fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.]] An alphabet is a standardized set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable. Alphabets are classified according to how they indicate vowels:

the same way as consonants, as in Greek (true alphabet)

diacritics or modification of consonants, as in Hindi (Devanāgarī: हिन्दी ) (abugida)

not at all, as in Phoenician (abjad)

The word "alphabet" came into Middle English from the Late Latin word Alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Ancient Greek Αλφάβητος Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and meant ox and house respectively. There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most common being Latin, deriving from the first true alphabet, Greek. Most of them are composed of lines (linear writing); notable exceptions are Braille, fingerspelling (Sign language), and Morse code.

History

Middle Eastern Scripts

, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts]] The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs which are called uniliterals, to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. Others suggest the alphabet was developed in central Egypt during the 15th century BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" before ca. 1050 BCE. The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These vowelless alphabets are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.The omission of vowels was not a satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants were used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable.(matres lectionis).These had dual function since they were also used as pure consonants.

The Proto-Sinatic or Proto Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenecian script was probably the first phonemic script and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.

The script was spread by the Phoenicians, across the Mediterranean. in 1443. Understanding of the phonetic alphabet of Mongolian Phagspa script aided the creation of a phonetic script suited to the spoken Korean language. Mongolian Phagspa script was in turn derived from the Brahmi script. Hangul is a unique alphabet in a variety of ways: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like widened mouth, L sound to look like tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the time; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed script writing (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).

On December 13, 1984, Sir Charles Bessinger discovered a series of written script symbols that had been etched into granite stones that had been iced over and preserved for an expected 3500 years. The Stones of Yai-Beng, as they are referred to, were found on the border of present day Nepal and China within 20 kilometers of Xi Tao. No pronunciation was ever brought forward and no derivable meaning either. On May 21, 1992, a troop of Uzbekistani bandits stole The Stones of Yai-Beng along with several other artifacts as they made their way to Germany for an exhibition.

Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is a semi-syllabary used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited, but it's still widely used in Taiwan where the Republic of China still governs. Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; rather, each possible final (excluding the medial glide) is represented by its own symbol. For example, luan is represented as ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an), where the last symbol ㄢ represents the entire final -an. While Zhuyin is not used as a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system that is, for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cell phones.

European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur).

Types

[[File:800px-Writing systems worldwide1.png|500px|thumb|Alphabets:

 Armenian ,  Cyrillic ,  Georgian ,  Greek ,  Latin ,  Latin (and Arabic ),  Latin and Cyrillic  Abjads:  Arabic ,  Hebrew  Abugidas:  North Indic ,  South Indic ,  Ge'ez ,  Tāna   Canadian Syllabic and Latin  Logographic+syllabic:  Pure logographic ,  Mixed logographic and syllabaries ,  Featural-alphabetic syllabary + limited logographic   Featural-alphabetic syllabary  ]]

The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic).

Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas are used to write Tigrinya Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant which is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. (In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a separate glyph.)

All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is basically an abjad, but has syllabic letters for . (These are the only time vowels are indicated.) Cyrillic is basically a true alphabet, but has syllabic letters for (я, е, ю); Coptic has a letter for . Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels.

The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a was not written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the Tigrinya abugida and the Amharic abugida (ironically, the original source of the term "abugida") have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic. (See below.)

Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone, though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas; in Zhuyin not only is one of the tones unmarked, but there is a diacritic to indicate lack of tone, like the virama of Indic.

The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been conflated that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, or j. However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole that is, they had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic. The alphabet in the polish language contains 32 letters.

The largest segmental script is probably an abugida, Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the khutma letters (letters with a dot added) to represent sounds from Persian and English.

The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz (for Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the Latin alphabet), with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with ch and ll until recently, or uses diacritics like Slovak č. The largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent is probably Georgian, with 41 letters.

Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs (though the Múra-Pirahã language of Brazil would require only 24 if it did not denote tone, and Rotokas would require only 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.

Alphabetic order

It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet. French uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can carry additional marks, such as é, à, and ô. In French, these combinations are not considered to be additional letters. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered to be distinct letters of the alphabet. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were also considered single letters, but in 1994 the Real Academia Española changed collating order so that ll is between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch is between cg and ci, and in 2010 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed it so they were no longer letters at all

In German, words starting with sch- (constituting the German phoneme ) would be intercalated between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of this graphic cluster appearing after the letter s, as though it were a single letter – a lexicographical policy which would be de rigueur in a dictionary of Albanian, i.e. dh-, gj-, ll-, rr-, th-, xh- and zh- (all representing phonemes and considered separate single letters) would follow the letters d, g, l, n, r, t, x and z respectively. Nor is, in a dictionary of English, the lexical section with initial th- reserved a place after the letter t, but is inserted between te- and ti-. German words with umlaut would further be alphabetized as if there were no umlaut at all – contrary to Turkish which allegedly adopted the German graphemes ö and ü, and where a word like tüfek, "gun", would come after tuz, "salt", in the dictionary.

The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ – ø – å, whereas the Swedish, Finnish and Estonian ones conventionally put å – ä – ö at the end.

Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words.

It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BCE preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic. Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.

The historical order was abandoned in Runic and Arabic, although Arabic retains the traditional "abjadi order" for numbering.

The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India use a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they are produced in the mouth. This organization is used in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.

The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter is associated with a word that begins with that sound, continue to be used in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek. However, they were abandoned in Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin.

Orthography and spelling

Each language may establish rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling.

However, languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.

Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways: A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tesseragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme and "dsch" for , although the latter is rare. Kabardian also uses a tesseragraph for one of its phonemes. A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or combinations of letters. An example is modern Greek which may write the phoneme in six different ways: ‹ι›, ‹η›, ‹υ›, ‹ει›, ‹οι› and ‹υι› (although the last is very rare).

A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons. For example, the spelling of the Thai word for "beer" [เบียร์] retains a letter for the final consonant 'r' present in the English word it was borrowed from, but silences it. Otherwise, according to Thai pronunciation rules, the word might be pronounced more like "bean."

Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence (sandhi).

Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.

A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items, such as the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries, or the various rules in English for spelling words from Latin and Greek, or the original Germanic vocabulary.

National languages generally elect to address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However, with an international language with wide variations in its dialects, such as English, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet.

Some national languages like Finnish, Turkish and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Strictly speaking, there is no word in the Finnish, Turkish and Bulgarian languages corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is almost never needed: each phoneme of Standard Italian is represented in only one way. However, pronunciation cannot always be predicted from spelling in cases of irregular syllabic stress. In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.

At the other extreme, are languages such as English, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not correspond to sounds in a consistent way. For English, this is partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. Even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.

Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet.

The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the International Phonetic Alphabet.

See also

ABC-DEF-GHI

Abecedarium

Acrophony

Akshara

Alphabet Effect

Alphabet song

Alphabetical order

Alphabetize

Butterfly Alphabet

Character encoding

Constructed script

Cyrillic alphabet

English alphabet

Hangul

ICAO spelling alphabet

Lipogram

List of alphabets

Pangram

Thai script

Transliteration

Unicode

References

Bibliography

— (Overview of modern and some ancient writing systems). —(Chapter 3 traces and summarizes the invention of alphabetic writing).

McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373–383

Powell, Barry B. 2009. Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-14051-6256-2

— Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing

External links

The Origins of abc

Damqātum 3 "Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico" (2007)

Alphabetic Writing Systems

Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe

Evolution of alphabets, animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland

How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Biblical Archaeology Review

Category:Documents Category:Orthography

Name	Richard Pryor
Caption	Richard Pryor, February 1986
Birth name	Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III
Birth date	December 01, 1940
Birth place	Peoria, Illinois, United States
Death date	December 10, 2005
Death place	Encino, California, United States
Medium	Stand-up, film, television
Active	1958–1999
Genre	Satire, observational comedy, black comedy, Improvisational comedy, character comedy
Subject	Racism, race relations, United States politics, African-American culture, human sexuality, self-deprecation, everyday life, recreational drug use
Influences	Lenny Bruce, Jack Benny, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, Redd Foxx, Paul Mooney
Influenced	George Carlin, Martin Lawrence, George Lopez, Denis Leary, Eddie Izzard, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Bill Hicks, Robin Williams, Colin Quinn, Bernie Mac, Patton Oswalt Artie Lange, and Jim Norton
Notable work	That Nigger's Crazy Bicentennial Nigger Himself in and Zeke Brown in Blue Collar
Spouse	Patricia Price (1960–1961) Shelley R. Bonus (1968–1969) Deborah McGuire (1977–1978) Jennifer Lee (1979–1982) Flynn Belaine (1986–1987) Flynn Belaine (1990–1991) Jennifer Lee (2001–2005)
Website	RichardPryor.com

}}

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III (December 1, 1940 – December 10, 2005) was an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer and MC. Pryor was known for uncompromising examinations of racism and topical contemporary issues, which employed colorful, vulgar and profane language, as well as racial epithets. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style. He is widely regarded as one of the most important stand-up comedians: Jerry Seinfeld called Pryor "The Picasso of our profession"; Bob Newhart has called Pryor "the seminal comedian of the last 50 years."

His body of work includes the concert movies and recordings (1971), That Nigger's Crazy (1974), ...Is It Something I Said? (1975), Bicentennial Nigger (1976), (1979), (1982), and (1983). He also starred in numerous films as an actor, such as Superman III (1983) but was usually in comedies such as Silver Streak (1976), and occasionally in dramatic roles, such as Paul Schrader's film Blue Collar (1978). He collaborated on many projects with actor Gene Wilder.

