It's strange how Eraserhead is.
It is a personal film, it's my first feature, and it took the longest of any film,
and I lived and loved that world.
I can't remember when I got the idea, when the word Eraserhead,
or any part of the idea came to me first.
I can't remember whether it was in Philadelphia,
or when I first came to California.
Completely don't remember.
Don't remember writing the script, and I don't remember the idea's coming in,
especially the initial idea.
In a lot of times, I remember when the first thing kind of came...
Maybe I don't. But, uhm... For sure, I don't remember this.
It all came from Philadelphia,
but I don't know when it bubbled up to the surface.
I got an Independent Filmmaker's Grant in 1968.
that's an Independent Filmmaker's Grant, that was a brand new programme,
and I was in the second group to get one of those grants.
That was to make The Grandmother, that's when I met
Alan Splet and Herb Cardwell, who is a cinematographer.
And I asked them, "Give me some tips on lighting".
Then when we came in time to mix, and I look over, and I see this guy...
He's like a beanpole in a shiny black suit, 15-20 year old suit,
and I shake his hand, and I can feel the bones rattle in his arm.
That was Al.
And this guy was as straight as an arrow, and I figured this is never gonna happen,
not in a million years.
And what followed was 63 non-stop days, Saturday-Sunday, of making sounds.
And I never had so much fun in my life, working with Al.
But I need extra money to finish the film.
So, I called Tony Velani in Washington D.C., where the AFI's headquarters were then.
Tony, bless his heart, came all the way up on the train, and I met him at the station,
and he came over, and I showed him the film at "Calvin Defreyn".
And he, you know, really liked what he saw.
They gave me 2200$ more to finish the film, and
on the way back to the train station I'm driving them, and he said,
"David, you should come to the Center For Advanced Film Studies out in California".
Luckily, I didn't have an accident, you know, when he said that, 'cause I was like...
I started floating.
And I just chilled trying to reach, you know, the brake and the gas pedal.
But they made a booklet, showing the Center and some of the 'fellows',
instead of students, they called them 'fellows'.
And they took 15 fellows a year.
So, now they sent this booklet out, and I'm getting this booklet,
and on the front cover is this 55-room mansion on 18 acres of land in the middle of Beverly Hills.
So, you kind of, you know, say, "This is... What kind of a fantastic world do we live in?"
You know, when you got a school like this.
And then you open it up and it goes through all these great directors
that came and taught and gave talks there.
And how much, you know, the industry was helping the school, and...
Different programs, different seminars, and one of the seminars they showed -
the students sitting in this room with beautiful wood paneling
and a fire in the fireplace, giant, like, hearth-like fireplace.
And some of the students are wearing sweaters.
And I'm thinking, "What kind of a place is California?"
'Cause it's not just, you know, hot all the time, it's sometimes cool enough
in the evenings for a fire and a fireplace, and to wear a sweater.
This seemed like the perfect, you know, thing.
The Center For Advanced Film Studies started in 1969.
I went out in the summer of 1970.
Al was placed as head of the sound department.
So Al went out, actually, a month before I did, and he took a little apartment on San Vincente,
right down the street from the "Whisky A Go Go".
And then Jack Fisk and my brother John and I drove out on the truck,
and rolled in to town after 3 days on the road at night.
And I'm still not getting the feel of LA,
I've got that little feel of the nighttime LA.
When I woke up the next morning, it was like I was almost blinded.
The light was so unbelievable, and I couldn't get over it - how bright it was.
I just stand out in front of the house, getting blinded by this light.
And it felt so good. It was unbelievable.
Then we walked up to the AFI, which was...
It was actually Doheny Sr.'s son, that was built for him.
It was built in 1929, finished in 1929.
And it was 55 rooms, reinforced concrete, high on the hill - the real deal.
When you go into this place, it's spectacular.
So we all went up there and kind of walked around with our, you know, jaws falling open, and...
That started, you know, the next sort of phase.
I worked on a script called "Gardenback",
and Frank Daniel and Gill Dennis both sort of took me under their wings.
Frank Daniel is the greatest film teacher in the history of the world,
and he since died, bless his heart.
But he was unbelievable as a great teacher.
And I took Film Analysis class with him, and then he and Gill,
who was his fellow there, but he was sort of working with Frank,
and they would have script meetings with me.
But it didn't work out. I was completely fed up. It was going nowhere.
It was getting longer, but all my good bits that I liked were, you know, just
being filled up in between with stuff I didn't have a clue why it was there.
So, the first day of the second year. So, now it's 1971.
For some reason, I got put into first year classes, and I thought that it wasů
That I might've flunked, you know, since my first year.
And plus I was fed up with "Gardenback".
So I went up to Frank Daniel's office and I quit.
I quit the school, and stormed out and went down.
I told Al I quit, and he said, "You know, I quit as well".
So, we both went out.
And went down to the "Hamburger Hamlet" and had some coffee, and when I got back home,
Peggy, my wife at the time, said, "What happened? You know, they've been calling ya".
So, I explained to her and she said, "Frank said, you've gotta come back,
you've gotta come up and talk". And so eventually, I went back up
and had a really good talk with Frank, and Frank said,
"If you're upset, we're doing something wrong. What do you wanna do?"
I said, "I wanna make 'Eraserhead'". He said, "Okay. You'll make 'Eraserhead'."
And he said, "It's a 21-page script, so it's a 21-minute film".
I said, "No. I think it's a hair longer than that".
And he said, "Well, in that case it's a 42-minute film".
I said okay and off I went. And that was the beginning of it.
Somehow, I had a script of Eraserhead by 1971.
There wasn't really a script, it was a 22-page thing,
and I don't know what people really got from that script.
I know that Frank Daniel, who was the dean of the school, he died maybe 5 years ago.
At his funeral his son told me that Frank himself didn't really like Eraserhead.
But he didn't... The script. Maybe the film too, I don't know.
