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| The Legend Of The Happy Worker |
Duwayne Dunham's comedy Legend Of The Happy Worker, based on SE Feinberg's play, was described by the film's executive producer, David Lynch, as being like "Disney on acid." The story revolves around Joe (Josh Whitehouse), a simple digger with a strong work ethic. When he's corrupted by his uncle Cleat (Colm Meaney), the young man loses himself, letting down his wife (Meagan Holder) and Goose (Thomas Hayden Church), the leader of the digging crew who promotes Joe and espouses the values of the cowboy. Joe is left to walk a path of redemption and rediscover himself and the values his community were built upon.
Dunham's directorial credits include Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey and Ready To Run for Disney. He also directed three episodes of Lynch and Mark Frost's episodic drama Twin Peaks, as well as editing two episodes of its original run before editing the whole of Twin Peaks: The Return. He previously edited Lynch's Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart, and also worked in the editorial department on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, before he edited the final installment of the original trilogy, Return Of The Jedi.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Dunham discussed what makes the cinema-going experience so unique, the decades-long journey to make Legend Of The Happy Worker, and making a bold request to Disney. He also reflected on his early career and experiencing the upheaval created by those great independent American auteur filmmakers in the 1970s.
Paul Risker: How would you describe your relationship to film, and what motivated you to pursue a career in filmmaking?
Duwayne Dunham: I love the feeling of being transported and swept away, even creating something as boring as the movies my father would shoot of our vacations. My first experience with the power of cinema was sneaking off with that camera on one of those trips and doing something totally unexpected. So, when he was running the home movies, something would show up [laughs], and I thought, 'Wow, you really can affect people.'
I was pretty young when I saw Lawrence Of Arabia, and that was the first time I had seen something where I thought, 'What is this? It's unbelievable.' And then shortly thereafter, another movie that struck me in a completely different way, just because of my age at the time, was The Graduate. I thought, 'I want some of this.' So, I went to film school in San Francisco and one of the things I enjoyed going to school there was that we had art houses and theaters that showed a lot of European films. But I especially liked going across the bridge into Berkeley, and just outside the main gates of the campus was a little theatre and a coffee shop. And what I realised is, other people in that coffee shop had been in that theatre, and were talking about the movie.
PR: I remember being sat with a friend at the cinema, who turned to me and said that he enjoys the experience of the movie theatre regardless of whether it's a good or a bad film. It's a moment that I often remember.
DD: The movie-going experience is unique. What other experience do we have where you pay money to go into a room full of strangers, where the lights are then turned out and the curtains open, and you're swept away? Or hopefully you are. You're transported into the story and then the lights come on, and you leave, but you will have shared this emotional experience with a bunch of strangers. Cinema is the only thing I know that can do that.
Hopefully it's a good film, and it allows you to decompress a little bit and collect your thoughts privately, because film is an emotional medium. I believe if you present a story and can make somebody feel something, then you've done your job.
PR: Speaking about making the audience feel something, the Sixties and Seventies were a period when film mattered in a cultural way that it doesn't today. It was an historic period in cinema history and it's a time you lived and worked through.
DD: The Seventies were the decade of the great independent American auteur filmmakers. You had Francis [Ford Coppola], [George] Lucas, [Martin] Scorsese and Miloš [Forman]. Being in film school, I knew that Francis was in the city, and he had American Zoetrope. He'd done The Conversation and Francis is a larger-than-life kind of character and George was something of a protégé. For whatever reason, I had done my senior thesis in film school on THX-1138. The film just resonated with me and I thought it was cool, and I wondered who had done that.
And Francis is the guy, in my opinion, who didn't want anything to do with the way Hollywood was being run — the people who were dictating what movies were being made and how to make those movies. That's what really chafed all of those guys: Don't tell me how to make my movie. What do you know about my movie? And so, you had these rebels, outsiders and mavericks. We were doing this ourselves, and we didn't need Hollywood because it was slow. I don't know that they ever accepted it, but there was so much work being done outside the system that they had to. And you had a shift in studio ownership. They weren't owned by Louis B Mayer and Frank Warner and other people who loved movies and made them on a hunch. That was all changing. Gulf and other big corporations owned the studios, and it was now about the bottom line.
So, you had Francis up in the city and George was over in Marin. Phil Kaufman was up there, of course, and Saul Zaentz was over at Fantasy, which was a record company, and he was doing Cuckoo's Nest with Miloš. You also had Carroll Ballard and Michael Richie up there, as well as Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins and Bob Dalva. Being a student, I thought there was a world out there. But it was a foreign world, and it was hard to see myself in it, but I wanted to be.
I was just very fortunate that, literally the day after I graduated, my little Volkswagen was packed up, and I was going to drive to Los Angeles to go to work for a little film company. My roommate came out and said, "Hey, there's a phone call, you better take this." So, I shut the car off, went back inside, and it was an instructor that I'd had at film school. He was the post-production supervisor on One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and he said, "I've got an apprenticeship opening and I thought of you. Would you like the job?" It was a six-hour drive to LA and a 20-minute ride to Berkeley, so there I was thrown in on Cuckoo's Nest. But it wasn't just Cuckoo's Nest. It was Cuckoo's Nest in Berkeley with Miloš Forman, Saul Saentz and Michael Douglas doing it their way there. And that really gave me a taste for it.