Pryor won an Emmy Award in 1973, and five Grammy Awards in 1974, 1975, 1976, 1981, and 1982. In 1974, he also won two American Academy of Humor awards and the Writers Guild of America Award.

Pryor is listed at number one on Comedy Central's list of all-time greatest stand-up comedians.

Life and career

Early life

Born in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor grew up in his grandmother's brothel, where his mother, Gertrude Thomas, practiced prostitution. His father, LeRoy "Buck Carter" Pryor was a former bartender and boxer.

After his mother abandoned him when he was 10, he was raised primarily by his grandmother Marie Carter, a violent woman who would beat him for any of his eccentricities. Pryor was one of four children raised in his grandmother's brothel. He was a victim of sexual abuse as a child.

He was expelled from school at the age of 14. His first professional performance was playing drums at a night club. Pryor served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960, but spent virtually the entire stint in an army prison. According to a 1999 profile about Pryor in The New Yorker, Pryor was incarcerated for an incident that occurred while stationed in Germany. Annoyed that a white soldier was a bit too amused at the racially charged sections of Douglas Sirk's movie Imitation of Life, Pryor and some other black soldiers beat and stabbed him, though not fatally. According to , when he was 19, he worked at a Mafia-owned nightclub as the MC. On hearing that they would not pay a stripper friend of his, he attempted to hold up the owners with a cap pistol. The owners were greatly amused.

During this time, Pryor's girlfriend gave birth to a girl named Renee. Years later, however, he found out that she was not his child. In 1960, he married Patricia Price and they had one child together, Richard Jr. (his first child and first son). They divorced in 1961.

Early career

In 1963, Pryor moved to New York City and began performing regularly in clubs alongside performers such as Bob Dylan and Woody Allen. On one of his first nights, he opened for singer and pianist Nina Simone at New York's Village Gate. Simone recalls Pryor's bout of performance anxiety:

Inspired by Bill Cosby, Pryor began as a middlebrow comic, with material far less controversial than what was to come. Soon, he began appearing regularly on television variety shows, such as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. His popularity led to success as a comic in Las Vegas. The first five tracks on the 2005 compilation CD , recorded in 1966 and 1967, capture Pryor in this era.

In September 1967, Pryor had what he called in his autobiography Pryor Convictions an "epiphany" when he walked onto the stage at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas (with Dean Martin in the audience), looked at the sold-out crowd, exclaimed over the microphone "What the fuck am I doing here!?", and walked off the stage. Afterward, Pryor began working profanity into his act, including "nigger". His first comedy recording, the eponymous 1968 debut release on the Dove/Reprise label, captures this particular period, tracking the evolution of Pryor's routine. Around this time, his parents died — his mother in 1967 and his father in 1968.

In 1967, his second child and first daughter, Elizabeth Ann, was born to his girlfriend Maxine Anderson. Later that year, he married Shelly Bonus. In 1969, his third child and second daughter, Rain Pryor, was born. Pryor and Bonus divorced later that year.

Mainstream success

In 1969, Pryor moved to Berkeley, California, where he immersed himself in the counterculture and rubbed elbows with the likes of Huey P. Newton and Ishmael Reed. He signed with the comedy-oriented independent record label Laff Records in 1970 and recorded his second album in 1971, Craps (After Hours). In 1973, the relatively unknown comedian appeared in the documentary Wattstax, where he riffed on the tragic-comic absurdities of race relations in Watts and the nation. Not long afterward, Pryor sought a deal with a larger label, and after some time, signed with Stax Records. His third, breakthrough album, That Nigger's Crazy, was released in 1974 and, Laff, who claimed ownership of Pryor's recording rights, almost succeeded in getting an injunction to prevent the album from being sold. Negotiations led to Pryor's release from his Laff contract. In return for this concession, Laff was enabled to release previously unissued material, recorded between 1968 and 1973, at will.

During the legal battle, Stax briefly closed its doors. At this time, Pryor returned to Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, which re-released That Nigger's Crazy, immediately after ...Is It Something I Said?, his first album with his new label. With every successful album Pryor recorded for Warner (or later, his concert films and his 1980 freebasing accident), Laff would quickly publish an album of older material to capitalize on Pryor's growing fame—a practice they continued until 1983. The covers of Laff albums tied in thematically with Pryor movies, such as The Wizard of Comedy for his appearance in The Wiz, Are You Serious? for Silver Streak, and Insane for Stir Crazy.

In the 1970s, Pryor wrote for such television shows as Sanford and Son, The Flip Wilson Show and a Lily Tomlin special, for which he shared an Emmy Award. During this period, Pryor tried to break into mainstream television. He was a guest host on the first season of Saturday Night Live. Richard took long time girlfriend, actress-talk show host Kathrine McKee (sister of Lonette McKee) with him to New York, and she made a brief guest appearance with Pryor on SNL. He participated in a "racist word association" skit with Chevy Chase.

The Richard Pryor Show premiered on NBC in 1977, but was canceled after only four episodes. Television audiences did not respond to the show's controversial subject matter, and Pryor was unwilling to alter his material for network censors. During the short-lived series, President of the United States">he portrayed the first African-American President of the United States, spoofed the Star Wars cantina, took on gun violence, and in another skit, used costumes and visual distortion to appear nude.

In 1974, Pryor was arrested for income tax evasion and served 10 days in jail. He married actress Deborah McGuire in 1977, but they divorced in 1978. He soon began dating Jennifer Lee and they married in 1981. They divorced the following year.

In 1979, at the height of his success, Pryor visited Africa. Upon returning to the United States, Pryor swore he would never use the word "nigger" in his stand-up comedy routine again. (However, his favorite epithet, "motherfucker", remains a term of endearment on his official website.)

In the 1970s and 1980s, Pryor appeared in several popular films, including Lady Sings the Blues; The Mack; Uptown Saturday Night; Silver Streak; Which Way Is Up?; Car Wash; Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings; Greased Lightning; Blue Collar & Bustin' Loose. In 1982, Pryor co-starred with Jackie Gleason in The Toy.

In 1983, Pryor signed a five-year contract with Columbia Pictures for $40,000,000. This resulted in the gentrification of Pryor's onscreen persona and softer, more formulaic films like Superman III, (which earned Pryor $4,000,000), Brewster's Millions, Stir Crazy, Moving, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil. The only film project from this period that recalled his rough roots was Pryor's semi-autobiographic debut as a writer-director, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, which was not a major success. Though he made four films with Gene Wilder, the two comic actors were never as close as many thought, according to Wilder's autobiography.

Pryor co-wrote Blazing Saddles, directed by Mel Brooks and starring Gene Wilder. Pryor was to play the lead role of Bart, but the film's production studio would not insure him, and Mel Brooks chose Cleavon Little instead. Before his infamous 1980 freebasing accident, Pryor was about to start filming Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I, but was replaced at the last minute by Gregory Hines. Pryor was also originally considered for the role of Billy Ray Valentine on Trading Places, before Eddie Murphy won the part.

Despite a reputation for profanity, Pryor briefly hosted a children's show on CBS in 1984 called Pryor's Place. Like Sesame Street, Pryor's Place featured a cast of puppets, hanging out and having fun in a surprisingly friendly inner-city environment along with several children and characters portrayed by Pryor himself. However, Pryor's Place frequently dealt with more sobering issues than Sesame Street. It was canceled shortly after its debut, despite the efforts of famed puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft and a theme song by Ray Parker, Jr. of Ghostbusters fame.

Pryor co-hosted the Academy Awards twice, and was nominated for an Emmy for a guest role on the television series, Chicago Hope.

Pryor developed a reputation for being difficult and unprofessional on film sets, and for making unreasonable demands. In his autobiography Kiss Me Like a Stranger, co-star Gene Wilder says that Pryor was frequently late to the set during filming of Stir Crazy, and that he demanded, among other things, a helicopter to fly him to and from set. Pryor was also accused of using allegations of on-set racism to force the hand of film producers into giving him more money. Also from Wilder's book:

In 1989, he appeared in Harlem Nights, a comedy-drama crime film starring Eddie Murphy. It was a financial success, grossing 3½ times the amount it cost to make it (worldwide) and is well known for starring three generations of black comedians (Pryor, Murphy, and Redd Foxx).

Illness

Pryor suffered a mild heart attack in November 1977. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986. In 1990, Pryor suffered a more severe heart attack and underwent triple heart bypass surgery.

The freebasing incident

On June 9, 1980, during the making of the film Bustin' Loose, Pryor set himself on fire after freebasing cocaine while drinking 151-proof rum. He ran down Parthenia St. from his Northridge, California, home until subdued by police. He was taken to the hospital, where he was treated for burns covering more than half of his body. Pryor spent six weeks in recovery at the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital. His daughter, Rain Pryor, stated that Pryor poured high-proof rum over his body and set himself on fire in a bout of drug-induced psychosis.

Pryor incorporated a description of the incident into his "final" comedy show in 1982. He joked that the event was caused by dunking a cookie into a glass of low-fat and pasteurized milk, causing an explosion. At the end of the bit, he poked fun at people who told jokes about it by waving a lit match and saying, "What's this? It's Richard Pryor running down the street."

