The Making of Blue Velvet Was Even Weirder Than You Think

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On August 19, 1985, a film crew assembled in the backyard of a Wilmington home. It was the early days of the city’s film industry, and the sight of trailers and trucks was still a novelty in the Forest Hills neighborhood. You could ask a stranger to use their house for a shoot, and they would say “yes” because they didn’t yet understand what a pain in the neck it would be. 

The weather was beautiful for the first day of shooting, sunny and unseasonably mild. Most of the crew wore shorts—except for the director, a skinny man in a neat white button-down shirt and khakis. 

At “Action!” a white-haired actor watering the lawn clutched his head in agony and crumpled to the ground. The hose’s spray arced upward, and crew members dodged the droplets as they splashed in every direction. A dog ran to the stricken man and leapt on his writhing body, eagerly lapping at the water.

When the director called “Cut!” he liked to follow it up with “Peachy keen!” or “Solid gold!” He was on the cusp of 40, an Oscar nominee whose last film, an expensive flop, had sapped his love of filmmaking and almost destroyed his career. He had come to North Carolina on the promise of making the movie he wanted to make. That director was David Lynch, and the film was Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet was a sensation upon release, dividing critics as sharply as it divided audiences. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert argued vociferously about whether it was “cruelly unfair to its actors” or “mesmerizing.” Audience members reportedly fainted in theaters, and Newsweek quoted one detractor as saying “I felt like a pervert watching it.” 

Though 40 years later it’s lost none of its ability to shock, Blue Velvet has surpassed its original status as a succès de scandale (or even cult classic) to become a great American work of art; the most recent Sight and Sound list declared it the 85th best film of all time. 

The story of its creation begins in Wilmington, where Lynch came to rediscover his passion for film and re-establish his good name after the calamitous experience of 1984’s Dune. Circumstances forced him to shoot here, but he loved it. “I’ve never had this good a feeling about going to work,” he said during the second week of filming. “I can hardly wait to get in the car and drive to shoot.” 

His longtime actor and muse Kyle MacLachlan recalled years later: “I never saw him happier.”

“I felt like a pervert watching it.”

One of the film’s many critics, as quoted in Newsweek after its release.

Lynch made use of Wilmington’s quaint and charming scenery—it’s still easy to recognize the Cape Fear River and Water Street in the first establishing shot. But the film peered deeper. As in many cities during the 1980s, Wilmington’s downtown was in decline, with tourist restaurants and picturesque diners sitting uneasily down the street from boarded-up storefronts and seedy dive bars, and crew members told me the tableau felt perfect for the story Lynch wanted to tell. 

“The whole city had this sense of a dark side and a light side,” said Eddie Bowen, a location manager on the film.

Investigating the case with the help of naïve high-schooler Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), he becomes entangled with a troubled nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) and a dangerous criminal (Dennis Hopper). Attracted, against his better instincts, to this lurid tale of kidnapping and sexual violence, Jeffrey descends from his comfortable world of well-appointed houses and Main Street coffee shops into his city’s low-rent apartments, decrepit nightclubs, and industrial wastelands—all shot within a few miles of those lovely gingerbread Victorians.

“You scratch any surface in Wilmington,” said Jeff Goodwin, the film’s makeup director, “and you’re gonna find something dark underneath that. That’s been true in Wilmington all the way back to the pirates.”

“There are a lot of things in Blue Velvet that seem so strange and Lynchian, that David Lynch just found in Wilmington and collaged into his movie,” said Dan Brawley, who runs the city’s Cucalorus Film Festival. The film’s designers dug into the city’s thrift shops, Black fashion stores, and artsy hangouts for props, costumes, and inspiration. Lynch also cast local oddballs in his film. 

“You go into someone’s real house, and you can’t believe it, what they’ve got in these houses,” Lynch told an interviewer with glee that autumn. “It gives you so many ideas!”

For Lynch’s crew, a mix of local neophytes and Hollywood pros, the Blue Velvet shoot still stands out as singular. “You didn’t know what the film was about,” said Shaw Burney, an art department assistant on the film, in the documentary It’s a Strange World. “You knew, certainly, it was the strangest thing you’ve ever experienced. And as we proceeded shooting, it got stranger and stranger.”

