David Lynch

For other people named David Lynch, see David Lynch (disambiguation).

David Lynch
Lynch in Washington D.C., January 23, 2007
Born	David Keith Lynch (1946-01-20) January 20, 1946 Missoula, Montana, U.S.
Years active	Since 1966
Spouse(s)	Peggy Lynch (1967–1974) Mary Fisk (1977–1987) Mary Sweeney (2006) Emily Stofle (2009-present)
Partner	Isabella Rossellini (1986–1991)

David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker and visual artist. Over a lengthy career, Lynch has employed a distinctive, unorthodox (and now known as "Lynchian") approach to narrative filmmaking that has become instantly recognizable to many audiences and critics worldwide. Lynch's films are known for nightmarish and dreamlike images and meticulous sound design. Lynch's work often depicts a seedy underside to small-town America (particularly Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks) or sprawling California metropolises (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and his latest release, Inland Empire). Beginning with his experimental film-school feature Eraserhead (1977), he has maintained a strong cult following despite inconsistent commercial success.

Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, for his films The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001), and also received a screenplay Academy Award nomination for The Elephant Man. Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. The French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, the country's top civilian honor, as a Chevalier in 2002 and then an Officier in 2007, while that same year, The Guardian described Lynch as "the most important director of this era". Allmovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking".

Life and career

Early life

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. His father, Donald Walton Lynch, was a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist, and his mother, Edwina "Sunny" Lynch (née Sundholm), was an English language tutor. His maternal grandfather's parents immigrated to the United States from Finland in the 19th century. Lynch was raised a Presbyterian and spent his childhood throughout the Pacific Northwest and Durham, North Carolina. He attained the rank of Eagle Scout and, on his 15th birthday, served as an usher at John F. Kennedy's Presidential Inauguration.

Intending to become an artist, Lynch attended classes at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. while finishing high school at Francis C. Hammond High School (now Francis C. Hammond Middle School) in Alexandria, Virginia in 1964. He enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for one year (where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf) before leaving for Europe with his friend and fellow artist Jack Fisk, planning to study with Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. Although he had planned to stay for three years, Lynch returned to the U.S. after only 15 days.

Early career and short films (1966–1970)

In 1966, Lynch relocated to the Fairmount neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) and made a series of complex mosaics in geometric shapes which he called Industrial Symphonies. At this time, he also began working in film. His first short film Six Men Getting Sick (1966), which he described as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", was played on a loop at an art exhibit. It won the Academy's annual film contest. This led to a commission from H. Barton Wasserman to do a film installation in his home. After a disastrous first attempt that resulted in a completely blurred, frameless print, Wasserman allowed Lynch to keep the remaining portion of the commission. Using this, he created The Alphabet in 1968, starring his then wife Peggy Lynch as 'the Girl' who chants the alphabet to a series of disturbing animated images before dying at the end.

In 1970, Lynch turned his attention away from fine art and focused primarily on film. He won a $5,000 grant (later extended to $7,200) from the American Film Institute to produce The Grandmother, a short film about a neglected boy who "grows" a grandmother from a seed. The film critics Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell later remarked that "this film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas that would filter into his later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium".

Eraserhead and cult success (1971–1979)

In 1971, Lynch moved to Los Angeles, California to study filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory. At the Conservatory, Lynch began working on his first feature-length film, Eraserhead, using a $10,000 grant from the AFI. The grant did not provide enough money to complete the film and, due to lack of a sufficient budget, Eraserhead was filmed intermittently until 1977. Lynch used money from friends and family, including boyhood friend Jack Fisk, a production designer and the husband of actress Sissy Spacek, and even took a paper route to finish it. A stark and enigmatic film, Eraserhead tells the story of a quiet young man (Jack Nance) living in an industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a constantly crying mutant baby. Lynch has called Eraserhead "my Philadelphia Story", referring to the 1940 film combined with his own fearful experiences living in Philadelphia. He said "this feeling left its traces deep down inside me. And when it came out again, it became Eraserhead".

The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable, but thanks to the efforts of the Elgin Theater distributor Ben Barenholtz, it became an instant cult classic and was a staple of midnight movie showings for the next decade. It was also a critical success, launching Lynch to the forefront of avant-garde filmmaking. The acclaimed film maker Stanley Kubrick said that it was one of his all-time favorite films. It cemented the team of actors and technicians who would continue to define the texture of his work for years to come, including cinematographer Frederick Elmes, sound designer Alan Splet, and actor Jack Nance. Meanwhile, Lynch continued producing short films, and during "a brief lull in the filming of Eraserhead" had produced The Amputee in 1974, revolving around a woman with stumps for limbs (Catherine Coulson) who has them washed by a doctor, played by Lynch himself.

Lynch says he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for the first time in 1975 at the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center in Los Angeles, California, two years after he learned Transcendental Meditation.

Rise to prominence (1980–1986)

File:87lynch.jpg

David Lynch on the set of Blue Velvet with the film's main actor Kyle MacLachlan

Eraserhead brought Lynch to the attention of producer Mel Brooks, who hired him to direct 1980's The Elephant Man, a biopic of the deformed Victorian-era figure Joseph Merrick (John Hurt). Lynch brought his own distinctively surrealist approach to the film, filming it in color stock black and white, but it has been described as "one of the most conventional" of his films. The Elephant Man was a huge commercial success, and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch. It also established his place as a commercially viable, if somewhat dark and unconventional, Hollywood director. George Lucas, a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, which he refused, feeling that it would be more Lucas's vision than his own. Meanwhile in 1983 he began the writing and drawing of a comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, which featured unchanging graphics alongside cryptic philosophical references. It ran from 1983 until 1992 in the Village Voice, Creative Loafing and other tabloid and alternative publications.

Lynch agreed to direct a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune for Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis's De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, on the condition that DEG release a second Lynch project, over which the director would have complete creative control. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be the next Star Wars, Lynch's Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud; it cost $45 million to make, and grossed a mere $27.4 million domestically. Later on, Universal Studios released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television, containing almost an hour of cutting-room-floor footage and new narration. Such was not representative of Lynch's intentions, but the studio considered it more comprehensible than the original two-hour version. Lynch objected to these changes and had his name struck from the extended cut, which has "Alan Smithee" credited as the director and "Judas Booth" (a pseudonym which Lynch himself invented, inspired by his own feelings of betrayal) as the screenwriter. The three hour version has since been released on video worldwide.

Lynch's second De Laurentiis-financed project was 1986's Blue Velvet, the story of a college student (Kyle MacLachlan) who after investigating a severed ear he finds in a field discovers his small, idealistic hometown hides a dark side. The film featured performances from Isabella Rossellini as a tormented lounge singer and Dennis Hopper as a crude, psychopathic criminal. Although Lynch had found success previously with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet's controversy with audiences and critics introduced him into the mainstream, and became a huge critical and moderate commercial success. The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The content of the film and its artistic merit created much controversy among audiences and critics alike. Blue Velvet introduced several common elements of Lynch's work, including abused women, the dark underbelly of small towns, and unconventional uses of vintage songs. Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" are both featured in unconventional ways. It was also the first time Lynch worked with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who would contribute to all of his future full-length films except Inland Empire. Woody Allen, whose film Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said that Blue Velvet was his favorite film of the year.

Transition to television (1987–1996)

Lynch at the 1990 Emmy Awards ceremony

In the late 1980s, Lynch moved from directing films to focusing on television, directing a short film entitled The Cowboy and the Frenchman in 1989 for French television, before meeting the producer Mark Frost, with whom he would go on to collaborate with on a number of projects. Initially, Lynch and Frost planned to create a surreal comedy named One Saliva Bubble, but it never materialised. Instead they created a show entitled Twin Peaks, a drama series set in a small Washington town where the popular high school student Laura Palmer has been raped and murdered. To investigate, the FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is called in, eventually unearthing the secrets of many town residents and the supernatural nature of the murder. Lynch himself directed only six episodes of the series, including the feature-length pilot, which debuted on the ABC Network on April 8, 1990. Lynch himself later starred in several episodes of the series as the FBI agent Gordon Cole. Twin Peaks gradually rose from cult hit to cultural phenomenon, and because of its originality and success remains one of the most well-known television series of the decade. Catch phrases from the show entered the culture and parodies of it were seen on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. Lynch appeared on the cover of Time magazine largely because of the success of the series.

