Issues
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Out of the Ashes: Life after the Fires
Los Angeles after the January 2025 fires
The first few days of 2025, I had been asking myself if this would be the year that Sarah—a film I’ve been making for 12 years, about a girl I met when I was making my second feature, Rich Hill—would… Read more
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From Shadows: What It Means to Love David Lynch
With David Lynch’s passing comes a reminder that, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, the “things that we love tell us what we are.” How simple, how direct, how naturally right this sounds on its face—yet scratch the surface and, whoa, you may find a huddle of rapacious black beetles tearing the hell out of each other. Explain that as a “thing that you love” to your grandmother—which I did, or tried to, during the summer break of my junior year at college, and would have had she not said almost to herself, during the Frank-ritualistically-raping-Dorothy scene, “I don’t know […]
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Out Ahead: The Anti-Convention of David Lynch’s Screenwriting
When I’ve taught screenwriting workshops I’ve been fond of reminding beginning screenwriters that Warner Brothers put David Lynch’s screenplay for Blue Velvet into turnaround in a day by with the terse comment, “The worst script ever submitted to us.” Presumably, the script was read by professionals. What had so offended them? What was so insufferable? Well, I tell my students, according to Robert McKee’s rules about a “well-made” object, the reader’s report was correct: The script is incompetent if you evaluate a script on how carefully and cleverly it adheres to how people expect stories to be told, or how much it adheres to the laudable values of plausibility, recognizability and […]
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Deadly Outpost: Flying Lotus on Ash
With 2017’s Kuso, the first feature from polymath Steve Ellison (a.k.a. musician Flying Lotus, a.k.a. rapper Captain Murphy), a respectable claim is made to the title of history’s most disgusting commercially released film, with such amusements as vomit baths, sentient wart coitus and a large talking cockroach residing in the prolapsed anus of funk godhead George Clinton. Ellison’s comparatively dialed-back followup Ash restricts itself to a combustible head, giving Scanners a run for its money, faces that liquefy like so many crayons under a blowtorch and a malevolent amoeba extracted from a waking patient’s skull via robo-surgery—without anesthetic. Any maturation […]
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Editor’s Letter
One of my earliest memories is visiting my grandmother in the small town of De Soto, Wis. I remember being fixated on the appliance providing the air that supported her emphysema, a shiny, alien-like oxygen tank squatting in her living room. The lingering vision of that corner of midwestern space—it’s not indirect enough to be what Freud called a screen memory, an anodyne remembrance obscuring something more traumatic. But the fact that I emotionally, viscerally reacted to the news last August that David Lynch was housebound with that disease and on supplemental oxygen, indicates that maybe it did function that […]
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Frequent Flying: Location Shooting in 2025
Carson Lund understood choosing rural New England for his directorial debut, Eephus, would be an unorthodox experience, but he couldn’t have predicted that securing a dream location would find him pitching an intimate town meeting on a Tuesday night. Eephus takes place over the course of the last amateur “Fall ball” baseball game on an old field before a new school is built on the site. Using Google Earth satellite view and following up in-person if a field looked promising, Lund estimates he visited upwards of 100 baseball fields across New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. Often, he was disappointed to […]
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City of Moods: David Lynch and Los Angeles
My initial encounter with David Lynch was in the form of Maxell T-120 videocassettes, hand-labeled with my mother’s impeccable penmanship to indicate which episodes of Twin Peaks were contained. I was five when the pilot of Lynch’s series premiered on ABC, and it was canceled before I finished first grade. I never had the nerve to pop one of those tapes in the VCR, and so, filed in faux woodgrain VHS cabinets next to other recorded-from-television fare, these tapes remained untouched. I grew up in the long shadow cast by downtown Los Angeles, and trips into the city were infrequent: […]
