David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, painter, musician, writer and actor.
His films led to him being labeled the first popular Surrealist by film critic Pauline Kael.
A recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and the César Award for Best Foreign Film twice, 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.
In 2007, a panel of critics convened by The Guardian announced that 'after all the discussion, no one could fault the conclusion that David Lynch is the most important film-maker of the current era', while AllMovie called him the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking.
Lynch initially studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977), became a success on the midnight movie circuit, and he followed that by directing The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), and Blue Velvet (1986).
Lynch next created his own television series with Mark Frost, the popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–91), which ran for two seasons. He also created the film prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), the road film Wild at Heart (1990), and the family film The Straight Story (1999) in the same period.
Turning further towards surrealist
filmmaking, three of his subsequent films operated on dream logic
non-linear narrative structures: Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive
(2001), and Inland Empire (2006).
More information: The Guardian
Lynch and Frost reunited in 2017 for a third season of Twin Peaks, which aired on Showtime. Lynch co-wrote and directed every episode, and reprised his onscreen role as Gordon Cole.
Lynch's other artistic endeavours include his work as a musician, encompassing the studio albums BlueBOB (2001), Crazy Clown Time (2011), and The Big Dream (2013), as well as music and sound design for a variety of his films (sometimes alongside collaborators Alan Splet, Dean Hurley, and/or Angelo Badalamenti); painting and photography; writing the books Images (1994), Catching the Big Fish (2006), Room to Dream (2018), and numerous other literary works; and directing several music videos (such as the video for Shot in the Back of the Head by Moby, who, in turn, directed a video for Lynch's The Big Dream) as well as advertisements, including the Dior promotional film Lady Blue Shanghai (2006).
An avid practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM), in 2005 he founded the David Lynch Foundation, which seeks to fund the teaching of TM in schools and has since widened its scope to other at-risk populations, including the homeless, veterans and refugees.
More information: David Lynch Foundation
David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. His father, Donald Walton Lynch (1915–2007), was a research scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and his mother, Edwina "Sunny" Lynch was an English language tutor.
Learning about the newly founded American Film Institute, which gave grants to filmmakers who could support their application with a prior work and a script for a new project, Lynch decided to send them a copy of The Alphabet along with a script he had written for a new short film that would be almost entirely live action, The Grandmother.
The Elephant Man's script, written by Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren, was based on a true story, that of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man in Victorian London, who was held in a sideshow but later taken under the care of a London surgeon, Frederick Treves.
Lynch wanted to make some alterations that would alter the story from true events but in his view make a better plot, but he needed Mel Brooks's permission, as Brooks's company, Brooksfilms, was responsible for production. Brooks viewed Eraserhead, and after coming out of the screening theatre, embraced Lynch, declaring, You're a madman! I love you! You're in.
The Elephant Man starred John Hurt as John Merrick, the name changed from Joseph, and Anthony Hopkins as Treves. Filming took place in London. Though surrealistic and in black and white, it has been called one of the most conventional of Lynch's films. The Elephant Man was a huge critical and commercial success, earning eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
He met the television producer Mark Frost, who had worked on such projects as Hill Street Blues, and they decided to start working together on a biopic of Marilyn Monroe based on Anthony Summers's book The Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, but it never got off the ground.
They went on to work on a comedy script, One Saliva Bubble, but that did not see completion either. While talking in a coffee shop, Lynch and Frost had the idea of a corpse washing up on a lakeshore, and went to work on their third project, initially called Northwest Passage but eventually Twin Peaks (1990–91).
A drama series set in a small Washington town where popular high school student Laura Palmer has been murdered, Twin Peaks featured FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) as the investigator trying to identify the killer, and discovering not only the murder's supernatural aspects but also many of the townsfolk's secrets; Lynch said, The project was to mix a police investigation with the ordinary lives of the characters.
Lynch approached ABC 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. But with $7 million from the French production company StudioCanal, Lynch completed the pilot as a film, Mulholland Drive. The film, a non-linear narrative surrealist tale of Hollywood's dark side, stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux.
More information: The Guardian
That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.
David Lynch
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