Laura Dern may now have an Oscar, an Emmy, a BAFTA, and multiple Golden Globes, she may have even benefited from nepotism as the child of actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, but as a fresh-faced 17 year-old student at UCLA, she was largely treated like everyone else. At least for as long as she actually got to attend the school. In a recent interview with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson on their podcast, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” Dern lamented over her experience being asked to leave the prestigious university after getting cast in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.”
“I was 17, so excited to get into UCLA,” Dern said. “I was there for two days, and I had auditioned and got offered the role in ‘Blue Velvet.’ I was ecstatic, I worshipped David Lynch, as people really were from ‘Elephant Man,’ ‘Eraserhead,’ which he’d made at this point.”
Dern reached out to all the necessary professors and staff to see if she could get a leave of absence to go shoot the film, but was denied at every turn. This was all in spite of her willingness to complete her course load at the same time.
“I will write papers. I’ll come back and double up classes,” Dern said of trying to accommodate her teachers. “I’ll hire a tutor. I’ll do classes. I can mail back — we didn’t have the internet the way we do now, so it was hard to do stuff online or anything.”
Though Dern was attending UCLA for psychology and journalism, but even shared the “Blue Velvet” script with the head of the film department to try and earn some sway. Unfortunately, the ploy did not work. Dern said the professor 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.”
Though Dern acknowledges the “shocking” nature of Lynch’s film, she now views the situation with some irony, as “Blue Velvet” is now required viewing for many student at UCLA.
“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,” said Dern on the podcast. “And you know what one of them is? Pisses me off.”