‘It’s So Close’

Lynch didn’t choose Wilmington. It was chosen for him when he made a deal to shoot his long-gestating screenplay with the legendary producer and aspiring mogul Dino De Laurentiis, who had just built an expensive studio and soundstage in Smiths Creek. 

De Laurentiis, the cigar-smoking Italian impresario who had produced Fellini and Pasolini and also Barbarella, had moved to Wilmington, it was said, because it fulfilled his two non-negotiables: It was in a “right-to-work” state (meaning he could use cheaper nonunion workers), and he could buy a really nice beach house nearby. 

De Laurentiis agreed to finance Blue Velvet for about $7 million, granting Lynch final cut—as long as he brought the movie in under two hours—as a kind of apology for the terrible time everyone had had making the big-budget flop Dune. 

When Lynch arrived in the summer of 1985, it was a quick drive from the airport to the studios. Years before Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, and Nights in Rodanthe, the productions were a little more disreputable: Lynch parked near a beat-up Harley-Davidson motorcycle with Maine plates. It belonged to Stephen King, who was in North Carolina directing the cocaine-fueled fiasco Maximum Overdrive for De Laurentiis. (A prankster would soon graffiti Lynch’s parking sign to read DEVOID LYNCH.) 

The production faced an immediate problem of Lynch’s own making: What should they do about Lumberton? In his screenplay, Lynch had set the story in a town with that name, a name he insisted came out of his imagination but which, producer Fred Caruso was dismayed to discover, was the name of a real town just up Highway 74. As a courtesy, Caruso called the Lumberton City Council to ask for permission to use the name, telling them that it had “a romantic quality” that Lynch loved. He also offered $500. The council agreed.

The film was scheduled for a 10-week shoot, starting with daytime setups, followed by scenes in the De Laurentiis studios and finishing with six weeks of overnight work. From the start, it was clear that Lynch was in no hurry. He rarely got a shot before late morning, instead rehearsing his actors for hours or tinkering with lighting. Once, he spent an eternity arranging dust bunnies under a radiator. He painstakingly cut masking tape to add the word LUMBERTON to an ice truck, even though the truck was barely visible through a diner window.

“You scratch any surface in Wilmington, and you’re gonna find something dark underneath that.”

Jeff Goodwin, the film’s makeup director

Bowen recalled a day outside the Wilmington police station when Lynch climbed a stepladder with a tiny paintbrush and carefully touched up the brick. “This was for a wide establishing shot where it would never in a million years be seen,” Bowen said. 

Blue Velvet was Bowen’s first movie—he was a young professor of film studies at UNC Greensboro who’d decided he needed some real-world experience—and he didn’t yet understand how unusual this behavior was for a director. 

“Other movies, I’ve learned, they’re relatively regimented, and there are shot lists, and everyone knows what they’re going to do,” he explained. “But David wanted to have a chance to experiment and come up with things.” 

Up on that ladder, Bowen now understands, Lynch was daydreaming. “He was trying to let the ideas come. He came up with these things that would Zen him out, and give him an excuse not to be shooting yet.”

Lynch loved details, and he particularly loved the severed ear that Goodwin made for him out of silicone. “David and I treated the ear like a character in the film,” Goodwin told me. “We called it Mr. Ear.” Goodwin first modeled it after his own ear, but Lynch thought it wasn’t big enough. (“You’ve got the smallest ears in the world!” Lynch exclaimed.) The little tuft of hair still attached to the ear is Lynch’s, which Goodwin collected after Lynch got a haircut in the makeup trailer. The ants that crawl over it were awakened from refrigerator-induced slumber and convinced to stay interested with a few drops of honey. 

Jeffrey Beaumont, who finds that ear in a vacant lot, shares Lynch’s aw-shucks manner, his floppy wedge of brown hair, and his verbal idiosyncrasies. “I used to know a kid who lived here,” Jeffrey says to Sandy as they walk past a house in their neighborhood. “He has the longest tongue in the world!” 