But he said that it was important that I'd be able to do it.
And a man was on the board of directors at AFI.
This is what his son, Frank's son told me. And, told Frank,
"This is not the kind of film that we make here, at the American Film Institute".
And Frank said, "This is exactly kind of film, you know,
we should be making here, at the American Film Institute".
So, it got strange, and as it turns out, I never knew about this till 5 years ago.
Frank turned in his resignation, thinking it would not be accepted,
and they accepted his resignation, from his son's story, because of "Eraserhead".
And Frank left the AFI.
Certain things had to be done before shooting commenced.
So I started working on those things. And somewhere in there, evenů
I'd sort of been going down the stables toward the end of the first year.
I call them "the stables".
There were stalls, there were garages, there were car garages, all equipped with hydraulic lifts
for the old, you know, cars. There were maid's quarters, there was a huge hay loft, and there was a place where
they stored firewood, which was, you know, kind of enormous, too.
And there was also a greenhouse and gardener's quarters.
And I took a room down there, and no one ever went down there, so I just sort of started,
you know, doing some things down there.
And then I got the whole stables to work in, and a garage and some stalls, and a hayloft.
And some other surrounding areas, so it was like, that was mini sound stage.
And then I got all this equipment from AFI. It was like heaven.
We had two cameras, two CM-3s, Eclair CM-3s. We had a whole lighting package.
We had video cameras, black and white, you know, video cameras.
We had a room that was called a camera room, where all the different camera things
were stored, lenses and everything. We had a room that we called a food room,
where we ate. We had green rooms, where Jack was putting on his makeup.
But strangely, on Eraserhead, the first person I met was in the film.
I never saw, I'm pretty sure I never saw more than one actor before the thing was cast.
Yeah, I would mostlyů Friends would just tell me about someone, or someone else
would tell me about someone, and this person would come in - bango!
It just was, you know, like perfect. I said, "You're perfect".
It was weird, I felt bad about it, 'cause I'd not, you know, seen enough people.
But they'd just come in, and they just had a...
It was like fate was just dropping them on the doorstep.
The most important actor was Henry Spencer.
There was a guy at AFI named David Lindeman, who was a theater director in San-Francisco
before he came down to AFI as a student. And he knew lots of actors.
So one day, I described the character I was looking for, as best as I could, and he said,
"There are two people that I would recommend".
One of them, his name was Jack Nance. So I said okay, and I made this arrangement to meet Jack.
Jeanne Bates was the only one I had doubts about, because she was so beautiful.
When she walked in, she looked, you know, way too beautiful.
And I told her, I said, "You know, you've gotta understand - you're too beautiful".
But she had a fixation, it was weird. And she said she would work very hard, you know, to get,
you know, into that and look that way. And I built her a drooping eye and a wart,
and some facial hair. And she did the rest. She did just a beautiful job.
Charlotte Stewart was a friend of Doreen's, who was signed on as production manager.
And Charlotte was in "Little House on the Prairie" in those days.
Many times she'd come in with all this, you know, TV makeup on,
and we'd have to get all that stuff off, and then frump her up,
then she'd be ready to go. Alan Joseph played Bill X, and he was also the first person
cast for that role, and the first person I saw. And they made a great family.
In those early Polaroids you can see a family picture of the three of them.
And it's a good-looking family. It was a great group, all the people.
Everybody was great to work with.
Everybody, you know, got there, and the rest of the world disappeared.
We were in a space that everyone seemed to understand.
The crew was Doreen [G.] Small, Catherine [E.] Coulson, Herb Cardwell, me and Jack.
And that was the crew for most of the picture.
Herb Cardwell was the first DP. Herb worked for nine months.
Herb is a great DP. And Herb died when he was 35 years old.
He died in his sleep. That was long after he finished, you know, working on Eraserhead.
"There's a beautiful airport, north of here in the desert". And we flew up there.
Beautiful day! Landed, just like the most perfect smooth landing.
Herb is the only guy I know... He's the best driver in the world.
Herb drove with both feet. And he would feather his stops, and feather his starts,
and he would accelerate at exactly the right moment in a turn.
You never feel any tension, you're very relaxed, everything is smooth,
and you're not rocking to and fro or side to side. But anyway, it's beautiful, Herb's driving.
In the same way he flies, so smooth - perfect! And we came... We went out after we'd landed
in the desert and, you know, kind of walked around in the desert, and then we flew back,
And when we landed in LA, it was night. And we were taxiing to the place, where he was gonna,
you know, stop his plane. He radioed to the tower, and the sound of his voice,
and the character of his voice, all the hair went up on the back
my head neck, and I got goose bumps all over. It occurred to me that Herb
in another life was a long-distance space pilot. The way he said goodnight to
the pilot at the tower, it was like he would've been flying for millions of years.
It was the weirdest thing. The guy was a pilot, and it was very beautiful,
the way he said goodnight to the tower. It was incredible.
And when Herb had to leave, 'cause he couldn't afford to stay anymore,
Tony Vellani told me about Fred, and he came to AFI as a cinematography student.
Fred and I met, and Fred had a very good attitude. You know, talked with Herb,
and it felt like the right thing. And then this transition, you know, brought Fred into the mix.
Fred Elmes took over, and Herb brought Fred up to speed over 2 or 3 or 4 week transition.
Fred then shot for three more years.
One day, Jack Fisk and I, we found out that a studio was being shut down.
It was kind of a cloudy day. And we went and rented 35-foot Flatbed
and drove over to this place. And the clouds made it seem like there was a
kind of a roof on the world. So when we went in to the place, it was like...
Even though a lot of the place was open, it seemed like it was under a roof.
And this was an ancient real deal studio. They were selling stuff for nothing.
When we drove out of there, we had 35' long, 12' high of flats, bales of wire,
kegs of nails, 30' by 40' black backdrop... I can't remember all the things we had.
