Original subtitles

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 ideas coming in.

Especially the initial idea.

A lot of times I remember

when the first thing kind of came.

Maybe I don't.

But, for sure I don' t remember this.

It all came from Philadelphia.

But I don't know when

it bobbled up to the surface.

I got a independent filmmakers Grant in 1968.

That's an independent filmmakers Grant.

That was a brand new program 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 Splett

and Herb Cardwell who was a cinematographer.

And I asked him give me some tips on lighting.

Then when we came time to mix

and I look over and I see this guy

he's like a bean pole 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 going to happen

not in a million years.

What followed was 63 non-stop days:

Saturday, Sunday... of making sounds.

Never had so much fun in my life working with Al.

But I need extra money to finish the film

so I called Tony Valani in Washington DC

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

I showed him the film at Calvin Dufresne.

He, you know, really liked what he saw.

They gave me 2 200 dollars more

to finish the film.

And on the way back to the train station, I'm driving him

and he said, David you should come to

the Center for Advanced Film Studies out in California.

And luckily I didn't have an accident

you know when he said that because I was like

I started floating.

I was still trying to reach the, you know

the break and the gas pedal.

But they made a booklet

showing the Center and some of the fellows

instead of students they call 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 they

got a school like this?

Then they open it up and it goes through

all these great directors that came and

talked, give talks there and how much, you know

the industry was helping the school.

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 hearst like fireplace.

Some of the students are wearing sweaters

and I'm thinking:

What kind of a place is California?

Because it's not just hot all the time

it's sometimes cool enough

in the evenings for a fire in the fireplace

and you wear a sweater.

This seemed like the perfect 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 Vicente.

Right down the street from the Whisky a Go Go.

Then Jack Fisk and my brother John and I

drove out in a truck

and rolled into town after three days on the road

at night.

And I'm still not getting the feel of LA

but I get a little feel of a nighttime LA.

When I woke up the next morning it was like

I was almost blinded.

The light was so unbelievable.

I couldn't get over it how bright it was.

I had to stand out in the 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 the senior's son

that was built for him.

And was built in 1929, finished in '29.

It was 55 rooms reinforced concrete.

High on a hill.

The real deal.

When you go into this place it's spectacular.

And so we all went up there, and

kind of walked around with their, you know

jaws falling open and

that started, you know, the next sort of phase.

I worked on a script called Gardenback

and Frank Danielle and Gil Dennis

both sort of took me under their wings.

Frank Danielle is the greatest film teacher

in the history of the world and he's since died.

Bless his heart but he was unbelievable

as a great teacher.

I took a film analysis class with him

and then he and and Gil who was this a 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

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.

I thought that it was

That I might have flunked my first year.

Plus I was fed up with Gardenback.

I went up to Frank Danielle's office and I quit.

I quit the the school. And stormed out

and went down...

I told Al 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 they've been... what, what happened?

They've been calling you and...

So I explained to her and she said

Frank said you gotta come back, you gotta come up and talk.

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 want to do?

And I said I want to 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.

He said, okay it's a 42 minute film.

I said, okay but...

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.

I don't know what people really got from that script.

I know that

Frank Danielle who was the Dean of the school

he died maybe five years ago

and 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.

He said, that it was important that I'd be able to do it.

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.

Frank said this is exactly the kind of film

we should be making here at the

American Film Institute.

It got strange.

As it turns out I never knew about this

until five years ago.

Frank turned in his resignation

thinking it wouldn't be accepted

and they accepted his resignation.

From his son's story, because of Eraserhead.

Frank left the AFI.

Certain things had to be done

before shooting commenced.

I started working on those things.

Somewhere in there,

even...

I sort of been going down to 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 cars.

There were maids quarters

there was a huge hayloft

and there was a place where they stored firewood

which was, you know, kind of enormous too.

There was also a greenhouse

and gardener's quarters.

I took a a room down there and

no one went ever went down there.

I just sort of started

doing some things down there.

Then I got the whole stables to work in

and a garage and some stalls and a hay loft.

And some other surrounding areas.

It was like a mini soundstage.

Then I got all this equipment from AFI.

It was like heaven.

We had two cameras, two CM3s, Éclair CM3s.

