The films of David Lynch seem any­thing but “com­mer­cial.” Dis­turb­ing, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, they shine a flash­light into the dark­est regions of the sub­con­scious mind. When you walk out of a the­ater after watch­ing a David Lynch film you feel like you just woke up from a vivid and unset­tling dream.

But Lynch has been lead­ing a dou­ble life. While mak­ing uncom­pro­mis­ing­ly artis­tic works for the movie the­aters, he has been direct­ing com­mer­cials for tele­vi­sion and oth­er media on the side. Why does he do it? “Well,” Lynch told Chris Rod­ley in Lynch on Lynch, “they’re lit­tle bit­ty films, and I always learn some­thing by doing them.”

Lynch began receiv­ing offers to make com­mer­cials after the crit­i­cal suc­cess of Blue Vel­vet in 1986. His first project was a series of four 30-sec­ond spots for Calvin Klein’s Obses­sion fra­grance in 1988, each with a pas­sage writ­ten by a famous nov­el­ist. The ad above quotes Ernest Hem­ing­way’s The Sun Also Ris­es. You can also watch com­mer­cials fea­tur­ing F. Scott Fitzger­ald and D.H. Lawrence, but the fourth one, fea­tur­ing Gus­tave Flaubert, is cur­rent­ly unavail­able.

Lynch has com­plet­ed many adver­tis­ing assign­ments over the years, always man­ag­ing to retain some­thing of his unique vision in the process. We’ve select­ed some of the most strik­ing­ly “Lynchi­an” of the com­mer­cials. Scroll down and enjoy.

When Lynch was asked a few years ago how he felt about prod­uct place­ment in movies, his video­taped answer went viral on YouTube: “Bull­shit. That’s how I feel. Total fuck­ing bull­shit.” So it’s strange to think that Lynch once agreed to place the entire fic­tion­al world of one of his most famous cre­ations, Twin Peaks, at the ser­vice of a Japan­ese cof­fee com­pa­ny. But that’s what he did in 1991, for Geor­gia Cof­fee. In Lynch on Lynch, the film­mak­er was asked whether he was con­cerned about what the com­mer­cials might do to the Twin Peaks image. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m real­ly against it in prin­ci­ple, but they were so much fun to do, and they were only run­ning in Japan and so it just felt OK.”

The four com­mer­cials, each only 30 sec­onds long, fol­low FBI Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er (Kyle McLach­lan) as he solves the mys­tery of a miss­ing Japan­ese woman in the town of Twin Peaks, all the while man­ag­ing to enjoy plen­ty of “damn fine” Geor­gia Cof­fee. Alas, the Japan­ese com­mer­cials were not as suc­cess­ful as the Amer­i­can TV series. “We were sup­posed to do a sec­ond year, and do four more 30-sec­ond spots,” Lynch said, “but they did­n’t want to do them.”

You can watch the first episode, “Lost,” above, and fol­low the rest of the sto­ry through these links: Episode Two: “Cher­ry Pie,” Episode Three: “The Mys­tery of ‘G’ ” and Episode Four: “The Res­cue.”

In 1991 Lynch made one of the creepi­est pub­lic ser­vice mes­sages ever (above) con­cern­ing New York City’s rat prob­lem. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy is by Lynch’s long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor Fred­er­ick Elmes.

“Who is Gio” (above) was shot for Geor­gio Armani in Los Ange­les in ear­ly 1992, right when sev­er­al Los Ange­les police offi­cers were acquit­ted in the video­taped beat­ing of black motorist Rod­ney King–a ver­dict that sparked may­hem in the streets. “We were shoot­ing the big scene with the musi­cians and the club the night the riots broke out in LA,” Lynch told Chris Rod­ley. “Inside the club we were all races and reli­gions, get­ting along so fan­tas­ti­cal­ly, and out­side the club the world was com­ing apart.”

Of all his ear­ly adver­tis­ing clients, Lynch said, Armani gave him the most free­dom. The two-and-a-half-minute ver­sion above is an exten­sion of the orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast 60-sec­ond com­mer­cial.

One of the most bizarre of Lynch’s com­mer­cials is his 1998 con­tri­bu­tion (above) to the “Parisi­enne Peo­ple” cam­paign. The Swiss cig­a­rette mak­er Parisi­enne invit­ed famous direc­tors to make short com­mer­cials for screen­ing in movie the­aters across Switzer­land. To see how oth­ers han­dled the same assign­ment, fol­low these links: Roman Polan­s­ki, Robert Alt­man, Jean-Luc Godard (with wife Anne-Marie Miéville), Giuseppe Tor­na­tore, and Ethan and Joel Coen.

Lynch’s sur­re­al 2000 com­mer­cial for Sony Playsta­tion (above), called “The Third Place,” is wide open for inter­pre­ta­tion. Writer Greg Olson takes a hero­ic stab at it in his book, David Lynch: Beau­ti­ful Dark:

For six­ty sec­onds we pro­ceed through a labyrinth of Lynchi­an themes and motifs visu­al­ized in black and white, thus sig­ni­fy­ing the bifur­ca­tion of the world into two polar­i­ties. A man in a black suit and a white shirt encoun­ters eerie pas­sage­ways, sud­den flames, bar­ren trees, fac­to­ry smoke, a woman who won’t speak her secrets, a wound­ed fig­ure wrapped in ban­dages. The man meets his own dou­ble, and a man with a duck­’s head. A source­less voice asks, “Where are we?” The dual­is­tic duck-man, who syn­the­sizes ani­mal instinct and human learn­ing, knows: “Wel­come to the third place.”

