The making of Eraserhead, long-time hit on the midnight circuit, is a story in itself. Tonight, director David Lynch and sound recordist and editor Alan Splet discuss the process by which this truly bizarre film was, so to speak, born. This is the first public presentation of the magnetic track mix of Eraserhead - far superior to the optically recorded track in general release.
Since making Eraserhead, David Lynch and Alan Splet again teamed up for The Elephant Man, which Pauline Kael hailed in The New Yorker as a film with “the power and some of the dream logic of a silent film, yet there are also wrenching, pulsating sounds....” Lynch is currently at work on a film version of Frank Herbert's “Dune,” with a budget set at $30 million. Alan Splet won an Academy Award for his work on Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion, and is currently Supervising Sound Editor on Ballard's Never Cry Wolf.

Eraserhead
“A dream of dark and troubling things” is the entire synopsis of Eraserhead provided by David Lynch, a man with an obvious flair for understatement. Eraserhead tells the story of Henry, a hapless hero, cursed with an unfortunate hairline, an innocence bordering on retardation, and a lonely life in the box-like apartment he shares with his radiator. Henry, however, does have a girlfriend, in a family way through means which neither can fathom, and the scene in which he must propose marriage is probably the most pregnant moment in film history. Their life together is filled with substance - every rubbery, liquidy, textured, nauseating substance one could possibly imagine - and Baby makes just one more. This genuine horror, which only a parent could love, finally drives Henry, a man of obsessive fantasies and awkward stasis, into action.
Eraserhead is not for the squeamish - precisely because every image evoked in this ingenious film is somehow all-too-familiar. It is, on the other hand, a treat for anyone who ever had inexplicably equivocal feelings about Los Angeles, where it was filmed at night. (Lynch states that his inspiration was Philadelphia, “decaying, degenerate, one of the sickest places in the world” (in Newsweek).)
Alan Splet produced some unique sound effects, described in Soho Weekly News: “The dialogue comes in clusters, and the rest of the soundtrack is filled with heightened industrial noises, steam, and assorted natural sounds that have been distorted.”