Pick Six Movies: S25E06:Wild at Heart
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[music, playing, a-chirping sound plays] And welcome.
To pick six movies.
The podcast for every season.
We pick eight themes, then we pick six movies related to that theme, then we pick one of those movies and give you some behind the scenes facts and stories about how and why the movie was made and then a full review to see if the movie has been done.
Then we repeat that process five more times every two weeks for a total of six picked movies.
Hence the title of this podcast Pick Six Movies.
I'm Chad Cooper, one of your hosts, and I will soon be joined by my lifelong friend and co-host, mr Bo Randolph.
This season's theme is Holiday Road, where we're discussing road trip movies, and this is the season finale, where we're going back for a heaping second helping of Nicholas Cage.
This time he's in a David Lynch movie, meaning that things are going to be weird on top of crazy inside a hurricane of insanity.
And what movie is capable of delivering such a force of unpredictable bat shittery while none other than Wild at Heart, easily one of the most romantically disturbing movies I've ever seen?
If you've never seen Wild at Heart, that's okay.
We'll take you by the hand and service your guide through Weirdsville Lynch, sa.
Let's say we get Mr Bo Randolph in here to set up this fever dream of a movie with a pleasant, albeit brief, history of the life of David Lynch and one of his most lynchian pieces of cinema, wild at Heart.
Then we'll talk about all of the totally bonkers stuff crammed into this movie and there is a lot of it, bo take it away the End.
Given that we have already broken our tradition of doing only bad movies this season on Pixx Movies, it seems only right we should break another.
Rather than wait until the end to hear from resident, deceased film critic, roger Ebert, let's hear from him right off the bat.
But first a little backstory.
In 1990, the subject of this episode, wild at Heart showed up at the Cannes Film Festival.
It was coming in hot, like we just finished the edit on this thing yesterday hot and yet it would go on to win the Palm D'Or, the grand prize for films it can.
When David Lynch climbed the podium to accept the award, there was a standing ovation.
There was also a healthy round of booing and jeering.
With that in mind, let's get to Ebert.
At the end of both Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart I was angry, he said, as if a clever con man had tried to put one over on me.
My taste is in the minority.
Blue Velvet was hailed as one of the best films of the decade.
Lynch's Twin Peaks is a cult hit on television.
Now comes Wild at Heart, which won the Palm D'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
Two great cheers and many booze.
Some of the latter from me.
There is something repulsive and manipulative about it and even its best scenes have the flavor of a kid in the schoolyard trying to show you pictures you don't feel like looking at.
It's a road picture with a 1950s T-Bird convertible as the chariot and lots of throwaway gags about Ripley's snake skin jacket his quote personal symbol of individuality.
End quote Cage does a conscious imitation of Presley in all of his dialogue and even bursts into song a couple of times.
I've seen the movie twice now.
I liked it less.
The second time you have to hand it to Ebert.
He knew what he liked and what he didn't.
And Ebert rarely liked Lynch.
He famously hated Blue Velvet and certainly Dune.
When reviewing Lost Highway, lynch's bizarre take on the OJ trial, ebert asked the rhetorical question is the joke on us?
And that's not the worst question to ask when talking about David Lynch.
His films can be challenging to say the least, but he's more curious because of other films in his catalog.
The Elephant man from 1981 was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and Lynch for Best Director, and it plays straight, not unlike the Straight Story, a film in which elderly lead actor Richard Farnsworth was nominated for an Oscar, and Lynch was nominated for numerous awards for his direction.
It's a bit maudlin, but nothing that could be classified as surreal.
Of that one, ebert said, quote the first time I saw the Straight Story I focused on the foreground and liked it.
The second time I focused on the background too and loved it.
The point is, david Lynch knows how to make a so-called normal movie.
He simply chooses not to.
In most cases he is, I would argue, an artist and as such his art is not for everyone.
In fact, sometimes it seems like he goes out of his way to be off-putting, but that's part of what makes Lynch Lynch.