Cuckoo's Nest led to Star Wars and then all that time I spent with George. But think of the movies from the period you're talking about: Godfather, Godfather 2, The Conversation, THX-1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Cuckoo's Nest, Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi, The Black Stallion, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and Amadeus. The list goes on. It was a crazy period in time I was working in movies, and they were often overlapping. I was working on Empire Strikes Back, Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Dragonslayer all at the same time. I don't think that period of time will ever be repeated.
Francis was the head of that group — he was the leader. But you just had this small community where everyone knew everyone.
PR: The Legend Of The Happy Worker has been a journey that has hit plenty of bumps in the road, but here we are. How do you reflect on the journey of finally getting the film made?
DD: It has been almost 40 years. David [Lynch] gave me this script when we had just finished Blue Velvet. He said, "If I make it, I'll just make it weird. If you make it with your sensibilities, you might turn it into something." Well, if David Lynch is saying that to a young person just starting out, then that's significant. And I will tell you now, David is an experimental filmmaker, and so is George Lucas — they're very similar. Look at the way they frame their shots and George would even say that he shoots around the movie, and he finds it in the cutting room. David definitely shoots around the movie and finds it in the cutting room. I do the same thing. Steven Spielberg, he shoots the movie — he just has that talent, which is his gift. But I love being in the cutting room.
It was hard to get a movie like Legend Of The Happy Worker made because what is it? Every time I read the script, I would get to the end and ask, but what does it all mean? I was drawn to the dialogue, which has a rhythm and a pace and a melody to it. And when I would reread the script, and sometimes years would go by, I'd realise that was the draw for me, and it would suck me right back in, and I'd say, "Okay, who can we go to?" There was no big studio that was going to make this because it's not that kind of movie. And so, we finally, with David's help, got our financing and got it made.
If I could describe this movie, it's an abstract painting in a very simple and common frame. You read into it what you will, but for me, again, it was the dialogue. There's something about the way Champion Goose talks that I just get carried away with it. And so, I said to myself, trust the dialogue. To the actors, I said, trust the dialogue and just play it straight. Don't do anything with it, just play it straight and trust the words.
PR: When you talk about Legend Of The Happy Worker you have to talk about the playful score that brings the world of the film to life.
DD: There was a whole journey with the music in this movie as well. I think David referenced this movie once I cut it up in his studio as being like "Walt Disney on acid." I said, "Good, that's great." Look, I can't do David Lynch. I've tried on certain things, especially when working on something like Twin Peaks, which is so much his DNA. But I can't do it; I don't have that in me.
As a matter of fact, when I'd just met him, he asked me to cut Blue Velvet for him. I read the script and I knew we were gonna have to have a conversation. I didn't know if I wanted to do the movie and I told him, "I don't know if it's my cup of tea." He said, "What do you mean it's not your cup of tea?" I told him I was more of a Disney kind of guy, and David said, "Look, sometimes we have to write things in a certain way so the studio and the money people understand. Doesn't mean that's the way it's gonna be." I'm not even sure saying that back, I know what he meant, but it was enough to convince me.
I know my own sensibilities and I loved the movie Finding Neverland. It was whimsical and fun, and it really captured the spirit of that story. I loved the music and that was Yan Kaczmarek. So, that's who I wanted to do the music for this film and he did. But Jan became very sick and passed away, so Phil Marshall, who I had worked with on a number of movies, filled in the gaps. We played around with some of the melodies and actually incorporated the accordion. And you don't hear the accordion featured in too many scores, but it has a playfulness.
And Goose, sometimes I think he's just a drunk. He drinks sherry by the barrel starting in the morning. It's a funny thing that he's got three giant barrels on the wall in his office there. And so you temper that part of the character with a visual that suggests the Seven Dwarfs and Hi ho hi ho…
I don't think Disney has ever given anybody license to use that in a movie. I think it was Alan Horn who was running Disney at the time, and I'd done Homeward Bound for them, so I just called Alan and I said, "Alan, I'm doing this movie and you know me. It's a fun movie and I want to use a clip. And I don't want the English version, I want the Spanish version of Hi ho hi ho." I told him it's Homeward Bound; it's the same movie, and so we were able to use that song. And I don't even know what to make of that scene. Every time that scene appears, it's like a dream right there.
Outside of just getting the movie made, the biggest challenge was probably the music — it was the question of what is the right music? It has got to be playful, and yet it goes deadly serious at times. It was important that we create a sense of place, and music was part of that place.
PR: Just as Legend Of The Happy Worker is about community, so too is the filmmaking process about creating a community to reach a shared goal. In filmmaking, you create lifelong relationships as well as memories and accomplishments that no one can ever take away from you.
DD; Making a film is creating a family and the reward for making that movie is the family. It was called the Lucasfilm family because it was a family. With Twin Peaks, those first seven episodes, I could call anybody, cast or crew and strike up a conversation, because we are a family.
At the end of the day, you've gone through something incredibly difficult and anybody who succeeds in making a movie, forget whether it's good or not, if you got it made, you deserve an award. It's so difficult, there are so many personalities, and you're basically Goose. You're going to do it my way, and I'm going to fool you into thinking it's your way. And when it's all over, there's a kind of melancholy. A movie is a life cycle of birth and death. You breathe life into something and then poof, it's over, and where'd everybody go? Well, you wrangle them up again and do another one.
Legend Of The Happy Worker premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.
