You Can Buy David Lynch’s Coffee Makers, Behind-the-Scenes Photographs and Early Drafts of Film Scripts
Nearly 450 objects are heading to auction this month. The collection reveals the “Twin Peaks” director’s restless creativity across many decades and art forms
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“Films start with a fragment, a piece of the puzzle,” director David Lynch told Wallpaper’s Will Hodgkinson in 2010. “The puzzle exists in the other room. I get hold of one piece, and I love it so much that it attracts other pieces to come in and join it. And pretty soon the puzzle is in my room. I certainly don’t know what the film is about until further down the line.”
For avid viewers, Lynch’s films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, as well as his television series “Twin Peaks,” have long remained puzzles, turning ideas that Lynch had fished from both dark and banal places in his mind into immersive, mysterious art.
Now, real pieces of Lynch’s puzzling films are on sale for the first time since his death in January. Nearly 450 items from the director’s archives—ranging from personal kitchen appliances to on-screen objects—will come to auction on June 18 as part of “The David Lynch Collection” by Julien’s Auctions.
“These historical and cherished pieces reflecting David Lynch’s singular artistic vision, as well as his passions and pursuits ranging from his director’s chair, espresso machine to his guitar, record collections and ‘Twin Peaks’-style decor, come directly from the home of the visionary artist whose enigmatic films stirred our most imaginative and collective surreal dreams,” Catherine Williamson, Julien’s managing director, says in a statement.
Some objects going up for sale are standard director fare, like a clapperboard, half a dozen camera tripods and a red-leather director’s chair with “David Lynch” emblazoned in gold letters.
But Lynch was no standard director. His first feature-length effort was Eraserhead, a black-and-white film from 1977 about a new father and his unsettling E.T.-like baby. A dozen behind-the-scenes photographs in the sale reveal his idiosyncratic vision: the lead actor Jack Nance with a tall head of hair, a clean black suit and a pocket protector; grandmotherly floral wallpaper; and the remnants of an uncomfortable chicken dinner.
While Eraserhead remains a cult classic and a perennial favorite at independent movie theaters, Lynch “clearly established himself as the U.S.A.’s foremost commercially viable avant garde ‘offbeat’ director” with films like Blue Velvet, the Palme d’Or-winning Wild at Heart and the first two seasons of “Twin Peaks,” which first aired on ABC in 1990, David Foster Wallace wrote in a 1996 article for Premiere.
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A second-draft script from the show’s pilot—with “Northwest Passage” crossed out in favor of “Twin Peaks”—shows Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost tweaking the setting to achieve the show’s signature balance between small-town American drama and dark, mystical horror. The script describes the fictional Double “R” Diner, where “two Diesel rigs idle in the oil-stained gravel lot outside. A couple of nighthawks sober up at the counter. A pretty country-western ballad plays on the jukebox inside.” Inside the Blue Pine Lodge, a character named Giovanna Pasqualini Packard (removed from the show after Isabella Rossellini, who starred in Blue Velvet and dated Lynch for five years, dropped out) is “combing her hair, lost in a dreamy state of mind.”
Also up for auction is a framed photograph of a nuclear bomb explosion that hung in the office of Lynch’s character, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole, during the show’s third-season revival in 2017.
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The auction also shows glimpses of Lynch’s other projects that never came to be. Items for sale include scripts and production materials for Ronnie Rocket, conceived as a follow-up to Eraserhead, and The Dream of the Bovine, projects that Lynch abandoned before they could enter his oeuvre.
Trained as a painter before breaking into filmmaking, Lynch always held space for other art forms. The auction features a custom five-necked guitar and a 1997 Parker Fly electric guitar, which Lynch played in a predictably unconventional style on his two solo albums, Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream.
Then there are the personal items that seem to encapsulate Lynch’s idiosyncratic personality and vision as succinctly as any film. Bidding on his at-home espresso machine, which retails for at least $7,500, is already up to $10,000. Three Mr. Coffee drip coffee machines—two black, one white—all date to the 1990s, a fitting callback to the coffee-soaked episodes of “Twin Peaks.”
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An array of ashtrays and cigarette lighters are a “macabre touch” in the sale, writes the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver. In August 2024, Lynch announced that he had been diagnosed with emphysema.
But even in his final months, Lynch’s creative forces remained alive and well, as this litany of objects, from woodworking tools to prop menus, proves.
“I knew he’d been unwell, but he was in great spirits,” actress Naomi Watts, who starred in Mulholland Drive, told the Los Angeles Times’ Tim Grierson in March. “He wanted to go back to work. ... He was not, in any way, done. I could see the creative spirit alive in him.”
