UCLA Really Didn’t Want Laura Dern To Be in ‘Blue Velvet’

On a recent episode of Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Laura Dern recalled getting the role of Sandy Williams in Blue Velvet, the 1986 David Lynch film that launched her career and a long collaboration with one of Hollywood’s most famous auteurs. She was 17 at the time and had just started her freshman year at UCLA.

“I was there for two days, and I had auditioned and got offered the role,” she explained. She was “ecstatic” because she “worshipped” Lynch. She went to the head of the film department where she was studying and asked for a leave of absence for the film. The department head told her “Absolutely not.”

“I said, ‘I have this opportunity’ and he said, ‘Well, I’ll look at the script if you want to give me the script, but, you know, you’re not going to get a leave of absence. It’s not going to happen. It’s not a medical emergency,’” she explained. So, she got him a copy of the script, but … well, you’ve seen the movie. This guy must have been a major prude because it didn’t help. She was called back to his office where he told her, “First of all, if you make this choice, you are no longer welcome at UCLA. You’ll be out. But secondly, having read this script, that you would give up your college education for this is insane.”

Well, we know how the story ends and who got the last laugh. But now that Laura Dern is Laura Dern, she’s got ears inside that program, and she says she learned, “Today, if you want to get a master’s in film at that school, when you write a thesis there are three movies you are required to study. And you know what one of them is?”

When I studied film in college Blue Velvet was not included in the curriculum, but I was forced to sit through Kubrick’s entire oeuvre over the course of a week. They really get away with a lot of twisted shit in college film departments.

“Pisses me off,” Dern concluded. Me too, babe.