Costume designer Ron Leamon told me that, when he asked Lynch what the actor should wear, the director replied, “Just dress him like me.” Jeffrey buttons his shirts right up to the neck—just like Lynch did every day. 

The lead characters’ houses still stand in the quiet residential neighborhoods of Forest Hills and Sunset Park. The house of the kid with the longest tongue in the world is in Princess Place. But Jeffrey and Sandy’s investigation soon leads them to a different part of town, the Carolina Apartments on Market Street. In Blue Velvet, this hulking, six-story edifice is the Deep River complex, home to the lounge singer Dorothy (Rossellini). 

It wasn’t hard to make the Carolina look Lynchian, recalled Bowen. When Jeffrey walks into the building—and the lobby “looks like something from Eraserhead”—no set dressing was required. That was just how the building was decorated. 

Inside Dorothy’s shabby apartment, Jeffrey hides in a closet and watches as the singer is sexually exploited by a psychopathic criminal who has kidnapped her husband and child. The scene—energized by Hopper’s live-wire performance as the nitrous oxide-huffing Frank—feels as brutal and transgressive to the viewer as it does to Jeffrey. This is a different world, we understand, a darker and more violent one, a long, long way away from what we are used to seeing in the movies. 

“You go into someone’s real house, and you can’t believe it, what they’ve got in these houses. It gives you so many ideas!”

David Lynch on shooting in Wilmington

But Blue Velvet also challenges us: Is it really so far away? The film’s neighborhoods impinge upon one another, and their borders are always changing. “That’s what’s scary,” Sandy says of Dorothy’s apartment building. “It’s so close.”

Abducted by Frank and his cackling minions, Jeffrey spends a terrifying night burrowing into Lumberton’s underworld. The climax of this journey takes place in a dilapidated apartment occupied by Ben, played by Dean Stockwell in a dressing gown and heavy makeup. That apartment appears essentially exactly as the film’s location team found it, in a 19th-century building left abandoned since its owner died in the late 1960s.

“We were the first people to walk back into that apartment in 15, 20 years,” Bowen recalled. The furniture was perfectly horrible. All the crew had to do was patch a hole in the floor and clean up jars of food that had exploded sometime in the past decade. “That was the kind of thing that David and Patty Norris, the production designer—who was absolutely astonishing—were able to dig out of Wilmington.” 

The entire nightmarish sequence, in fact, is a testament to Lynch’s (and his crew’s) ability to find inspiration anywhere. The dowdy women serving at Ben’s beck and call were personally chosen by Lynch, who loved attending extras casting and plucking characters out of the mix. The costumes were scrounged from the wardrobe of Year of the Dragon, which had shot at the De Laurentiis studios the year before. 

The woman woozily dancing atop a car as Frank beats Jeffrey up? “That woman dressed like that every single day of her life,” said Dan Brawley. “She was a waitress at the Dixie Grill. I used to see her at the bus stop and think, I’m living in a David Lynch movie.” 

The actor who seemed to have the finest time throughout the production was Fred Pickler, who played the Yellow Man, the crooked cop in a bright yellow suit who’s in cahoots with Frank. Pickler, a former Wilmington police officer, worked as an armorer, supplying prop masters with guns. As Goodwin tells it, they still hadn’t cast the role well into the shoot, but when Pickler walked into the production office, Norris said, “There’s your Yellow Man right there!”

Pickler was, in his words, “a good ol’ boy who’d never been in a movie before,” but suddenly there he was glowering menacingly, speaking in his deep coastal drawl, and—in his character’s final moments—spilling a mouthful of stage blood all over his yellow suit. 

In one take, after Frank shot and killed the Yellow Man, Pickler kept watching the scene avidly—until Hopper leaned down and whispered, “Fred, you’re supposed to be dead. Close your eyes; it’s throwing me off.” In It’s a Strange World, the jovial Pickler calls Blue Velvet “one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

In Blue Velvet World

Midway through filming, Hurricane Gloria swept into the Mid-Atlantic. Forecasters warned it might be the storm of the century, and the production shut down to prepare. “David was so excited,” Ron Leamon recalled. “I think he felt like if there was destruction, he could film it.” 

