[TCM Underground] This week on TCM Underground: Eraserhead, It's Alive

[Ubiquitous]

Eraserhead(1977)
A cog in the industrial machine tries to cope with his unhappy wife and
mutant baby.

It's Alive(1974)
A couple's use of an experimental fertility drug produces a monstrous
infant.

--
Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.

[A Friend]

In article <noKdnYYgWZgtooPE...@giganews.com>, Ubiquitous

<web...@polaris.net> wrote:

> Eraserhead(1977)
> A cog in the industrial machine tries to cope with his unhappy wife and
> mutant baby.
>
> It's Alive(1974)
> A couple's use of an experimental fertility drug produces a monstrous
> infant.

They're both interesting. ERASERHEAD is probably better appreciated
when one is stoned.

[Stephen DeMay]

It's Alive.. but you're not well

[Ubiquitous]

no...@noway.com wrote:
> Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net> wrote:

>> Eraserhead(1977)
>> A cog in the industrial machine tries to cope with his unhappy
>> wife and mutant baby.
>>
>> It's Alive(1974)
>> A couple's use of an experimental fertility drug produces a

>> monstrous nfant.

>
>
>They're both interesting. ERASERHEAD is probably better
>appreciated when one is stoned.

I don't think being stoned is sufficient.

[Ubiquitous]

no...@noway.com wrote:
> Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net> wrote:

>> Eraserhead(1977)
>> A cog in the industrial machine tries to cope with his unhappy wife and
>> mutant baby.>
>

>They're both interesting. ERASERHEAD is probably better appreciated
>when one is stoned.

Eraserhead (1977)
"Be warned. The nightmare has not gone away..."
Tagline for Eraserhead

David Lynch's 1977 feature directing debut has been called the greatest
student film ever made. Started while he was a student at the American Film
Institute (AFI), it outgrew its academic origins to consume five years of
Lynch's life. Although its nightmare vision seems determinedly non-commercial,
the film established Lynch's position as an uncompromising cinematic
visionary, leading to such accomplished later works as The Elephant Man
(1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive (2001) and the television series
Twin Peaks. It continues to maintain a cult following, drawn by its
surrealistic images of American life, sexuality and fatherhood.

Eraserhead's plot defies any coherent description. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance),
who inhabits a bleak urban landscape, is forced to meet the parents of
girlfriend Mary X (Charlotte Stewart). After being quizzed repeatedly by
Mary's mother (Jeanne Bates) and sharing a dinner of miniature chickens that
squirt black goo, he's informed that Mary has given birth prematurely and he
must marry her and move her into his apartment. After a few days during which
their child cries incessantly, Mary leaves him with the mutant child, leading
to a series of bizarre encounters with the prostitute across the hall (Judith
Roberts) and a strange woman (Laurel Near) who seems to live in Henry's
radiator. Lynch has steadfastly refused to unpack any of the meanings in this,
preferring the audience to draw its own conclusions.

The film grew out of a variety of influences. While studying at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he had lived in one of Philadelphia's
poorer neighborhoods, a bleak urban landscape filled with violence that was
reflected in the film's world. When he moved to the American Film Institute
(AFI) in Los Angeles, he read Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, about a man
transformed into a giant cockroach, and Nikolai Gogol's story "The Nose," in
which a man's nose leaves his face to assume independent life. Both also
contributed to the film's vision. In addition, he drew on his own fear of
fatherhood, feelings exacerbated when his first child, Jennifer, was born in
1968 with two clubbed feet, requiring surgery. For a final touch, he had a
daydream in which a boy brings a severed head to a pencil factory, which
became one of Nance's dreams in the film.

With only a 20-page script, Lynch had trouble raising production money.
Production designer Jack Fisk, who played the Man in the Planet and had been a
friend since childhood, donated some money. He also helped out with filming
and his girlfriend and later wife, Sissy Spacek, often held the slate. Other
money came from Nance's wife, Catherine E. Coulson, who served as assistant
director and would later play the Log Lady on Twin Peaks. Lynch also
contributed whatever he could afford from his job delivering newspapers. After
three years of working on the film whenever he could manage, he finally scored
a small grant from the AFI. Director Terrence Malick tried to secure backing
for it, but when one potential investor saw a sample reel, he walked out.

In all, it took Lynch and his crew of six five years to complete the film,
shooting whenever he had time and money. Nance had to keep his hair styled for
Henry throughout that period. The AFI let him use their grounds for shooting,
and he converted their stables into some of the film's sets. He even moved
into the stables as filming dragged on. Two years into production
cinematographer Herbert Cardwell died suddenly. It took a month to replace him
with Frederick Elmes. Once the film was shot, Lynch and Alan Splet then spent
a year working on the elaborate, multi-layered soundtrack.

