Blue Velvet
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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 […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Mar 18, 2025 -
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 […]
by Larry Gross on Mar 18, 2025 -
Editor Duwayne Dunham on Collaborating with David Lynch on Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks
Five years after the Music Box Theatre’s previous David Lynch retrospective coincided with the television premiere of the highly anticipated Twin Peaks: The Return, the Chicago-based arthouse now presents David Lynch: A Complete Retrospective – The Return, a week-long celebration of Lynch’s work that also pays tribute to his many collaborators, friends and, in one particular instance, offspring. Running through April 14th, the retrospective also includes several in-person appearances, one being from Duwayne Dunham, Lynch’s editor on Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return. An industry veteran who has continued to work extensively for both Lynch and […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 12, 2022 -
DOC NYC 2017: Peter Braatz on Blue Velvet Revisited
The past year has proven to be a uniquely rewarding time for David Lynch obsessives, with the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks being the obvious highlight, but also marked by recent Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD special editions of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the new documentary, David Lynch: the Art Life, focused on Lynch’s painting roots. However, one of the most fascinating Lynch-related features in recent memory has yet to receive the widespread U.S. exposure it richly deserves, and it reflects back to a more traditionally structured Lynch favorite (indeed, still the film that some cite as his key work) that those […]
by Travis Crawford on Nov 14, 2017 -
Behind-the-Scenes Blue Velvet Footage in Blue Velvet Revisited
Last August we posted the trailer for the reissue of Peter Bratz’s Blue Velvet Revisited, a feature-length, Super 8 documentary on the making of David Lynch’s classic with a new score by Tuxedomoon and Cult with No Name. The footage in that trailer consisted on square, black-and-white video. Now, not one but two new teasers have been posted online with restored, color-corrected footage that reveals the full range of the film, including strange, behind-the-scenes moments, interview footage with Lynch, and the director in a nicely starched shirt buttoned up to the collar. For more on Blue Velvet Revisited, check out […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 14, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Blue Velvet Revisited, Directed by Peter Braatz
Marking the David Lynch film’s 30th Anniversary, this Fall will see the release of Peter Braatz’s Blue Velvet Revisited, a feature-length documentary consisting of Super 8 footage the director shot on the North Carolina set of Blue Velvet. Braatz previously made a short film out of this material, No Frank in Lumberton, but now he’s pulled out all the stops, commissioning a brand-new soundtrack that excites me just as much as this footage does. That soundtrack, featuring new work recorded in 2015 by Tuxedomoon, Cult with No Name and John Foxx, is already available for pre-order on Amazon and iTunes. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2015 -
David Lynch and Patti Smith Talk Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and More on the BBC
David Lynch can be a tough interview — check out my attempt back in 2001. Patti Smith does a bit better in this joint interview on the BBC2 Newnight’s Encounters series. They both discuss their memories first hearing the song “Blue Velvet,” and Smith’s reflexive lyricism brings out something allied in Lynch. Check it out.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 21, 2014 -
Watching Blue Velvet in the Land of Borges
In Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The South” the narrator notes that “every Argentine knows that the South begins at the other side of Rivadavia.” And this is where I found myself last month, in a city called Mar Del Plata, for the 27th Mar Del Plata Film Festival, hundreds of miles south of Buenos Aires, where I had been invited by Pablo Conde to attend the book launch of a Spanish translation of The Blue Velvet Project, which originally appeared here at Filmmaker from August 2011 to August 2012. Where I was, among generous, film-loving people, everything hovered on the […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Nov 29, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project Goes to Mar Del Plata
Some of the best writing we’ve ever published has been Nicholas Rombes’ Blue Velvet Project, a year-long survey of David Lynch’s classic, done solely through the examination of single frames spaced at 47 second intervals. The series wrapped up a couple of months ago, and I’ve been missing it. The Project carries on, however, landing this week at the 27th Mar Del Plata Festival in Argentina. Each year, the festival publishes one book about cinema, and this year’s is, you guessed it, El Proyecto Terciopelo Azul. In the photo above, Rombes signs copies for festival attendees. I’m excited for him […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2012 -
“Blue Velvet Project” Creator Nicholas Rombes
One year ago, Nicholas Rombes proposed “The Blue Velvet Project” to me at Filmmaker. For 12 months, three times a week, he would scrutinize a single frame from David Lynch’s modern classic, looking both inside and outside of its aspect ratio for correspondences, allusions and meanings. For Rombes, it would be another in his “time-based” critical film essays — appropriately so, for it was because of another of these columns, 10/40/70 at The Rumpus, that I discovered his writing in the first place. (In fact, I interviewed him previously about this other fascinating project.) Nick had contributed to Filmmaker before […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 17, 2012
