#hell gate

Not a whole lot is known about the backstory of this PSA, which was made in the early 1990s as part of the We Care About New York campaign started by Mayor Ed Koch a decade earlier. When we asked the Sanitation Department about it, a spokesperson said that the officials who would have been responsible for it have passed away. “We have never really been clear on the specifics there—who approached whom, who paid, etc,” DSNY’s Joshua Goodman told us.

Goodman suggested we speak to the PSA’s cinematographer, Frederick Elmes. Elmes regularly collaborated with Lynch—they made “Eraserhead” and “Blue Velvet” together, among other films, as well as a string of commercials.

We reached out to Elmes to learn more about how Lynch’s We Care About New York ad, and he was kind enough to speak with us.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Hell Gate: Tell me about how this PSA got made.

Frederick Elmes: David Lynch and I went to film school together. We went to the American Film Institute, and we made the film “Eraserhead” together, and I worked with him on several other features. In the midst of all this, I started shooting television commercials. And David kind of had an interest in making short films, like, you know, television commercials, but there really wasn’t anybody that was too tuned in to what he was doing. We did work together on one French perfume commercial in the early days. I would say that this job for the New York City Sanitation Department was just completely the opposite. 

So where the French commercial was this kind of romantic, very dreamy, beautiful woman in a beautiful house in Paris, with sort of gorgeous color, this spot with the rats is very gritty New York, black and white, with food spilling in the streets. But that’s what they wanted to see. It was supposed to be a rough-edged look at people throwing trash just anywhere and trying to help break that habit, because what it leads to is the rat population.

Did you interface at all with the Sanitation Department? Did they know what they were getting?

No, I’m sure they had no idea what they were getting. I’m certain they had no idea. I mean, there was no such thing as making a storyboard about it. David may have made a couple of little sketches about trash in the street and rats crawling around in the gutter and in the subway system and so on. But I don’t think they had any sense of the mood of it, or the music—the music kind of swells and gets kind of gruesome there at the end. 

In fact, it’s hard to know just what part the Sanitation Department had in it. I mean, it’s a PSA, so the job goes out to an advertising agency who comes up with a concept and tries to put together a package—”Yes, this director and here’s the story we’d like to tell,” and then they get some input from the director. I don’t know that I ever remember seeing a script. I just remember David listing off a bunch of shots that we had to do in various neighborhoods in the city. 

Did David come up with the specific images of people across the city—like the mom kneeling down and giving her daughter a popsicle and then carelessly tossing the wrapper?

Yeah. The agency liked seeing that sort of thing because, yes, it’s trash in the streets. I don’t believe they ever had a sense of the edge that David Lynch would put on it.

Filming the rats—how did you do that? You must have had to get really close to them.

Really, really close. Yes. We used special close-up lenses to let us get in there. And it couldn’t just be in a studio, it had to be in a gritty situation. We weren’t going to build that, we just went and found it. I don’t remember where we shot, but it could have been in part of the subway system where there’s decay, and there’s a sense of filth and a little bit of water. You know, a place you wouldn’t ever want to go.

Did you have to wait for a rat to emerge to start filming them?

No, we didn’t. We brought rats. We actually had some control over the rats. There was an official rat handler that helped us with controlling things, and it was all quite humane.

Did David tell you specifically, “Get in really close on those rat teeth?”

Yeah, oh, absolutely. I don’t know that that was ever in his description to anyone else. [Laughs]. But he and I had a plan to get super close and not miss any detail there.

What was y’all’s relationship to New York City? 

I grew up on the East Coast, I knew the city pretty well. David had been to the city and was certainly familiar with it, but was living in Los Angeles. Actually, we were both living in Los Angeles at that time, so we had to come out to the city to scout these locations to make it happen. It was a pretty low-budget affair. It’s a PSA, not a real commercial, as it were.

What was it like seeing it on TV?

It was pretty shocking. It really did stir things up. It was so contrary to any other campaign that we’d heard of. I remember getting calls from people, some of the local New York crew that I knew would say, “Oh yeah, I saw it. Wow. It’s making waves.” [Laughs] It was shocking that this would actually go on television, it was so edgy.

Did you get any notes from the Sanitation Department?

No, I just remember the shock from friends and people who worked on it saying, “Oh my God, it’s on the air!” 

It is funny to think of a cereal ad with cheery upbeat music, and then right afterwards, you get rat teeth and all these really dissonant horns and that kind of wailing sound effect. 

It’s all stuff that David built. They are effects that David built. He was particularly good at putting together a moving soundtrack, something that connects emotionally with the images. So he had a bunch of tricks up his sleeve to build those tracks. He loved that sense of industrial city sounds, and he had a library of things, so he just drew from that. And we had a sound recorder with us so we could actually collect things on the fly as we were shooting.

What else do you remember about shooting this ad, or working with David Lynch back in that time?

It was a wonderful exploration, because it was an opportunity for us to make a short film together. David and I just loved doing that sort of thing, working on little shorts. 

And this one had a real sense of purpose—that we could take this idea that they want a PSA that’s going to promote this notion of getting rid of waste, and actually make a film that promotes that. For us, it was like a playground, a fun project to do and see it through the laboratory and get the sound right and all those things. And then realize that, yeah, they actually liked it enough to use it, you know? [Laughs]

There’s a lot of discussion now about how good David Lynch was at highlighting the surreal that exists within the mundane, and when you think about it, it’s kind of surreal that we New Yorkers just walk around in mounds of trash with rats crawling around us. This PSA really gets at that.

David was pretty good at catching that feeling, at creating images that make you feel a certain way. I don’t know what effect this PSA had, but that was a pretty rotten time in New York City. I used to shoot in the city a lot on films, and it was a time when the city was not in great shape. 

The trash was bad, but everything was bad. There were problems with finances and all those things. The infrastructure was falling apart. Maybe this played a little role in making people realize what was happening.

I do wish it had been a little more effective on the rat front.

I’ll tell you, it used to be worse than what it is now. 

Well thank you so much for speaking with me—I’m really sorry for your loss.

Yeah, it’s been a really rough, rough time. I had been in touch with him, and I knew he was sick, and the emphysema was getting worse. And I think the fires and all that just just made it even, rougher on him, because he lived in the Hollywood Hills there. 

I knew him for many, many years. We worked on a lot of projects together, and he was a wonderful, wonderful collaborator. He always listened. He was always curious what others working with him had to say, what their thoughts were. And he was willing to try to integrate and use other opinions in his work.