But where did this screwball sensibility come from?
Some hippie commune?
Is he, gasp?
Perhaps European?
Actually, lynch was born in Missoula, montana, his folk, successful but not artistic per se.
His father worked as a scientist for the Department of Agriculture and his mother was an English language tutor.
He was even Presbyterian.
A few years after Lynch was born, he moved to the even less artsy-fartsy land of Idaho With his father's job.
The family was on the move a lot Washington State, north Carolina, back to Idaho, then Virginia.
Of this upbringing, lynch said my childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman building, backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees, middle America as it's supposed to be.
But on the cherry tree there's this pitch using out some black, some yellow and millions of red ants crawling all over it.
I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.
Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast.
He was an eagle scout and spent his 15th birthday in a Boy Scout uniform watching the inauguration of John F Kennedy.
While he was a bright kid, he had little interest in school.
Of that, lynch commented for me back then.
School was a crime against young people.
It destroyed the seeds of liberty.
The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude.
Now we get to the artistic bent of David Lynch.
From early goings he showed an interest in painting and wanted to pursue it as a career.
Encouraged by a Virginia friend of his father's who was a professional artist, he tried a couple of art schools but found no home there.
He wasn't challenged or inspired, and so Lynch took off with a friend to travel around Europe.
They had plans to train with an artist in Salzburg but found out he wasn't available when they arrived.
Disillusioned by this Wally, world-like rebuff, lynch and his pal returned to America.
After only two weeks he landed in Philadelphia where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
There he found a community and inspiration and a girlfriend, peggy Reavy, with whom he got up to the devil's business and so was sired Jennifer Lynch.
David did the proper thing and married Peggy.
They bought a 12 room house for $3,500 in Philly, which sounds crazy until you hear that it was in a very bad neighborhood, like people getting shot and the house being broken into repeatedly bad.
But if you want to trace the origins of Lynch's aesthetic, this is a pretty good place to start that journey.
Married, a baby, on the way, pursuing an art life and surrounded by the threat of violence and death, he made ends meet by printing engravings, but the artistic itch was always there.
He started putting out feelers for an animator.
Having been seized with the idea of seeing his paintings come to life and move, he finally bought his own cheap 16 millimeter camera and produced a short film called Six Men Getting Sick.
It tied for first prize in the school he was attending and he was commissioned to do an art installation for $1,000.
He bought a camera of his own, did some shooting, but when it came time to deliver, he realized the animation he created was garbage.
Thanks to a bum lens on this new camera, the guy who hired him, in a fit of 60s era good vibes, told him hey, take the leftover money, man, and just make something interesting.
And so he did.
The alphabet was made in 1968.
It was a blend of animation and live action in which a girl, played by Lynch's wife, peggy, scenes the alphabet to a series of pictures of horses and then dies by bleeding to death suddenly in bed.
Also, his daughter's crying was recorded and distorted for even more of an unsettling effect and played behind the film.
When asked about his inspiration for this nightmare, lynch said Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way.
So that's sort of what started the alphabet going.
The rest of it was just subconscious.
Ah, there you have it, the subconscious, truly the key to Lynch's career as an artist.
Let that it go, baby, and see what comes out the other side.
He tried his hand at some other shorts experimental, to be sure, but good.
And in 1971, he packed up the family and moved to Hollywood where he studied at the AFI Conservatory.
There he started work on a short called Garden Back but got pissed off about all the instructors telling him to lengthen it and change dialogue.
He was actually about to quit the school when one instructor intervened and said Lynch was one of their best students and too good to just up and quit.
Lynch said he would stay if all the instructors at the conservatory could keep their filthy mitts off.
Whatever it was he was gonna make, and so a racer head was born.
It took years for this movie to be made.
Lynch lived off grants for the film, loans from friends and a paper route he ran.
At the same time he and Peggy split up, but it seemed like it was a pleasant enough divorce, as those things go.
