Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
The New Yorker has published an excerpt from Dennis Lim‘s upcoming book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place:
One of the first video recordings of a David Lynch interview dates from 1979. The twenty-minute black-and-white segment was produced for a television course at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conducted in the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the locations that constituted the barren wasteland of his first feature, “Eraserhead” (1977). This was the moment of Lynch’s first brush with cult fame: “Eraserhead” was a year into its three-year run as a midnight movie at the Nuart Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard. Against a backdrop of hulking tanks and rusted pipes, an eager student reporter named Tom Christie directs questions to Lynch and his cinematographer, Frederick Elmes. The thirty-three-year-old Lynch, in a voice so flat and nasal it verges on cartoonish, enthuses about all the “neat areas…down in the tanks,” explaining that he found the location while driving by one day: “I think this place is beautiful, if you look at it right.” He directs the camera’s attention to a blotch on the ground: the remains of a cat, procured from a veterinarian for use in the film, that “got covered in tar and preserved itself.”
In a related video, watch Justin Theroux discuss the magical mysteries of David Lynch for Criterion‘s Mulholland Drive release:
Rolling Stone‘s David Ehrlich on the 13 horror filmmakers you need to know:
Imagine if Jason Reitman had followed Juno with The Shining. That’s the best comparison you could come up David Robert Mitchell’s progression from directing a micro-budget teen flick The Myth of the American Sleepover to making It Follows (2014), a movie that opens with a frantic young woman being savagely murdered by an invisible monster. The story of a sexually transmitted entity that slowly (but relentlessly) stalks its target until they pass the bulls-eye onto someone else, the film is a clever allegory for the threat of getting an STD, the isolation of having one, and the fear of passing it along. Those anxieties that plague you in high school, the ones Mitchell so vividly revisited in his first movie? Yeah, it turns out they never go away.
Watch Edgar Wright, Common, and more discuss the first movie that scared them:
The Verge‘s Keith Phipps on how misfits lost the midnight movie:
It’s midnight in Hobart, Indiana, and the auditorium of the cozy, single-screen Art Theatre is echoing with the sounds of cartoon characters in the throes of passion. One orgasm follows another — first Marge Simpson then Bugs Bunny — as first-time attendees to the Art’s weekly screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show go through a variation on a ritual that’s taken place for nearly 40 years: the hazing of the “virgins.” (Virgins under 18 get off the hook this particular night, due to the risqué nature of the initiation.) It’s not a packed house, but it’s lively as about 35 attendees, many of them regulars, file in and wait for the show to start, both on the screen and off.
Watch a video essay on Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s cinema of penance:
At Film Comment, Martin Scorsese talks film preservation:
Yes. I saw this film [Heaven Can Wait] in the original studio nitrate print. If you see nitrate on a big screen, there is a difference from “safety film.” This goes off the subject a bit, but I was talking about projecting a certain classic film off of a Blu-ray on a big screen for young people who are 13 or 14 years old. The impact, if it has any, is still the same, but it’s not a film experience. It’s a different kind of experience, and I think it’s akin to the difference between nitrate film and the celluloid that we’ve known for the past 50 years or so.
Listen to Guy Maddin discuss Roy Andersson: