Category Archives: On Influences

David Lynch – Room to Dream

My mistake, I suppose, was expecting a conventional book tour interview.

This was David Lynch after all, the guy who’s given us the Lady in the Radiator, Frank Booth, and those miniature demonic grandparents who slip under apartment doors.

The setting was perfect. It’s hard to beat the cavernous decadence of The Theatre at Ace Hotel, originally built in 1927, the “former flagship movie house of United Artists.”

But then the lights went down and the evening started with all 8 episodes of Dumbland, Lynch’s crudely drawn and animated web series about a brutish mouth-breather (literally), his traumatized wife, and their hyperactive son in the suburbs. This is David Lynch’s suburbs, however, so a neighbor is a man with a removable arm who has sex with ducks, ants do a song-and-dance number calling attention to the main character being a “dumbturd,” and another character has the stick caught in his mouth removed by way of his eye sockets. It’s funny in a punishing way. To me, the series is more a testament to Lynch’s genius with sound design, which he employs to great unsettling effect.

Still, my heart sank a little because these events don’t usually run very long and the “Dumbland” screening ate up over half an hour. I was not encouraged, then, when Kristine McKenna, moderator and co-author of Lynch’s new hybrid memoir-biography, said she wasn’t going to ask him anything about the book. Instead, she had a few questions about “Summer,” as in the season, the first day of which is when this talk took place.

Okay, all right, I could go with this. Lynch is too interesting a person not to have something intriguing to share. He doesn’t like summer vacations. His ideal day is waking up refreshed, having a cup of coffee, doing some meditation, and then getting to work on a project, which can mean a painting, a film, or just daydreaming. He compared phones to sugar, meaning they’re as hard to give up as a “bag of really good cookies.”

That portion lasted about 10 minutes and then it was time for audience questions, which were submitted prior to the start of the program. Most of them concerned Twin Peaks, with one question prompting him to tell the story of how the pivotal character of Bob was inspired by set dresser/actor Frank Silva being in the “wrong” place at the right time. Another got him to reveal that he’d written and abandoned a film adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. An inquiry into his recurring dreams had him describing one where he’s in the desert watching his approaching father become distorted by the waves of heat coming off the sand, and not knowing whether this was his “good” father or his “bad” father. Later in the dream he’s hiding at the very top of a marble structure listening to the footsteps below, presumably one of the fathers looking for him. The best question was “How do you keep your hair up?” Smiling slyly, Lynch replied, “I have a heart-to-heart talk with it every morning.”

Good stuff, I thought, but then it was all over, six audience questions answered in 20 minutes. And the long, long, long line for the book signing still awaited……which I admit I abandoned.

Sure, I was disappointed. Not so disappointed I was going to cut off someone’s ear so Kyle Maclachlan could find it in a field later. No.

But look, I love Lynch’s movies and how his mind works. He’s a master of mood, of atmosphere, of residing very comfortably in that often discomfiting zone between dreaming and waking life. I do find him inspiring and an influence on my writing. I just wanted more time with the guy.

Hey, at least I have the book, Room to Dream, which I must say is pretty impressive in its depth and breadth. We’re cautioned that answers to the puzzles that are Lynch’s art do not reside here, but that’s fine, I’m not looking for answers. I just find him, the work, and his creative process fascinating and stimulating. If books are where I have to go to access that as well as the perspectives of his family members and creative collaborators, there are worse places to look. I mean, imagine being inside Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen fat suit.

Ray Bradbury and Attitude

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Photo by Alan Light

By now I’m sure you’ve heard that we lost one of the great titans of literature a few days ago: Ray Bradbury, the grand fabulist, visionary, prolific concoctor of enthusiastic, exuberant, far-sighted prose. Admittedly, I’ve read only a small fraction of his vast output, focusing on his longer works like Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Death Is A Lonely Business, but even so I can feel his influence, his imprint, in the skin of my own dark-fantastic stories.

As impacted by his fiction as I’ve been, however, it’s Bradbury’s nonfiction, specifically his collection of essays on writing known as Zen in the Art of Writing, that’s raising the hair on the back of my neck these days.

Because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about attitude. As in, how the right attitude about his work can usher a writer through the occasionally tumultuous and volatile terrain of story-telling. And how that attitude can carry-over and color his view of his life. To say Bradbury’s attitude toward both was ecstatic is certainly true, but still the word seems too meager to encompass the size of his passionate curiosity as a man of this world and a creator of “other-worlds” to be seen by our collective mind’s eye.

This passion is immediate, right there in the preface: “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it’s your turn. Jump!”

Throughout the essays in his book Bradbury implores writers to work with zeal and gusto. Joy. To first, be excited, to be a “thing of fevers and enthusiasms.” He poses these questions: “How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightening bolt? What are the best and worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”

There’s energy in these words, encouragement, and obviously some provocation, like a finger poking you in the chest a little too hard. But there’s also a deep sincerity here; I think it infuses every piece he’s ever written, and I find the mixture pretty intoxicating. Maybe that sounds a bit overheated, but this book affected me, and perhaps it’s because I broke it open at a moment in my writing when I needed to hear certain things said without equivocation.

Like this: “The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire too?”

Isn’t that what any writer wants to achieve?

And also this: To reach a point where “…you might easily find a new definition for Work. And the word is Love.”

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. It’s sad to say good bye, but thank you for the life you’ve led. No doubt you’ll lead one just as fantastic in the after…

On Influences – Tim Burton

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My parents were in town recently and we paid a visit to the Tim Burton exhibition at LACMA, which is a treasure-trove of his sketches, illustrations, paintings, and short films, as well as a collection of models, props and costumes from his various feature films. It’s abundantly clear the guy has always been bursting with dark, mischievous imagination, even from a very young age.

After getting a taste of Mr. Burton’s macabre aesthetic, and having read more than a few of my stories and scripts over the years, my dad sensed we might be kindred spirits and asked me if he’d been an influence. I answered with an unequivocal “Yes.”

I saw “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” when it opened in 1985 and enjoyed it, but it was “Beetlejuice” three years later that really made an impression on me. I’d never seen anything like it before, and it remains my favorite Burton film. Working from a brilliantly original screenplay by the late Michael McDowall and the late Warren Skarren (story by McDowall and Larry Wilson), Burton let loose his talent for mixing the morbid and the banal into something twisted and humorous, and yet somehow still tenderhearted, and created a world where the humans not the monsters are the real horror show.

Burton achieved similar results with “Edward Scissorhands” (scripted by Caroline Thompson, who also wrote the script for “The Nightmare Before Christmas”). One of its first images is of Edward’s home, a crumbling gothic manor on a hill overlooking a suburban neighborhood stocked with cookie-cutter houses painted in sickening pastels. Edward with his literal scissors for hands is brought into this society, and some people accept him, some people even love him, but ultimately the fear and prejudices of a vocal minority drive him back to the castle.

It’s these more personal, idiosyncratic projects that I respond to, more so than “Batman” or “Planet of the Apes” or “Alice in Wonderland.” However, for the record, I am a devoted fan of “Batman Returns,” in my opinion the weirdest and darkest studio summer film ever made. It’s obvious Warner Brothers took the leash off, and Burton and his collaborators delivered something more inspired and challenging than its predecessor. Absolutely not what most people were expecting. In an interview the film’s screenwriter Daniel Waters (another influence, his script for “Heathers” is exceptional) described people coming out of a screening looking like they’d just been punched in the face. Fantastic!

Although my stories are ultimately more sinister in tone than Burton’s, probably much closer to David Lynch territory in fact (another influence I’ll get to in a separate post), Burton’s influence is definitely present in the fairytale sequences I devised for my psychological thriller screenplay “The Wrinkleman,” and in the setting and characters in “The Creeps,” my horror-fantasy script about an orphan girl and a nightmare salesman. And we both share a general love for turning innocence on its ear, finding the humor in the grotesque, and placing our sympathies with the monster rather than the ordinary man.

Are you a Tim Burton fan? If you’re a writer, director, artist, etc., has he influenced or inspired you? What’s your favorite Burton film?