He remarried not long after, taking up with the sister of the guy he went to Europe with and kept after a racer head.
It was finally completed in 1976.
The film is the story of a guy named Henry, played by Lynch mainstay Jack Nance, who is tormented when his wife has a deformed baby and leaves it in his care.
Lynch called it my Philadelphia story, referencing his life there, with Peggy and Jennifer and the people being shot down the road.
It's bizarre, surreal, filled with imagery that's inexplicable and yet haunting.
There is something engaging about a racer head, even as it defies true understanding.
Stanley Kubrick, director of 2001 and the Shining maybe you've heard of him called it one of his favorite movies and is widely considered a landmark in cult cinema.
The film got Lynch some notoriety, not the least from a guy named Stuart Cornfield, an executive producer from Mel Brooks, director of Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles Maybe you've heard of him too.
Lynch wanted to make a movie about a three-foot guy with red hair and something to do with electricity called Ronnie Rocket, but Cornfield pointed out that Ronnie Rocket sounded like another cult movie and maybe Lynch would like to move up to the big league.
Cornfield said the words the elephant man and Lynch said I'm in.
Before he was hired, though, mel Brooks had to watch a racer head.
Here's the thing people who make movies love David Lynch.
He's like a comics comic or a musicians musician.
Even Steven Spielberg cast David Lynch in his recent movie, the Fablemen's, so when Brooks saw the movie, he came out of the screening, embraced Lynch and said you're a bad man, I love you, you're in.
As mentioned before, the elephant man is very mainstream.
It's also very good.
It was nominated for eight Oscars and it put Lynch on the map as a big time director.
You may have heard the story about David Lynch being offered return of the Jedi, and the elephant man is why it might make sense for him to get such an offer.
But Lynch thought return of the Jedi was a mess of a script and he isn't totally wrong about that and so he decided instead to do his own space opera, an adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi political epic Dune.
It's like he looked at Return of the Jedi and said I can make a bigger mess than that.
Dune had eluded adaptation for almost 20 years.
The guy who did another cult movie, el Topo, alejandro Yodorovsky, was famously going to do an adaptation before that fell apart and you should absolutely watch the documentary Yodorovsky's Dune if you've never seen it for more on that.
But Lynch had a hot hand, but his version and that of the studio were very different.
Because of notes, he said he began to make a series of compromises along the way that left him feeling a little uneasy about the quality of the film.
That uneasiness turned to outright frustration when he was told to cut the movie down to two hours from three and a half, which meant lopping off an hour in change and he was eventually shut out of the editing room completely.
The movie is a fascinating fiasco, but it was both commercially and critically unsuccessful.
Not surprising then that a guy like Lynch decided he was done with big studio movies for a while.
Side note there is an extended cut of Dune that was released for TV, adding back an hour of runtime and some new narration.
But Lynch hated that cut so much he did the old Alan Smithy nameswap as director thing and also changed the writing credit to Judas Booth, tipping his hat to two famous betrayers.
When he signed the deal for Dune, lynch also contracted to do two other movies for the producer.
One would be a never-developed sequel to Dune, assuming that that was going to be a big hit, and the other was a personal film, a movie called Blue Velvet.
Blue Velvet is maybe the purest example on film of Lynch's theme of the darkness lurking behind small town sweetness.
The main character, jeffrey, played by Kyle McLaughlin, finds a severed ear and becomes embroiled in a mystery with his would-be girlfriend, portrayed by a very young Laura Dern.
He discovers Dorothy, a lounge singer played by Isabella Rossellini, and the man who has kidnapped her husband and child, frank Booth, played with wild energy by Dennis Hopper.
It's dark and twisted and horrifying and was of course hated by Roger Ebert and loved by almost everyone else.
In fact, blue Velvet became Lynch's second best director nomination at that year's Oscars.
This run carried Lynch into the 90s, when he would meet TV producer Mark Frost, who was probably best known for Hill Street Blues.