A lot of like radiators and things that I needed for the film,
But the whole... All these sets were built with those Flats.
And since I had a paper route, if there were holes in them, I would just do,
you know, papier-mache, you know, patches with the newspapers,
The Wall Street Journal, and flour and water. And all that 35' wide 12' high,
all this stuff - 100$. One hundred dollars.
My brother John helped me build sets. Like I said, Jack Fisk, you know, helped
getting all these things. They were stored down at the stables, all the flats,
you know, all the stuff. Then I had, you know, to built, you know, many things for sets.
Jack Nance helped me a lot, you know, on certain building projects.
And I loved working with Jack. We were troweling plaster one time, and I...
It wasů Had a curved surface, so I talked to this guy, about plastering, how do you trowl,
you know, get this stuff smooth like glass. He said, "You've gotta trowl it".
So, Jack and I, we just kept saying, "You've gotta trowl it",
you know, all day long, troweling this thing. And finally got it pretty smooth, butů
It wasn't all day long, it was all month long. It was more like that.
Jack at first wore the skin off his hands, 'cause he wasn't wearing gloves.
And, you know, plaster, a lot of plaster has sanded it. So, when you rubbing stuff down
with your bare hands, you don't realize it at first. But the skin sort of starts turning to jelly,
and rubs off, and you get to start seeing your bones, and your hands are on fire,
and it's really bright red. And Jack did this. You know, Jack did a lot of crazy stuff.
There were several props that I needed, and a deal was struck through AFI
and Warner Brothers. I just could drive on, and I metů I mean, this was 1971.
I met an old-timer that'd been on that studio for years, years and years -
head of the prop department. Welcomes me, in we go. "What do you want?"
Up at one aisle down the other, unbelievable stuff. I'd say, you know,
"Could I, you know, get this thing here?" He'd say, "Put it out there on your truck".
I just went through, and about 4 years later I returned those props.
All different people, all different-looking place - they had no record of it, nothing.
Al was head of the sound department.
So, we had all the equipment that Al had at our disposal. And that included
And that included Nagras and microphones, and cabling, and, you know, all that.
And since there's not a lot of, you know, sync sound, you know,
dialogue in the film, but still Al, you know, recorded all that.
The room, as every room is, it was a hair too live. As everybody knows,
you can add echo, but you can't take it away. So we built sound blankets.
The sound blankets were burlap around fiber glass, and then grommeted along the edge.
And so the grommets, you could hang them on nails at the top of the set walls,
and then the sound blankets would drape down, you could move them around
really nice, they were light. And I think, AFI wanted, you know, them built.
Theoretically, they would keep them and use them. So, we made a budget
and put all the materials in there, and found out how much that cost and all that this kind of stuff.
Al, before his incarnation as a sound man, was an accountant in Philadelphia breweries.
So Al was pretty much of an ace on an adding machine.
He and the other accountants would go so fast and jam the machines.
And Al was so rapid, he'd jam the best machines. So he wanted to go after we finish
this budget next toward to the AFI accounting department and tell them these numbers up.
So we went over there, and there was a girl at the desk, and Al said,
"Could we borrow the adding machine?" And she said,
"What do you want that adding machine for? I'll addů" And he said, "No, no, no,
I'll add them up. But, you know, could we just use it?" And she said,
"Give me the numbers, I'll add them up". And Al said, "No, no. Let me add them up,"
you know. "I've got 'em right here", and he kind of went around.
This girl's eyes went about like silver dollars. He had those things in a heartbeat.
This machine, you know, jumped to life and the paper was spit out,
and he popped it and borrowed a stapler and put it together, and we walked back across the hall.
He was superfast on machines.
And unfortunately, Alan Splet and Herb Cardwell are both gone now.
Al is legally blind. But Herb can't hear.
Al and Herb decided they were gonna fly across the country.
And Al was gonna be the navigator, and he had all the maps and everything like that,
but Al would be reading these maps, you know, very close, 'cause he was so blind.
And the first leg of the trip they were going up to - Pocatello, Idaho.
So, they took off, and Al navigated Herb up there.
They radioed ahead that they were gonna land at night, and they guy said
he's so late he's going back into town. But he'll leave a rental car there
and just, you know, come in, you know, lock upů That wasů The good old days.
So Herb did a perfect landing, you know, at night. They parked a plane,
there was the rental car. They did everything the guy wanted,
then saw him driving into town.
And around Pocatello, Idaho there's just these narrow little two-lane roads.
And pitch black. So, Al is riding shotgun, Herb's driving, 'cause Al
couldn't get a driver license, 'cause of his blindness. And Al tells this story.
As they're driving from this little airport into the city of Pocatello, Idaho, Herb is talking.
And he's telling him some story or something, and talking fairly, you know, rapidly.
And the talking suddenly starts not making sense to Al, but it's rapid nonsense.
And Al notices that the lights are now illuminating the side of the road, and the car is...
You know, starting to go off the road. Herb's voice is now going up in pitch,
and he's talking just as fast, but his voice is rising. He's in the shoulder of the road,
and his voice is going up higher and higher in pitch, even though Al is screaming
at Herb right next to him. Herb doesn't hear, he keeps talking, and his voice...
It comes to little squeak coming out of him. And finally, Al goes over and hits him or
and yells loud enough, and Herb comes out and comes back onto the road just at the nick of time.
They continued their trip just fine. Of course, you know, that's like Al have got to
keep, you know, a good eye on Herb. He didn't have a good eye.
There needed to be, you know, certain things discovered.
And I love organic phenomenon. That has led me to various things,
and it led me to one day calling a veterinarian. I asked him if he had a dead cat.
And he said, "No, sir, I don't". I explained to him, he said, "What do you want a dead cat for?"
And I said, "I wanna study this cat". So, something...
He at first pegged me for a total nutcake.
Then something caught him and he took my number.
Lo and behold, ten minutes later the same guy, veterinarian, calls me and he says, "I have a cat".