After his "final performance", Pryor did not stay away from stand-up comedy long. In 1983, he filmed and released a new concert film and accompanying album, , which he directed himself. He then wrote and directed a fictionalized account of his life, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling.

In 1984, his fourth child and second son, Steven, was born to his girlfriend Flynn Belaine. Pryor married Belaine in October 1986. They divorced in July 1987. Before their divorce was final, Belaine conceived Kelsey Pryor. Meanwhile, another of Pryor's girlfriends, Geraldine Mason, gave birth to Franklin Mason, his fifth child and third son, in April 1987. Six months later in October 1987, Belaine gave birth to Kelsey Pryor, Richard's sixth child and third daughter.

Marriages

Pryor was married seven times to five different women: #Patricia Price (1960–1961, divorced) with one child named Richard Pryor Jr. #Shelly Bonus (1967–1969, divorced) with one child named Rain Pryor #Deborah McGuire (September 22, 1977 – 1979, divorced) #Jennifer Lee (August 1981 – October 1982, divorced) #Flynn Belaine (October 1986 – July 1987, divorced) with son Steven (born before the marriage) and daughter Kelsey (before divorce finalized) #Flynn Belaine (1 April 1990 – July 1991, divorced) #Jennifer Lee (June 29, 2001 – December 10, 2005, his death)

His marriages were characterized by accusations of domestic violence and spousal abuse, except for his relationship with Belaine. Most of these allegations were connected to Pryor's drug use. The exception was Patricia Price, who was married to Pryor before his rise to stardom. During his relationship with Pam Grier, Pryor proposed to Deborah McGuire (1977).

He had six children: Richard Jr., Elizabeth, Rain, Steven, Franklin and Kelsey.

Later life

In his later years, Richard Pryor used a power operated vehicle/scooter due to multiple sclerosis (M.S., which he said stood for "More Shit"). He appears on the scooter in his last film appearance, a small role in David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997).

In 1998, Pryor won the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. According to former Kennedy Center President Lawrence J. Wilker,

In 2000, Rhino Records remastered all of Pryor's Reprise and WB albums for inclusion in the box set ...And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992).

In 2001, he remarried Jennifer Lee, who also had become his manager.

In 2002 a television documentary depicted Pryor's life and career. Broadcast in the UK as part of the Channel 4 series Kings of Black Comedy, it was produced, directed and narrated by David Upshal. It featured rare clips from Pryor's 1960s stand-up appearances and movies such as Silver Streak, Blue Collar, Stir Crazy, and Richard Pryor Live In Concert. Contributors included Whoopi Goldberg, Dave Chappelle, Lily Tomlin, George Carlin, Joan Rivers, Ice-T, and Paul Mooney. The show tracked down the two cops who rescued Pryor from his "freebasing incident", former managers and even school friends from Pryor's home town of Peoria, Illinois. In the US the show went out as part of the Heroes of Black Comedy series on Comedy Central, narrated by Don Cheadle.

In 2002, Pryor and his wife and manager, Jennifer Lee Pryor, won legal rights to all the Laff material, which amounted to almost 40 hours of reel-to-reel analog tape. After going through the tapes and getting Richard's blessing, Jennifer Lee Pryor gave access to the tapes to Rhino Records in 2004. These tapes, including the entire Craps album, form the basis of the double-CD release .

A 2003 television documentary, !! consisted of archival footage of Pryor's performances and testimonials from fellow comedians, including Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, and Denis Leary, on Pryor's influence on comedy.

In 2004, Pryor was voted #1 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time. In a 2005 British poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, Pryor was voted the 10th greatest comedy act ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.

In late 2004, his sister said he had lost his voice. However, on January 9, 2005, Pryor's wife, Jennifer Lee, rebutted this statement in a post on Pryor's official website, citing Richard as saying: "Sick of hearing this shit about me not talking... not true... good days, bad days... but I still am a talkin' motherfucker!"

Pryor was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. The animal rights organization PETA gives out an award in Pryor's name to people who have done outstanding work to alleviate animal suffering. Pryor was active in animal rights and was deeply concerned about the plight of elephants in circuses and zoos.

Death

covered with flowers, beer bottles, fan letters etc.]] On December 10, 2005, nine days after his birthday, Pryor went into cardiac arrest in Encino, California. He was taken to a local hospital after his wife's attempts to resuscitate him failed. He was pronounced dead at 7:58 am PST. He was 65 years old. His widow Jennifer was quoted as saying, "At the end, there was a smile on his face." The film will star Marlon Wayans as the young Pryor. Other actors previously attached include Mike Epps and Eddie Murphy. The film will be directed by Bill Condon and is scheduled for a 2011 release.

On December 19, 2005, BET aired a Pryor special. It included commentary from fellow comedians, and insight into his upbringing.

A telling comment on how Pryor influenced and changed the shape of comedy is attributed to Bill Cosby. He reportedly once said, "Richard Pryor drew the line between comedy and tragedy as thin as one could possibly paint it."

An image of Pryor can be seen on the Rage Against The Machine music video for their Soulsonic Force cover of "Renegades of Funk".

There is a street just west of the downtown Peoria area named in his honor.

On March 1, 2008, fellow comedian George Carlin performed his final HBO special. An image of Pryor can be seen in the background throughout his set.

Discography

Albums

;Official canon

Richard Pryor (Dove/Reprise, 1968)

Craps (After Hours) (Laff Records, 1971, reissued 1993 by Loose Cannon/Island)

That Nigger's Crazy, (Partee/Stax, 1974, reissued 1975 by Reprise)

...Is It Something I Said?, (Reprise, 1975, reissued 1991 on CD by Warner Archives)

Bicentennial Nigger, (Reprise, 1976)

(2-LP set), (Warner Bros. Records, 1978)

(Warner Bros. Records, 1982)

, (Warner Bros. Records, 1983)

;Others

L.A. Jail, (Tiger Lily, 1976)

Are You Serious???, (Laff, 1977)

Who Me? I'm Not Him, (Laff, 1977)

Black Ben The Blacksmith, (Laff, 1978)

The Wizard of Comedy, (Laff, 1978)

Outrageous, (Laff, 1979)

Insane, (Laff, 1980)

Holy Smoke!, (Laff, 1980)

Rev. Du Rite, (Laff, 1981)

Richard Pryor Live! (picture disc), (Phoenix/Audiofidelity, 1982)

Supernigger, (Laff. 1983)

Compilations

Pryor Goes Foxx Hunting, (Laff. 1973)

* Split LP with Redd Foxx, containing previously released tracks from Craps (After Hours)

Down And Dirty, (Laff. 1975)

* Split LP with Redd Foxx, containing previously released tracks from Craps (After Hours)

Richard Pryor Meets... Richard & Willie And... The SLA!!, (Laff. 1976)

* Split LP with black ventriloquist act Richard And Willie, containing previously released tracks from Craps (After Hours)

Richard Pryor's Greatest Hits, (Warner Bros. Records, 1977)

* Contains tracks from Craps (After Hours), That Nigger's Crazy, and ...Is It Something I Said?, plus a previously unreleased track from 1975, "Ali".

...And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992) (9-CD box set) (Warner Bros. Records/Rhino, 2000)

* Box set collection containing all Warner Bros. albums plus a bonus disc of previously unissued material from 1973 to 1992.

The Anthology (1968–1992) (2-CD set) (Warner Bros. Records/Rhino, 2002 in music/2002)

* Highlights culled from the albums collected in the ...And It's Deep Too! box set.

(2-CD set) (Warner Bros. Records/Rhino, 2005)

* Pryor-authorized compilation of material released on Laff, including the entire Craps (After Hours) album.

Filmography

The Busy Body (1967)

Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales (1968)

Wild in the Streets (1968)

Black Brigade (1970)

The Phynx (1970)

You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat (1971)

Dynamite Chicken (1972)

Lady Sings the Blues (1972)

The Mack (1973)

Wattstax (1973)

Hit! (1973)

Some Call It Loving (1973)

Uptown Saturday Night (1974)

The Lion Roars Again (1975)

Adios Amigo (1976)

Car Wash (1976)

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)

Silver Streak (1976)

Which Way Is Up? (1977)

Greased Lightning (1977)

Blue Collar (1978)

The Wiz (1978)

California Suite (1978)

(1979)

The Muppet Movie (1979) (cameo)

Wholly Moses (1980)

In God We Tru$t (1980)

Stir Crazy (1980)

Bustin' Loose (1981)

(1982)

Some Kind of Hero (1982)

The Toy (1982)

Superman III (1983)

(1983)

Motown 25 (1983)

(1985)

Brewster's Millions (1985)

Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986)

Critical Condition (1987)

Moving (1988)

See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)

Harlem Nights (1989)

The Three Muscatels (1991)

Another You (1991)

A Century of Cinema (1994)

Mad Dog Time (1996)

Lost Highway (1997)

Bitter Jester (2003)

'' (2003)

(2005, BET Special)

Black Dynamite (2009) Cameo via archive footage

References

External links

Richard Pryor: Stand-Up Philosopher, City Journal, Spring 2009

Post by Richard Pryor on his official website rebutting voice-loss rumors

Richard Pryor's KFC Cruelty Billboard

Richard Pryor's Ancestry

Bright Lights Film Journal career profile

;Obituaries

Category:1940 births Category:2005 deaths Category:African American comedians Category:African American film actors Category:American film actors Category:American stand-up comedians Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Disease-related deaths in California Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Mark Twain Prize recipients Category:People from Peoria, Illinois Category:Deaths from multiple sclerosis Category:Writers Guild of America Award winners

Name	India.Arie
Background	solo_singer
Landscape	Yes
Birth name	India Arie Simpson
Born	October 03, 1975Denver, Colorado, United States
Instrument	Vocals, guitar, flute, keyboard
Voice type	Contralto
Genre	Soul, R&B;, neo soul, blues, folk, pop
Occupation	Musician, songwriter, record producer
Years active	2001–present
Label	Motown (1999–2007)SoulBird / Universal Republic (2007–present)
Url	www.indiaarie.com

India.Arie (born India Arie Simpson; October 3, 1975) is an American soul, R&B;, and neo soul singer-songwriter, record producer, guitarist, and flautist.

