The 2002 movie David Lynch removed his name from: “It’s going to be detrimental”
In most cases, it can be hugely beneficial for an established auteur to lend their name to a movie made by an unknown or unproven director, but as it turned out, David Lynch had his limits.
Like Peter Jackson’s involvement in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Martin Scorsese attaching his illustrious moniker to Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, or Guillermo del Toro ‘presenting’ Mama, Orphanage, and others, having a filmmaking heavyweight promoted in the marketing can instantly increase a film’s appeal.
It’s simple Hollywood economics: if a studio isn’t entirely convinced that a concept, trailer, or inexperienced director is enough to entice an audience to the cinema, then slapping on a recognisable name, regardless of how much, if anything, they had to do with the picture might just do the trick.
That was sort of the case for Eli Roth, who was struggling to drum up much interest in his feature-length debut, 2002’s Cabin Fever. As a protégé of Lynch’s, he was aware that the Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive creator carried significantly more cache in the industry than he did at the time.
As a result, when the time came to pitch Cabin Fever around town, he slyly added Lynch’s name to the project as an executive producer. Funnily enough, the people who weren’t interested in his backwoods horror story before had their interest suddenly piqued by the four-time Academy Award nominee.
“When I was trying to cast the film, I couldn’t get any actors to read the script,” Roth explained. “So I said, ‘David, we need to put your name on the film as an exec producer, just so I can get the movie going’, and he did. Once he put his name on it as an exec producer, every actor and agent that had passed on it were suddenly excited about it.”
With a cast and financial backers mysteriously in place, Roth wrapped production on Cabin Fever in late 2001, and once principal photography was in the can, he agreed that “David has a right to take his name off the film if he wants to.” He did, but it wasn’t out of spite. Instead, it was an act of kindness, with the director having been down a very similar road before.
Since people had mistakenly believed that he directed Boxing Helena, which was helmed by his daughter, Jennifer, as well as Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, which he executive-produced, Lynch informed Roth that “you don’t need my name anymore, everybody is seeing my name on this, and they think it’s a David Lynch film.”
“You wrote this, produced it, directed it, it’s your baby,” he insisted. “I think that at this point, it’s going to be detrimental to have my name on there.”
With that, Lynch’s name was excised from the credits as a producer, although he did get a special thanks anyway, by which point most people were aware that Cabin Fever was, in fact, an Eli Roth movie.