I can't believe it. "I got off the phone. Two minutes later in it comes. Had to put it to sleep.
You can have this cat". He asked me that it would never show up in the film.
In the film. Or, uh... Or be recognizable.
So I had to have this setup in my basement there. I drove down
and got the cat in a cardboard box. Just before lunch I put into a jar
filled with formaldehyde. And it went in like a slinky. It just laid down in the formaldehyde.
And then I went upstairs and had lunch, and came back down, and I went to get
the cat out of the jar. And it'd gotten rigor mortis.
This had a narrow top. It was like trying to pull a steel cat out of a glass jar.
So, I finally got this thing out of there. I had a whole setup on the workbench,
my idea of like an operating theater. And I went to work, getting inside this cat.
When I opened up the inside, it was unbelievable. And it's...
If you've seen Fellini's "Roma", there's... The organs inside the cat were brilliant colors.
And as soon as the air got to the organs, they started, the color just draining out
right before your eyes. Just draining away before your eyes.
Just like when they'd open up these, you know, things under the city,
and these ancient things were perfect, and the air starts getting to them,
and they start fading. So, uhmů But studying this cat was kind of,
you know, important. There was no time put on it, but the school went two years,
so theoretically, you know, I would be finished with this film by the end of the second year.
And by the end of the second year, I hadn't yet started shooting.
So, we started shooting in June of 1972.
- Hello! - Hey, Cath!
- Hey, David! - Do you have some stories you wanna talk about, Catherine?
- You know, I was, uhm... Duh, I've got a lot of stories. I really remember well
the very first night of shooting. I remember being up in the hayloft park.
- Right. - And it was likeů We'd set up a whole little set,
and then there was the room with a couch. I remember
keeping Jack's hair photo-ready, you know. - Right.
I remember when Jack had his first haircut.
Which was the afternoon of the first day of shooting.
And I wanted it short on the sides, tall on top.
Jack and Catherine had a friend who was a professional barber,
who drove out to the stables, he got his haircut in the hayloft.
In the hayloft held the Xs interior. In the afternoon Jack got his hair cut,
and I stayed there with the barber and Jack and said, "It's looking good", you know.
And the barber laughed. But I still had a big surprise ahead of me.
I'm not sure if it was Catherine or Charlotte Stewart, Catherine Coulson or
Charlotte Stewart, who combed his hair first.
Eventually, Catherine's job was to comb Jack's hair.
But Jack has as luck would have it, a certain type of hair.
When you comb it up, it stays up. So it was long on top.
And when Jack came in, it was a very big shock. Some people said,
"David, you can't do that, you know. That's too strange".
But it was so perfect in proportion to Jack's body. Henry, you know, forget Jack
- he was turning into Henry. It was so beautiful! So it stayed.
But even so, on that first day, it's not quite as high as it eventually, you know, got.
There's little stages to the hair, but it was pretty high.
But when we were driving Jack around as Henry, he would sit in the back
in the middle of the backseat, because people would...
There was no strange hair in those days. Sometimes there was hippy hair,
but not hair like that, and he would draw a small crowd, and people would
start coming around. So we had to kind of keep him hidden, as we went around.
- That was kind of hard on him. 'Cause we go for long periods of time before we'd shoot again,
and I'd have to cut it all over again, because cutting his hair was really...
I think, it's what destroyed the marriage ultimately.
Because I had to keep teasing it, remember? - Jack had the most incredible hair!
- He did. He used to wear all these different hats, to try and kind of mush it up under his hat.
And I remember my family never really knew him without that
weird hair. When he would go to like family reunions, they would always see him
with this, you know, kind of odd- flattened hair. 'Cause he didn't like
to tease it up when he wasn't in the film. - I know.
- But I know I... I am really sorry that I didn't ask for that credit.
You know... Even with your design, I wanted that Mr Nance's hair thing.
And his suit came from "Goodwill". It was... In those days,
the "Goodwill" was like you go into a place you couldn't believe what you are seeing.
It was so beautiful. So we just walked in and picked, you know,
all the parts for Henry's suit. Shoes included. I'm pretty sure those were from "Goodwill".
The first scene we shot was a scene on the couch with Henry, Mary and Mary's mother,
Mrs X. And we did all the X's stuff first, and then we did the Xs,
how they relate at Henry's apartment. But most of those things are gone.
But there was a scene at the front door of Henry's apartment with Mr. and Mrs. X paying a visit.
That was, uh... It kills me. That was the part of the film that's been lost.
Then Allen, you know, and Jeanne were finished. So they actually got finished
almost like in a regular film, you know, fairly soon and professionally.
But then, when we got into Henry's apartment, it just went into another,
you know, zone. And that's when we, you know, bit off quite a chunk of time.
- Hey, David. - Hey, Fred.
And we would work at night. So, people would start showing up
at about 4:35 in the afternoon, and eventually we would have some dinner
and start going to work. But unfortunately, the pace was quite slow.
- We'd set it up for hours and hours, and lighted and stuff. See, I think that time was really,
uh, kind of a wonderful distortion, because it wasn't really important how long something took,
it was... What was important, it's how it really looked and felt.
And nobody was really pushing, because after a while, you know,
they just sort of like forgot about us, right? - Exactly right, Cath.
- We'd just got to keep going, and keep going and keep going.
- See, what I want to do is have the mainů The look on Henry's face, you know,
that kind of shit's like so real, you just feel like it's here anyway.
The look on Henry's face is where this thing is getting ready to cut, you know, the big cut.
Well, you do a run-through, you know, Jack maybe and his robe,
or something like this, and he's gonna be in this suit. You rehearse with no lighting.
- And then... - You're right, you're right.
- And then with his point of view of the scissors.
Those are the ones, the point of view shots that are really important, okay?
Those two are really important. And the opening up,
we can do the third person and the cutting.
- So it's really one shot indoor, the very top of the list.
