“I sure don’t wanna do this piece a shit”: the abandoned movie that led David Lynch to ‘Eraserhead’
When Eraserhead was finally released in 1977, David Lynch had already been chipping away at it for five years, and this time was filled with financial struggle and even a divorce, so things weren’t exactly going smoothly on any front.
The difficulties of fatherhood, sexual anxieties, and living in an industrial wasteland all blossomed in the form of Eraserhead, defined by its dark chiaroscuro lighting, its surreal, decaying setting, and its monstrous, alien-like baby that the protagonist Henry is forced to care for. You can see the prominent influence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a cornerstone of surrealist writing, and it clearly served as a vast fountain of inspiration for Lynch, who’d previously been working on a project that overtly paid homage to Gregor Samsa’s story.
Before he began filming Eraserhead, Lynch had been working on a project called Gardenback, about which he explained in Lynch on Lynch by Chris Rodley, “The whole thing unfolded from this painting I’d done. The script had a story, in my mind, and it had what some people could call a ‘monster’ in it. When you look at a girl, something crosses from her to you. And in this story, that something is an insect.”
Caleb Deschanel (yes, Zooey Deschanel’s father) was a fellow at the American Film Institute’s Centre for Advanced Film Studies at the time, and he was interested in Lynch’s script, with Lynch recalling, “Caleb was telling me about this producer over at Fox who was ready to do a series of low-budget horror films. This guy was a sort of a friend of his, and he wanted my permission to show him Gardenback.”
But Lynch always had an idiosyncratic way of working, and he knew he wasn’t going to give in to any old conditions unless he could make what he wanted, never compromising his artistic integrity.
“This guy said, ‘Look, I want to give you $50,000 to make this movie. Caleb will shoot it, and it’ll be a labour of love; you’ll get everybody in there to do stuff for nothing’. But he said, ‘It’s only 45 pages. You gotta make it 115 or 110 pages. It’s gotta be a feature script’. And this, like, hurt my head! ‘What does he mean?’”
So, then Lynch spoke to Frank Daniel of the Czechoslovakian Film School about what went down, and soon he managed to come to a compromise that would change everything for him: “Frank said, ‘We must be doing something wrong, because you’re one of our favourite people, and you’re upset. What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I sure don’t wanna do this piece a shit Gardenback now—it’s wrecked!’ And he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to do Eraserhead‘. And he said, ‘OK, do Eraserhead then’.”
And just like that, Lynch began the process of bringing Eraserhead to life, which included the creation of the alien baby, which, to this day, remains a mystery. He penned the iconic ‘In Heaven’ and gathered a small cast and crew, and within five years, he’d made something that would put him on the map as the most unique new director around, even if many critics initially hated the film.
He quickly went on to find better success with The Elephant Man (strangely enough, produced by Mel Brooks), and while he never came back to Gardenback, he subsequently dedicated his career to making bizarre and surreal tales, becoming one of the most beloved filmmakers in the history of cinema.