Lynch did the film's effects himself and was as tightlipped about them as he
was about the picture's meaning. One of the most astounding elements was the
mutant child, which Nance nicknamed "Spike." The prop had several moving parts
and at one point gushes fluid. Although he has never confirmed it, critics
have speculated that he made Spike from either a skinned rabbit or a lamb
fetus. He wouldn't let the projectionist screening the rushes view any scenes
with the child, making him don a blindfold. When the picture was finally
completed, the crew held a mock wake for the child, and Lynch buried the prop
in a secret location.

What resulted from the attenuated production process, was a work of surprising
unity and technical accomplishment. Sound designer Alan Splet, who would go on
to win the Oscar® for The Black Stallion (1979), created a multi-layered
soundtrack combining mechanical sounds with Fats Waller songs. The sound is
almost constant during the film, with Splet using as many as 15 different
tracks at once. It marries with the stark black and white images captured by
Cardwell and Elmes to create a seamless surreal vision of existence.

After a disastrous preview that led to Lynch's cutting 20 minutes from the
film (including two characters played by Coulson), Eraserhead premiered at the
Filmex festival in Los Angeles, where it was seen by Libra Films' Ben
Barenholtz. He convinced a local theatre owner to give it some midnight
screenings, where it began developing a cult following. It ran a year at the
Cinema Village and then moved to the Nuart for three years of midnight
showings. It was also successful in New York and San Francisco. Those showings
attracted the attention of other filmmakers, with John Waters trumpeting the
film to his own fans at every opportunity. Stanley Kubrick considered it his
favorite movie and created the mood he wanted for The Shining (1980) by
screening the film for his cast. When George Lucas saw it, he offered Lynch
the chance to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), which Lynch turned down.
Finally, it caught the attention of Mel Brooks, who was so impressed he hired
Lynch to direct his production of The Elephant Man (1980).

Themes from Eraserhead have continued to recur in Lynch's other works,
particularly his use of dreamlike imagery. His practice of having songs carry
over from dreams into real life -- as he did with "In Heaven," the song
written and dubbed by Peter Ivers -- can also be found with Roy Orbison's "In
Dreams" in Blue Velvet and in episodes of Twin Peaks. The film's industrial
sounds and bleak industrial landscape are echoed in the factories shown in The
Elephant Man and the sawmill in Twin Peaks. Deformity is another recurring
theme, with the baby in Eraserhead resembling John Merrick's makeup in The
Elephant Man. All of this reflects an overarching view of life as absurd, with
the blatantly surreal moments in his work contrasted with moments of ordinary
activity that usually reflect some deeper meaning underneath.

Lynch was not the only participant to benefit from Eraserhead's fame. The
picture would launch Nance's career as a character actor, most notably in such
Lynch films as Dune (1984), Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart (1990) and Lost Highway
(1997), not to mention Twin Peaks.Stewart and Coulson would also appear on
that series, while Roberts followed Eraserhead and other independent films
with more commercial fare, most notably the horror film Dead Silence (2007)
and the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Elmes has built a solid career
as cinematographer on films and television productions, winning the National
Society of Film Critics Award for Blue Velvet and Independent Spirit Awards
for Wild at Heart and Night on Earth (1991). Fisk has become one of the
screen's leading production designers, with Oscar® nominations for There Will
Be Blood (2007) and The Revenant (2015), while Splet was in demand as a sound
designer until his premature death in 1994.

The film had a major cultural impact, inspiring an episode of the sitcom
Laverne & Shirley, a character in the comedy House Party (1990), jokes on
Mystery Science Theatre 3000, an episode of the animated series Samurai Jack
and an experimental film made by one of the characters on Gilmore Girls. The
soundtrack influenced David Fincher's Seven (1995) and the Coen Brothers'
Barton Fink (1991), which also run low-level noise almost throughout. Other
films influenced by Eraserhead include Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) and Darren
Aronofsky's Pi (1998). T-shirts and posters displaying Nance and his strange,
electrified haircut continue to sell. In 2004, the film was added to the
National Film Registry. A 2010 poll conducted by the Online Film Critics
Society named Lynch's the second best directorial debut in film history,
behind Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941).