We had a whole lighting package.

We had video cameras black and white

video cameras.

We had a a room that was called

the camera room where all

the different camera things were stored.

Lenses and everything.

We had a room that was for we called

the food room where we ate.

We had green rooms where Jack

would put on his makeup.

Strangely on Eraserhead the first person I met

was in the film.

I never saw...

I can't... I'm pretty sure I never saw

more than one actor

before the thing was cast.

I would... mostly friends would tell me

about someone or someone else would tell me

about someone and this person would come in:

Bango! This was like perfect.

I said you're perfect.

It was it was weird. I felt bad about it

because, I said, I'm not seeing enough people.

But they just come in and they

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 Lindemann

who was a theater director in San Francisco

before he came down to AFI as a student.

He knew lots of actors. So one day

I described the character I was looking for

as best that I could.

He said there are two people

that I would recommend.

One of them, his name was Jack Nance.

So I said, okay.

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

way too beautiful.

I told her. I said you gotta understand

you're too beautiful.

But she had a fixation. It was weird.

She said she would work very hard

to get into that and look that way.

I built her

a drooping eye and a wart

and some facial hair.

And she did the rest.

She just did a beautiful job.

Charlotte Stewart was a friend of Doreen's

who was signed on as production manager.

Charlotte was in

A Little House on The Prairie in those days.

And many times she'd come in with all

this 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

He was also the first person cast

for that role and first person I saw.

It made a great family.

In those early polaroids

you can see a family picture of the three of them.

It's a good-looking family.

It was a great group, all the people.

Everybody was great to work with.

Everybody got there and

the rest of the world disappeared.

We were in a space that

everyone seemed to understand.

The crew was Doreen Small, Catherine Colson

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.

Herb died when he was 35 years old.

He died in his sleep.

That was long after he finished

working on Eraserhead.

One day Herb took me and Peggy flying

and he said 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.

I you just you never feel any tension.

You are very relaxed. Everything is smooth

and you're not rocking to and fro

or side to side.

But anyway, it's beautiful.

Herb is driving in the same way he flies.

So smooth, perfect.

We came, we went out and

after we'd landed in the desert and you know

kind of walked around in the desert.

And then flew back. When we landed in LA

it was night.

And we were taxiing to the place

where he was gonna stop his plane.

He radioed to the tower

The sound of his voice

and that the character of his voice

all the hair went up in the back of my neck.

and I got goosebumps all over.

And it occurred to me

that Herb in another life

was a long distance space pilot.

The way he said good night to the pilot...

to the tower

it was like he would have been flying

for millions of years.

It was it was the weirdest thing.

The guy was a pilot.

It was very beautiful

the way he said goodnight to the tower.

It was incredible.

When Herb had to leave because he

couldn't afford to stay anymore

Tony Valani told me about Fred and

he came to AFI as a cinematography student.

Fred and I met

Fred had a very good attitude

you know, talked with Herb...

And it felt like the right thing.

And then this transition

brought Fred into the mix.

Then Fred Elms took over.

Herb brought Fred up to speed over a two or three

or four-week transition.

And 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

a 35-foot flatbed

and drove over to this place.

And the clouds made it seem like there was

kind of a roof on the world.

So when we went into 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.

And they were selling stuff for nothing.

When we drove out of there we had

35 feet long 12 feet high of flats.

Bales of wire, kegs of nails.

30 foot by 40 foot 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 the sets were built with those flats.

Since I had a paper route

if there were holes in them

I would just do paper mache patches.

With the newspapers, Wall Street Journal

and flour and water.

All that 35 feet by 12 foot high

all this stuff, 100 dollars.

100 dollars.

My brother John helped me build sets.

Like I said, Jack Fisk helped

getting all these things.

They were stored down at the stables.

All the flats, all the stuff.

Then I had to

you know, build many things for for sets.

Jack Nance helped me a lot

on certain building projects.

I loved working with Jack.

We were troweling plaster one time and I

it was had a curved surface so

I talked to this guys about plastering

how do you trowel uh you know get this

stuff smooth like glass he says you

gotta trowel it

And so Jack and I just kept saying

you gotta trowel it, all day long

troweling this thing

and finally go it pretty smooth.