Background

Simpson was born in Denver, Colorado. She absorbed musical skills early in life as she was encouraged by both parents. Her mother Joyce is a former singer (she was signed to Motown as a teenager and opened for Stevie Wonder and Al Green) and is now her stylist. She has an older brother named J'On. After her parents divorced, Simpson's mother moved the family to Atlanta, Georgia when she was thirteen. Simpson had taken up a succession of musical instruments throughout her schooling in Denver, but her interest in the guitar while attending the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, led to a personal revelation about songwriting and performing. "When I started tapping into my own sensitivity, I started to understand people better. It was a direct result of writing songs", she said at the press release of her debut album, Acoustic Soul.

Co-founding the Atlanta-based independent music collective Groovement EarthShare (Groovement was the collective artists' name and EarthShare was their independent label name), her one-song turn on a locally-released compilation led to a second-stage gig at the 1998 Lilith Fair. In 1999, a Universal/Motown music scout spotted her and made an introduction to former Motown CEO Kedar Massenberg. Arie currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Musical career

Acoustic Soul (2001)

Acoustic Soul was released on March 27, 2001 and debuted at number ten on the U.S. Billboard 200 and number three on the Top R&B;/Hip-Hop Albums. Within months, without the concentrated radio airplay that typically powers pop and rap albums, Acoustic Soul was certified double platinum, selling 2,180,000 copies in the U.S. and 3,000,000 copies worldwide. While Arie and the album were nominated for seven Grammy awards in 2002, they won no awards, losing in five of seven categories to Alicia Keys. She closed the ceremony with a performance of her song "Video".

Voyage to India (2002)

Arie followed the success of her debut on 24 September 2002 with the release of Voyage to India. It debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 and number one on the R&B; chart. In 2003 it won her two Grammy Awards in 2003—"Best R&B; Album" and Best Urban/Alternative Performance" for the song "Little Things". Soon after its release, Voyage to India was certified platinum selling 1,400,000 copies in the U.S. and 2,300,000 worldwide .

Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship (2006)

Arie's third studio album, , was released on June 27, 2006. It gave Arie her first number-one spot on the Billboard 200 and was her second chart-topper on the R&B; chart. This album was also the first number-one album for Motown in twelve years . Its first-week sales of 161,000 copies are Arie's best sales week to date and was certified gold in August 2006, selling 730,000 in US and 1,300,000 worldwide. "I Am Not My Hair" was the most successful release from Testimony: Vol. 1., reaching the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 at #97 and the UK Singles Chart at #65.

Her cover of Don Henley's "The Heart of the Matter" from Testimony: Vol. 1 was used in 2008 as a feature in the trailers to the film .

''Testimony: Vol. 2, Love & Politics (2009)

Her highly anticipated next album, was released on Tuesday, February 10, 2009. It debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, and No. 2 on the R&B; chart. Within this CD, Arie collaborated with such artists as Sezen Aksu, Keb Mo, Gramps Morgan and Musiq Soulchild to fulfill her self-proclaimed desire to "do projects with people who are making music that is meaningful, with a lot of integrity and a lot of sonic diversity". Arie, in the cited interview, also identified this CD as the first of her collection to come directly from her own point of view, without feeling any necessity to fulfill fan or media needs. Arie was able to achieve this newfound ability to write and sing songs without worrying about public opinion after a much-needed vacation to Hawaii. This CD was Arie's first CD produced after her change from Motown to Universal Records.

Open Door

India.Arie's new album, a work produced in collaboration with Israeli singer Idan Raichel is due to be released in the spring of 2011.

Collaborations

Arie performed a duet with rock singer-guitarist John Mellencamp on the song "Peaceful World" for his 2001 album Cuttin' Heads.

Arie performed a duet with jazz singer Cassandra Wilson on the song "Just Another Parade" for her 2002 album Belly of the Sun.

On the September 12, 2005 premiere of The Tyra Banks Show, Arie performed "Just 4 2day", a song she wrote especially for Tyra's show. She also performed "What About the Child", a song that did not air but was made available as a one-dollar Internet download to support child victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Arie is also featured on Stevie Wonder's album A Time to Love, released on October 18, 2005. Arie and Wonder duet on the title track "A Time to Love", written by Arie, which was nominated for "Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals" at the 2006 Grammy Awards. Three years earlier, their rendition of Mel Tormé's 1944 classic "The Christmas Song", recorded for the holiday TV commercial for retailer Target, had been nominated for the same category, making it the first song created and financed exclusively for a commercial to be nominated for a Grammy Award.

Arie performed a duet with Brazilian musician Sérgio Mendes on the title song "Timeless" for his 2006 album Timeless.

Arie performed the vocals for "It Might Be You" on Dave Koz's 2007 album At the Movies.

Arie collaborated with Akon for her song "I Am Not My Hair". On the April 16, 2007 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show entitled "After Imus: Now What?", Arie guest-starred as a panelist. She stated that she wasn't completely crazy about the duet partner, but the label suggested that it would make the album more commercial. Versions without Akon on the song were made available.

Arie performed the song "She Is" for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, inspired by the PBS Independent Lens documentary Iron Ladies of Liberia.

Arie performed a duet with singer Anthony David for his song "Words" for his 2008 album Acey Duecy.

Arie performed "Self-Fulfilling" in duet with Beate S. Lech of Beady Belle on the band's 2008 album Belvedere.

Arie sang the Alphabet song with Elmo on Sesame Street.

Arie performed "Video" with British singer Adele at the 2009 VH1 Divas

Arie is one of over 70 artists singing on "", a charity single in aid of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Arie performed a duet with Marc Cohn on the song "Make It With You" for his 2010 album Listening Booth: 1970.

Arie collaborated in 2010 with Santana for the Beatles' cover, While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Arie contributed vocals to "Imagine" for the 2010 Herbie Hancock album, The Imagine Project along with Seal, P!nk, Jeff Beck, Konono N°1, Oumou Sangare and others.

Discography

Studio albums

2001: Acoustic Soul

2002: Voyage to India

2006:

2009:

2011: Open Door

Grammy Awards history

References

External links

Official website

India.Aire interview by Pete Lewis, 'Blues & Soul' April 2009

India.Arie on Motown Records website

Profile on VIBE.com

India.Arie at NPR Music

Category:1975 births Category:African American female singer-songwriters Category:American contraltos Category:American female guitarists Category:American flautists Category:American record producers Category:American rhythm and blues guitarists Category:American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters Category:American soul singers Category:Musicians from Colorado Category:English-language singers Category:Feminist artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Living people Category:Motown artists Category:Neo soul singers Category:People from Atlanta, Georgia Category:People from Denver, Colorado Category:People from Savannah, Georgia

Name	David Lynch
Caption	Lynch in Washington D.C., January 23, 2007
Birth place	Missoula, Montana, U.S.
Birth name	David Keith Lynch January 20, 1946
Years active	Since 1966
Spouse	Peggy Lynch (1967–1974)Mary Fisk (1977–1987)Mary Sweeney (2006) Emily Stofle (2009-present)
Partner	Isabella Rossellini (1986–1991)

David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, television director and visual artist. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound design. Indeed, the surreal and in many cases violent elements to his films have gained them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences.

Moving around various parts of the United States as a child within his middle class family, Lynch went on to study painting in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films. Deciding to devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977). After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man (1980), from where he gained mainstream success. Then being employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films for them, the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proven to be a critical and commercial failure, and his own neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was instead highly critically acclaimed.

Proceeding to create his own television series with Mark Frost, the highly popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990-1992), he also created a cinematic prequel, (1992), a road movie, Wild at Heart (1990), and a family film, The Straight Story (1999) in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his following films worked on "dream logic" non-linear narrative structures, Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).

Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, for his films The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and also received a screenplay Academy Award nomination for The Elephant Man. Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival while that same year, The Guardian described Lynch as "the most important director of this era". Allmovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking", whilst the success of his films have led to him being labelled "the first popular Surrealist."

Life and career

Early life: 1946-1965

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. His father, Donald Walton Lynch, was a research scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his mother, Edwina "Sunny" Lynch (née Sundholm), was an English language tutor Due to Donald's job, the Lynch family often moved around according to where the Department of Agriculture assigned him. It was because of this that when he was two months old, David Lynch moved with his parents to Sandpoint, Idaho, and only two years after that, following the birth of his brother John, the family again moved, this time to Spokane, Washington. It was here that his sister Martha was born, before they once more moved, this time to Durham, North Carolina, then to Boise, Idaho and then to Alexandria, Virginia. Commenting on much of his early life, Lynch has remarked that "I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school… 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." Alongside this schooling, his father made him join the Boy Scouts, although he would later note that he only "became one so I could quit, and put it behind me." He rose to the highest rank of Eagle Scout. It was through being an Eagle Scout that he was present with other Boy Scouts outside of the White House at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch's birthday in 1961.

