Lynch arrived to Los Angeles in the very early 1970s, when he accepted a scholarship at the prestigious American Film Institute. The AFI was then located at the Greystone Mansion (905 Loma Vista Dr, Beverly Hills 90210) the estate of the 1920s millionaire Ned Doheny. The mansion was built between 1927 and 1930 and it represented the kind of splendor that Jazz-Age Los Angeles, flush with the success of the film and oil industries, wanted to show the rest of the world. Doheny was shot in his mansion in 1929 in a confusing episode, only a few months after he had moved his family in. By the time Lynch arrived, the AFI had been leasing the Doheny property from the city of Beverly Hills for five years.

In 1972, Lynch decided to start working at “the Center” (as he referred to the AFI and the mansion) on his first feature, an ambitious, strange project called Eraserhead. He commandeered the Doheny stables, down the road from the main building, and proceeded to turn them into “the Eraserhood.” “It was a little mansion in and of itself,” Lynch said in the authorized book of interviews Lynch on Lynch. “It had a maids’ quarters, and places above for different people who worked for Doheny, kitchens, bathrooms, like a little hotel, with a lot of other stuff around. And I got four or five rooms and the hayloft and a couple of garages.” Over the next few years, Lynch would obsessively work on his first cult masterpiece in his little fiefdom within the grounds of the Greystone Mansion.