an outright cliff on the other.

Basically what happens all morning is that Robert Loggia's sinister black Mercedes 6.9 and the tailgating Infiniti and the production's big complicated camera truck go off and are gone for long stretches of time, tooling back and forth along the same barricaded mile of what is supposed to be Mulholland Drive. While the car filming is going on, the other 60 or so members of the location crew and staff all perform small maintenance and preparatory tasks and lounge around and shoot the shit and basically kill enormous amounts of time. There are grips, propmasters, sound people, script people, dialogue coaches, camera people, electricians, makeup and hair people, a first-aid guy, production assistants, standins, stunt doubles, producers, lighting technicians, on-set dressers, set decorators, ADs, unit publicists, location managers, costume people, continuity people, script people, special-effects coordinators and technicians, LAFD cigarette discouragers, a representative of the production's insurance underwriter, a variety of personal assistants and foctota and interns, and a substantial number of persons with no discernible function at all. The whole thing is tremendously complex and confusing, and a precise census is hard to take because a lot of the crew look generally alike and the functions they perform are extremely technical and complicated and performed with high-speed efficiency, and it takes a while to start picking up on the various distinguishing cues in appearance and gear that allow you to distinguish one species of crew personnel from another, so that the following rough taxonomy doesn't start emerging until late on 9 January: Grips tend to be large, beefy blue-collar guys with walrus mustaches and baseball caps and big wrists and beer guts but extremely alert, intelligent eyes; they look like very bright professional movers, which is basically what they are. The production's electricians, lighting guys, and effects guys, who are also as a rule male and large, are distinguished from the grips via their tendency to have long hair in a ponytail and to wear elaborate tool belts and T-shirts advertising various brands of esoteric high-tech gear.

None of the grips wear earrings, but more than 50 percent of the technical guys wear earrings, and a couple have beards, and four of the five electricians for some reason have Fu Manchu mustaches, and with their ponytails and pallor they all have the distinctive look of guys who work in record or head shops; plus in general the recreational-chemical vibe around these more technical blue-collar guys is very decidedly not a beer vibe.

A lot of the camera and sound and makeup crew are female, but a lot of these, too, have a similar look: thirtyish, makeupless, insouciantly pretty, wearing faded jeans and old running shoes and black T-shirts, and with lush, well-conditioned hair tied carelessly out of the way so that strands tend to escape and trail and have to be chuffed out of the eyes periodically or brushed away with the back of a ringless hand – in sum, the sort of sloppily pretty tech-savvy young woman you can just tell smokes pot and owns a dog. Most of these hands-on technical females have that certain expression around the eyes that communicates "Been there, done that." A bunch of them at lunch won't eat anything but bean curd and don't regard certain grips' comments about what bean curd looks like as in any way worthy of response. One of the technical women, the production's still photographer, has on the inside of her forearm a tattoo of the Japanese character for "strength," and she can manipulate her forearm's muscles in such a way as to make the ideogram bulge Nietzscheanly and then recede.

A lot of the script people and assistant wardrobe people and production assistants are also female, but they're of a different genus – younger, less lean, more vulnerable, without the technically savvy self-esteem of the camera or sound women. As opposed to the hands-on women's weltschmerzian serenity, the script and PA females all have the same pained I-went-to-a-really-good-college-and-what-am-l-doing-with-my-life look around the eyes, the sort of look where you know that if they're not in twice-a-week therapy it's only because they can't afford it. Another way to distinguish different crewpeople's status and function is to look at what kind of personal communication gear they have. The rank-and-file grips are pretty much the only people without any kind of personal communicative gear. The rest of the hands-on and technical crew carry walkie-talkies, as do the location manager, the people in touch with the camera truck, and the burly guys manning the road's barricades. Many of the other crew carry cellular phones in snazzy hipside holsters, and the amount of cellular-phone talking going on more than lives up to popular stereotypes about L.A. and cellulars. The second AD, a thirtyish black lady named Simone, whom I get to interact with a lot because she's always having to politely inform me that I'm in the way of something and need to move, has an actual cellular headset instead of just a bolstered cellular phone, though with Simone the headset isn't an affectation – the headset leaves her hands free to write stuff on her clipboard.

The sees true executive class – line producer, publicist, underwriter, DP – all have pagers that sometimes will all sound at once but just slightly out of sync, producing in the weird ionized Santa Ana air a sound blend that fully qualifies as Lynchian. (The exception to every rule is Scott Cameron, the first AD, who bears with Sisyphean resignation the burden of two walkie-talkies, a cellular phone, a pager, and a very serious battery-powered bullhorn all at the same time.)

So about like once an hour everybody's walkie-talkies start crackling a lot, and then a couple minutes later Lynch and the actual shooting team and cars come hauling back into base and everybody on the crew springs into frantic but purposeful action so that from the specular vantage of the roadside cliff the set resembles an anthill that's been stirred with a stick. For a particular shot inside the moving Mercedes, some of the grips construct a kind of platform and secure it to the hood of the car with clamps and straps, and then various other technicians attach a 35mm Panavision camera, several different complicatedly angled mole and Bambino lights, and a three-by-five-foot bounce to various parts of the hood's platform. This stuff is locked down tight, and the second-assistant camera, a breathtaking and all-business lady everyone addresses as Chesney, fiddles complexly with the camera's anamorphic lens and various filters. When sunlight off the windshield is a problem,19 the director of photography and a camera guy in a pith helmet and Chesney all huddle and confer and decide to brace a gauzy diffusion filter between the camera and the windshield. During the crew's frantic activity – all of it punctuated with loud bullhorn commands from Cameron – the technicians from the camera truck and the stand-ins from the cars take their own turns standing around and talking on cellulars and rooting through the baskets of corporate snacks on the snack table looking for stuff they like. The exterior driving shots all have stand-ins in the cars, but usually when the shooting team returns to base the actual name actors will emerge from their trailers20 and join the roil. Robert Loggia in particular likes to come out and stand around chatting with his stand-in, who's of the same meaty build and olive complexion and strand-intensive balding pattern and craggy facial menace as Loggia, and of course is identically dressed in mobster Armani, so that from the distance of the roadside hill their conversation looks like its own surreal commentary on parallel identity.

