Fact: in my three days here for Premiere magazine I will meet two (2) different people named Balloon.
The major industry around here seems to be valet parking; even some of the fast food restaurants here have valet parking; I’d love to have the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills concession on maroon valet sportcoats. A lot of the parking attendants have long complicated hair and look sort of like the Italian male model who’s on Harlequin Romance covers. In fact pretty much everybody on the street seems ridiculously good-looking. Everybody is also extremely well- and fashionably dressed; by the third day I figure out that the way to tell poor and homeless people is that they look like they dress off the rack. 17 The only even marginally ravaged-looking persons in view are the hard-faced Latin guys selling oranges out of grocery carts on whatever median strips aren’t already taken by cittern players. Supermodels can be seen running across four-lane roads against the light and getting honked at by people in fuchsia Saabs and tan Mercedeses.
And it’s true, the big stereotype: from any given vantage at any given time there are about four million cars to be seen on the roads, and none of them seems to be unwaxed. People here have got not only vanity license plates but vanity license-plate frames. And just about everybody talks on the phone as they drive; after a while you get the crazy but unshakable feeling that they’re all talking to each other, that whoever’s talking on the phone as they drive is talking to somebody else who’s driving.
On the first night’s return from the set, a Karmann-Ghia passed us on Mulholland with its headlights off and an older woman behind the wheel holding a paper plate between her teeth and still talking on a phone.
So the point is Lynch isn’t as out of his filmic element in LA as one might have initially feared.
Plus the location helps make this movie “personal” in a new way, because LA is where Lynch and his S.O., Ms. Mary Sweeney, 18 make their home. Corporate and technical headquarters for Asymmetrical Productions is the house right next door to theirs. Two houses down on the same street is the house Lynch has chosen to use for the home of Bill Pullman and brunette Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway’s first act. It’s a house that looks rather a lot like Lynch’s own, a house whose architecture could be called Spanish in roughly the same way Goya could be called Spanish.
A film’s director usually has a number of Assistant Directors, whose various responsibilities are firmly established by Hollywood convention. The First Assistant Director’s responsibility is the maximally smooth ordered flow of the set. He’s in charge of coordinating details, shouting for quiet on the set, worrying, and yelling at people and being disliked for it. This allows the director himself to be kind of a benign and unhassled monarch, occupied mostly with high-level creative concerns and popular with the crew in a kind of grandfatherly way. Lost Highway’s First Assistant Director is a veteran 1st A.D. named Scott Cameron, who wears khaki shorts and has stubble and is good-looking in a kind of unhappy way. 19 The Second Assistant Director is in charge of scheduling and is the person who makes up the daily Call Sheet, which outlines the day’s production schedule and says who has to show up where and when. There’s also a Second Second Assistant Director, 20 who’s in charge of interfacing with the actors and actresses and making sure their makeup and costumes are OK and going to summon them from their trailers when the stand-ins are done blocking off the positions and angles for a scene and everything’s ready for the first string to come on.
Part of the 2nd A.D.’s daily Call Sheet is a kind of charty-looking précis of the scenes to be shot that day; it’s called a “One Line Schedule” or “One Liner.” Here is what January 8’s One Liner looks like:
(1) Scs 112 INT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES /DAY/ 1 pgs
MR. EDDY21 DRIVES MERCEDES, PETE 22 LISTENS FOR CAR TROUBLE.
(2) Scs 113 EXT MULHOLLAND DRIVE /DAY/ ⅛ pgs
MR. EDDY TAKES THE CAR FOR A CRUISE, INFINITI MOVES UP FAST BEHIND THEM
(3) Scs 114 EXT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES /DAY/ ⅛ pgs
MR. EDDY LETS INFINITI PASS AND FORCES IT OFF ROAD
These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Griffith Park, a roughly Delaware-sized expanse out in the foothills of the Santa Monicas. Imagine a kind of semi-arid Yellowstone, full of ridges and buttes and spontaneous little landslides of dirt and gravel. Asymmetrical’s advance team has established what’s called a Base Camp of about a dozen trailers along one of the little roads between Mulholland and the San Diego Freeway, 23 and Security has blocked off areas of several other roads for the driving scenes, burly guys with walkie-talkies and roadie-black T-shirts forming barricades at various places to keep joggers and civilian drivers from intruding into the driving shots or exposing the production to insurance liability during stunts. LA civilians are easygoing about being turned back from the barricades and seem as blasé as New Yorkers about movies being filmed on their turf.
Griffith Park, though lovely in a kind of desiccated, lunar way, turns out to be a thoroughgoingly Lynchian filming environment, with perfu-sive sunshine and imported-beer-colored light but a weird kind of subliminal ominousness about it. This ominousness is hard to put a finger on or describe in any sensuous way. It turns out that there’s a warning out that day for a Santa Ana Wind, a strange weather phenomenon that causes fire hazards 24 and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion anxiety in man and beast alike. LA’s murder rate is apparently higher during Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it’s easy to confirm that something’s up atmospherically: sounds sound harsher, smells smell stronger, breathing tastes funny, the sunlight has a way of diffracting into spikes that penetrate all the way to the back of the skull, and overall there’s a weird leathery stillness to the air, the West-Coast equivalent of the odd aquarial stillness that tends to precede Midwestern thunderstorms. The air smells of sage and pine and dust and distant creosote. Wild mustard, yucca, sumac, and various grasses form a kind of five-o’clock shadow on the hillsides, and scrub oak and pine jut at unlikely angles, and some of the trees’ trunks are creepily curved and deformed, and there are also a lot of obstreperous weeds and things with thorns that discourage much hiking around. The texture of the site’s flora is basically that of a broom’s business end. A single red-tailed hawk circles overhead through the whole first day of shooting, just one hawk, and always the same circle, so that after a while the circle seemed etched. The road where the set is is like a kind of small canyon between a butte on one side and an outright cliff on the other. The cliff affords both a good place to study the choreography of the set and, in the other direction, a spectacular view of Hollywood to the right and to the left the S.F. Valley and the Santa Monicas and the distant sea’s little curved rind of blue. It’s hard to get straight on whether Asymmetrical chose this particular bit of Griffith Park or whether it was simply assigned to them by the LA office that grants location-licenses to movies, but it’s good tight cozy site. The whole thing forms a rough triangle, with the line of Base Camp trailers extending down one small road and the catering trailer and salad bars and picnic tables for lunch spread out along a perpendicular road and a hypotenusally-angled larger road between them that’s where the actual location set is; it’s the c2 road with the set that’s got the great hill and cliff for viewing.