The Elephant Man (film)
The Elephant Man was a critical and commercial success with eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor.Treves presents Merrick to his colleagues and highlights his deformed skull, which forces him to sleep with his head on his knees, since if he were to lie down, he would asphyxiate.Carr Gomm permits him to stay, and Merrick spends his time practicing conversation with Treves and building a model of a cathedral he can see from his window.Merrick quickly becomes an object of curiosity to high society, and Mrs. Mothershead expresses concerns that he is still being put on display as a freak for this audience.Sanger and Cornfeld set up an Eraserhead viewing at a 20th Century Fox screening room; Brooks loved it and enthusiastically agreed for Lynch to direct.[10] At the time, Hurt was still making Heaven's Gate which had fallen badly behind schedule due to director Michael Cimino's perfectionism.Hurt spent so long waiting for something to do that he performed the role of Merrick in the interim before returning to Heaven's Gate to complete shooting.[6][14] The makeup, now supervised by Christopher Tucker, was based on direct casts of Merrick's body, which had been kept in the Royal London Hospital's private museum.Composer John Morris argued against using the music, stating that "this piece is going to be used over and over and over again in the future... And every time it's used in a film it's going to diminish the effect of the scene."[16] Following their return from England with a print, Lynch and Sanger screened The Elephant Man for Brooks, who suggested some minor cuts but told them that the film would be released as they had made it.It can't be easy to act under such a heavy mask ... the physical production is beautiful, especially Freddie Francis' black-and-white photography.Roger Ebert gave it 2/4 stars, writing: "I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks."[22] In the book The Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture, Nadja Durbach describes the work as "much more mawkish and moralising than one would expect from the leading postmodern surrealist filmmaker" and "unashamedly sentimental".[26] The Elephant Man was nominated for eight Academy Awards,[27] tying Raging Bull at the 53rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Actor in a Leading Role (Hurt),[28] Art Direction-Set Decoration (Stuart Craig, Robert Cartwright, Hugh Scaife), Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Music: Original Score, and Writing: Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.Industry experts were appalled that the film was not going to be honoured for its make-up effects when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations at the time.[36] A 4K restoration (created from the original camera negative, supervised by Lynch) was carried out for the film's 40th anniversary, and was released in a director-approved special edition in both Blu-ray and DVD formats from The Criterion Collection in the United States on September 29, 2020.In 1980, the company 20th Century Fox Records published this film's original musical score as both an LP album and as a cassette in the United States.Its front cover artwork features a masked John Merrick against a backdrop of smoke, as seen on the advance theatrical poster for the film.