The two of them conspired on a couple of failed projects before hitting on the idea of a girl washing up on a rocky shore wrapped in plastic found in the Pacific Northwest.
Abc picked the show up and Lynch and Frost created a landmark of television part satire, part thriller, part Lynchian weirdness.
It was, of course Twin Peaks.
The question who killed Laura Palmer became something of a cultural touchstone.
Whether you had seen the show or not, you knew about the log lady and Agent Dale Cooper and his love of coffee and pie.
The tale of Twin Peaks is its own twisted tale, but suffice to say that ABC was putting a lot of pressure on Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer, which was decidedly not the point of the show.
But Lynch gave in all the while removing himself further from the program due to his disillusionment with working with the ABC executives.
It was during this time he was given a book by a friend of his who wanted Lynch's take on the material that he was thinking of producing or maybe even directing.
Lynch asked what if I read it and wanna do it myself?
His pal told him to go ahead and make it.
Then the book was, of course, wild at Heart, the story of Sailor and Lula.
The author was a man named Barry Gifford who had grown up with a father and organized crime, and, if you're curious about that, he has a whole series of autobiographical works called the Roy Stories.
Wild at Heart is only the first of a series of novels about Sailor and Lula, though the first novel ends with the break-up scene at the end of the film, without any of the Wizard of Oz stuff to go along with it.
Lynch loved the book, though, and the violence and road trip elements really spoke to him.
Lynch called it just exactly the right thing at the right time.
He fell in love with the book after finishing the pilot for Twin Peaks.
At the same time, two other projects got caught up in a mess when his usual studio, the DeLorentis Entertainment Group, got gobbled up by Carol Coe.
The downside was this picture about finding love in hell was slated to start shooting in two weeks.
From the time all this production mess was resolved, which meant Lynch had to write the script in a week and get the party started.
To get the movie made, the first draft was deemed too dark and Lynch added a happy ending and some nods to the Wizard of Oz.
By his own admission, a rebel with a dream of the Wizard of Oz is kinda like a beautiful thing, and for the rebel Sailor, he had only one choice Nicolas Cage.
We've talked at length about Cage before, but the character of Sailor may be the closest to Cage's daring sense of cinematic adventure of any of his roles.
He is of course channeling Elvis Presley and even sings the Elvis songs himself or the soundtrack.
Cage also brought to the set the Snake Skin jacket, something he pitched to Lynch, who naturally ran with it.
In adapting the book, lynch invented some new characters, including the murderous middleman, mr Reindeer, and the scene in which Twin Peaks alum Sherilyn Finn is seen as a car crash victim.
But the movie lives and dies by the relationship between Cage's Sailor and Lula, as played by Laura Dern.
She'd worked with Lynch before, on Blue Velvet, you may recall, and this time around she'd also be working with her mother, diane Ladd, who plays Marietta Fortune in the film, her mother in the movie.
To create a bond, though, between Sailor and Lula, cage and Dern went on a road trip of their own, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for a weekend trip, a way for the pair to explore their characters.
What emerged from the trip was a sense that Sailor and Lula were essentially one person compliments to each other.
Where Sailor was raw and overly masculine, lula is the sexual feminine side.
And then the movie is filled out by Lynch regulars Harry Dean Stanton as the hapless detective, johnny Farragut, grace Zabrisky as Juana, one of a trio of Hitman that includes David Patrick Kelly as Drop Shadow, isabella Rossellini as Perdita, the daughter of Juana, crispin Glover, in an amazing cameo, as Cousin Dell, and Willem Defoe in a career sleazy performance as the Hitman, and Ledge Bobby Peru.
The movie was given a $10 million budget, and Lynch took the show on the road, filming in New Orleans and LA.
By all accounts, lynch runs a good set, and most of the actors he works with return for more.
Jack Nance, he of Eraser Head fame, still returns in Wild at Heart as a man with a story about a dog.