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

because he wasn't wearing gloves.

A lot of plaster has sand in it.

So when you're 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 can start seeing

your bones. And their hands' on fire

and it's really bright red.

Jack did this. Jack did a lot of crazy stuff.

There were several props that I needed

A deal was struck through AFI

and Warner Brothers.

I just could drive on and I met...

I mean this was 1971.

I met an old timer that had been

at that studio for years and years.

Head of the prop department.

Welcomes me. In we go.

What do you want?

Up one aisle, down the other.

Unbelievable stuff.

I'd say, could I get this thing here?

He says, put it put it out there on your truck.

I just went through...

About four 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.

We had all the equipment that Al had at our disposal.

That included inauguras and microphones

and cabling and you know all that.

And since there's not a lot of

sync sound, dialogue, in the film but still

Al 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.

We built sound blankets.

The sound blankets were burlap around fiberglass

and then grommeted along the edge.

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 real nice.

They were they were light

I think AFI wanted 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 they cost

and all 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 they'd jam the machines.

Al was so rapid he would jam the best machines.

He wanted to go after we finished this budget

next door to the AFI accounting department

and tally these numbers up.

So we went over there.

There was a girl at the desk

and Al said can we borrow

the adding machine.

And she said what do you want

the adding machine for? I'll add those.

He said, no no I'll add them up

could we just use it?

She said, give me the numbers

I'll add them up. And Al said, no no

let me add them up I've got 'em right here

and he kind of went around.

And this girl's eyes went about

like silver dollars.

He had those things in a heartbeat.

This machine jumped to life and

the paper was spit out and he popped it

and borrowed her stapler and put it together

and we walked back across the hall.

He was super fast on machines.

Unfortunately Alan Splatt and Herb Cardwell

are both gone now.

Al is legally blind

But Herb can hear and see.

Al and Herb decided

they were gonna fly across the country.

and Al was going to be the navigator and

he had all the maps and everything like that

but Al would be reading his maps

you know very close

because he was so blind.

The first leg of the trip

they were going up to Pocatello, Idaho.

They took off and Al navigated Herb

up there and they

they radioed ahead, they were going to

land at night.

And the guy said it's so late he's going back

into town but he'll leave a rental car there.

Just come in, lock up.

It was the good old days.

Herb did a perfect landing at night.

They parked the plane, there was the rental car.

they did everything the guy wanted

and started driving into town.

And around Pocatello, Idaho there's just

these narrow little two-Lane roads and

pitch black.

Al's riding shotgun, Herbs driving

because Al couldn't get a driver's license

because of his blindness.

Al tells this story

as they're driving from this little airport

into the city of Pocatello, Idaho.

Herb is talking.

He's telling some story or something

and talking fairly rapidly.

The talking suddenly doesn't start...

it starts not making sense to Al.

But it's rapid, nonsense.

Al notices that the lights

are now illuminating the side of the road.

and the car is starting to

go off the road.

Herb, his voice is now going up in pitch

and he's talking just as fast

but his voice is rising

and he's in the shoulder of the road.

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.

Finally Al, he goes over and hits him

or he yells loud enough and Herb comes out

and comes back onto the road just in

the Nick of time.

They continue the trip just fine.

Course, that's like, Al's got to keep

good eye on Herb.

Or you didn't have a good night.

There needed to be certain things discovered

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.

He said, no sir, I don't.

And I explained to him..

He said, what do you want a dead cat for?

And I said, I want to study this cat.

Something...

He at first pegged me for a total nut cake.

Then something caught him

and he took my number.

And lo and behold

10 minutes later this 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.

I had to put it to sleep and

you can have this cat.

He asked me that it would never show up

in a film.

In the film.

Or be recognizable.

So I had had this set up

in my basement there.

And I drove down and got the cat

in acardboard box.

Just before lunch I put it 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 had gotten rigor mortis.

This had a narrow top.

It was like trying to pull a steel cat

out of a out of a glass jar.

I finally got this thing out of there.

I had a whole

set up on the workbench

my idea of a like a

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

it was... there's a

The organs inside the cat were brilliant colors.

And as soon as the air got to

the organs they started, the color

just started draining out right before your eyes.