On September 27, the storm skirted Wilmington on its way to multiple landfalls in the Outer Banks, New York, and Connecticut. The next day, Lynch complained to a documentarian: “I was really disappointed! We were ready for a real big storm, and nothing happened.”

But in every other respect, Lynch was having the time of his life. “I feel like I’m in Blue Velvet world, and everything is going just the way I want it to go,” he said in Blue Velvet Revisited, a collection of set footage shot by German film student Peter Braatz. (Lynch liked Braatz’s polite letter; “We are making an extremely low budget film Peter so bring a lot of money and help us out,” the director wrote back.)   

The crew didn’t necessarily feel the same. Bowen remembers the experience as utterly exhausting; during six weeks of night shoots, he worked from 2 p.m. to 10 a.m., six days a week. Leamon recalled a setup at Winnie’s Tavern on Burnett Boulevard—the Slow Club in the film—taking 36 hours to shoot. Members of the band, wearing velvet suits Leamon found in the bargain bins of a local tuxedo store, had to sleep in their cars, then return to set for another take.

It was a challenge to stretch $7 million over 10 weeks of shooting. Johnny Griffin is now the director of the Wilmington Regional Film Commission, but in 1985 he was working craft services on the set of Blue Velvet—his first movie job. The production paid for a catered lunch, but to save money during day shoots, they sent Griffin out to rustle up something cheap for breakfast. Griffin spent the two hours before call time driving around town buying croissants and donuts.

“I feel like I’m in Blue Velvet world, and everything is going just the way I want it to go.”

David Lynch on set in 1985

It was Blue Velvet world, an uncanny version of a typical film set, just as Lumberton was an uncanny version of a typical small town. The production’s logo, painted on boxes and binders, featured a severed ear. Lynch played Shostakovich over speakers to get everyone in the right mood, and he directed scenes of bizarre violence with the same polite fastidiousness he displayed toward everything. He’d begin a note to Hopper, “When you say that word…” 

Hopper would say, “That word’s fuck, David.”

Lynch would reply, “Yes, I know, when you say that word…”

For a crucial shot of a robin in a tree, Lynch didn’t like the look of the bird the animal wrangler brought in. Someone on set heard that a Wilmington school bus had struck and killed a robin, and the schoolchildren had brought it back to their science teacher to stuff. Lynch acquired the taxidermied robin, glued a bug to its mouth, and attached wires to its wings so he could puppeteer it from off-camera. His director of photography, Frederick Elmes, told him the bird looked far too mechanical. “Yeah, it’ll be great!” Lynch replied.

Many days, Lynch and Rossellini would disappear into her trailer for half an hour to “meditate.” “At the time it seemed rather suspicious,” Bowen told me, “although now I think that’s actually what they were doing.” (Lynch and Rossellini did eventually divorce their respective spouses and were together for five years.) 

Everyone involved with the film remembers the night they filmed the indelible scene in which a battered Dorothy appears, naked, in Jeffrey’s front yard. The scene is not titillating; in her memoir, Rossellini wrote that Lynch told her the scene was based on a memory of encountering a naked woman on the street as a child and becoming so frightened he burst into tears.

And yet, titillation or no, she was supposed to stand naked under the lights on a front lawn, and it was not a closed set. (Closed sets are expensive.) An assistant director went door-to-door, one story goes, warning neighbors she was about to appear nude. 

Despite those warnings—or maybe because of them—“people came out with blankets and picnic baskets,” Rossellini wrote, “with their grandmothers and small children.”

Stirring Rumors

The finished cut arrived in New Hanover County on September 26, 1986. “The film’s use of sex and violence generated rumors in Wilmington,” wrote Gina White on page 1 of the Wilmington Morning Star’s lifestyle section. “Blue Velvet was said to be in danger of an X rating.” 

On opening night, White reported from the College Road Cinemas, where 200 tickets were sold for the 7 p.m. show. 

