Jack Of Eraserhead

Production values: Jack Fisk finds days of heaven

Cismont resident Jack Fisk has a charmed career. Few movie production designers have worked on so many critically acclaimed films or as consistently with extraordinary directors, such as Terrence Malick and David Lynch. Like them, Fisk favors art over commerce.

Yet versatility is a hallmark of Fisk’s designs. He recreated a hauntingly accurate 1950s America in his breakout film, Malick’s Badlands (1973) and more recently in The Tree of Life (2011). He built the prom that Carrie White incinerated in Carrie (1976). For Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), he earned an Academy Award nomination for replicating California’s ragged early oil towns and rigs. 

With boyish enthusiasm, the utterly unpretentious Fisk, 65, says his love of building artificial worlds began in childhood when living in a wooded area in Richmond.

"I built a lot of forts.” As an adult, he says, “They turned into sets.”

After Fisk graduated from art school, director Jonathan Demme gave him his first production design assignment for $100 a week on the 1971 biker movie Angels Hard As They Come . Bewildered, Fisk called cinematographer Stephen Katz to find out what an art director does.

“And he said, ‘I don’t know,’” Fisk laughs. “So, to cover my a**, I did everything: I did costumes and props and went crazy, but I loved it.”

Since they met in ninth grade David Lynch has figured heavily in Fisk’s life. "We went to art school together, we went to Europe together, we moved to L.A. together.”

Fisk worked on one of Lynch’s 1960s student films, acted in his Eraserhead in 1977, and designed his The Straight Story (1999) and Mulholland Drive (2001). Lynch was once even married to Fisk’s sister.

Lynch is “like Jimmy Stewart from Mars," according to Fisk. "He's not strange."

It was through Lynch that Fisk first met Malick in the early ’70s, when the two directors were studying at the American Film Institute. Fisk discovered that Malick was making a film about the ’50s. Intrigued, Fisk researched the era.

Of mice and men

The tragic story of the friendship between two migrant workers, George and mentally retarded Lenny, and their dream of owning a farm

On the Road, The Original Scroll

A reproduction of Kerouac's original 1951 scroll draft of "On the Road" offers insight into the writer's thematic vision and narrative voice as influenced by ...

Three cups of tea, one man's mission to promote peace -- one school at a time

Traces how the author, having been rescued and resuscitated by Himalayan villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2, worked to build schools that would ...

The elements of style

Offers advice on improving writing skills and promoting a style marked by simplicity, orderliness, and sincerity.

The Grapes of Wrath

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.