Lynch himself uses the downtime between takes to confer with ADs and producers and to drink coffee and/or micturate into the undergrowth, and to smoke American Spirits and walk pensively around the camera truck's technical fray, sometimes holding one hand to his cheek in a way that recalls Jack Benny. Now 50 years old, Lynch looks like an adult version of the kind of kid who gets beaten up a lot at recess. He's large, not exactly fat but soft-looking, and is far and away the palest person anywhere in view, his paleness dwarfing even the head-shop pallor of the lighting and effects guys. He wears a black long-sleeved dress shirt with every possible button buttoned, baggy tan chinos that are too short and flap around his ankles, and a deep sea-fisherman's cap with a very long bill. The tan cap matches his pants, and his socks are both the same color, suggesting an extremely nerdy costume that's been chosen and coordinated with great care – a suggestion that, with Lynch, seems somehow endearing rather than pathetic. The stiff quality, of his stride and posture suggest either an ultradisciplinarian upbringing or a back brace.

Lynch's face is the best thing about him. In photos of him as a young man, Lynch looks rather uncannily like James Spader, but he doesn't look like James Spader anymore. His face is now full in the sort of way that makes certain people's faces square, and his eyes – which never once do that grotesque looking-in-opposite-directions-at-once thing they were doing on the 1990 Time cover – are large and mild and kind. In case you're one of the people who figure that Lynch must be as "sick" as his films, know that he doesn't have the beady or glassy look one associates with obsessive voyeurism or OCD or degeneracy-grade mental trouble. His eyes are good eyes: He looks at stuff with very intense interest, but it's a warm and fullhearted interest, sort of the way we all look when we're watching somebody we love doing something we also love. He doesn't fret or intrude on any of the technicians, though he will come over and confer when somebody needs to know what exactly he wants for the next setup. He's the sort who manages to appear restful even in activity; i.e., he looks both very alert and very calm. There might be something about his calm that's a little creepy – one tends to think of really high-end maniacs being oddly calm, e.g. the way Hannibal Lecter's pulse rate stays under 80 as he bites somebody's tongue out.

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12 Mary Sweeney is one of Lost Highway's three producers. Her main responsibility seems to be rushes, the rough cut and its storage, and organization. (She was Lynch's editor on Fire Walk With Me).

13 One Lost Highway Crewperson described Scott Cameron as 'the Mozart of stress,' whatever that's supposed to mean

14 Not 'third assistant,' for some reason

15 Robert Loggia

16 Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all smunched together and then emptied of some ineffable but vital essence. He's not particularly tall, but he looks tall in Lost Highway's footage because he has extremely poor posture and Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies, in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?), and surprisingly good in White Squall.

To be frank, it's almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good Balthazar Getty's going to be in Lost Highway from my impressions of him as a human being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it's probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he'd annoy the hell out of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody's cellular phone for an 'emergency.' For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who you could tell were making about I percent of what he was making on the movie. I admit I eavesdropped an some of his cellular-phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody 'But what did she say about me?' three times in a row. I admit none of these are exactly capital offenses, but they added up.

Okay, fuck it: The single most annoying thing about Balthazar Getty was that whenever Lynch was around, Getty would be very unctuous and over-respectful and ass-kissy, but when Lynch wasn't around Getty would make fun of him and do an imitation of his distinctive speaking voice that wasn't a very good imitation but struck me as being disrespectful and mean.

17 There are trailers for Lighting, Props, Effects, Wardrobe, grippish stuff, and some for the bigger stars in the cast, though the stars' trailers don't have their names or a gold star on the door or anything. The Effects trailer flies a Jolly Roger. Hard grunge issues from the Lighting trailer, and outside a couple of other trailers tough-looking crewpeople sit in canvas chairs reading Car Action and Guns & Ammo. Some portion of the movie's crew spends just about all their time in Base Camp doing various stuff in trailers, though it's hard to figure out just what they're doing, because these crewpeople have the kind of carnyesque vibe about them of people who spend a lot of time with their trailers and regard the trailers as their special territory and aren't very inviting about having you climb up in there and see what they're doing. (This is a long way of saying I was scared of the guys in the trailers and didn't ask them what they were doing.) But a lot of it is highly technical. The area closest to daylight in the back of the Lighting- or Camera-Related trailer, for example, has tripods and lightpoles and attachments of all lengths and sizes lined up very precisely, like ordnance. Shelves near the tripods have labeled sections for '2 X MIGHTY,' '2 x 8 JUNIOR"2 X MICKEY MOLES,"2 X BABY BJs," on and on.

18 LAFD inspectors were all over the set glaring at you if you lit a cigarette, and nicotinic conditions were pretty rugged because Scoff Cameron decreed that people could smoke only if they were standing near the sand-filled butt can, of which there was apparently only one, and Lynch, a devoted smoker of American Spirit all-natural cigarettes, tended to commandeer the bun can, and people who wanted to smoke and were not near Lynch pretty much had to chew their knuckle and wait for him to turn his back so they could steal it.

19 There's one very young guy on the crew whose entire function seems to be going around with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and Windexing every glass surface blindingly clean

20 Name actors on location spend truly massive amounts of time in their trailers, and yet it's totally unclear what they do in there all that time, and I think PREMIERE magazine could get a really interesting article out of even a casual probe into the whole mystery

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