“It was a trip,” Phillip Wyatt told her. 

“It was gruesome,” reported UNC Wilmington student Leann House. 

Phyllis Bostic “thought it was good” and “enjoyed it.” Though Bostic claimed she “played Dean Stockwell’s girlfriend in the film,” no such character exists; perhaps she was a victim of the edits Lynch made to get the movie down from a reported four-hour rough cut to the contractually obligated two hours. (If so, Bostic was in good company; the Criterion DVD features nearly an hour of deleted scenes, including an entire subplot featuring Megan Mullally as Jeffrey’s college girlfriend.)

By December, the film was long gone from Wilmington’s cineplexes, but not its news. The actual town of Lumberton had finally learned what Lynch had done with their good name. “Reports and questions” about the movie, wrote the Morning Star, “have stirred residents to defend this city of about 20,000 people on the Lumber River.” 

Lynch had promised not to portray the town in a negative light, officials groused, yet had “exchanged accuracy for sex and violence to try to appeal to moviegoers’ prurient interests.” 

Lumberton police supervisor C.E. Johnson said that, if the filmmakers had wanted to pick a city that actually suffered from such problems, “they should have gone to Fayetteville.”

With its outré subject matter and highbrow bona fides, Blue Velvet mixes the genre fare that kickstarted Wilmington’s film industry with the sleek entertainment so often shot there now. “It lives in this lineage of Southern B movies,” Brawley, the film festival director, pointed out. “Obviously it’s not a B movie, but it shares DNA with a B movie.” Most B movies, however, don’t receive an Oscar nomination for best director.

“They should have gone to Fayetteville.”

Lumberton police supervisor C.E. Johnson, after seeing the film.

Brawley’s festival previously featured a Blue Velvet locations tour and now commissions artists to make site-specific works inspired by the fictionalized Lumberton. For years, Wilmington maintained a connection to the film through Hopper, who bought property downtown and lived there, on and off, for years. When the actor died in 2010, Brawley got to take a look inside. “It was decked out like an ’80s set for a swinging bachelor,” he told me. “All the bathroom fixtures were black with gold handles.” It could have been a location for Blue Velvet.

These days, Connie Nelson of the Wilmington visitors’ bureau told me, foreign tourists and the occasional Lynch-head ask about the film, and interest surged when the director died in 2025. The bureau doesn’t give out addresses of homes featured in the movie, but will direct visitors to Sandy’s school (New Hanover High) or Ben’s apartment (a bar called the Barbary Coast). 

A frequent question: Can I visit where Kyle MacLachlan found the ear? (The scrubby vacant lot is now a well-kept rugby field.) 

To watch Blue Velvet now with an eye toward its landscape is to see an act of filmmaking alchemy. A visionary director focused the ingenuity and talent of skilled craftspeople and designers and scouts on one task: transforming Wilmington into the exact place that Lynch saw in his daydreams, and in his nightmares. 

Watch Blue Velvet a second or third time, and you might notice a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot about halfway through. Jeffrey has tailed Frank and his cronies to an industrial warehouse. It’s late at night, and the giggling bad guys make their way through a spotlight’s glare into the building.

When Lynch saw the original lighting treatment for the scene, he worried the brightly lit, blank warehouse just wasn’t visually interesting enough. (You can still see it—it’s at 1121 S. Front St.) “I like industry to make smoke and make waste,” fellow filmmaker Peter Braatz, who was on set, captured Lynch saying. “That’s when you get the neat textures. I like steel mills and smoke and oil and stuff like that.” 

Crew members cut cardboard into machinery shapes and carefully placed them before the spotlight. Someone turned on a smoke machine, and soon the warehouse was illuminated with pistons and levers and the silhouettes of industry hard at work, because that was how Lynch saw it. He wanted the neat textures.

“When you’re watching Blue Velvet, you’re not looking at a snapshot of Wilmington,” Bowen said. “You’re looking inside David’s head.”

Correction: C.E. Johnson was the police supervisor in Lumberton, not Wilmington.