Lynch had become interested in painting and drawing from an early age, becoming intrigued by the idea of pursuing it as a career path when living in Virginia, where his friend's father was a professional painter. At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia, he did poorly academically, having little interest in school work, but was popular with other students, and after leaving decided that he wanted to study painting at college, thereby beginning his studies at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1964, where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf. Nonetheless, he left after only a year, stating that "I was not inspired AT ALL in that place", and instead deciding that he wanted to travel around Europe for three years with his friend Jack Fisk, who was similarly unhappy with his studies at Cooper Union. They had some hopes that in Europe they could train with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka at his school, however upon reaching Salzburg they found that he was not available, and disillusioned, they returned to the United States after spending only fifteen days of their planned three years in Europe.

Philadelphia and short films: 1966–1970

Back in the United States, Lynch returned to Virginia, but since his parents had moved to Walnut Creek, California, he was forced to stay with his friend Tony Keeler for a while, before he decided to move to the city of Philadelphia, where, at the advice of Jack Fisk, who was already attending it, he decided to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, something he preferred far more than his previous art college in Boston, claiming that "In Philadelphia there were great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there." It was here that he began a relationship with a fellow student, Peggy Reavey, and they were married in 1967. The following year, Peggy gave birth to their child, a girl whom they named Jennifer. Later describing this situation, Peggy stated that "[Lynch] definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant." As a family, they moved to the Fairmount neighbourhood of Philadelphia, where they were able to purchase a large twelve-room house for a relatively low $3,500 due to the high crime and poverty rates in the area. Later describing living there, Lynch stated that "We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street… We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in… The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city." Meanwhile, in order to help financially support his family alongside his art studies, he took up a job printing engravings.

It was at the Philadelphia Academy that Lynch made his very first short film, which was entitled Six Men Getting Sick (1966). He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he subsequently began discussing the idea of creating an animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson. When this project never came about, Lynch decided to work on a film alone, and so purchased the cheapest 16mm camera that he could find in order to do so. Taking one of the abandoned upper rooms of the Academy as a working space, he spent $200 - which at the time he felt to be a lot of money - to produce Six Men Getting Sick. Describing the work as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", Lynch played the film on a loop at the Academy's annual end-of-year exhibit, where it shared joint first prize with a painting by Noel Mahaffey. This led to a commission from one of his fellow students, the wealthy H. Barton Wasserman, who offered him $1000 to create a film installation in his home. Spending $450 of that on purchasing a second-hand Bolex camera, Lynch produced a new animated short, but upon getting the film developed, realized that the result was simply a blurred, frameless print. As he would later relate, "So I called up Bart [Wasserman] and said, 'Bart, the film is a disaster. The camera was broken and what I've done hasn't turned out.' And he said, 'Don't worry, David, take the rest of the money and make something else for me. Just give me a print.' End of story."

Using this leftover money, Lynch decided to experiment on making a work that was a mix of animation with live action, producing a four minute short entitled The Alphabet (1968). The film starred Lynch's wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who chants the alphabet to a series of images before dying at the end by haemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorded to record the sound of his baby daughter Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch felt to be particularly effective. Later describing where he had got inspiration for this work from, Lynch stated that "Peggy's neice 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."

Learning about the newly founded American Film Institute, which gave grants to film makers who could produce for them both a prior work and a script for a new project, Lynch decided to send them a copy of The Alphabet along with a script that he had written for a new short film, one that would be almost entirely live action, and which would be entitled The Grandmother. The Institute agreed to help finance the work, initially offering him $5000, out of his requested budget of $7,200, but later granting him the further $2,200 which he needed. Starring people he knew from both work and college and filmed in his own house, The Grandmother revolved around the story of a neglected boy who "grows" a grandmother from a seed to care for him. The film critics Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell later remarked that "this film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas that would filter into his later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium".

Los Angeles and Eraserhead: 1971–1979

) on the cover.]] In 1971, Lynch moved with his wife and daughter to the city of Los Angeles in California, where he began studying filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory, a place that he would later describe as being "completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great… you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing." He began writing a script for a proposed work entitled Gardenback, which had "unfolded from this painting I'd done." In this venture he was supported by a number of figures at the Conservatory, who encouraged him to lengthen the script and add in more dialogue, something that he reluctantly agreed to do. Nonetheless, with all the interference on his Gardenback project, he became fed up with the Conservatory, and announced that he was quitting. Attempting to prevent this, many of the teachers at the centre asked him to reconsider, believing that he was one of their best students, and he finally agreed, albeit on the condition that he could create his own project that would not be interfered with. Feeling that Gardenback was "wrecked", he instead set about on a new film, which he called Eraserhead.

Despite the fact that the film was planned to be about forty-two minutes long (it would end up being eighty-nine minutes long), the script for Eraserhead was only twenty-one pages long, and some of the teachers at the Conservatory were concerned that the film would not be a success with such little dialogue and action. Nonetheless, they agreed not to interfere as they had done with Gardenback, and as such Lynch was able to create the film free from interference. Filming, which began in 1972, took place at night in some abandoned stables, allowing the production team, which was largely Lynch and some of his friends, including Sissy Spacek, Jack Fisk, cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound designer Alan Splet to set up a camera room, green room, editing room, sets as well as a food room and a bathroom. Initially, funding for the project came from the AFI, who gave Lynch a $10,000 grant, but it was not enough to complete the work, and under pressure from studios after the success of the relatively cheap feature film Easy Rider, they were unable to provide him with any more. Following this, Lynch was also supported by a loan given to him by his father, and by money that he was able to bring in from a paper round that he took up delivering the Wall Street Journal. Not long into the production of Eraserhead, Lynch and his wife Peggy amicably separated and divorced, and so he began living full-time on set. Meanwhile, in 1977, Lynch would remarry, this time to a woman named Mary Fisk.

Filmed in black and white, Eraserhead tells the story of a quiet young man named Henry (Jack Nance) living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby whom she leaves in his care. The baby constantly cries, eventually leading to its accidental death, at which the world itself begins to fall apart. Lynch has consistently refused to either confirm or deny any interpretation of Eraserhead, or to "confess his own thinking behind the many abstractions in the film." Nonetheless, he admits that it was heavily influenced by the fearful mood of Philadelphia, referring to the film was "my Philadelphia Story".

It was due to the financial problems with the production of Eraserhead that filming was haphazard, regularly stopping and starting again. It was in one such break in 1974 that Lynch created a short film entitled The Amputee, which revolved around a woman with two amputated legs (played by Jack Nance's wife, Catherine Coulson) reading aloud a letter and having her stumps washed by a doctor (played by Lynch himself).

Eraserhead was finally finished in 1976, after five years of production. Lynch subsequently tried to get the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, but whilst some reviewers liked it, others felt that it was awful, and so it was not selected for screening. Similarly, reviewers from the New York Film Festival also rejected it, but it was indeed screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, from where Ben Barenholtz, the distributor of the Elgin Theater, heard about it. He was very supportive of the move, helping to distribute it around the United States in 1977, and Eraserhead subsequently became popular on the midnight movie underground circuit, The acclaimed film maker Stanley Kubrick said that it was one of his all-time favorite films.

The Elephant Man and mainstream success: 1980–1982

), attempts to kidnap the deformed John Merrick (John Hurt).]] The cult success of Eraserhead on the underground circuit led to it being seen by Stuart Cornfeld, an executive producer to the producer Mel Brooks, who later remarked that "I was just 100 per cent blown away… I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. It was such a cleansing experience." Contacting Lynch, he agreed to help him with his next planned project, a film entitled Ronnie Rocket for which Lynch had already written a script. Nonetheless, Lynch soon realized that Ronnie Rocket, a film that he described as being about "electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair", was not going to be picked up by any financiers, and so he asked Cornfeld to find him a script written by someone else which he could direct. Cornfeld went away and found him four possible scripts, but upon hearing the title of the first, The Elephant Man, Lynch was already sure that that was the script for him, going on nothing but the title.

The Elephant Man script - written by Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren - was based upon a true story, that of Joseph Merrick, a heavily deformed man living in Victorian London, who was held in a sideshow but was later taken under the care of a London surgeon, Frederick Treves. Lynch wanted to film it, but at the same time also had to make some alterations that would alter the story from true events, but in his view make a better plot. However, in order to do so he would have to get the permission of Mel Brooks, whose company, BrookFilms, would be responsible for production; subsequently Brooks viewed Eraserhead, and after coming out of the screening theatre, embraced Lynch, declaring that "You're a madman, I love you! You're in."

The resulting film, The Elephant Man, starred John Hurt as John Merrick (his name was changed from Joseph), as well as Anthony Hopkins as Frederick Treves. Filming took place in London, and Lynch brought his own distinctively surrealist approach to the film, filming it in color stock black and white, but nonetheless it has been described as "one of the most conventional" of his films. The Elephant Man was a huge critical and commercial success, and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch.