Yes. The duck-man knows.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Debuts Lady Blue Shang­hai

David Lynch’s Organ­ic Cof­fee (Bar­bie Head Not Includ­ed)

Last month we brought you some lit­tle-known soap com­mer­cials by Ing­mar Bergman. Today we present a series of lyri­cal tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments made by the great Ital­ian film­mak­er Fed­eri­co Felli­ni dur­ing the final decade of his life.

In 1984, when he was 64 years old, Felli­ni agreed to make a minia­ture film fea­tur­ing Cam­pari, the famous Ital­ian apéri­tif. The result, Oh, che bel pae­sag­gio! (“Oh, what a beau­ti­ful land­scape!”), shown above, fea­tures a man and a woman seat­ed across from one anoth­er on a long-dis­tance train.

The man (played by Vic­tor Polet­ti) smiles, but the woman (Sil­via Dion­i­sio) averts her eyes, star­ing sul­len­ly out the win­dow and pick­ing up a remote con­trol to switch the scenery. She grows increas­ing­ly exas­per­at­ed as a sequence of desert and medieval land­scapes pass by. Still smil­ing, the man takes the remote con­trol, clicks it, and the beau­ti­ful Cam­po di Mira­coli (“Field of Mir­a­cles”) of Pisa appears in the win­dow, embell­ished by a tow­er­ing bot­tle of Cam­pari.

“In just one minute,” writes Tul­lio Kezich in Fed­eri­co Felli­ni: His Life and Work, “Felli­ni gives us a chap­ter of the sto­ry of the bat­tle between men and women, and makes ref­er­ence to the neu­ro­sis of TV, insin­u­ates that we’re dis­parag­ing the mirac­u­lous gifts of nature and his­to­ry, and offers the hope that there might be a screen that will bring the joy back. The lit­tle tale is as quick as a train and has a remark­ably light touch.”

Also in 1984, Felli­ni made a com­mer­cial titled Alta Soci­eta (“High Soci­ety”) for Bar­il­la riga­toni pas­ta (above). As with the Cam­pari com­mer­cial, Felli­ni wrote the script him­self and col­lab­o­rat­ed with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ennio Guarnieri and musi­cal direc­tor Nico­la Pio­vani. The cou­ple in the restau­rant were played by Gre­ta Vaian and Mau­r­izio Mau­ri. The Bar­il­la spot is per­haps the least inspired of Fellini’s com­mer­cials. Bet­ter things were yet to come.

In 1991 Felli­ni made a series of three com­mer­cials for the Bank of Rome called Che Brutte Not­ti or “The Bad Nights.” “These com­mer­cials, aired the fol­low­ing year,” writes Peter Bon­danel­la in The Films of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, “are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, since they find their inspi­ra­tion in var­i­ous dreams Felli­ni had sketched out in his dream note­books dur­ing his career.”

In the episode above, titled “The Pic­nic Lunch Dream,” the clas­sic damsel-in-dis­tress sce­nario is turned upside down when a man (played by Pao­lo Vil­lag­gio) finds him­self trapped on the rail­road tracks with a train bear­ing down on him while the beau­ti­ful woman he was din­ing with (Anna Falchi) climbs out of reach and taunts him. But it’s all a dream, which the man tells to his psy­cho­an­a­lyst (Fer­nan­do Rey). The ana­lyst inter­prets the dream and assures the man that his nights will be rest­ful if he puts his mon­ey in the Ban­co di Roma.

The oth­er com­mer­cials, which are cur­rent­ly not avail­able online, are called “The Tun­nel Dream” and “The Dream of the Lion in the Cel­lar.” (You can watch Rober­to Di Vito’s short, untrans­lat­ed film of Felli­ni and his crew work­ing on the project here.)

The bank com­mer­cials were the last films Felli­ni ever made. He died a year after they aired, at age 73. In Kezich’s view, the deeply per­son­al and imag­i­na­tive ads amount to Fellini’s last tes­ta­ment, a brief but won­drous return to form. “In Fed­eri­co’s life,” he writes, “these three com­mer­cial spots are a kind of Indi­an sum­mer, the gold­en autumn of a patri­arch of cin­e­ma who, for a moment, holds again the reins of cre­ation.”

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Ear­li­er this week, we brought you Audrey Hepburn’s Screen Test for Roman Hol­i­day (1953). Next up, we have Katharine Hep­burn appear­ing on the very 70s set of The Dick Cavett Show. In case you’re won­der­ing, the two Hep­burns were only dis­tant­ly relat­ed. Accord­ing to Salon, they shared one com­mon ances­tor, James Hep­burn, Earl of Both­well, the third hus­band of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Any­way, here’s the back­sto­ry on the Cavett inter­view that aired on Sep­tem­ber 14, 1973:

Hep­burn rarely grant­ed inter­views, and when she did, she want­ed them under her terms. When she agreed to appear on the Dick Cavett Show they went in the stu­dio a day ear­ly so she could get the feel of things. They end­ed up doing the inter­view right then and there, with­out an audi­ence.

Watch a clip of the actu­al inter­view here.

In the past, we have fea­tured Cavet­t’s inter­views with Ing­mar Bergman, Woody Allen, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, and George Har­ri­son. And don’t for­get this feud between Nor­man Mail­er and Gore Vidal. Through Ama­zon, you can also pur­chase high­lights of con­ver­sa­tions with Mar­lon Bran­do, Fred Astaire, Robert Mitchum, Orson Welles, Grou­cho Marx, Kirk Dou­glas, Bette Davis, and oth­ers. h/t Peter Kauf­man

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