[Ubiquitous]

neo...@webtv.net wrote:
>On Thursday, May 18, 2017 at 8:43:36 PM UTC-4, Ubiquitous wrote:

>> It's Alive(1974)
>> A couple's use of an experimental fertility drug produces a monstrous
>> infant.
>

>It's Alive.. but you're not well

It's Alive (1974)
Larry Cohen's $400,000 killer baby shocker It's Alive (1974) reaped better
than $30 million in worldwide box office rentals for Warner Bros., with credit
for the film's unexpected popularity due in large part to an unforgettable
advertising campaign; deucedly simple, the thirty second TV spot consisted of
a back-to-front camera move around a wicker perambulator while an offscreen
narrator declaimed "There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby... It's
Alive!" and a monstrous claw jutted violently from within. That the film
earned back nearly ten times its shooting budget (making Cohen, in the
process, independently wealthy) is less remarkable than the fact that its
success came three and a half years after its original theatrical release.

Produced by fiat of former Warners head of production Dick Shepherd
(emboldened by the success of The Exorcist, 1973), It's Alive fell victim to a
regime change that occurred when Shepherd quit Warners for MGM. Disowned by
its home studio, the film was dumped into a single Chicago bijou before being
remaindered to the ass-end of double and triple bills. Encouraged by praise
from overseas (It's Alive was exhibited at the Cinmathque Franaise in Paris
and became Warner Bros.' highest-grossing release in Singapore, second only to
My Fair Lady, 1973), Cohen kept hope alive. When the players at Warners
changed seats yet again, he showed the film to marketing executive Arthur
Manson, who concurred with head of distribution Terry Semel (later CEO of
Yahoo!) that they had a potential hit on their hands. It's Alive was given a
proper re-release in March 1977 and, later that year, was booked by Warners as
a co-hit in support of Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Conceived in the aftermath of such scandals as Watergate and thalidomide-born
birth defects, at a time when the so-called Generation Gap seemed stretched to
its absolute limit, It's Alive reflects the fears of parents about the nature
and implications of procreation. While recalling the sundry monstrosities of
Greek mythology (Cohen hired New York actor John Ryan to play Frank Davis, a
businessman whose newborn child tears its way from the womb and wreaks havoc
across Western LA on its journey home, after seeing him play Agamemnon on
Broadway to Irene Papas' Medea), Cohen also imbues It's Alive with a canny
sense of film history. While Rosemary's Baby (1968) is an obvious precursor,
Cohen's use of the Los Angeles River Basin forges a kinship with the noir
classics He Walked by Night (1948) and The Third Man (1949), as well as the
big bug scare film Them! (1954).

The specter that haunts It's Alive most thoroughly is Mary Shelley's immortal
manmade man, the Frankenstein monster. Cohen cadged his title from the iconic
scene in James Whale's 1931 film adaptation of the Shelley novel, in which
Colin Clive (as Dr. Henry Frankenstein) heralded the birth of Boris Karloff's
unnamed monster with "It's alive! It's alive!" Midway through the Cohen film,
Frank Davis (fittingly, a public relations man obsessed with image) ruminates
on his perceived fraternity with that most infamous maker of monsters:

"When I was a kid, I always thought the monster was Frankenstein. Karloff
walking around in these big shoes, grunting. I thought he was Frankenstein.
Then I went to high school and read the book and I realized that Frankenstein
was the doctor who created him. Somehow, the identities get all mixed up,
don't they?"
As with the Universal Frankenstein, It's Alive spawned its own share of
sequels -It Lives Again (1978) and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)
- as well as a 2008 remake shot in Bucharest.

All too fittingly, It's Alive marked the ending of one Hollywood career and
the birth of another. Composer Bernard Herrmann, long since on the outs with
frequent collaborator Alfred Hitchcock, agreed to score Cohen's film as long
as he could record his symphonic shades of terror at the storied St. Giles
without Cripplegate, a Gothic church in the heart of London's Barbican.
(Herrmann would compose scores for Brian De Palma's Obsession and Martin
Scorsese's Taxi Driver before his 1975 death, but his cues from It's Alive
were repurposed for the first sequel.) Design of the problematic Davis child
was the work of 23 year-old Rick Baker. Baker had assisted veteran makeup man
Dick Smith on the set of The Exorcist but would soon distinguish himself for
his own work on such films as the 1976 King Kong remake, Star Wars (1977), and
An American Werewolf in London (1981), for which he won the inaugural Academy
Award for Best Makeup and Hair Styling.

[luisb...@aol.com]

It changed cinema--in the US anyway. I wonder whether he imagined it as a game changer. He must have.