However, Lynch clashed with the ABC Network on several matters, particularly whether or not to reveal Laura Palmer's killer. The network insisted that the revelation be made during the second season but Lynch wanted the mystery to last as long as the series. Lynch soon became disenchanted with the series, and, as a result, many cast members complained of feeling abandoned. Later he stated that he and Frost had never intended to ever reveal the identity of Laura's killer, that ABC forced him to reveal the culprit prematurely, and that agreeing to do so is one of his biggest professional regrets. Twin Peaks suffered a severe ratings drop and was canceled in 1991. Still, Lynch scripted a prequel to the series about the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer.

While Twin Peaks was in production, the Brooklyn Academy of Music asked Lynch and Badalementi to create a theatrical piece which would only be performed twice at their academy in New York City in 1989 as a part of the New Music America Festival. The result was Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, which starred such frequent Lynch collaborators as Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage and Michael J. Anderson as well as containing five songs sung by Julee Cruise. David Lynch produced a 50-minute video of the performance in 1990. Following this, Lynch returned to making feature films, after his friend, Monty Montgomery offered him the chance to adapt Barry Gifford's novel, Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula into a film. Lynch agreed, with the result being Wild at Heart, a crime and road movie starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern. Despite receiving a muted response from American critics and viewers, it won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

Without Frost this time, he decided to revisit Twin Peaks, making the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992. The film was, for the most part, a commercial and critical failure in the United States; however, it was a hit in Japan and British critic Mark Kermode (among others) has hailed the film as Lynch's "masterpiece". Meanwhile, Lynch continued working on a series of television shows with Mark Frost. After Twin Peaks, they produced a series of documentaries entitled American Chronicles (1990) which examined life across the United States, the comedy series On the Air (1992), which was cancelled after only three episodes had aired, and the three-episode HBO mini-series Hotel Room (1993) about events that happened in the same hotel room but at different dates in time.

Return to cinema and digital work (1997–2006)

Lynch speaking at an Amazon.com reception in January 2007

Following his unsuccessful television ventures since Twin Peaks, Lynch returned to making feature films. In 1997 he released the non-linear, noiresque Lost Highway, co-written by Barry Gifford and starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. The film failed commercially and received a mixed response from critics. However, thanks in part to a soundtrack featuring David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and The Smashing Pumpkins, it helped gain Lynch a new audience of Generation X viewers. Lost Highway was followed in 1999 with the G-rated, Disney-produced The Straight Story, edited by Mary Sweeney and written by Sweeney and John E. Roach, which was, on the surface, a simple and humble movie telling the true story of Iowan Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), who rides a lawnmower to Wisconsin to make peace with his ailing brother, played by Harry Dean Stanton. As Le Blanc and Odell stated, the plot made it "seem as far removed from Lynch's earlier works as could be imagined, but in fact right from the very opening, this is entirely his film - a surreal road movie". The film garnered positive reviews and reached a new audience for its director.

The same year, Lynch approached ABC once again with ideas for a television drama. The network gave Lynch the go-ahead to shoot a two-hour pilot for the series Mulholland Drive, but disputes over content and running time led to the project being shelved indefinitely. However, with seven million dollars from the French production company StudioCanal, Lynch completed the pilot as a film, Mulholland Drive. The film, a non-linear narrative surrealist tale of the dark side of Hollywood, stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux. The film performed relatively well at the box office worldwide and was a critical success, earning Lynch a Best Director prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There) and a Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Association.

With the onset of popularity of the internet, Lynch decided to utlilise this new medium, releasing several new series that he had created exclusively on his website, davidlynch.com. In 2002, he created a series of online shorts entitled Dumbland. Intentionally crude both in content and execution, the eight-episode series was later released on DVD. The same year, Lynch released a surreal sitcom via his website - Rabbits, which revolved around a family of humanoid rabbits. Later, he showed his experiments with Digital Video in the form of the Japanese-style horror short Darkened Room.

In 2006, Lynch's latest feature film, Inland Empire was released. At almost three hours, it was the longest of Lynch's films. Like Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway before it, the film did not follow a traditional narrative structure. It starred Lynch regulars Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, and Justin Theroux, with cameos by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring (voices of Suzie and Jane Rabbit), and a performance by Jeremy Irons. Lynch described the piece as "a mystery about a woman in trouble". In an effort to promote the film, Lynch made appearances with a cow and a placard bearing the slogan "Without cheese there would be no Inland Empire".