The De Laurentiis films, Dune and Blue Velvet: 1983–1986

Following on from the success of The Elephant Man, the film maker George Lucas, himself a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct the third film in his Star Wars trilogy, . Lynch however refused, feeling that the resulting picture would be more his own vision than Lucas'. Soon after however, the opportunity to direct another big-budget science fiction epic arose when Dino de Laurentiis of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group asked him to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune (1965). Lynch agreed, and in doing so was also contractually obliged to produce two other works for the company. He then set about writing a script based upon the original novel, initially with both Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren, and then just by himself when De Laurentiis wasn't happy with their ideas. Lynch also helped build some of the sets, attempting to create "a certain look" for the film, and he particularly enjoyed building the set for the oil planet of Giedi Prime, for which he "used steel, bolts, and porcelain to construct" it. ) and his hostage, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) from Blue Velvet.]]

Dune is set in the far future, when humans live in an interstellar empire run along a feudal system. The main character, Paul Atreides (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is the son of a noble who takes control of the desert planet Arrakis which grows the rare spice melange, the most highly prized commodity in the empire. Lynch however was unhappy with the work, later remarking that "Dune was a kind of studio film. I didn’t have final cut. And, little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises" to his own vision. He produced much footage for the film that was eventually removed out from the final theatrical cut, dramatically condensing the plot. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be as successful as Star Wars, Lynch's Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud; it had cost $45 million to make, and grossed a mere $27.4 million domestically. Later on, Universal Studios released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television, containing almost an hour of cutting-room-floor footage and new narration. Such was not representative of Lynch's intentions, but the studio considered it more comprehensible than the original two-hour version. Lynch objected to these changes and had his name struck from the extended cut, which has "Alan Smithee" credited as the director and "Judas Booth" (a pseudonym which Lynch himself invented, inspired by his own feelings of betrayal) as the screenwriter.

Meanwhile in 1983 he had begun the writing and drawing of a comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, which featured unchanging graphics of a tethered dog that was so angry that it could not move, alongside cryptic philosophical references. It ran from 1983 until 1992 in the Village Voice, Creative Loafing and other tabloid and alternative publications. It was around this period that Lynch also got increasingly interested in photography as an art form, and travelled to northern England to take photos of the degrading industrial landscape, something that he was particularly interested in. with the film's main actor Kyle MacLachlan. MacLachlan would also appear as the protagonist in Lynch's Dune and Twin Peaks.]]

Following on from Dune, Lynch was contractually still obliged to produce two other projects for De Laurentiis: the first of these was a planned sequel, which due to the film's lack of success never went beyond the script stage. The other was a more personal work, based upon a script that Lynch had been working on for some time. Developing from ideas that Lynch had had since 1973, the resulting film, Blue Velvet, was set in the fictional town of Lumberton, USA, and revolves around a college student named Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who finds a severed ear in a field. Subsequently investigating further with the help of friend Sandy (Laura Dern), he uncovers that it is related to a criminal gang led by psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped the husband and child of singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and repeatedly subjects her to rape. Lynch himself characterizes the story as "a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story."

For the film, Lynch decided to include pop songs from the 1950s, including "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison and "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton, the latter of which was largely inspirational for the film, with Lynch stating that "It was the song that sparked the movie… There was something mysterious about it. It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns - lawns and the neighbourhood." Other music for the film was also produced, this time composed by Angelo Badalamenti, who would go on to produce the music for most of Lynch’s subsequent cinematic works. Dino de Laurentiis loved the film, and it achieved support from some of the early specialist screenings, but the preview screenings to a mainstream audience were instead highly negative, with most of the audience hating the film. Although Lynch had found success previously with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet's controversy with audiences and critics introduced him into the mainstream, and became a huge critical and moderate commercial success. The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Woody Allen, whose film Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said that Blue Velvet was his favorite film of the year.

Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart and Fire Walk With Me: 1987–1996

During the late 1980s, Lynch had begun to work in television as well as cinema, directing a short piece entitled The Cowboy and the Frenchman for French television in 1989. Around this time, he met the television producer Mark Frost, who had formerly worked on such projects as the television police series Hill Street Blues, and they decided to start working together on a biopic of singer and actress Marilyn Monroe based upon Anthony Summers's book, The Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Whilst this project never got off the ground, the duo went on to work on a comedy script entitled One Saliva Bubble, but that too did not see completion. It was whilst they were talking in a coffee shop that Lynch and Frost both had the idea of a corpse washing up on the shore of a lake, and using this image as a basis subsequently set about on their third project, which they initially named Northwest Passage but which would eventually come to fruition as the television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991).

A drama series set in a small Washington town where popular high school student Laura Palmer has been raped and murdered, Twin Peaks featured FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as the investigator trying to unearth the killer, and discovering not only the supernatural elements to the murder but also the secrets of many of the local townsfolk - as Lynch himself summed it up, "The project was to mix a police investigation with the ordinary lives of the characters." In plotting out the series, Lynch later related that "[me and Mark Frost] worked together, especially in the initial stages. Later on we started working more apart." They subsequently pitched the series to the ABC Network, who agreed to finance the pilot episode, and once this was completed they also commissioned the first season, which comprised seven episodes.

A second season went into production soon after, which would last for a further twenty-two episodes. In all, Lynch himself only directed six episodes out of the whole series due to other responsibilities, namely his work on the film Wild at Heart (see below), but carefully chose those other directors whom he entrusted with the job. Meanwhile, Lynch also appeared in several episodes of the series, acting in the role of deaf FBI agent Gordon Cole. The series was a success, with high viewing figures both in the United States and in many nations abroad, and soon spanned a cult following. Nonetheless, the executives at the ABC Network, believing that public interest in the show was decreasing, insisted that Lynch and Frost reveal who the killer of Laura Palmer was prematurely, something that they only begrudgingly agreed to do, and Lynch has always felt that agreeing to do so is one of his biggest professional regrets. Following the revealing of the murderer and the series' move from Thursday to Saturday night on the ABC Network, Twin Peaks'' continued on for several more episodes, but following a ratings drop was cancelled. Lynch, who disliked the direction that the writers and directors had taken in the previous few episodes, chose to direct the final episode, which he ended on a cliff hanger, later stating that "that's not the ending. That's the ending that people were stuck with."

While Twin Peaks was in production, the Brooklyn Academy of Music asked Lynch and the composer Angelo Badalamenti, who had been responsible for the music in Twin Peaks, to create a theatrical piece which would only be performed twice at their academy in New York City in 1989 as a part of the New Music America Festival. The result was Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, which starred such frequent Lynch collaborators as Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage and Michael J. Anderson as well as containing five songs sung by Julee Cruise. David Lynch produced a fifty-minute video of the performance in 1990. Meanwhile, Lynch was also involved in the creation of various commercials for different companies, including perfume companies like Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani and for the Japanese coffee company Namoi, the latter of which involved a Japanese man searching the town of Twin Peaks for his missing wife.

Whilst still working on the first few episodes of Twin Peaks, Lynch's friend, Monty Montgomery "gave me a book that he wanted to direct as a movie. He asked if I would maybe be executive producer or something, and I said 'That's great, Monty, but what if I read it and fall in love with it and want to do it myself?' And he said, 'In that case, you can do it yourself'." The book was Barry Gifford's novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula, which told the tale of two lovers on a road trip, and Lynch felt that it was "just exactly the right thing at the right time. The book and the violence in America merged in my mind and many different things happened." With Gifford's support, Lynch set about to adapt the novel into a film, with the result being Wild at Heart, a crime and road movie starring Nicolas Cage as Sailor and Laura Dern as Lula. Describing his plot as a "strange blend" of "a road picture, a love story, a psychological drama and a violent comedy", he altered much from the original novel, changing the ending, and incorporating numerous references to the classic film The Wizard of Oz. Despite receiving a muted response from American critics and viewers, it won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

Following on from the success of Wild at Heart, Lynch decided to return to the world of the now-cancelled Twin Peaks, this time without Mark Frost, to create a film that acted primarily as a prequel but also, in part, as a sequel, with Lynch stating that "I liked the idea of the story going back and forth in time." The result, (1992), primarily revolved around the last few days in the life of Laura Palmer, and was much "darker" in tone than the television series, having much of the humour removed, and dealing with such topics as incest and murder. Lynch himself stated that the film was about "the loneliness, shame, guilt, confusion and devestation of the victim of incest." Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was financed by the company CIBY-2000, and most of the cast of the series agreed to re-aprise their roles for the film, although some refused, and many were not enthusiastic about the project. The film was, for the most part, a commercial and critical failure in the United States; however, it was a hit in Japan and British critic Mark Kermode (among others) has hailed it as Lynch's "masterpiece".

Meanwhile, Lynch continued working on a series of television shows with Mark Frost. After Twin Peaks, they produced a series of documentaries entitled American Chronicles (1990) which examined life across the United States, the comedy series On the Air (1992), which was cancelled after only three episodes had aired, and the three-episode HBO mini-series Hotel Room (1993) about events that happened in the same hotel room but at different dates in time.

Lost Highway, The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive: 1997-2001

Following his unsuccessful television ventures since Twin Peaks, Lynch returned to making feature films. In 1997 he released the non-linear, noiresque Lost Highway, co-written by Barry Gifford and starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. The film failed commercially and received a mixed response from critics. However, thanks in part to a soundtrack featuring David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and The Smashing Pumpkins, it helped gain Lynch a new audience of Generation X viewers.

