David Lynch

In the early 1980s, comics were as much a part of Los Angeles alternative culture scene as independent film and punk rock. That's gone now, but here, comics historian Ben Schwartz takes a look back. None of them knew each other. They saw one another's comics in 'zines, weeklies and punk newspapers. "Yeah, there were a number of us," remembers Matt Groening, 30 years after his strip "Life in Hell" debuted in the Los Angeles Reader. "I don't think we even considered it a 'scene.

This must be the season for vanity documentaries. First Oliver Stone rounded up seven Latin American leaders for his misconceived "South of the Border" and now Angela Ismailos corrals 10 of her favorite filmmakers for "Great Directors." The results, as with the Stone film, are very much of a mixed bag. Ismailos, a cineaste making her feature debut, has acted on an impulse to meet her cinematic idols and try to "connect the films that had meant so much to me to these filmmakers who made them."

And it was written that the tribes of television should, at regular intervals, unite to resurrect those shows that had once fed their people and caused much wonder throughout the land. Shows like "Friends," "Sex and the City" and "ER." And so, at the appointed time, the scribes gathered at ABC with much reverence and a pretty darn good cast to re-create the cultural phenomenon that was "Twin Peaks." And this new reincarnation was called "Happy Town" and even as it strove to give glory on Wednesday nights, it became a late mid-season replacement and seems doomed to languish in its own insurmountable imperfection.

Werner Herzog and David Lynch make quite a pair. Herzog, the German-born director of such films as "Fitzcarraldo," "Grizzly Man" and "Rescue Dawn," is a relentless adventurer and the master of external conflict, of man's desire to fling himself recklessly toward the void. Lynch, maker of "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr.," explores an inner domain, a dreamscape where nightmare and reality intersect. So it is somewhat unlikely that Lynch would serve as executive producer on Herzog's latest film, "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done," which opens Friday in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent theater.

David Lynch is having an art show. Yes, that David Lynch. It isn't the first for the creative force whose obsessively weird sensibility has brought us films such as "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet" and "Inland Empire" and the TV series "Twin Peaks." An artist since his high school days, Lynch has chalked up 32 solo shows including three appearances in the late 1980s and early '90s at the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica and a 40-year retrospective of paintings, drawings, photographs and installations in 2007 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Sixteen years after the release of her first film, "Boxing Helena," filmmaker Jennifer Lynch still can't believe the often toxic personal attacks she endured from critics over her controversial love story involving obsession and amputation. "Obviously, I am not going to make something that everybody likes all the time," says the 41-year-old Lynch, who enjoys exploring the dark side of life as much as her famous filmmaker father, David Lynch. "But the venom was really extreme on this.

In recent years, David Lynch has become at once more accessible and harder to pin down. For one thing, he's not really a full-time filmmaker anymore. Upon the release of his last feature, "Inland Empire" (2006), a three-hour waking nightmare shot on consumer-grade video, he renounced celluloid for the democratic promise of digital. A large-scale retrospective of his paintings and photographs in Paris last year reinforced his renaissance-man credentials.

If you ever wanted to know what it's like to hang out with David Lynch, the 2007 documentary "Lynch" gives us an elliptical peek into his often dark artistic vision. Directed by the pseudonymous blackANDwhite, the film is appropriately unconventional and artsy without straining to feel like a film by Lynch.

For a series so widely acknowledged as a television landmark, David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" has received conspicuously shoddy treatment on the home-video front. The eight-episode first season was released in 2001 without the pilot; the second (and final) season arrived on DVD only last spring after extensive delays.