Documentaries and animation (2007–present)

File:GustheBartender.png

The character of Gus the bartender from The Cleveland Show is both based on and voiced by Lynch.

In 2008, Lynch announced that he was working on a road documentary "about his dialogues with regular folk on the meaning of life," with traveling companions including singer Donovan and physicist John Hagelin, two prominent members of the Transcendental Meditation movement. The results of this enterprise, called the Interview Project, are accessible from Lynch's web site.

Lynch currently has two films in production, both of which differ in content from his previous work. One of these is an animation entitled Snootworld, and the other is a documentary on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi consisting of interviews with people who knew him.

In 2010, Lynch began guest appearances on the Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show as Gus the Bartender. He had been convinced to appear in the show by its lead actor, Mike Henry, who is a fan of Lynch's.

Lady Blue Shanghai, written, directed and edited by Lynch, is a 16-minute internet promotion film made for Dior and placed on the internet in May 2010.

Recurring themes and collaborators

Main article: Frequent David Lynch collaborators

There are several recurring themes within Lynch's work, leading Le Blanc and Odell to state that "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas". One of the key themes that they noted was the usage of dreams and dreamlike imagery within his works, something they related to the "surrealist ethos" of relying "on the subconscious to provide visual drive". This can be seen in John Merrick's dream of his mother in The Elephant Man, Agent Cooper's dreams of the red room in Twin Peaks and the "dreamlike logic" of the narrative found in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Other themes include industry, with repeated imagery of "the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming woodmills and smoke billowing factories", as can be seen with the industrial wasteland in Eraserhead, the factories in The Elephant Man, the sawmill in Twin Peaks and the lawn mower in The Straight Story. Another theme is the idea of a "dark underbelly" of violent criminal activity within a society, such as with Frank's gang in Blue Velvet and the cocaine smugglers in Twin Peaks. The idea of deformity is also found in several of Lynch's films, from the protagonist in The Elephant Man, to the deformed baby in Eraserhead, as is the idea of death from a head wound, found in most of Lynch's films. Other imagery commonly used within Lynch's works are flickering electrictity or lights, as well as fire and the idea of a stage upon which a singer performs, often surrounded by drapery.

Lynch also tends to feature his leading female actors in multiple or "split" roles, so that many of his female characters have multiple, fractured identities. This practice began with his choice to cast Sheryl Lee as both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks and continued in his later works. In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays the dual role of Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield, whilst in Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts plays Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms and Laura Harring plays Camilla Rhodes/Rita and in Inland Empire, Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace/Susan Blue. By contrast, Lynch rarely creates multi-character roles for his male actors.

Lynch is also widely noted for his collaborations with various production artists and composers on his films and multiple different productions. He frequently works with Angelo Badalamenti to compose music for his productions, former wife Mary Sweeney as a film editor, casting director Johanna Ray, and cast members Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Zabriskie, and Laura Dern.

Influences

Lynch has expressed his admiration for filmmakers Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Tati, Alejandro Jodorowsky, writer Franz Kafka (stating "the only artist I felt could be my brother was Kafka"), and artist Francis Bacon. He states that the majority of Kubrick films are in his top ten, that he really loves Kafka, and that Bacon paints images that are both visually stunning, and emotionally touching. He has also cited the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka as an inspiration for his works. Lynch has a love for the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz and frequently makes reference to it in his films, most overtly in Wild at Heart.

An early influence on Lynch was the book The Art Spirit by American turn-of-the-century artist and teacher Robert Henri. When he was in high school, Bushnell Keeler, an artist who was the stepfather of one of his friends, introduced Lynch to Henri's book, which became his bible. As Lynch said in Chris Rodley's book Lynch on Lynch, "it helped me decide my course for painting — 100 percent right there." Lynch, like Henri, moved from rural America to an urban environment to pursue an artistic career. Henri was an urban realist painter, legitimizing everyday city life as the subject of his work, much in the same way that Lynch first drew street scenes. Henri's work also bridged changing centuries, from America's agricultural 19th century into the industrial 20th century, much in the same fashion as Lynch's films blend the nostalgic happiness of the fifties to the twisted weirdness of the eighties and nineties.