Following Lost Highway, Lynch went on to work on directing a film from a script written by Mary Sweeney and John E. Roach. The resulting motion picture, The Straight Story, was, like The Elephant Man before it, based upon a true story, that of Alvin Straight (played in the film by Richard Farnsworth), an elderly man from Laurens, Iowa, who goes on three hundred mile journey to visit his sick brother (played by Harry Dean Stanton) in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, riding the whole way there upon an electric lawnmower. Commenting on why he chose this script, Lynch would simply relate that "that's what I fell in love with next", and displayed his admiration for Straight, describing him as being "like James Dean, except he's old." Once more, Angelo Badalamenti produced the music for the film, however creating instrumentation that was "very different from the kind of score he's done for [Lynch] in the past." Having many differences with most of his work, particularly in that it did not contain any profanities, sexual content or violence, The Straight Story was rated G (general viewing) by the Motion Picture Association of America, and as such came as "shocking news" to many in the film industry, who were surprised that it "did not disturb, offend or mystify." As Le Blanc and Odell stated, the plot made it "seem as far removed from Lynch's earlier works as could be imagined, but in fact right from the very opening, this is entirely his film - a surreal road movie".

The same year, Lynch approached ABC once again with ideas for a television drama. The network gave Lynch the go-ahead to shoot a two-hour pilot for the series Mulholland Drive, but disputes over content and running time led to the project being shelved indefinitely. However, with seven million dollars from the French production company StudioCanal, Lynch completed the pilot as a film, Mulholland Drive. The film, a non-linear narrative surrealist tale of the dark side of Hollywood, stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux. The film performed relatively well at the box office worldwide and was a critical success, earning Lynch a Best Director prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There) and a Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Association.

Internet work and Inland Empire: 2002-present

With the onset of popularity of the internet, Lynch decided to utlilize this new medium, releasing several new series that he had created exclusively on his website, davidlynch.com. In 2002, he created a series of online shorts entitled Dumbland. Intentionally crude both in content and execution, the eight-episode series was later released on DVD. The same year, Lynch released a surreal sitcom via his website - Rabbits, which revolved around a family of humanoid rabbits. Later, he showed his experiments with Digital Video in the form of the Japanese-style horror short Darkened Room.

In 2006, Lynch's latest feature film, Inland Empire was released. At almost three hours, it was the longest of Lynch's films. Like Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway before it, the film did not follow a traditional narrative structure. It starred Lynch regulars Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, and Justin Theroux, with cameos by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring (voices of Suzie and Jane Rabbit), and a performance by Jeremy Irons. Lynch described the piece as "a mystery about a woman in trouble". In an effort to promote the film, Lynch made appearances with a cow and a placard bearing the slogan "Without cheese there would be no Inland Empire".

In 2008, Lynch announced that he was working on a road documentary "about his dialogues with regular folk on the meaning of life," with traveling companions including singer Donovan and physicist John Hagelin, two prominent members of the Transcendental Meditation movement. The results of this enterprise, called the Interview Project, are accessible from Lynch's web site. is both based on and voiced by Lynch.]]

Lynch currently has two films in production, both of which differ in content from his previous work. One of these is an animation entitled Snootworld, and the other is a documentary on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi consisting of interviews with people who knew him.

In 2010, Lynch began making guest appearances on the Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show as Gus the Bartender. He had been convinced to appear in the show by its lead actor, Mike Henry, who is a fan of Lynch's and who felt that his whole life had changed after seeing Wild at Heart.

Lady Blue Shanghai, written, directed and edited by Lynch, is a 16-minute internet promotion film made for Dior and placed on the internet in May 2010.

Cinematic influences and themes

Influences

Lynch admits that his work is more similar in many respects to those of European film makers than American ones, believing that most films that "get down and thrill your soul" were by European directors. Lynch has commented on his admiration for such film makers as Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog and Jacques Tati. He has also stated that Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) is one of his favourite films, as is Kubrick's Lolita (1962).

Recurring motifs

There are several recurring themes within Lynch's work, leading film critics Le Blanc and Odell to state that "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas". One of the key themes that they noted was the usage of dreams and dreamlike imagery within his works, something they related to the "surrealist ethos" of relying "on the subconscious to provide visual drive". This can be seen in John Merrick's dream of his mother in The Elephant Man, Agent Cooper's dreams of the red room in Twin Peaks and the "dreamlike logic" of the narrative found in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Discussing his attitude to dreams, Lynch has stated that "Waking dreams are the ones that are important, the ones that come when I'm quietly sitting in a chair, letting my mind wander. When you sleep, you don't control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I've made or discovered; a world I choose… [You can't really get others to experience it, but] right there is the power of cinema."

Another of Lynch's prominent themes include industry, with repeated imagery of "the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming woodmills and smoke billowing factories", as can be seen with the industrial wasteland in Eraserhead, the factories in The Elephant Man, the sawmill in Twin Peaks and the lawn mower in The Straight Story. Describing his interest in such things, Lynch stated that "It makes me feel good to see giant machinery, you know, working: dealing with molten metal. And I like fire and smoke. And the sounds are so powerful. It's just big stuff. It means that things are being made, and I really like that."

Another theme is the idea of a "dark underbelly" of violent criminal activity within a society, such as with Frank's gang in Blue Velvet and the cocaine smugglers in Twin Peaks. The idea of deformity is also found in several of Lynch's films, from the protagonist in The Elephant Man, to the deformed baby in Eraserhead, as is the idea of death from a head wound, found in most of Lynch's films. Other imagery commonly used within Lynch's works are flickering electrictity or lights, as well as fire and the idea of a stage upon which a singer performs, often surrounded by drapery.

With the exception of The Elephant Man and Dune, which are set in London and an extraterrestrial galaxy respectively, all of Lynch's films have been set in the United States, and he has stated that "I like certain things about America and it gives me ideas. When I go around and I see things, it sparks little stories, or little characters pop out, so it just feels right to me to, you know, make American films." A number of his works, including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway are intentionally reminiscent of the 1950s American culture even though they were set in the later decades of the twentieth century. Lynch later commented on his feelings for this decade, which was that in which he grew up as a child, by stating that "It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways… there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future."

Lynch also tends to feature his leading female actors in multiple or "split" roles, so that many of his female characters have multiple, fractured identities. This practice began with his choice to cast Sheryl Lee as both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks and continued in his later works. In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays the dual role of Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield, while in Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts plays Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms and Laura Harring plays Camilla Rhodes/Rita and in Inland Empire, Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace/Susan Blue. By contrast, Lynch rarely creates multi-character roles for his male actors.

Recurring collaborators

Lynch is also widely noted for his collaborations with various production artists and composers on his films and multiple different productions. He frequently works with Angelo Badalamenti to compose music for his productions, former wife Mary Sweeney as a film editor, casting director Johanna Ray, and cast members Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Zabriskie, and Laura Dern.

Other art

Painting

Lynch first trained as a painter, and although he is now better known as a filmmaker, he has also produced much painting work. Lynch has stated that "all my paintings are organic, violent comedies. They have to be violently done and primitive and crude, and to achieve that I try to let nature paint more than I paint." Many of his works are very dark in colour, and Lynch has described this as being due to the fact that "I wouldn't know what to do with [colour]. Colour to me is too real. It's limiting. It doesn't allow too much of a dream. The more you throw black into a colour, the more dreamy it gets… Black has depth. It's like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream."

Many of his works also contain letters and words added to the painting, something which he explains: "The words in the paintings are sometimes important to make you start thinking about what else is going on in there. And a lot of times, the words excite me as shapes, and something'll grow out of that. I used to cut these little letters out and glue them on. They just look good all lined up like teeth... sometimes they become the title of the painting."

Lynch considers the Anglo-Irish twentieth century artist Francis Bacon to be his "number one kinda hero painter", stating that "Normally I only like a couple of years of a painter's work, but I like everything of Bacon's. The guy, you know, had the stuff."

Lynch was the subject of a major art retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, Paris from March May 3–27, 2007. The show was entitled The Air is on Fire and included numerous paintings, photographs, drawings, alternative films and sound work. New site-specific art installations were created specially for the exhibition. A series of events accompanied the exhibition including live performances and concerts. Some of Lynch's art include photographs of dissected chickens and other animals as a "Build your own Chicken" toy ad.

Between 1983 and 1992, Lynch wrote and drew a weekly comic strip called The Angriest Dog in the World for the L.A. Reader. The drawings in the panels never change, just the captions.

Music

Lynch has also been involved in a number of music projects, many of them related to his films. Most notably he produced and wrote lyrics for Julee Cruise's first two albums, Floating into the Night (1989) and The Voice of Love (1993), in collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti who composed the music and also produced. Lynch has also worked on the 1998 Jocelyn Montgomery album Lux Vivens. He has also composed bits of music for Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, and Rabbits. In 2001, he released BlueBob, a rock album performed by Lynch and John Neff. The album is notable for Lynch's unusual guitar playing style: he plays "upside down and backwards, like a lap guitar", and relies heavily on effects pedals. Most recently Lynch has composed several pieces for Inland Empire, including two songs, "Ghost of Love" and "Walkin' on the Sky", in which he makes his public debut as a singer. In 2009, his new book-CD set was released. In 2008, he started his own record label called David Lynch MC on which its first release Fox Bat Strategy: A Tribute to Dave Jaurequi was released in early 2009. In August 2009, it was announced that he was releasing Afghani/American singer Ariana Delawari's Lion of Panjshir album in conjunction with Manimal Vinyl Records in October 2009.