- So I can shot with this zone here with a 28 Henry? - Right. Cut it.
- Henry cuts, he gets halfway up, we stop and move over here with the 90...
Well, after Jack and I'd get rehearsed, you know, on our own,
then Jack goes away and Herb would start, you know, lighting based on what he saw
in the rehearsal. It was painstaking lighting. It was exact, it was beautiful what Herb was doing.
And sometimes, you know, fifteen or twenty little inkies, you know, floating around
up on the ceiling. That's why I say I Philadelphia was my greatest influence,
because a lot of things started in Philadelphia, and there was a certain mood
to some of these interiors. They carry way more than what you see.
Thing is indicated from this interiors. Something about the light and the molding and
the proportions - a thing is indicated. And the mood outside.
It sort of seemed like to me, that there were factories, industrial buildings
and neighborhoods, dark and forlorn, tucked in somewhere, sort of like,
you can't get there from here. They're sort of lost in another kind of place,
and this is what comes from Philadelphia.
And this is the world of Eraserhead, where you can be in a room and feel the exterior,
and know what it is like just from a mood.
That's the way it was in Philadelphia as well. I don't rememberů
I remember one sunny day, and that's about it.
- I'm feared.
Jack was one of the old-time greats at hitting marks completely together.
We'd work out the tiniest details, and first time, every time, after that he'd,
you know, get it, you know, just right.
- Well, this is a 90 millimeter lens and I have a big slate. Did you already put it on?
Well, the thing is, with a small crew, working at night and see Catherine...
I think, she is the hero, heroine of the thing, because she wasn't even supposed
to be helping. But she ended up... She had a waitress job in the day, and then would stay up
all night. And she'd bring, you know, grilled cheese and fries and different things,
sometimes home from the restaurant. To the AFI, you know, to the stables.
Or... We had a hot plate, and she would cook things, you know, for us.
So she was really burning the candle.
- Catherine! - Yeah?
- You had a job during the day, didn't you? - Yeah, well, I had a few of them.
- What? - I mean, one of those jobs I'd have, when I was, uhmů
- A waitress? - Working at "Barbeque Heaven".
- And then you'd bring up... - And I worked at "Barbeque Heaven" at lunchtime,
so that I could sleep till like around 11. And go in, and then we would get you
odd jobs at the restaurant, remember? - I don't remember that!
- You fixed the roof for them. - I did?
- One time, yeah, because they'd give you grilled cheese, sandwiches and French fries.
- Wow. - If you did... So you did like odd jobs, this was that,
uhm, restaurant on Beverly Hills, on the corner... - Yeah, I remember you work in there, but I don't remember...
- No, no, you... That was a way for you to get like, free food.
- Getting checkout food was really expensive, so I started making dinner.
- Right. - And then pretty soon we were making breakfast, then lunch.
- Right. - And we cooked it all on that little hot plate, remember that?
- I sure do, Catherine. -Yeah. There was a lot of grilled cheese, and then
for a long time they were into egg salad, as I recall. - Aha.
- You liked to eat the same thing every day, and a lot of us kind of got used to that.
But each person had kind of fixations on food.
Al ate these small yoghurts, pure yoghurt, out of plastic containers though.
And he'd use a plastic spoon. Jack Nance couldn't stand the way
Al ate yoghurt, especially when he get near the bottom, was trying to get
the last little bit out, and that spoon scraping on that plastic... It was pretty funny.
- Didn't you start out holding the boom, Catherine? - Yeah, the first thing I did was hold the boom for Alan.
- Right. - Then I learned how to be a camera assistant
during that time. And I really am glad I learned how to do that.
I can still tell what 3'8" is, you know. - That's fantastic, Catherine.
- When I first met you, I remember going in for my interview for the nurse.
And I'm really kind of sorry we never shot that scene.
There was a scene, which was never even shot, of a nurse in a hospital basement,
where they went to get the baby. And Catherine was going to
play that nurse, but she never got to play it.
- There was this picture of me and Frankie being tied to a bed.
- Right. - Yeah, and uhmů We were trying to find somebody
to do that scene, do you remember that? I was calling all my women friends
and asking them if they would mind, you know, if they'd like to be in this movie,
and they'd be in the scene where they just would be tied to a bed, you know.
And this guy had, like, this kind of battery cables. And everybody said no
for some reason. I don't... I'd never really understood that.
- They weren't good sports, Catherine! - I guess we were pretty good sports though.
- Yeah. - Frankie and I did it, right?
- I actually have that little scene, Catherine. - Oh, you do?
- Yeah, a part of it, anyway. - God, I'd love to see that someday.
- Yeah. - Well, you know, mostly what I remember, David,
is I remember being there really long hours, and really having fun figuring stuff out.
I remember the night that you asked Doreen and me to fill this whole drawer full of pudding.
- Right. - And lay like a little thin layer of peas on top?
- Right. - And we were trying to calculate the square of the
cubic footage of the drawer based on what was on the package of vanilla pudding.
- Right. - It was like "use two cups of cold milk".
And we were trying to figure out how many of those little packages
that we'd got from the Sunbeam Market, 'cause that was the one
that was open really late on Sunset.
- I remember that Sunbeam Market. Peggy used to go there.
- Yeah. We'd go down there to the Sunbeam's and buyů We didn't have
a whole lot of money either, right? - No, we didn't, Catherine.
- So, we tried really hard to make the vanilla pudding stretch, we tried to
make it with water instead of milk, so that it would, you know,
be a little less expensive, and then you just coated it with this little layer of peas,
and they were, uhm... They were frozen peas, as I recall, we had to kind of
cook them, so they'd be plump enough, 'cause they couldn't be really shriveled.
we'd line the drawer with plastic and then we'd seal the whole thing with the pudding,
and then you'd just lay this little layer of peas, and then the scene was just... Henry...
I haven't seen it for a while, but Henry just reached in and pulled it out, right?