His influences have also included Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Luis Buñuel. Some of Lynch's influences have cited him as an influence themselves, most notably Kubrick, who stated that he modeled his vision of The Shining (1980) upon that of Eraserhead and who, according to Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish, once commented while screening Eraserhead for a small group that it was his favorite film.

Personal life

Lynch has had several long-term relationships. In 1967, he married Peggy Lentz in Chicago, Illinois. They had one child, Jennifer Chambers Lynch, born in 1968, who is a film director. They filed for divorce in 1974. On June 21, 1977, Lynch married Mary Fisk, and the couple had one child, Austin Jack Lynch, born in 1982. They divorced in 1987, and Lynch began dating Isabella Rossellini after filming Blue Velvet. Lynch and Rossellini broke up in 1991, and Lynch developed a relationship with Mary Sweeney, with whom he had one son, Riley Lynch, in 1992. Sweeney also worked as Lynch's longtime film editor/producer and co-wrote and produced The Straight Story. The two married in May 2006, but divorced that July. Lynch married actress Emily Stofle, who appeared in his 2006 film Inland Empire, in February, 2009.

Transcendental Meditation

Lynch speaking on Transcendental Meditation and the creative process in 2007

Lynch advocates the use of meditation techniques in bringing peace to the world. He was first initiated into Transcendental Meditation in July 1973, and has practiced the technique consistently since then. He reportedly became close with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the TM movement, during a month-long "Millionaire's Enlightenment Course" held in 2003, the fee for which was US$1 million.

In July 2005, he launched the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and Peace, established to help finance scholarships for students in middle and high schools who are interested in learning the Transcendental Meditation technique and to fund research on the technique and its effects on learning. He promotes his vision on college campuses with tours that began in September 2005. In 2009, Lynch organized a benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall for the David Lynch Foundation. On April 4, 2009, the "Change Begins Within" concert featured Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Donovan, Sheryl Crow, Eddie Vedder, Moby, Bettye LaVette, Ben Harper, and Mike Love of the Beach Boys.

Lynch is working for the building and establishment of seven buildings, in which 8,000 salaried people will practice advanced meditation techniques, "pumping peace for the world". He estimates the cost at $7 billion. As of December 2005, he had spent $400,000 of personal money, and raised $1 million in donations. In December 2006, the New York Times reported that he continued to have that goal.

Lynch's book, Catching the Big Fish (Tarcher/Penguin 2006), discusses the impact of the Transcendental Meditation technique on his creative process. He is donating all author's royalties to the David Lynch Foundation. His involvement with a public event to announce a TM construction project in Germany met with resistance from the public and government when a TM leader made controversial statements about Hitler.

Lynch attended the funeral of the Maharishi in India in 2008. He told a reporter, "In life, he revolutionised the lives of millions of people. ... In 20, 50, 500 years there will be millions of people who will know and understand what the Maharishi has done." In 2009, he began shooting a documentary on the life of the Maharishi.

In May 2010, David Wants to Fly, a debut film by young German filmmaker David Sieveking, a documentary about Lynch and his commitment to the TM movement, hit the box offices.

Art and design

Lynch maintains an interest in other art forms. He described the twentieth-century artist Francis Bacon as "to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter". He continues to present art installations and stage designs. In his spare time, he also designs and builds furniture. He started building furniture from his own designs as far back as his art school days. He built sheds during the making of Eraserhead, and many of the sets and furniture used in that movie are made by Lynch. He also made some of the furniture for Fred Madison's house in Lost Highway.

Lynch was the subject of a major art retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, Paris from March May 3–27, 2007. The show was entitled The Air is on Fire and included numerous paintings, photographs, drawings, alternative films and sound work. New site-specific art installations were created specially for the exhibition. A series of events accompanied the exhibition including live performances and concerts. Some of Lynch's art include photographs of dissected chickens and other animals as a "Build your own Chicken" toy ad.

Between 1983 and 1992, Lynch wrote and drew a weekly comic strip called The Angriest Dog in the World for the L.A. Reader. The drawings in the panels never change, just the captions.