In November 2010, Lynch released two electro pop music singles, "Good Day Today" and "I Know", through the independent British label Sunday Best Recordings. Describing why he created them, he stated that "I was just sitting and these notes came and then I went down and started working with Dean [Hurley, his engineer] and then these few notes, 'I want to have a good day, today' came and the song was built around that".

Personal life

Lynch has had several long-term relationships. In 1967, he married Peggy Lentz in Chicago, Illinois. They had one child, Jennifer Chambers Lynch, born in 1968, who is a film director. They filed for divorce in 1974. On June 21, 1977, Lynch married Mary Fisk, and the couple had one child, Austin Jack Lynch, born in 1982. They divorced in 1987, and Lynch began dating Isabella Rossellini after filming Blue Velvet. Lynch and Rossellini broke up in 1991, and Lynch developed a relationship with Mary Sweeney, with whom he had one son, Riley Lynch, in 1992. Sweeney also worked as Lynch's longtime film editor/producer and co-wrote and produced The Straight Story. The two married in May 2006, but divorced that July. Lynch married actress Emily Stofle, who appeared in his 2006 film Inland Empire, in February, 2009.

Transcendental Meditation

.]] Lynch advocates the use of meditation techniques in bringing peace to the world. He was first initiated into Transcendental Meditation in July 1973, and has practiced the technique consistently since then. Lynch says he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the TM movement, for the first time in 1975 at the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center in Los Angeles, California. He reportedly became close with Maharishi during a month-long "Millionaire's Enlightenment Course" held in 2003, the fee for which was 1 million.

In July 2005, he launched the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and Peace, established to help finance scholarships for students in middle and high schools who are interested in learning the Transcendental Meditation technique and to fund research on the technique and its effects on learning. He promotes his vision on college campuses with tours that began in September 2005. In 2009, Lynch organized a benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall for the David Lynch Foundation. On April 4, 2009, the "Change Begins Within" concert featured Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Donovan, Sheryl Crow, Eddie Vedder, Moby, Bettye LaVette, Ben Harper, and Mike Love of the Beach Boys.

Lynch is working for the building and establishment of seven buildings, in which 8,000 salaried people will practice advanced meditation techniques, "pumping peace for the world". He estimates the cost at $7 billion. As of December 2005, he had spent $400,000 of personal money, and raised $1 million in donations. In 2009, he went to India to film interviews with people who knew the Maharishi as part of a biographical documentary.

David Wants to Fly, released in May 2010, is a documentary by German filmmaker David Sieveking "that follows the path of his professional idol, David Lynch, into the world of Transcendental Meditation (TM)."

An independent project starring Lynch is called Beyond The Noise: My Transcendental Meditation Journey. It is directed by young film student Dana Farley, who has severe Dyslexia and Attention deficit disorder. Farley started Transcendental Meditation when she was sixteen and it enabled her to overcome the stresses of getting through the her last years of high school and into college. Filmmaker Kevin Sean Michaels is one of the producers and the film will be at film festivals in 2011.

Website

Lynch designed his personal website, a site exclusive to paying members, where he posts short videos and his absurdist series Dumbland, plus interviews and other items. The site also featured a daily weather report, where Lynch gives a brief description of the weather in Los Angeles, where he resides. Until June 2010, this weather report (usually no longer than 30 seconds) was also being broadcast, on his personal YouTube-channel David Lynch – Daily Weather Report. An absurd ringtone ("I like to kill deer") from the website was a common sound bite on The Howard Stern Show in early 2006.

Lynch is an avid coffee drinker and even has his own line of special organic blends available for purchase on his website. Called "David Lynch Signature Cup", the coffee has been advertised via flyers included with several recent Lynch-related DVD releases, including Inland Empire and the Gold Box edition of Twin Peaks. The possibly self-mocking tag-line for the brand is "It's all in the beans ... and I'm just full of beans." This is also a quote of a line said by Justin Theroux's character in Inland Empire.

Filmography

Features

Short films

Television series

{| class="wikitable sortable" !Year !Series !Episodes |- |1990–1991 |Twin Peaks |30 |- |1992 |On the Air |7 |- |1993 |Hotel Room |3 |}

ceremony.]]

Online series

{| class="wikitable sortable" !Year !Series !Episodes !Available on DVD |- |2002 |Rabbits | |The Lime Green Set DVD |- |2002 |Dumbland |8 |The Lime Green Set DVD |- | |Out Yonder | |The Lime Green Set DVD |- |2009 |Interview Project | | |}

Music videos

{| class="wikitable sortable" !Year !Song !Musician |- |1982 |"I Predict" |Sparks |- |1990 |"Wicked Game" (film version) |Chris Isaak |- |1992 |"Dangerous" |Michael Jackson |- |1995 |"Longing" |Yoshiki |- |2009 |"Shot in the Back of the Head" |Moby |}

Other

In October, 2008, at the OMMA Video Conference, Jen Gregono, chief content officer at On Networks, announced that her company signed Lynch to a webisode series based on his book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity.

In June 2009, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse released an album called (named after a Slate.com article of the same name, "Dark Night of the Soul; David Lynch's Inland Empire"), with a 100+ page booklet with visuals by Lynch. The album contained complete packaging and a blank CD because of a dispute with the record label. The artists involved implied that consumers can get the music online and just burn the blank CD provided.

Awards and nominations

'''Academy Awards:

1981: Best Director (The Elephant Man, nominated)

1981: Best Adapted Screenplay (The Elephant Man, nominated)

1987: Best Director (Blue Velvet, nominated)

2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

'''BAFTA Awards:

1981: Best Direction (The Elephant Man, nominated)

1981: Best Screenplay (The Elephant Man, nominated)

'''Cannes Film Festival:

1990: Golden Palm (Wild at Heart, won)

1992: Golden Palm (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, nominated)

1999: Golden Palm (The Straight Story, nominated)

2001: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., won Tied with Joel Coen for ''The Man Who Wasn't There)

2001: Golden Palm (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

'''DGA Award:

1981: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (The Elephant Man, nominated)

'''Emmy Awards:

1990: Outstanding Achievement in Main Title Theme Music (Twin Peaks, nominated)

1990: Outstanding Achievement in Music and Lyrics (Twin Peaks for the song "Into the Night", nominated)

1990: Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series (Twin Peaks for the pilot episode, nominated)

1990: Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series (Twin Peaks for the pilot episode, nominated)

1990: Outstanding Drama Series (Twin Peaks)

'''Golden Globes:

1981: Best Director (The Elephant Man, nominated)

1987: Best Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)

2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

2002: Best Screenplay (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

'''Independent Spirit Awards:

1987: Best Director (Blue Velvet, nominated)

1987: Best Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)

2000: Best Director (The Straight Story, nominated)

2007: Special Distinction Award (Shared with Laura Dern for their collaborative work, won)

'''Saturn Awards:

1993: Best Writing (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, nominated)

1993: Life Career Award (won)

2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

'''Venice Film Festival:

2006: Future Film Festival Digital Award (Inland Empire won)

2006: Career Golden Lion (won)

'''WGA Award:

1981: Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (The Elephant Man, nominated)

1987: Best Original Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)

References

;Notes

;Footnotes

;Bibliography }}

David Lynch: Interviews, a collection of interviews with Lynch from 1977 to 2008, edited by Richard A. Barney for the series Conversations with Filmmakers (University Press of Mississippi, 2009, ISBN 1604732377 [paperback], ISBN 1604732369 [hardback]). This volume covers topics that include Lynch's filmmaking, furniture design, painting, and music career.

Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with Lynch, conducted, edited, and introduced by filmmaker Chris Rodley (Faber & Faber Ltd., 1997, ISBN 0-571-19548-2; revised edition published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005, ISBN 0-571-22018-5).

The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood by Martha Nochimson (University of Texas Press, 1997, ISBN 0-292-75565-1).

The Complete Lynch by David Hughes (Virgin Virgin, 2002, ISBN 0-7535-0598-3).

Weirdsville U.S.A.: The Obsessive Universe of David Lynch by Paul A. Woods (Plexus Publishing. UK, Reprint edition, 2000, ISBN 0-85965-291-2).

David Lynch (Twayne's Filmmakers Series) by Kenneth C. Kaleta (Twayne Publishers, 1992, ISBN 0-8057-9323-2).

Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch by Jeff Johnson (McFarland & Company, 2004, ISBN 0-7864-1753-6).

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006, ISBN 1585425400 / 978-1585425402).

Snowmen by David Lynch (Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 2008, ISBN 978-3-86521-467-6).

David Lynch: Beautiful Dark by Greg Olson (Scarecrow Press, 2008, ISBN 0-8108-5917-3).

The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory by Allister Mactaggart (Intellect, 2010, ISBN 978-1-84150-332-5).

David Lynch - Un cinéma du maléfique, by Enrique Seknadje, Editions Camion Noir, 2010. ISBN : 978-2-35779-086-5

David Lynch in Theory, a collection of essays edited by Francois-Xavier Gleyzon (Charles University Press, 2010) ISBN 978-80-7308-317-5.

External links

(currently offline)

David Lynch Foundation : Education : Transcendental Meditation

David Lynch at Allmovie

David Lynch at Moviefone

David Lynch at Rotten Tomatoes

Site about the Artwork of Lynch

Bibliography of books and articles about Lynch via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center

Interviews

*Film Threat interview

*Wired interview

*Guardian interview

*Interviews for Cinefantastique

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