Then David Lynch’s Blue Velvet found me
It took my breath away. I was still busy with my soap opera adventures, but, dazzled by the film, I incubated the embryonic questions it begat in my brain until Twin Peaks appeared on ABC-TV and I suddenly knew that I had to write about Lynch. Through a combination of persistence and miracles, I found myself at his door and began a five-year process of interviewing him that resulted in The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (1997), and what looks to be my lifelong passion for his work. There will be a second book in due course, covering his work after 1997. Again, I was indebted to a great-hearted, imaginative editor. This editor, Jim Burr, of the University of Texas Press, has remained my friend, and I continue to work with him. Lynch and I have remained in contact, and in 2012 when he came to the New York Film Festival to show Inland Empire, we took time out to laugh about how long we’ve been talking.
Lynch’s unique and visionary use of the popular media changed my vision
What I learned from talking to him and from discussing his films in detail has inspired me to investigate unsuspected energy and innovation in sometimes surprising places in Hollywood movies and American television. These journeys have led me to question indiscriminate scholarly contempt for the phenomenon of the couple in American and international entertainment and to excavate the much misunderstood phenomenon of the screen gangster, in, respectively, and Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong (2007).