A Fly in the Life of David Lynch 

 

 

“This just isn’t working,” said the famous director, his typical composure beginning to strain with exasperation as take 34—unsuccessful as the previous thirty-three—had to be cut.

 

“I don’t know what we can do,” said Tobis, the A.D.  “Seems like we’ve tried everything.”

 

“Yeah, that syrup didn’t really do the trick, did it,” Lynch noted, rhetorically, referring to the attempt of daubing the dials on the TV set with corn syrup to try to attract the fly to the vicinity of the screen.

 

“Where is the fly now, anyhow…?” he asked suddenly, eyes dancing in mid air around him in an attempt to spot it.

 

“It’s around here somewhere….  We have plenty more where that came from.”

 

“No,” Lynch reminded him with pursed lips.  “It has to be this particular fly.  No others will do—so please, find it and keep it confined until we’re ready again.”

 

The A.D.’s assistant did as he was told without a demurrer.

 

“And remember,” Lynch added, calling after him, “the life span of a typical housefly at this temperature is 26 days, and we don’t know exactly how many days old Felix is.”

 

Everyone on set by now knew the pet name the famous director had given it.  Meanwhile, Lynch continued to sit in his chair with a pensive frown star-crossing his sincere blue eyes.  Those eyes, pooled within concentric rings of fried egg and age, and the crop of a kind of buzzcut Elvis do of high hair atop his head, indicated the gears in his mind were visibly grinding overtime for some kind of solution.  Tobis, as well as Rhonda Levine, his trusty talent coordinator, hovered nearby in case he had a thought or request or question.

 

“Isn’t there such a thing as a ‘fly wrangler’….” he wondered.  “Or a ‘fly whisperer’…?”

 

“Dana’s on the phone now to the scout at Warner Brothers trying to find out,” Tobis assured him.  “Someone did get in touch with a spider wrangler, the guy who worked on Arachnophobia back in 1990…”

 

“No, no, no!” Lynch raised his voice only minimally, still keeping his cool, yet firmly communicating his dissatisfaction.  “It has to be someone who knows flies inside and out…”

 

The scene they had spent all day on—since ten that morning, and now it was past eleven in the evening—was a quite simple scene in conception:  The camera trained on an old TV set in a darkened room, moving slowly closer and closer to it, while on the screen a close-up of a man looking irate and haggard, wearing a sweaty undershirt, shows him increasingly swiping and batting the air before his face, as if pestered by a fly.  It is then theoretically to become increasingly clear on the viewer that there is a fly—not in front of the man’s face in the TV show, but actually buzzing around the TV screen.  I.e., the TV character is being bothered by a fly in “real life” outside the TV.

 

However, for nearly ten hours now, all the director’s horses and all the director’s men had been unable to get one measly fly to perform as it was supposed to. 

 

“One measly fly…!” Lynch complained, holding the lit cigarette he hadn’t even taken a single draw from in the fingers of the same hand holding the styrofoam cup of black coffee he hadn’t sipped yet.  “Heavens to Betsy!”

 

Just then there was a minor commotion over by the scaffolding.  A stack of glossies fell off the rungs of a tall ladder that had been disturbed and scattered to the floor.

 

“I got him!” said one of the people Friday whose name nobody knew.  “I got the fly!”

 

“You do!?  Let’s see!”

 

And Tobis, who had been handed the jar by the nameless employee, hastened over to hold it up for Lynch’s inspection.

 

“Precious!” he exulted, blue eyes jittery with delight as he followed the fly’s zigzag attempts to escape the glass confines of the jar. “That’s my Felix! Absolutely precious!  Don’t let it out of your sight!”

 

Sharon Gertstein, who had been directly manning the phones on this problem, informed Rhonda that they had finally found a fly expert, and that he would be able to arrive within the hour.  She told Rhonda, who in turn told Lynch.

 

“Wunderbar!” he exclaimed in overjoyed relief.

 

“Should we stay up and running?” Tobis asked.

 

“Yes,” Lynch answered without hesitation.  “Call a general powwow to see if everyone can stay longer.”

 

“How much longer…?”

 

“Ohhh, say three hours, tops.  I think—if this fly wrangler is good—we should be able to wrap it by then.  How’s Bruce doing…?”

 

Lynch was referring to actor Bruce Boxleitner, who had been playing the irate man on the TV for the past ten hours from another set, off and on.

 

“He’s patched in,” Tobis said.  “He can hear you now.”

 

Lynch fixed his intently blue and watery eyes on something inconsequential before him as he addressed his star’s disembodied voice.

 

“Bruce?  Bruce…?”

 

“Yeah, Dave, I can hear you… what’s the word…?”

 

“Bruce, we have a ‘fly wrangler’ coming in soon—he’s going to take care of the fly and make sure it takes direction…”

 

Boxleitner’s laugh could be heard, crackling a bit from an intercom-type sound.

 

“Don’t you wish you had a wrangler for some actors…?” he intoned jokingly from beyond.

 

“Well,” Lynch smiled.  “Not for you!  I don’t need one for good actors like you!”

 

“I’ve only been here two days—just wait…!”

 

“You mean, ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch’…?”

 

“Exactly,” Bruce laughed again.

 

“Bruce, how are you holding up?  Do you think you can last another hour or two…?”

 

“Oh hell yeah—I can swat an imaginary fly until dawn if you need me to…!”