Just draining away before your eyes.

Just like when they'd open up these things

under the city and these ancient things

were perfect. And the air starts getting to them

and they start fading.

But studying this cat was kind of important.

There was no time put on it

but the school went two years, so theoretically

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 '72.

- Hello? - Hey, Cath.

- Hey, David.

- Do you have some stories

you want to talk about, Catherine?

- God, I got a lot of stories.

I really remember well the very first

night of shooting.

I remember being up in that hay loft part.

- Right - And it was like

we set up a whole

little set and then there was the room

with the couch and 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.

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 hair cut in the hay loft.

In the hay loft held the X's interior.

In the afternoon Jack got his hair cut

and I stayed there with the barber and Jack.

Said, it's looking good.

And the barber left.

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 and 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.

And some people said, David, you can't do that

that's too 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, that first day

it's not quite as high as it eventually got.

There's little stages to the hair

but it was pretty high.

When we would drive Jack around as Henry

he would sit in the back in the middle

of the back seat because people would

there was no strange hair in those days

I mean there was hippie hair but not hair

like that and he would draw a small crowd

and people would start coming around.

We had to kind of keep him hidden

as we went around.

- That was kind of hard on him.

Because we'd go for long periods of time

before we'd shoot again then 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 my family

never really knew him without that weird hair.

He would go to like family reunions

and you always see him with this

you know, kind of odd flattened hair.

Because he he didn't like to tease it

and wear it up when he wasn't just on the film.

- I know.

- But I know I am really sorry that

I didn't ask for that credit.

That even though it was your design that

I wanted that Mr. Nance's hair thing.

- And his suit came from Goodwill.

And it was in those days the Goodwill was like

you go into a place you couldn't believe

what you were seeing, it was so beautiful.

So we just walked in

and picked 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.

We did all the X's stuff first

and then we did the X's 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.

And that was...

It kills me. That part of the film has been lost.

Then Alan and Jeannie were finished.

They actually got finished almost

like in a regular film.

Fairly soon and professionally.

Then when we got into Henry's apartment

it just went into another zone.

And that's when we bit off

quite a chunk of time.

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

and light it and stuff.

See, I think that time

was really

a kind of a wonderful distortion because

it wasn't really important how long

something took it was what it what was

important is 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. - And we just got to

keep going and keep going and keep going...

- See, what I want to do is have

mainly the look on Henry's face

God, it's just like so real.

I feel like he's here, but anyway.

The look on Henry's face just when

he's getting ready to cut you know the big cut.

- Well, you do a run through...

Jack may be in his robe

or something like this and he's going to be in his suit

and you rehearse with no lighting.

- And then his point of view of the scissors.

Those are the point of view shots

that are really important, okay?

Those two are really important.

Now, the opening up we can do third person

and the cutting.

- So it's really one shot indoor

at the very top of the list.

- Second shot is over here with the 28.

- Right. Henry. - Cutting.

- Henry... - Cuts.

He gets halfway up, we stop, we move over here

with the 90.

- After Jack and I had rehearsed

on our own. Then Jack goes away and

Herb would start lighting based on

what he saw in the rehearsal.

It was painstaking lighting, it was exact

it was it was beautiful what Herb was doing.

Sometimes you know 15 or 20 little inkies

floating around up in the ceiling.

That's why I say Philadelphia

is my greates influence because

a lot of things started in Philadelphia.

And there is a certain mood

to some of these interiors.

And they carry way more than what you see.

A thing is indicated from these interiors.

Something about the light

and the moulding

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 that 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 remember... I remember one sunny day

and that's about it.

- What?

- Unfair.

- Jack was one of the all-time greats

at hitting marks.

Completely together.

We'd work out the tiniest details and

first time every time after that he'd

get it just right.

- This is a 90 mm lens and I have a big slate.

- Did you already put it on? - Well the thing is

that with a small crew

working at night, and see, Catherine

I think she's the hero

heroine of the 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.

She'd bring grilled cheese and fries

and different things sometimes home

from the restaurant

up to the you know to AFI to the stables.

and or we had a hot plate and

she would cook things for us.

So she was really burning that candle.

- Catherine? - Yeah.

- You had a job during the day, didn't you?