- Exactly, all the utensils were down inside that stuff.
- Right. Well, I remember that I was... I was, you know, really learning
how to do follow focus, but it was like a macro lens, wasn't it?
- Aha. - Then I had to figure out how much distance it was,
kind of like between peas, you know, if he'd reach his hand in.
Well, I just had another memory, when the new fellows were coming -
the following year? - Aha.
- And they were having this big fancy dinner up at the main house.
- That was the bed scene! - Right. And we were still in those tanks,
and it was really, really cold outside. - Yeah, Jack had a couple of lines about that.
- But we were going, driving back up and down that long driveway
with these big Sparklett's bottles, trying to get the water warm enough.
- Exactly. - You'd just run hoses into the tanks, hadn't you?
- Yeah. - And it was really cold, and they were in it like all night!
- Exactly right. - And what did we use to make the milk,
when we were going to make the milk bath? - I believe, uh... I believe, we used milk.
- I think we did. - I think so.
- I think we used milk, and that was another reason why the warm water
wasn't such a good idea, although it didn't really heat the tanks completely
when you'd bring down these Sparklett's bottles and pour a little bit of warm in.
But you know how milk is when it gets warmed? - Yeah, it's nice.
- Yeah, it tastes okay, but I don't remember it smelling really great.
- Aha. - But I remember Judith and Jack being really,
really good sports. - They were fantastic.
- I think Jack kind of enjoyed being in there with Judith.
- I think he might have. Yeah, the matter is I don't really remember that bothering me at all.
After one year, like I said, almost to the day, Fred had been shooting
for three months, we ran out of money. AFI would give a certain amount of money to each film,
and that was it. And we'd run out. So it just stopped.
And, you know, hope was in the air. But I think it was quite a long time before
I got more money to continue. And two great supporters of the film were Jack Fisk
and Sissy Spacek. Jack in those days, right around that time, after we'd been down for a while,
Jack had two jobs as productionů You know, they called it art director then.
And since he had two jobs, he would have me follow him to the bank, and he'd sign over
one of those paychecks to me, so we could, you know, keep working. And things like that.
Both Jack and Sissy put money into the film. Also Jack's sister, Mary Fisk,
played a huge part near the end of "Eraserhead" by, you know,
raising all the finishing money. From then on it went piecemeal,
with many months downtime, trying to get money or build a set or, you know,
to go forward. And then we'd shoot for a burst, and then, you know, go down again.
I know pretty clearly that there was one particular shot, when Henry walks down the hall,
he put his hand on the doorknob and turns it, and there's a cut.
A year and a half later he comes through the door.
I started living in the stables in 1972.
To live and work in the same place is the best.
It was a perfect, you know, scenario.
I lived in the stables and had it, you know, for all those years.
And Al a lot of the times lived here, lived in the one wing, and I lived in Henry's room.
I lived there, maybe, off and on, two or three years.
It was illegal, what I was doing. And Henry's room was inside of a room
that might've been a living room, at one time, for the maids.
It had two doors. Both of the doors we went in and out of.
One of the doors had a door on it. And you opened it up,
and it had another door, that was a door in the hallway. So it was a two-door deal.
So, when I slept, I bolted a piece of plywood over the doorway, the original doorway,
from the inside, and they padlocked me in from the main door.
Someone coming up would see a piece of plywood with just rounded,
you know, ins of bolts, you know, and no other, you know, visible way
to open it orů And then they'd see a padlock on the main door.
So I was secure in there, I felt. And then I'd hunker down
and sleep in the day, and it was very dark in there, there was no windows.
It was kind of a beautiful room to sleep in.
They knew I was there, certain key people, but they kept it quiet and turned their head away.
Jim King, who lived at the gatehouse with his wife, Jim knew very well
I was staying down there. And he would give me a yearly inspection.
He would announce, "I'm here for your yearly inspection", and come through in,
look at all the rooms, 'cause he had to do it. And then give me a,
you know, passing mark, that we were keeping things okay,
and off he go till I saw them the next year.
One night, this was after Herb had gone, a big bin, like a big giant trash bin,
not a lowboy, but one of those things with the ladders on them,
you've gotta go up the ladder to see inside, this had been delivered in a courtyard
up at the main house. Fred and I went up there, and no one was around.
It was just sitting there. No one knew what was in it.
And we discovered that inside there were like ten thousand light bulbs in ancient,
you know, wrappings from some studio that was getting rid of that stuff
from years, ages ago. We crawled in there and probably got, you know,
two or three hundred, maybe five hundred inky bulbs.
Fred got bulbs bigger than basketballs. There still has, there, you knowů
I don't know if they were 5000W bulbs or more, I don't know what they were.
But all different kinds of ancient light bulbs - it was like, beyond Christmas.
- I, you know, I have like, all these images in my head like,
going around and looking for allies. Driving and driving and driving around,
and then going ahead and bringing everything down in our cars.
- Right. - Then... That we all just sort of did everything.
All the locations - well, not all of them, but pretty nearly every one of them
was downtown LA. But on the other side of the street from Cedar-Sinai Hospital,
there was a whole block that used to exist, a huge block under...
Where the Beverly Center is now. And in that area it was just like in "Spanky And Our Gang",
"Our Gang" comedies, "The Little Rascals" - it was out of the 20's or 30's.
There was a pony-ride from way back, you know, somewhere in like the 30's.
There was a little key shop, little key stand, and there were these tanks and oil wells.
You couldn't see them from the street, because they had this donut of earth around
in case the tanks blew out. So you'd climb up over these things
and down into a brand new world. And that was one of the greatest finds.
And right next to where this happened, there was a narrow tank coming up out of the ground,
and it was surrounded by a donut of water. But just down at the bottom of the water
there was tar. Who knows how thick it was. Tar preserves things.
And the cat has served many purposes, but I'd lower this cat in there,
and then about a year later came back, pulled the wire, and the cat came out,
impregnated with tar. And I laid the cat down on the ground and came back another year later,
and it was a perfects marriage of cat and earth.