The end result was edited, however, shaving a couple of scenes that were deemed too erotic, including one in which Dern tells Cage to take a bite of Lula while sitting on his face and another where she orgasms while talking about being eviscerated by an animal.
You know Lynch stuff.
Also, some of the violence was trimmed, including the scene in which Harry Dean Stanton is tortured and another where Bobby Peru meets his unlikely end.
And because it was so violent, test screenings were bad.
At the first screening, 80 people left after the torture scene with Harry Dean Stanton.
That was eventually cut, but only after 100 walked out at the second screening.
And then came Cannes, where Roger Ebert led some jeers, but Lynch took home the palm door anyways.
After the buzz around the film grew, author Barry Gifford, who would later partner with Lynch to write Lost Highway, recalls being asked by reporters how he felt about the movie, clearly angling for the writer to stamp his feet about Lynch's changes Instead, gifford said this is wonderful, it's like a big, dark musical comedy.
When it hit theaters in the US, the movie nabbed about $15 million domestically, which isn't much, but it covered the budget, and critics were of course split, some saying it was genius.
Others like Ebert, saying Lynch veered into territory where his characters became quote so cartoony.
One is prone to address him more as theorist than director.
Re-evaluations have been kind to the movie, though, and I would argue that this represents Lynch at his most daring and creative.
A preview has Lynch set off on one of his most fascinating periods of creativity, including Lost Highway, mulholland Drive and what I argue is his best film, twin Peaks.
Firewalk with Me.
But that, ladies and gentlemen, is a tale for another day.
Now let's get chat out a PD Corrational Institute and take one more road trip into a whirlwind of Elvis Oz and some incredible cage.
Ladies and gentlemen, sailors and lulas, it's 1990s, wild at heart, music, and welcome back to another episode of Pick Six Movies.
My name is Beau.
I am one of your hosts on this road trip in the hell.
With me, as ever is the lula to my sailor.
And where's always an outfit that shows off his nipples.
Yes, the beloved Chad Cooper, they're perky.
They point up and they say hello, yeah, that's what my daddy always said he liked.
I'm very interested in discussing this movie with you because it is truly unlike anything we have ever discussed on this podcast and we have reviewed a lot of movies.
I feel that Wild at Heart is, dare I say, more artistic than any film we've ever reviewed.
Yes, I dare do say that, beau.
Yeah, I think that's accurate, but we've never talked about David Lynch to this degree Not directly and Lynch is somebody that can absolutely do a line drive down the middle if he wants to like straight story and even a lot of Twin Peaks is not as weird as people give a credit for until you get into like that third season, that and straight story and Elephant man and he's done some documentaries and things like that but he's also a first-class artistic weirdo.
Absolutely.
This movie is like a club that Stefan would describe on SNL Weekend Update.
This movie's got it all Nicholas Cage, laura Dern, the Wicked Witch of the West, underwear, cockroaches, manslaughter, obese ladies in lingerie, rape, bad oral hygiene, exploding heads and pantyhose, abortion, an old man with a vacuum cleaner, elvis impressions, voodoo, leg braces, car crashes, isabella Rosalini's carpet vomit, homophobia, silver dollars and lap dances while you shit.
All of that is 100% accurate.
And that's not all.
There was so much more that I could have added to that.
Every bit of that's in here.
None of that is an exaggeration.
All of those things are included in this movie, which is sort of what makes it wonderful.
Like I get why people don't like this version of Lynch.
I don't think I liked this movie.
I get that.
You know what this movie reminded me of.
It reminded me of that time that you and I and a few of the other vagrants that we grew up with, when we went to the local county fair in Bug Tussle, america, right, and there was a trailer that said you could come in and you could see these Haitian pygmies or something like this, and we were like just idiot teenagers and we were like, oh my God, we totally got to do this.
So we paid our two bucks, went in this trailer and then they pulled back this curtain to show these two little people that played a guitar and started howling music and it went from this is going to be entertaining and fun to this is one of the most disturbingly sad things that I will remember for the rest of my life.
