—Frank Herbert, Dune
Chihuahua, Mexico
1983
In another place, in another time, a sheltered and naïve young man is given a great responsibility. A large number of people have put their faith in him, believing he has the power to lead them into the future. Though he has an air of confidence, he carries a secret: He’s unsure that he’s up to the task. If he is actually the one.
This is true for Paul Atreides, the protagonist of Frank Herbert’s Dune, but it is also true for me. At twenty-four years old and carrying a grand total of zero films under my belt, I am cast as the lead in a $40 million film that is supposed to be far more than a single feature. The hope is that it will be the launch of the next big thing: the Duniverse. (The Duneverse?) It doesn’t happen—not then—so that’s why that word looks so clumsy.
In the distance, across the Samalayuca Dune Fields, men are burning old tires to get the right color and intensity of black smoke. As a key point of the plot, the planet Arrakis, aka Dune, doesn’t have water; thus, it has no blue sky. But of course, Mexico does. Can’t get around that. So, our intrepid director, the thirty-seven-year-old former Eagle Scout from Montana, the Oscar-nominated visionary behind Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, David Lynch, has taken on the not-inconsiderable task of blotting out the sky.
You’d think that would be ambitious enough. But on top of having to, I repeat, hide the sky, he must also completely clear the desert. I can see crew members out there in the crushing midday heat yanking plants out of the ground and hauling critters—snakes and anything else that moves—out of the shot. And because this is a film of epic scope—like if David Lean went to space—the crew has to cover a vast landscape. I don’t envy them. Though, I’m sure they’re looking back at me thinking the exact same thing.
The costume department is dressing up a long line of extras in full vinyl suits, sheaths of plastic and rubber with headpieces and faceplates. Out in the heat, fainting is not uncommon. Once in a while, someone will just drop. The extras, playing the emperor’s fighters, known as the Sardaukar, are actual members of the Mexican Army.
I think this is all normal.
It is early in the shoot, and I am young enough to enjoy my time on set like it’s summer camp, green enough not to worry about how (or if) it will all come together onscreen. I marvel at the scope of this thing and eagerly make notes in my script, which I carry around in a woolen pouch I bought at a Coyoacán flea market. I constantly reread my dog-eared paperback copy of Dune, the pages covered in the red dust that is indiscriminately blowing around.
It is a blessing, this ignorance. Not apathy—of course I want to do well—but optimism. The confidence is a survival technique. If I acknowledged the sheer size and stakes of this thing, I’d probably be too afraid to get out of bed each morning.
Here’s what I know: This isn’t my previous job at the Empty Space theater in Seattle, performing for a ninety-nine-seat house, taking home $185 a week. No, this is something far different. And with nothing else to compare it to, I just accept it. Well, this is the movies, I guess.
It all started out innocuously enough.
Six months earlier, in December 1982, I am a working theater actor in Seattle when a message is left on my answering machine by a Hollywood casting agent. She invites me to a room at the plush Four Seasons downtown to audition for the role of Paul Atreides, a call that I’m sure is a prank. But I call back, and sure enough, it’s real. Then I’m in between two beds reading lines—called “sides”—for Elisabeth Leustig, a kind-faced woman with cascading waves of light brown hair and a thick French accent. I stand in front of a small video camera set up on a flimsy stand. She is casting for the lead in a big-budget film of Dune, a book I loved as a teenager, a character who defined me as a teenager. They might as well be choosing astronauts for Mars.
Only half a year out of the University of Washington’s Professional Actor Training Program, I am currently “on the boards,” co-starring as the hothead Damis in a production of Molière’s Tartuffe. Working with a cast I know well from the previous summer’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I am living the local actor’s life in Seattle. The Empty Space is a tiny theater up in the hip Capitol Hill area, near the Comet Tavern, where we go out drinking after rehearsal. It is a communal, tightly knit circle I’m happy to be a part of.
Film is nothing that I’m even considering, even as a lark.
Apart from taping an audition for a local insurance company and being an extra in a movie filmed at UW, I have never been in front of a camera. Nothing remotely close to this. The tape for Elisabeth is less a formal audition than a glimpse of what I look and sound like, whether I have a modicum of acting talent, whether I have that ineffable quality that makes screen acting come alive. Something has to translate through the lens and emerge on the other side in a process that contains more than a touch of magic. “That glass has a psychic and spiritual thing about it,” legendary director Sidney Lumet once said. He called it “the third eye.”
I know how to navigate a script onstage, but performing alone in a hotel room is like feeling around in the dark. Elisabeth is kind and helpful, and when I’m done, she says some nice things. In her studied but warm way, she confesses that she has a feeling about me. She tells me I’d been recommended around town, so she scheduled me for the last slot of the day, to give us more time together. It seems like a promising sign, but what do I know?
When we’re done, I get up the courage to ask, “What happens next?”
“Well, Kyle”—she pronounces it Keel—“I’m off to San Francisco to see more actors,” she says while packing up, “but I think”—sink—“we’ll be in touch.”
On the bus ride back to my studio apartment near the university, I scan my naturally cautious mind; I find no danger, no downside I can make out. I have it loosely mapped in my head to move to New York City soon, get a cheap place downtown with a roommate, wait tables to pay my bills, and start auditioning for anything and everything. I’ve studied voice since I was sixteen, so maybe musical theater on Broadway or a repertory theater contract that will send me somewhere like Cincinnati Rep or the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Build a theater career step by step. Careful, meticulous—that feels right to me.
This Dune audition is just a fun divergence, maybe a good story to tell. A colossal roll of the dice.
I mean, it’s not like I’m going to get it.
But then comes an enthusiastic call from Elisabeth telling me they didn’t find anyone in San Francisco, along with some mention that the front-runner is not quite right, and I’m being booked on a flight to Los Angeles, a place I last visited as a teenager, in the back of my parents’ station wagon going to Disneyland.
L.A. has never been a real place to me. But now I am there, sitting alone in David Lynch’s temporary office on the Universal Studios back lot, waiting for him to return from his daily lunch at Bob’s Big Boy.
I haven’t yet watched David’s cult debut, Eraserhead, but my friends told me it was the weirdest thing they’d ever seen. Yet the man now walking in can’t be less so. He wears a loose black sport coat over a white oxford shirt buttoned all the way to the top, baggy khaki pants, and swooping waves of hair with a prominent forelock crashing down. His walk is both hurried and casual, purposeful but not heated. He’s an interesting mix of disheveled artist and professional straight arrow, maybe the perfect combination.
David speaks in a clipped, flat Great Plains honk, a voice that will forever become part of my consciousness. “SO, I HEAR YOU’RE UP IN SEATTLE. THAT WHERE YOU GREW UP?”
“Uh, no. I’m from Yakima originally, the east side of the state.”
“OH, WOW. NO KIDDING. I WAS BORN IN MISSOULA.” His voice is like an EKG machine, beeping at a steady frequency. I find it relaxing—almost hypnotic. “MY DAD WAS IN THE FOREST SERVICE. THEN WE MOVED TO IDAHO, THEN SPOKANE.”
This leads into geographic small talk about places we visited as kids, lakes where we vacationed. Though we’re over a decade apart in age, our pasts don’t seem much different at all. Time moves slowly up there. David and I find a commonality of experiences around the Northwest, especially the rural parts. We share stories of outdoor childhoods around water, animals, and trees, places that allowed our fertile imaginations to run wild. The freedom to improvise with whatever was around, wherever our curiosity or interests took us. Spatter painting on that blank canvas. Courting whims, oblivious to the potential harm.
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