Music

Lynch has also been involved in a number of music projects, many of them related to his films. Most notably he produced and wrote lyrics for Julee Cruise's first two albums, Floating into the Night (1989) and The Voice of Love (1993), in collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti who composed the music and also produced. Lynch has also worked on the 1998 Jocelyn Montgomery album Lux Vivens. He has also composed bits of music for Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, and Rabbits. In 2001, he released BlueBob, a rock album performed by Lynch and John Neff. The album is notable for Lynch's unusual guitar playing style: he plays "upside down and backwards, like a lap guitar", and relies heavily on effects pedals. Most recently Lynch has composed several pieces for Inland Empire, including two songs, "Ghost of Love" and "Walkin' on the Sky", in which he makes his public debut as a singer. In 2009, his new book-CD set Dark Night of the Soul was released. In 2008, he started his own record label called David Lynch MC on which its first release Fox Bat Strategy: A Tribute to Dave Jaurequi was released in early 2009. In August 2009, it was announced that he was releasing Afghani/American singer Ariana Delawari's Lion of Panjshir album in conjunction with Manimal Vinyl Records in October 2009.

Website

Lynch designed his personal website, a site exclusive to paying members, where he posts short videos and his absurdist series Dumbland, plus interviews and other items. The site also features a daily weather report, where Lynch gives a brief description of the weather in Los Angeles, where he resides. As of December, 2008, this weather report (usually no longer than 30 seconds) is also being broadcast on his personal YouTube-channel David Lynch – Daily Weather Report. An absurd ringtone ("I like to kill deer") from the website was a common sound bite on The Howard Stern Show in early 2006.

Lynch is an avid coffee drinker and even has his own line of special organic blends available for purchase on his website. Called "David Lynch Signature Cup", the coffee has been advertised via flyers included with several recent Lynch-related DVD releases, including Inland Empire and the Gold Box edition of Twin Peaks. The possibly self-mocking tag-line for the brand is "It's all in the beans ... and I'm just full of beans." This is also a quote of a line said by Justin Theroux's character in Inland Empire.

Filmography

Features

Year	Film	Oscars		BAFTA		Golden Globe		Other
		Nominations	Wins	Nominations	Wins	Nominations	Wins
1977	Eraserhead
1980	The Elephant Man	8		7	3	4
1984	Dune
1986	Blue Velvet	1				2
1990	Wild at Heart	1		1		1		Palme d'Or
1992	Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
1997	Lost Highway
1999	The Straight Story	1				2
2001	Mulholland Drive	1		2	1	4		Best Director (Cannes Film Festival)
2006	Inland Empire	56		800	145	47		Best Director (Cannes Film Festival)

Short films

• Six Men Getting Sick (1966) - available on The Short Films of David Lynch DVD
• Absurd Encounter with Fear (1967) - available on The Lime Green Set DVD
• Fictitious Anacin Commercial (1967) - available on The Lime Green Set DVD
• The Alphabet (1968) - available on The Short Films of David Lynch DVD
• The Grandmother (1970) - available on The Short Films of David Lynch DVD
• The Amputee (1974) - available on The Short Films of David Lynch DVD
• The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988) - available on The Short Films of David Lynch DVD
• Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted (1990) - available on The Lime Green Set DVD
• Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995) - available on The Short Films of David Lynch DVD
• Darkened Room (2002) - available on the Dynamic 1 DVD
• Ballerina (2006) - available on the Inland Empire DVD
• Boat (2007) - available on the Dynamic 1 DVD
• Bug Crawls (2007) - available on the Dynamic 1 DVD
• Scissors (2008) - available on The Lime Green Set DVD

Television series

Year	Series	Episodes
1990–1991	Twin Peaks	30
1992	On the Air	7
1993	Hotel Room	3

Online series

Year	Series	Episodes	Available on DVD
2002	Rabbits		The Lime Green Set DVD
2002	Dumbland	8	The Lime Green Set DVD
	Out Yonder		The Lime Green Set DVD
2009	Interview Project

Music videos

Year	Song	Musician
1982	"I Predict"	Sparks
2009	"Shot in the Back of the Head"	Moby

Other

In October, 2008, at the OMMA Video Conference, Jen Gregono, chief content officer at On Networks, announced that her company signed Lynch to a webisode series based on his book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity.

