By Amy Wallace
        Washington Post/Los Angeles Times Syndicate
        Sunday, September 26, 1999; Page G10

        HOLLYWOOD—It is no secret that David Lynch, the
        writer-director-composer-painter, has an unusual relationship with Bob's
        Big Boy restaurant. For seven years in the 1980s he ate lunch there every
        day, ordering cup after cup of oversweetened coffee and a single
        chocolate milkshake while scribbling notes on Bob's little square napkins.

        What is not widely known--and what reveals something fundamental about
        the 53-year-old filmmaker--is that during this period, back when he
        "thought that sugar was really a beautiful thing" (he doesn't eat it anymore),
        he took pains to arrive at Bob's at precisely 2:30 p.m. each day. The
        reason: It increased the odds that he would encounter perfection.

        "If you go earlier, at lunchtime, they're making a lot of chocolate
        milkshakes. The mixture has to cool in a machine, but if it doesn't sit in
        there long enough--when they're serving a lot of them--it's runny," he said.
        "At 2:30, the milkshake mixture hasn't been sitting there too long, but
        you've got a chance for it to be just great."

        Lynch's reward for this meticulous preparation was minimal: only three
        perfect milkshakes out of more than 2,500. But that wasn't the point. For
        Lynch, it was enough to know he had set the stage for excellence to occur.
        Lynch thinks a lot about this idea, which affects not just his diet (he still
        eats the same thing, every day, for lunch and dinner), but also his
        preference for sparse furnishings and his Zenlike approach to choosing
        projects. Whether with milkshakes or movies, Lynch believes you must
        make room for inspiration to strike--to lay the proper groundwork for
        greatness to take hold.

        So he seems particularly pleased with "The Straight Story," his eighth
        feature film, which arrives in theaters Oct. 15. Based on the true story of
        Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old Iowa man who rode a lawn mower 350 miles
        to see his ailing brother, the script caught Lynch's attention, held it and
        wouldn't let it go. The result: Three years after his last film ("Lost
        Highway"), and nine years after his hit TV series "Twin Peaks" introduced
        his eccentric vision to mainstream America, Lynch has completed a movie
        unlike any he has made before.

        For one thing, "The Straight Story" marks Lynch's first time directing a
        project he did not write (Mary Sweeney, Lynch's longtime editor and
        companion, and John Roach share writing credit). The film, which stars
        Richard Farnsworth as Straight and Sissy Spacek as his daughter, Rose, is
        not populated by the misfits and mutants whom Lynch fans have come to
        know in films such as "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet." Instead, it
        celebrates decent Midwestern folk, many of them elderly.

        Most surprisingly, the movie--which is being released by Walt Disney
        Pictures under its family-friendly Disney banner--is rated G.

        Lynch knows some people will call this a departure for him.

        "When you've done two or three films that first got an X and finally got an
        R and then you do a G-rated film, it's kind of considered to be a different
        kind of thing for a person," he acknowledged one morning recently with an
        understatement that sounded, appropriately, Midwestern. (Lynch himself
        grew up in Missoula, Mont.)

        Welcoming a visitor to his Hollywood Hills home, Lynch sat in a low-slung
        chair in a nearly empty room that he laughingly asserted was still too
        cluttered.

        On a purely visual level, "The Straight Story" is a loving portrait of
        American farm country. Rarely have endless rows of corn been so
        embraced by a camera. But among the windmills and silos, bleached-out
        barns and harvesting machinery, there are also images that will warm the
        hearts of die-hard Lynch fans: an ample woman on a plastic lawn chair, for
        example, sunning herself with a metallic reflector while biting into a pink
        Sno-ball.

        Much has been written about the link between Lynch's formal training as a
        painter and the vivid imagery of his films. But Lynch is the first to say that
        his movies bear little resemblance to his canvases. He sees more
        connection between filmmaking and musical composition, with which he
        also enjoys experimenting (often in collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti,
        who has created music for every Lynch project since 1986).

        Not surprisingly, then, "The Straight Story" is also a striking aural
        experience. In addition to directing the film, Lynch is credited as its sound
        designer, and even casual viewers will notice the care he has taken to
        stimulate the ears as well as the eyes. Whether it's the whir of a grain
        elevator, the crash of a lightning storm or the whiz-whoosh of cyclists on a
        country road passing at close range, the film serves up the audible textures
        of life in the heartland.

        "Film to me is like music in the way it deals with things happening in
        sequence. Certain events have to precede others in a certain way for it to
        work. But there's a connection between music, film, painting, writing,
        everything," said Lynch, who does all those things while also making and
        designing furniture and raising his and Sweeney's 7-year-old son.

        Lynch's cinematic power first struck the public's fancy in 1977 with the
        release of "Eraserhead," a surrealistic nightmare about a couple raising a
        mutant baby. The unsettling film, whose main character fantasized about
        having his head used as an eraser, would become one of the most
        successful midnight movies on the cult circuit.

        "Eraserhead" also impressed comedian Mel Brooks, whose company was
        producing a film about John Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man whose
        deformed head and body masked a gentle soul. Brooks hired Lynch to
        write and direct the black-and-white "Elephant Man." After its release in
        1980, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including one for
        Lynch for best director.

        Suddenly, Lynch was on the A-list. But he was more interested in pursuing
        his own projects than in making big Hollywood pictures. He worked on his
        own small film, "Ronnie Rocket," at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope
        Studios.

        When Zoetrope's financial woes forced Lynch to suspend production,
        however, he signed on with producer Dino De Laurentiis to make his first
        big-budget film: the long-anticipated screen version of "Dune," Frank
        Herbert's best-selling sci-fi novel. It was a huge undertaking--Lynch
        himself winnowed the 500-page tome into a script that tried to make
        cinematic sense of Herbert's complex vision, and employed 20,000 extras
        to try to bring it to life.

        The result: mixed reviews, disappointing box office and what Lynch would
        later describe as "a tremendous amount of pain." Devastated by his failure
        to bring "Dune" to life in a comprehensible way, he sought solace each day
        at Bob's Big Boy.

        "The coffee and the sugar would really get me going. And I would try to
        catch ideas," he said the other day, explaining that the daily routine helped
        him think in much the same way that uncluttered spaces do. "The more
        things you have in a room, it does something to the mind. "

        Apparently, Lynch was onto something, because his next film--mapped
        out, at least in part, on Bob's napkins--was "Blue Velvet." Heralded by
        Newsweek as "a breakthrough, fusing [Lynch's] most personal obsessions
        with sex, death and innocence with a mystery story," the movie followed an
        amateur sleuth (Kyle MacLachlan) on a search for the owner of a human
        ear (found in a field) that leads him into a dark underworld of drugs,
        corruption and sexual violence. Once again, Lynch received an Oscar
        nomination for best director.

        Since "Blue Velvet," Lynch has made the initially popular TV series "Twin
        Peaks" (and the less than popular feature film based on it, "Twin Peaks:
        Fire Walk With Me"), two more feature films ("Wild at Heart" in 1990 and
        "Lost Highway" in 1996) and a few other forays into television.

        But "The Straight Story" intrigued him in a new way, he said, because it
        posed a challenge: capturing on film the content of a man's heart.