Yeah, that's how I feel about Wild at Heart, because when you hear about it on the surface of a movie with Elvis impressions and Wizard of Oz imagery and it's David Lynch being wacky and goofy and you're like this will be a pretty good time and seriously, 60 seconds into the film, it's like oh no that's the thing about this movie is it's a real roller coaster ride for me.
I don't dispute that at all.
Like you said, it begins with this scene of incredible violence and then gets kind of goofy and then gets really dark and sexually disturbing and then it gets goofy again and then it gets super violent again and then it just gets weird and then goofy again and it goes all over the place.
But that's I think, if I'm defending Lynch and I kind of am in this situation, it follows the idea of a road trip with a lot of destinations along the way and I think you end up in a happy place, but along the way you're going to see some really sick shit.
It had been decades since you or I had seen this movie and I can take.
For some reason in my head, this movie got mashed up with true romance, oh yeah, and the movies kind of follow some of the same beats, and true romance came out, I think, three years after this and it just made me wonder if Tarantino was directly influenced by this movie when writing true romance.
I wouldn't be surprised.
As I said in the introduction, lynch tends to be the director that a lot of directors love.
Yeah, because he kind of puts it all on the field.
I also got this movie a little bit mashed up with Raising Arizona.
Not the plot of it, but Nicholas Cage's performance in this.
I don't know how many months away it was from when he filmed Raising Arizona, but there are whiffs of HI McDonough in this character.
HI McDonough is a little more slapsticky than this character and a little more innocent, even though, I would argue, sailor is not a bad guy.
He's kind of a low level crook at worst, and even though he banse lauders.
HI McDonough never split somebody's head open like a pumpkin.
Well, that's true, Right, I don't think he ever had any malice in his heart.
But again, in both of these movies we do rob a feed store and we do wear pantyhose on our heads to comedic effect.
This is true, there's a lot of like crisscross.
And again in my head I was like is that what happens here?
Is that what happens there?
And it was interesting to go in and tease out, because I truly thought at the end of this movie that Elvis Presley is who wakes up, Sailor.
And then I was like, oh shit, no, it's the other one.
Yeah, that's true.
There are moments in this movie, though, that I find so endearing, and one of them is the story we'll get to it, but you know the story about Cousin Dell and Nicholas Cage's reaction of oh hell, peanut.
Yeah.
As that story is, we told, it's still one of the funnier things I think I've ever seen in a movie.
It really makes me laugh.
One thing I think that's important to touch on is the time period in which this movie came out, because this was really at the forefront of this rise of the independent filmmaker.
Like Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival was this thing, and you had, like, people like Sotterberg with Sex Lies and Video Tape, and Gus Van Sant with my own private Idaho, and even people like Spike Lee or the Coen Brothers or Kevin Smith or Jane Campion.
There was this track of getting films into theaters, where you went to these small festivals and then studios would come in and scoop up movies and then throw some marketing dollars behind them and then they would get some real notoriety, and then it was almost like the independent filmmaker became a brand in and of themselves.
Tarantino is a perfect example that it was this person's next film and, even more so than the movie itself, that audiences were going to see what these new artists were creating, and I don't think that that exists in the world today at all.
I mean, you have movies like Moonlight and Lady Bird, things like that, where it almost feels like big independent studios like A24 or the things like that are putting these movies out.
It was a very different time where you could make a freaky, weird movie like this and then be able to find the fast track to getting it into theaters in small town America.
This is a movie that would end up on streaming today.
And get lost in all the noise of streaming.
Absolutely.
I think that with all of the noise in the world of streaming, not that I need someone to curate movies and tell me what's good or bad, but I need someone to curate movies and tell me what's good or bad, Like if a studio is going to come in and say, hey, this is a quality film, there is buzz about this movie, there's something here worth seeing.
Then you put some dollars and you begin to market it.
I think just putting it on streaming and like, oh, the audience will find it, that doesn't work.