- Yeah, well I had a few of them I mean

one of the jobs I had was when I was...

- A waitress?

- Working at Barbecue Heaven.

- I worked at Barbecue Heaven at lunchtime

so that I could sleep till like around 11

and go in and 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 give you grilled cheese sandwiches

and French fries. - Wow.

- So you did like odd jobs this was

that restaurant in Beverly Hills on the corner.

- Yeah, I remember you working there

but I don't remember... - No no, you...

that was a way for you to get, like, free food.

- Getting takeout food was really

expensive so I started making dinner.

- Right. - And pretty soon we were making

breakfast and lunch.

- Right. - And we cooked it

on that little hot plate, remember that?

- I sure do, Catherine. - Yeah, there's a lot of

grilled cheese and then for a long time

there you were into egg salad, as I recall.

- Uh-huh.

- You like 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 yogurts

pure yogurt

out of plastic containers though.

And he would use a plastic spoon.

Jack Nance couldn't stand the way Al ate yogurt.

Especially when he got near the bottom

was trying to get the last little bit out

and that spoon scraping on that plastic.

It was 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 three feet

eight inches is, you know? - That's fantastic, Catherine.

- When I first met you

I remember going in for my interview for the nurse.

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 um 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.

- 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 wouldn't mind you know if they'd

like to be in this movie

and they'd be in this scene where they

just would be tied

to a bed you know and this guy had like

these kind of battery cables.

and everybody said no.

For some reason. I never really understood that.

- They weren't good sports, Catherine.

- I guess we were pretty good sports, though.

- Yeah, you and Frank... - Frank and I did it, right?

- You and Frankie did it great.

- Does that exist anymore?

- 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, mostly what I remember, David

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. - It had like a little

thin layer of peas on top.

- Right. - And we were trying

to calculate the square

or the cubic footage of the drawer

based on what was in a package

of vanilla pudding. - Right.

- It was like, you used two cups of cold milk

and we were trying to figure out how many

of those little packages that we got

from the Sun Bee Market 'cos that was the one

that was open really late on Sunset.

- I remember that Sun Bee Market. Peggy used to go there.

- We'd go down there to the Sun Bee

and buy as... but 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 and

we tried to make it with water instead

of milk so that it would you know be

a little less expensive.

You just coated it with this little layer of peas

And they were, um

they were frozen peas as, I recall.

We had to kind of cook them so they'd be plump enough

because they couldn't be really shriveled

- Right.

- So we lay the... after we fill finally we

line the drawer with plastic and then

we fill the whole thing uh with the pudding.

And then you just laid 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 the utensils were

down inside that stuff.

- Right. Well, I remember that I was

really learning how to do follow focus

but it was like a macro lens, wasn't it?

- Uh-huh. - Then I had to figure out

how much distance there was kind of like

between peas you know as he reached his hand in.

- But, I just had another memory when

the new fellows were coming the following year

and they were having this big fancy dinner

up at the main house.

- That was the bed scene.

- Right. And we were filling 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 sparkles 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 you use to make the the milk...

it looks like a milk bath.

- I believe, uh...

I believe...

- 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.

We'd bring down these sparkles bottles

and pour a little bit of warm in but you

know how milk is when it gets warm.

- Yeah, it's nice. - Yeah. It tastes okay

but I remember it smelling really great.

- Uh-huh. - But I remember

Judith and Jack being really really

good sports through out it all. - They were fantastic.

- I think Jack kind of enjoyed being

in there with Judith. - I think he might have.

- Yeah, as a matter of fact I don't even 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.

It just stopped.

Hope was in the air.

But I think it was a quite a long time before

I got more money to continue.

And two great supporters of the film

were Jack Fisk and Sissy Spacek.

And Jack in those days

right around that time I'm after we'd been

down for a while

Jack had two jobs as production...

what they called 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 keep working.

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 raising all the finishing money.

Then from then on it went piecemeal

with many months

downtime trying to get money or

build a set to go forward.

And then we'd shoot for a burst

and then go down again.

I know pretty clearly that

there's one particular shot when Henry

walks down the hall

he puts 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 scenario.

I lived in the stables and had it

for all those years.

And Al, a lot of the times lived

he had lived in the one wing

and I lived in Henry's room.

That was I lived there maybe

often on two or three years.

It was illegal what I was doing.

Henry's room was inside of a room

that might have 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 open it up

and it had another door, there was a door

in the hallway.

So it was a two-door deal.

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.

So you someone coming up would see

a piece of plywood

with just the rounded ends of bolts

and no other visible way to

open it.

Then they'd see a padlock on the main door.

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 a it was a kind of a beautiful room to sleep in.

They knew I was there certain key people

but they kept quiet and

turned their head away.

Jim King, who lived in 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 and look at all the rooms.

Because he had to do it.

And then give me a you know passing mark

that we're keeping things okay and

off you go, until I saw him 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 the

the things with the ladders on them you

got to go up a 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

10 000 light bulbs in ancient wrappings.

From some studio that was getting rid of

this stuff from years, ages, ago.

And we crawled in there

and probably got

two or three hundred, maybe 500 inky bulbs.

Fred got bulbs bigger than basketballs that he still has.

They were... I don't know if they were 5 000 watt

bulbs or more. I don't know what they what they were.

But all differen kind of ancient light bulbs.

It was like beyond Christmas.

- I have all these images in my head

like going around and looking for alleys

and driving and driving and driving around and then

going ahead and bringing everything down

in our cars.

- Right. - And that we all just sort of

did everything.

- All the locations were

well not all of them but, um

pretty nearly every one of them was

downtown LA.

On the other side of the street from

Cedars-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 20s or 30s.

And there was a pony ride

from way back somewhere in like the 30s.

There was a little key shop

little key stand

and there were these

tanks and oil wells.

And 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.

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 had served many purposes

but I lowered this cat in there

and then about a year later came back

and 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 perfect 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 was a scene where Henry catches

his foot on a wire that was connected to this cat

as if some sort of strange thing had been going on.

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 Mars, remember Mars? - Mars Baumgarten.

- Oh, he was a great guy. He really helped us a lot.

- He sure did. - But the thing...

one of the reasons why also it's so indelibly printed

is that so often we would then do it again.

- Exactly. - We had a chance

to really get into it.

- And somewhere along in there

George 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 good reduced rate.

And that really saved us.

So there's the guy named, there was George Hutchison

who just recently left CFI

and Mars Baumgarten was the night man

and we'd see Mars all the time.

That went on for... they saw us you

know for many many years

bringing in the film.

We'd screen our dailies up at the main house

and Ron Barth was our projectionist.

He was night watchman for a while.

And Ron is one of the several people

who claimed 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

and something woke him up

he looked up and on the stairs was Doheny

in his bathrobe.

And then just gently disappeared.

Jack Nance saw Doheny.

One night we were shooting on the stage

for the Lady in the Radiator and it came time for me

to deliver my papers.

During the time I was gone Jack

wandered back down into the basement of

the main house because we shot that up

in the laundry area.

And 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 from, um

it wouldn't ruin the look of the mansion.

It was a it was a concrete pit

with maybe 20 foot walls.

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 this 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

basement and Jack went down there that night

and took a nap.

And he was awakened and saw Doheny.

The Lady in the Radiator was never in the original script.

One night I was sitting in the food room

and I started drawing on a three by five card.

And I drew the Lady in the Radiator.

I'd been thinking about some things and

it sort of came to me

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

but that whole thing she lived in there

where it was warm.

I thought I better check on that radiator

to see if it's possible

that somebody could be in there.

And I went running in, because I couldn't

picture it in my mind, to the set

already months established

and looked at that radiator.

And it's unlike any radiator.

It has a place in the middle

that just was a perfect entrance to where she was

And how many radiators have that?

It went like that until 1976

when I was asked to leave the stables.

When George Stevens Jr.

kind of thought they would make a great place

for him to have an editing room.

So I had to get out and

it was I was practically finished but we

rallied and finished up everything

in time and left I think it was '75.

It might have been '75.

- Catherine. - What?

- How many years did you work on Eraserhead?

- I think about four. - No, no you worked six years.

- Six? - Yeah.

- Well, maybe five... - It 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...

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 from filling the drawer

of pudding to, you know

dyeing the sheets so with tea so that

they weren't too white.