 

“God bless you, Bruce!  Tobis will let you know when we’re ready again.”

 

“All righty, David…”

 

When seventy-five minutes later Tito Schifrin (son of the well-known theme song composer Lalo Schifrin, of Mission Impossible theme fame) arrived, Lynch did not begrudge him being some fifteen minutes late.  He was only glad to have someone on hand, finally, who could begin to address the nodus of this thorny difficulty that had plagued this 17^th day of shooting of his new movie that, of course, had nothing to do with flies.

 

“Mr. Schifrin,” Lynch said, firmly taking his hand to grasp and shake after Tobis had ushered him in, “I cannot tell you how pleased as punch I am to see you…!”

 

“Call me Tito, please,” the youngish, vaguely Hispanic, half Slavic man said, returning the director’s vigorously warm clasp.  “And the pleasure is all mine, Mr. Lynch.  I’ve admired your work for years—I was particularly captivated by your use of Polish—my grandmother was a Polish Jew—in Inland Empire…”

 

“You are too kind, Tito—and please call me Dave.  Your father’s work as a composer greatly influenced me, I’ll have you know, especially his theme music for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.  An absolute classic!”

 

“Thank you so much.  He is by the way doing quite well for his age, and is happy in his retirement in Buenos Aires, at our family home…”

 

“Good to hear that.  Now, are you up for some fly-wrangling?  What do you say, Tito?”

 

“Show me the fly, and I will see what I can do!”

 

“Peachy keen!”

 

Tobis dutifully brought forth the jar in which the fly for now remained resting on the bottom.  Tito took it in his hands and brought his eye, peering bulbously from a fly-wrangler’s monocle, close to the glass to inspect it.

 

“Hmmm, so far so good.  The fly is middle-aged, not yet old and ready to die.”

 

“Yes…?” Lynch said hopefully, leaning forward in his director’s chair.

 

“Yes.  He still has life in him.”  He shook the jar ever so gently, to prod the fly into action, and it did flit about momentarily within its glassy confines.   

 

“It’s name is Felix,” Lynch said, sensing that Tito would understand, implicitly and perfectly.  And so he did.

 

“Felix,” the young fly-wrangler mused, the eye in his monocle growing fond. “All right, Dave!  Where do you want me to work?”

 

“Right over here, Tito.  Tobis, show Tito the screen.”

 

When Tito was brought to the television and let the fly out, Lynch walked over within proximity. 

 

“Let me know if I’m in the way, Tito…”

 

“No, Dave, you are fine,” Tito said, waving his arms like a classical symphony conductor as the fly oscillated back and forth or up and down.  “Tell me how you would like the fly to act.”

 

Lynch then proceeded to tell Tito in specific detail the entire choreography of how he envisioned the fly’s behavior for the three minutes and twenty-six seconds the scene was slated to last:  First flying in wide arcs to the left of the TV; then darting toward the TV on a tangent that increasingly crossed over to the space to its right; and finally zeroing in on the screen in ever-increasing intensity and delimitation.  For the last 81 seconds, it was to crawl on the screen itself, fly off, then re-alight, five times—each time lasting approximately ten seconds.

 

“One of those times—ideally the second to last—I need the fly to crawl on the screen right under where Bruce’s nose will be—someone call up Bruce please!”

 

And within seconds Bruce’s face appeared on the TV.

 

“Bruce,” Lynch called out to the air, “position your head at the 64-second mark, at the end zone, please…”

 

“Gotcha,” Bruce said, and like the professional he was, had his head exactly tilted as Lynch had scripted.  Of course, he had already done this 34 times today, not counting the five in rehearsal before that.

 

As Tito was jotting hasty notes into a tiny notebook, the fly perched on his shoulder, Lynch stepped back, only saying, “I’ll let you work your magic now.  Good luck and Godspeed!”

 

Within the hour, Tito Schifrin and his fly performed exactly to specifications, more than Lynch could have dreamed possible, and only three takes were necessary to get it just right.  At the end, Tito asked for a favor which he apologized must seem odd:

 

“I would like to keep the fly, if you don’t mind.  I always do that on these projects…”

 

“I understand perfectly,” Lynch said, with a madly earnest glint in his blue eyes.  “You’ve grown attached to it—to him—to Felix.”

 

“Yes,” Tito confessed, heartened to have someone appreciate his quirk.  “I have an album of all the flies I have worked with, pinned in amber.”

 

“Tito,” Lynch added, coming intensely close into Tito’s personal space, “I would very much like to see that album some time, if you would do me the great honor!”

 

“I in turn would be honored to do so, Dave!”

 

“Superb!  My people will contact your people for a luncheon at your convenience.  Thanks so much for your assistance today, Tito.  Happy trails!”

 

“Pożegnanie -- Życzę Wam wszystkiego najlepszego…!”

 

Lynch didn’t know what that meant, but he knew it was Polish.

 

“I’ll ask Gracie Zabriskie what that means next time I see her!”

 

While on his way out, Tito Schifrin saluted him with a doff of his hamburg hat.

 

* * * * *

A triplet of handclaps resounded—clap!clap!clap!—in a cavernous reverberation throughout the vast warehouse where they had been laboring into the wee hours.

 

“Okey-dokey!  Ladies and gentlemen!” Lynch announced to the loyal if exhausted crew. “That’s a wrap for today!  See you bright and early tomorrow!  Don’t let the bedbugs bite!”