In June 2009, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse released an album called Dark Night of the Soul (named after a Slate.com article of the same name, "Dark Night of the Soul; David Lynch's Inland Empire"), with a 100+ page booklet with visuals by Lynch. The album contained complete packaging and a blank CD because of a dispute with the record label. The artists involved implied that consumers can get the music online and just burn the blank CD provided.

Awards and nominations

Academy Awards:

• 1981: Best Director (The Elephant Man, nominated)
• 1981: Best Adapted Screenplay (The Elephant Man, nominated)
• 1987: Best Director (Blue Velvet, nominated)
• 2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

BAFTA Awards:

• 1981: Best Direction (The Elephant Man, nominated)
• 1981: Best Screenplay (The Elephant Man, nominated)

Cannes Film Festival:

• 1990: Golden Palm (Wild at Heart, won)
• 1992: Golden Palm (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, nominated)
• 1999: Golden Palm (The Straight Story, nominated)
• 2001: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., won Tied with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There)
• 2001: Golden Palm (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

DGA Award:

• 1981: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (The Elephant Man, nominated)

Emmy Awards:

• 1990: Outstanding Achievement in Main Title Theme Music (Twin Peaks, nominated)
• 1990: Outstanding Achievement in Music and Lyrics (Twin Peaks for the song "Into the Night", nominated)
• 1990: Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series (Twin Peaks for the pilot episode, nominated)
• 1990: Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series (Twin Peaks for the pilot episode, nominated)
• 1990: Outstanding Drama Series (Twin Peaks)

Golden Globes:

• 1981: Best Director (The Elephant Man, nominated)
• 1987: Best Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)
• 2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)
• 2002: Best Screenplay (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

Independent Spirit Awards:

• 1987: Best Director (Blue Velvet, nominated)
• 1987: Best Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)
• 2000: Best Director (The Straight Story, nominated)
• 2007: Special Distinction Award (Shared with Laura Dern for their collaborative work, won)

Saturn Awards:

• 1993: Best Writing (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, nominated)
• 1993: Life Career Award (won)
• 2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

Venice Film Festival:

• 2006: Future Film Festival Digital Award (Inland Empire won)
• 2006: Career Golden Lion (won)

WGA Award:

• 1981: Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (The Elephant Man, nominated)
• 1987: Best Original Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)

Further reading

• David Lynch: Interviews, a collection of interviews with Lynch from 1977 to 2008, edited by Richard A. Barney for the series Conversations with Filmmakers (University Press of Mississippi, 2009, ISBN 1604732377 [paperback], ISBN 1604732369 [hardback]). This volume covers topics that include Lynch's filmmaking, furniture design, painting, and music career.
• Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with Lynch, conducted, edited, and introduced by filmmaker Chris Rodley (Faber & Faber Ltd., 1997, ISBN 0-571-19548-2; revised edition published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005, ISBN 0-571-22018-5).
• The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood by Martha Nochimson (University of Texas Press, 1997, ISBN 0-292-75565-1).
• The Complete Lynch by David Hughes (Virgin Virgin, 2002, ISBN 0-7535-0598-3).
• Weirdsville U.S.A.: The Obsessive Universe of David Lynch by Paul A. Woods (Plexus Publishing. UK, Reprint edition, 2000, ISBN 0-85965-291-2).
• David Lynch (Twayne's Filmmakers Series) by Kenneth C. Kaleta (Twayne Publishers, 1992, ISBN 0-8057-9323-2).
• Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch by Jeff Johnson (McFarland & Company, 2004, ISBN 0-7864-1753-6).
• Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006, ISBN 1585425400 / 978-1585425402).
• Snowmen by David Lynch (Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 2008, ISBN 978-3-86521-467-6).
• David Lynch: Beautiful Dark by Greg Olson (Scarecrow Press, 2008, ISBN 0-8108-5917-3).
• The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory by Allister Mactaggart (Intellect, 2010, ISBN 978-1-84150-332-5).

External links

• Official website
• David Lynch Foundation : Education : Transcendental Meditation
  • Template:MySpace
• David Lynch at IMDb
• David Lynch at Allmovie
• David Lynch at Moviefone
• David Lynch at Rotten Tomatoes
• Site about the Artwork of Lynch
• WGBH Forum Network: David Lynch - Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain
• Bibliography of books and articles about Lynch via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center

Interviews

• • Film Threat interview
  • Wired interview
  • Guardian interview