All those things just be kind of became

what we normally did

in the course of a day.

So when I went on 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.

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 '76 sometime

maybe... 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

what you're seeing and expand the world.

And 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 is

a particular particular, you know, feel.

I was editing all along. It was...

It was always kind of right up to where we were.

and I just plug in you know the pieces.

Then it was quite long at one point and

I had a stand-up old Moviola.

and it was a beauty it was very kind to film.

And I loved that machine.

Then I moved that Moviola to

the bungalow and had a setup in a garage

and Al and I could work together in there.

Then when we came time to mix was all mono

eight Dubbers and Magmix.

Some people came to AFI

and they were part of Cannes Film Festival.

They wanted to see Eraserhead.

To see if it was going to go to Cannes.

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 24 hours

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 would get in this thing

wanting to go out, we just kept working.

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 then there I discovered this

Dutch apple pie.

Then I got the bill for that piece

of Dutch apple pie

I had to stop doing that.

Then I was in the 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

you just put it in the oven

and then you put it in the refrigerator.

I would take a slice of pie and wrap it in a

wax paper and put it under my jacket.

And then I'd eat that in the Hamburger Hamlet,

Surreptitiously, and 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 Warner Brothers

would throw away.

Big trash bins filled with it.

And so we got... 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 removed the back seat

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

de-gaussed everything when we got back.

And all the stock for Eraserhead came

from the throwaway bins at Warner Brothers.

We finished, Al and I...

The mix was done

but the film was not married, sound and picture.

So there were 12 reels of sound

and 12 reels of picture.

And 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 really early in the morning and

found out that there were four or five films ahead of me

that they gotta look at before they look at Eraserhead.

So I'm eating this donuts and having

coffee and sitting on the curb out there

and kept going in the guy says two more films

like that, until they started running the eraser

So finally it was over, packed it up

came back and never heard anything.

Snd 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 for Paris two days earlier.

And the guy was showing films to an empty house.

Eraserhead never went to Cannes.

I invited friends and we had a kind of a

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 want to have a dream like that.

The film showed at Filmex '77.

That was the official first screening of Eraserhead.

I was too afraid to go in with the people.

So I paced outside and it seemed like the film was

400 hours long.

And I was dying.

And I had that 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 2 db.

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 it was, I think it was killing people

in the front rows.

Fred drove me home that night and

I sat I told him, I said I'm cutting

I'm cutting the film tonight.

and I'm gonna cut this scene, this scene

this thing and Fred was

completely against it and and told me I was crazy.

Are you sure? I said, I am positive.

And I went and I cut the composite print.

That's something you really shouldn't do.

Then I had to go over to CFI, because I

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 and he became very confused.

Because I had to bring him up to speed

and all this stuff, and bring them bunch of elements.

Finally it got straightened out and a new

picture and soundtrack were made.

20 minutes shorter the way it is now.

The way it was supposed to be.

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 have 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.

Later on they look back and they wish

they had taken a couple more things.

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 Barenholz, known as the grandfather

of the Midnight Film.

If it wasn't for Ben getting Eraser...

picking it up and and distributing it

nothing would have happened to it. Zero.

And it opened at The Cinema Village

in the fall of 1977.

And there were 26 people

in the theater the first night.

That was a Friday night. Then Saturday night

there was 20-24.

And Ben said I'm not going to spend any money and

I'm not going to do any kind of big promotion.

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 service station.

I swing a u-turn, slam on the brakes pull

into this place.

And I said I want those guys off

those hooks. I'm buying all of them right now.

And the guy

helps me get them down I sit them all

in the back seat and uh those were my boys

and I kept them for many years.

Sometime, The New Art Theater where was running

Eraserhead every Friday night

said they needed a they would like me 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 at The New Art 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 have

brought the print down with me

when I came down to visit. - Uh-huh.

- 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 were all you know

we're all watching it for the first time

in quite a while.

And nobody was saying... you know they

weren't responding a whole lot and

and then it was over and we were like

really kind of feeling good about the work

and you know, it was like

you were really looking forward to

hearing what people had to say

and they walked out

they all just walked by you and said

gracias senor.

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 the, you know

25 years or more that it's been out.