Damn Fine Auction: Hundreds of David Lynch’s Personal Items Are Going Up for Sale

Navigating the filmography of director David Lynch, who died in January at age 78, is a little like making your way through Lynch’s psyche. Often bizarre, frequently abstract, movies like Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive (2001), and the television series Twin Peaks all challenged viewers by bucking against conventional storytelling. Any movie with a dreamy, ethereal quality is often dubbed “Lynchian.”

It’s now possible to browse Lynch’s persona in a more intimate way. A number of his personal effects are set to be sold via Julien’s Auctions on Wednesday, June 18. The catalog, which includes 441 of Lynch’s possessions, is full of miscellanea with connections to his work. A draft of the Twin Peaks pilot is included, as are scripts for unmade projects like the offbeat detective story Ronnie Rocket and Dream of the Bovine—a tale about cows who find themselves transformed into humans that could have co-starred Marlon Brando.

There’s a 35mm print of his debut film, Eraserhead, as well as prop menus from Mulholland Drive’s Winkie’s diner. Lynch-used lighting equipment sits alongside domestic items like silverware. A painting that hung in the office of his Peaks character Gordon Cole that captures an atomic explosion, is also being offered, along with clapboards, guitars, and one of his rare nods to Hollywood conformity: a director’s chair.

The demand for Lynch memorabilia is already outpacing some of Julien’s pre-auction estimates. The director’s chair, expected to net $7000, is already bid up to $30,000 at the time of this writing. A red curtain, a frequent motif in his work, paired with a zig-zag rug, was thought to be worth around $2000; it’s at $17,500 and climbing. The nuclear explosion photo is sitting at $15,000, seven times its estimated price.

Like his characters, Lynch was also a coffee aficionado. Several Mr. Coffee drip machines are available, as is a high-end La Marzocco espresso maker.

“Everywhere you pivoted, there was a space to make art, as well as a place to make coffee,” Catherine Williamson, Julien’s managing director of entertainment, told The Hollywood Reporter shortly after the auction listings went live in late May. “Anyplace in his home, I don’t think we were ever more than 15 feet away from a coffee station. His love for coffee was real.”

Despite the plethora of coffeemakers, the auction is not a complete representation of Lynch’s estate. Most of the archival items related to his career are due to be donated; New York’s Pace Gallery will handle his paintings.

The Lynch lot is part of Julien’s Hollywood Legends auction, which runs through Friday, June 20 and features a fedora worn by Harrison Ford in a fitting test for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) (estimated to sell for $25,000 to $35,000) and a prop wand wielded by Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) ($10,000 to $20,000). If you’d like to pair your Lynch espresso machine with other kitchenware, you can pick up a blender used by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), so long as you have roughly $5000 to spare.

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