Tar impregnated cat in earth, and I have a photograph of that.
But the cat did end up in a scene, but it was unrecognizable.
There is a scene where Henry catches his foot on a wires connected to this cat,
as if some sort of a strange thing had been going on.
But that never made it into the film, but I have a little piece of that, you know, film left.
- And I remember having to call CFI and get in my car and drive as fast
as my car would go to get there by midnight. - Right.
- And give it to Mars, remember Mars? - Mars Baumgardt.
- Oh, he was a great guy. He really helped us a lot. - He sure did.
- But the thingů It was thenů I think, one of the reasons why also
it's so indelibly printed is that so often we would then do it again.
- Exactly. - So, we had a chance to really, you know, get into it.
And somewhere along in there, John Stevens Jr. made a deal with Sid Solo,
who was running CFI, that we could get all our film developed free.
And then printed at a very, you know, good reduced rate.
And that really saved us. So, there was the guy namedů
There was George Hutchison, who just recently left CFI. And Mars F. Baumgardt
was the night man, and we'd see Mars all the time. They saw us, you know,
for many, many years, bringing in, you know, the film.
We'd screen our dailies up at the main house, and Ron Barth was our projectionist.
He was a night watchman for a while. And Ron is one of the several people,
who claim to have seen the ghost of Doheny.
As a night watchman, he sometimes took a little nap on a couch in the main entrance hall.
Something woke him up, he looked up, and on the stairs was Doheny
in his bathrobe and then just gently, you know, disappeared.
Jack Nance saw Doheny.
One night we were shooting on the stage for The Lady in the Radiator,
and came time for me to deliver my papers. And during the time I was gone
Jack wandered back down into the basement of the main house
'cause we shot that up in the laundry area.
In a mansion like that, people like the smell of clothes that have been dried in the air
and the sun. So, there was a pit off the laundry room, and this pit, you couldn't see it fromů
It wouldn't ruin the look of the mansion. It was a concrete pit with maybe 20 ft walls,
and they had all these lines in it, where they'd hang out the laundry,
and it would dry with no one seeing laundry on a line.
And in that pit I built the set for, you know, The Lady in the Radiator.
Through the laundry room you could enter the basement corridors, and then they kind of
slanted down to a deeper, you know, basement, and Jack went down there that night
and took a nap. He was awakened and saw Doheny.
The Lady in the Radiator was never in the original script.
And one night I was sitting in the food room, and I started drawing on a 3 by 5 card.
And I drew The Lady In The Radiator. I'd been thinking about some things,
and it sort of came to me, you know, right then, that she was going to be in the film.
And that she was connected with the radiator.
I don't know how it happened, you know, but that whole thing - she lived in there,
where it was warm. And I thought, "I'd better check on that radiator
to see if it's possible that somebody could be in there".
And I went running in, 'cause I couldn't picture it in my mind, to the set,
already months established. And looked at the radiator, and it's unlikely a radiator.
It has a place in the middle that, you know, just was a perfect entrance
to where she was. And how many radiators have that?
And it went like that until 1976, when I was asked to leave the stables,
when George Stevens Jr. kind of thought they would make
make a great place for him to have an editing room. So I had to get out.
I was practically finished, but we rallied and finished up everything in time and left.
I think it was 1975. Might have been 1975.
- Catherine! - What?
- How many years did you work on "Eraserhead"? - I think about four.
- No, no, no. You worked six years. - Six?
- Yeah. Well, maybe five. - That was a long time of my life.
- Maybe five years. - Yeah, I remember being really young when I started.
And I'm just looking at these pictures of all of us, you know... We kind of,
when we finished it, we all looked a little bit older. It became kind of like,
the more challenges, I mean, it was some filling the drawer of pudding to,
you know, dyeing the sheets with tea so that they weren't too whiteů
All those things just kind of became what we normally did in the course of a day.
So, when I went out to work on other movies, everything, which was so
compartmentalized, always seemed not quite the real thing.
- Exactly. - "Eraserhead" really felt like the real thing.
And you were always in charge, you always knew exactly what you wanted,
but you had each of us feeling like we were really part of it,
which I think we were. But it was really helping you with this vision.
Then, in 1976, sometime, maybeů I can't remember when -
sometime in there, we finished Eraserhead.
A sense of place is critical to a film.
And sound particularly can expand, you know, what you see, and expand the world.
Those things can break a mood or enhance a mood.
Naturally, you want to make a world, and it's a particular world in every film,
but this one has a particular particular, you know, feel.
I was editing all along. So it was always kind of ride up to where we were.
And I'd just plug in, you know, the pieces, but then it was quite long at one point.
I had to stand up old bubble, you know, moviola.
And it was a beauty. It was that very kind of film.
And I loved that machine. Then I moved that moviola to the bungalow,
and had a setup in the garage. Al and I could work together in there.
Then when we came in time to mix, it was old mono, 8 dubbers and meg mix.
Some people came to AFI, and they were part of Cannes Film Festival.
And they wanted to see "Eraserhead", to see if it was going to go to Cannes.
So Al and I had a talk that we would try to work and make the Cannes Film Festival
with "Eraserhead". And Al said, "I'll do it, I'll go, you know, 24 hours,
but if you will not take your Bob's break in the afternoon", which almost killed me.
But I said, "Okay, Al. I'll do that, but it's killing me".
So, every afternoon at 2:30 I started to get this thing,
I wanted to go out - we just kept working.
And eventually Al said, "Okay, look. We won't go all the way to Bob's,
but we'll go up to the "Hamburger Hamlet" and have a coffee".
So that's what we did, we went up there, and there I discovered this Dutch apple pie.
Then I got the bill for, you know, that piece of Dutch apple pie,
and had to stop, you know, doing that.
