Premiere magazine, which published from 1987-2007, offered first-rate reporting about the movie industry for a good, long time, until corporate interference reduced it and destroyed it. One of its last gasps of greatness was “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” David Foster Wallace’s 1996 on set-reportage about the mystifying filmmaker as he made the equally inscrutable Lost Highway. An excerpt:

“The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. This is on 8 January in L.A.’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. He is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the base camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take to run down the base camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first (and generally representative) sight of Lynch is from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public, (though I never did see anybody else relieving themselves on the set again, Lynch really was exponentially busier than everybody else.) and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.”

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Trailer for Lost Highway:

More David Foster Wallace posts:

• David Foster Wallace survives luxury cruises–if barely.

• David Foster Wallace considers lobster.