Something Really Wild

Good News in Hollywood

"David's changed since Blue Velvet," says Dern. "He said a lot less then. Now he's more excited and more verbal in his desires. Also, Blue Velvet was such a specific painting, and we were all specific symbols in his painting, and our purpose was to deliver what the script asked. With Wild at Heart, the script was 'here' and we got to journey and play till we got it 'there.' There was a lot more freedom."

What Dern's comments leave out is that the director who made Blue Velvet was coming back from the huge failure of Dune, a film so off in its totality that the majority of Lynch's admirers tend not to be able to watch it, much less defend it (they have perhaps not yet discovered that this painterly sci-fi plays just great if you turn the sound off and watch it as a silent picture). Lynch was on a relatively tight rein with De Laurentiis when he did Blue Velvet. By contrast, he came to Wild at Heart as the celebrated director of Blue Velvet, and he had a good deal of leeway. Wild at Heart went into production like lightning with a script that Lynch proceeded to rewrite substantially as he shot. And not only that, he shot a lot. He brought in a first cut that was some four hours long. After the early marketing screening (which quite a number of shocked folk walked out on), for which the film had been trimmed to about two hours and a half, he cut more scenes and then went out and shot more footage. "I don't think anything's finished till it's finished," he says.

The cliched ending to the story of a film that gets made the way Wild at Heart seems to have been made is that the final picture should be an uneven, self-indulgent, possibly intermittently effective but basically disappointing, if not outright terrible, film. But Wild at Heart is a cliche buster. And its early success, at Cannes and with critics, on top of the "Twin Peaks" coup, has Lynch's stock at a dizzying high. It's nice to see the odds defied. There's so little good news in Hollywood. Not that Lynch couldn't fall quickly from this elevation. It's possible that a big studio will come along and give him enough rope to hang himself. Or maybe the intuitive threads that make up the lifeline to his creativity will get tangled up in all the kudos-nobody in showbiz is immune to the dangers of massive amounts of praise. But maybe not. And maybe there's hope for Gregor Samsa on the big screen, if someone could just find a bug that will work with David Lynch for the right money.

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Virginia Campbell is co-editor of Movieline

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