And then I was in a grocery store, and I saw a Dutch apple pie,
the same, almost exactly the same price for a whole pie,
as it was for one slice at "Hamburger Hamlet". So I bought this pie,
and you just put it in the oven, and then you put it in refrigerator,
and I would take a slice of pie and wrap it in the wax paper and put it into my jacket,
and then I'd eat that at Hamburger Hamlet, surreptitiously. That was a real thrill.
We didn't have any money for sound stock.
So, somehow we heard there were bins of sound stock that the sound editors
from the Warner Brothers would throw away. A big trash bins filled with it.
And so we gotů There was somebody connected to AFI
that was working over there, we got on the lot. And then we found these bins.
And in preparation I'd remove the backseat of the Volkswagen,
and we filled every square inch of that Volkswagen,
full of almost total clean reels. And then Al had a degausser, so we
degaussed everything when we got back, and all the stock for "Eraserhead"
came from those throwaway bins at Warner Brothers.
We finished, Al and Iů The mix was done, though at the film was not married,
sound and picture. So, there were 12 reels of sound and 12 reels of picture.
This had to go right now to New York City, because they were screening films
for Cannes. So I took the last money in the bank and got an airline ticket,
a Red-eye, to New York. And I got there, you know, like really early in the morning
and found out that there were 4 or 5 films ahead of me that they've got to look at
before they looked at "Eraserhead".
So I'm eating these donuts and having coffee, and sitting on the curb out there,
and keep going in, and the guy says, "Two more films",
and like that till they start to run the "Eraserhead".
So finally, it was over, I packed it up, came back and never heard anything.
So I made a phone call, and it turns out that the people, who I thought were
looking at the film in that room, had left New York to Paris two days earlier.
And that guy was showing the films to an empty house.
So "Eraserhead" never went to Cannes.
I invited friends, and we had a kind of a formal screening of "Eraserhead"
when it was finally finished. And my parents came to the first screening of "Eraserhead".
And afterwards, someone sitting next to my mother told me she said,
when the lights came up, "Oh, I wouldn't wanna have a dream like that".
The film showed at "Filmex 77", that was official first screening of "Eraserhead".
And I was too afraid to go in with the people, so I paced outside.
It seemed like the film was 400 hours long. And I was dying. And I hadů
There was a little button behind the last row of seats in this giant theater,
and you just push this button, and it bumps the sound, you know, 2Db.
And I had pushed it a bunch of times, but I pushed it too many times.
So not only was the film very, very long, but I think it was killing people
in the front rows. So Fred drove me home that night.
And I told him, I said, "I'm cutting the film tonight. I'll cut this scene, this scene, this scene".
And Fred was, you know, completely against it and told me I was crazy,
and he said, "Are you sure?" And I said, "I am positive".
And I went it, I cut the composite, you know, print.
And that's something you really, you know, shouldn't do.
Then I had to go over to see AFI, because I, you know, I didn't know how to stitch
this thing together after I did it, to make that work.
And I had this editor over there, he became very confused.
Cause I had to bring him up to speed and all that stuff, and bring him,
you know, a bunch of elements.
Finally it got straightened out, and I knew picture and soundtrack were made
20 minutes shorter, the way it is now. The way it was supposed to be.
You know, I just needed to suffer that screening.
I wish I had those scenes, because I loved them as little scenes,
but they didn't belong in the film.
I could've done a lot better job taking care of things.
Sometimes everyone has the experience when they need to move to another place,
they find they can't take as much stuff with them as they would like.
So later on, they'd look back and they'd wish they'd taken a couple more things.
So I've lost a lot of things from Eraserhead that I wish I'd kept.
Well, in those days, no one thought too much of Eraserhead.
It was Midnight Films that put it on the map, and that was Ben Barenholtz,
known as the grandfather of the midnight film.
If it wasn't for Ben, getting "Eraserhead"... picking it up and distributing it,
nothing would have happened to it. Zero.
And they opened at the "Cinema Village" in the fall of 1977.
And there were 26 people in the theater on the first night.
That was a Friday night, then on Saturday night there was 24.
And Ben said, "I'm not gonna spend any money, I'm not gonna do any kind of
a big promotion," and he said, "In two months there's gonna be lines around the block".
And that's exactly what happened.
It played in 17 cities for as long as four years on the midnight circuit.
That usually meant one night a week, Friday or Saturday at midnight.
I'm going down Sunset Boulevard, and I see five Woody Woodpecker dolls
with hooks in their back, and I feel the pain of them, they're hanging in the serving station.
I'd swing a U-turn, slam on the brakes, pull into this place and I'd say,
"I want those guys off those hooks, I'm buying all of them right now".
And the guy helped me get them down, and I sat them all at the backseat,
and those were my boys, and I kept them for many years.
Sometime the "Nuart Theater", who was running "Eraserhead" every Friday night,
said they needed, they would like to maybe think about doing a new trailer,
some kind of thing to, you know, kind of goose "Eraserhead" attendance.
So I had Fred and Catherine shoot me giving a talk on Fred's couch
with the Woodpeckers, and that ran into the "Nuart",
along with the official "Eraserhead" trailer.
- You know, I haven't seen the movie in a really long time,
but I do remember that night that you showed it to the cast and crew of "Dune".
I think I might've brought the print down with me when I came down to visit.
- Aha. - So, then you screened it for the crew,
and we watched it, we stood in the back and watched it, Jack and you
and me and Fred and, I think, Jenny.
And we all were watching it for the first time in quite a while.
And nobody was saying, you know, they weren't responding, the whole lot,
and then it was over, and we were really like, kind of feeling good
about the work, and you just like, you were really looking forward to hearing
what people had to say and, and they walked outů They all just walked by,
saying, "Hell, gracias, sengor". It was very funny. They just didn't know quite what to say.
It is a personal film.
And no reviewer or critic or viewer has ever given an interpretation
that is my interpretation since, you know, 25 years or more that it's been out.