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Dugpa: Wow. That's a great story. Most recently, you have been working on David Lynch.com'

John Neff: For the last year and a half. Since February of 2000. David made the commitment to go online, and he said (I'm paraphrasing him here' 'The Internet allows you to be your own radio station, film studio, and television studio, you're on the air 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and nobody can tell you what to do.' Strangely, that appeals to him. He had no idea of what it would take in terms of time, people, effort, cost, etc. None of us did. We just blindly started writing, recording, mixing stuff, and building the backbone. We have a store where you can buy things, lots of things. Well that means that you have to have a whole e-commerce substructure, and you've got to have stuff to sell. You have to design it, you have to manufacture it, you have to make it, you have to warehouse it. Oh my God, we had to have a warehouse. Then we had to have a fulfillment operation. I mean every step along the way, people are concerned with how long it is taking the website to come up, and there's this pre-introductory page, and believe me' that page costs a heck of a lot of money, because we've been building the whole structure behind it. We're shooting two new series. David built sets on the property. The neighbors complained, so we had to tear it down, and relocate them elsewhere. Some of the scenes are shot on location. You have to write the scripts, hire the actors. We're shooting it all on DV cam, Sony PD-150's, 100A's, and editing on Final Cut Pro on Macintoshes. Apple in fact is a strategic partner on the site. They are assisting with hardware, software, and streaming capabilities. They've been very involved, and very wonderful to us. Other people are involved too. Sorenson jumped in for the streaming compression. In Final Cut Pro, you might have four, eight audio tracks, but you can't do anything with the audio. Now DV doesn't have time code, addressable outside time code. David wants to mix in Protools in the big studio. So we shoot on DV, and how do we mix the thing, how do we post it? We bring in actors to do a lot of ADR, because we have a lot of noise on the set. How do you get that in synch? We had to invent that, because DV isn't addressable via outside standard time code. I won't give away all the trade secrets, but we ended up working on them visually as QuickTime movies in Protools, and exporting the audio, and reintegrating it in Final Cut Pro. So we have four Final Cut Pro editing stations, and it's just massive, and David is paying for this all out of his own pocket. So David Lynch.com is supposed to launch the same day the film opens, October 12th. We shall see' We're in a mad crunch time producing stuff. He's still writing some stuff for one of the series. We're gonna go shoot the last week of September, some of Episodes of one the series, have it all posted by the 12th, and all compressed for streaming video. So David Lynch.com has been a massive effort. There is lot of people working on it, and we think it's gonna be really cool.

Dugpa: I'm looking very forward to it.

John Neff: Well, I don't want to start any avalanches, but he is also going to be going on live chat from time to time, answering questions. His daughter, Jennifer Lynch is going to have a streamed radio show. I'm setting her up with her broadcast setup this week. There will be a chat room on the official site. It's going to be a fun thing.

Dugpa: So what other type of things can we look forward to from David Lynch.com?

John Neff: We've got another thing that is going to show up on the website called 'Industrial Soundscapes.' Most of them are David alone, but some of them are David and myself, playing slow, sonorous tone poems. We're playing the keyboards side by side, and we watch where each other are going and we just kind of freeform these pieces that are 8, 10, 12-minutes long. We're thinking of doing a CD of industrial soundscapes. David has quite a rig with a Parker Fly with a midi driver on it, and he's got the VG8 Virtual Amp Roland Floorbox unit as well as the GR-33 guitar synth. The music for Dumbland is David playing guitar through the guitar synth with the arpeggiators doing all kinds of weird stuff like triggering drums and all kinds of baloney. It's just the wildest, stupidest patches that we could come up with.

Dugpa: That sounds wild. So tell me, what will the infrastructure of David Lynch.com be like? Will it be a subscription service?

John Neff: It will be a subscription site. It's very reasonable. That's because this site is literally costing millions of dollars to put up. There is NO advertising. It's not going to have any popup ads, no banners, no baloney. It's strictly a private entertainment site. Everything' EVERYTHING is designed and done by David. He doesn't sit in an office and tell people to do things. The Dumbland cartoon series' he animated and drew the whole series with his mouse. 60 hours per cartoon. Then we post it for three or four days in the studio, and then it takes another guy three or four days to marry it up and compress it and get it ready to show on the Internet. I mean, what did that cost? You got 30, 50 thousand dollars in a three-minute silly thing. How about David's time? What's that worth? So it is subscription. Very minor cost wise, but without advertising or sponsors, there's no other way to do it. The store isn't by subscription. If somebody wants to buy a copy of Eraserhead, which will be out on DVD, or the Blue Bob CD, posters, shirts, all kinds of baloney, you can go to the store. You don't have to join. There's also some freebies just for showing up. There will always be things to do on the site, that you won't have to buy, but to see the series, and the stuff that cost money to produce, it is subscription.

Dugpa: So how soon after the sites launch will the new Eraserhead DVD be available?

John Neff: It's in production. We are filming some stories about the production of it. David tried to come up with some extra scenes, but there isn't enough of the old material left. So there might be some stills and some other odds and ends, but there aren't scenes from it per say, because all the negative and the lifts are just gone. They got shipped or dumped many years ago unfortunately. They're not recoverable.

Dugpa: Tell us about the transfer of that film to DVD.

John Neff: The negative resides at the museum of modern art in New York, and they shipped the negative back, and we had a high-def transfer made from the negative. Every single one of the 130,000 frames has been digitally cleaned by a poor guy we locked up in a closet, and won't let out until it's perfect. The sound will be the stereo Dolby SR track. We really tried to make a 5.1 track, but enough of the original elements don't survive' so we couldn't do a fair job of it. But it's going to be great. It will be in an 8 by 8-inch box with a lot of photos. Very classy... and reasonable.

Dugpa: Sounds great. Fans have been waiting for this one for a very long time.

John Neff: For a real DVD instead of some of these..

Dugpa: <laughs>

John Neff: See, when you release picture, and even though David owns Eraserhead, there are foreign territories. And you sell the rights to distribute pictures in these various foreign territories. Venus and Mars. So they have the right to release VHS and now DVD's or whatever, and he's terminated all of those foreign territories contracts as they have expired, but a few have existed into the DVD age, and there are a few out there. They are not from a new negative. They are probably from an internegative (actually a duping negative). We're going from the original spliced camera negative. So this will be the definitive DVD. And there won't be any VHS of it either. David is a real believer of Digital. Tape is over with.

Dugpa: I remember when word first got out that David was working on a new Eraserhead DVD. Then a few months later, a new Eraserhead DVD popped up in the UK. Many people bought and preordered it thinking that it was the new Lynch approved transfer.

John Neff: And they were very disappointed.

Dugpa: Yes.

John Neff: Film scratches and everything. David had nothing to do with that, would like to have not seen that happen, but they had the right to do it, and once the word got out that David was doing it, they capitalized on it. It's unfortunately part of the movie business. But David's will be good.