Avant-garde director David Lynch has had one of the more unlikely odysseys to film success. Born in Montana, the son of a Department of Agriculture tree scientist, he spent his youth in Idaho, Washington and Alexandria, VA and found his true vocation while experimenting with "film painting" at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. On the basis of "The Alphabet" (1968), a five-minute short combining live action and animation, Lynch received a grant from the American Film Institute to make a 34-minute film, "The Grandmother" (1970). Over a five-year period, drawing on his own fears about the confinements of youthful marriage and fatherhood and working in and around the AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, Lynch created his appalling black-and-white meditation on family life, "Eraserhead" (1977), a nightmarish vision packed with grotesque physical deformities and an unlikely quest for spiritual purity, starring Jack Nance in a hair-raising performance, his first of many collaborations with Lynch.