Founders & Administrators

The point is, there are mysterious forces of life just underneath the surface, forces of nature, decay, birth, and in modern life, there are also unnatural forces, such as those created by the machines of industrialization – “the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming woodmills, and smoke-billowing factories” as Lynch expresses it.

David Lynch has a fascination with these processes and the forces outside our control. This is revealed in his paintings as well as his films. If you put the two together, you have in many of his films an intuitive plot driven by artistic logic rather than surface plot logic. Plot logic can be very demanding, in the sense that it needs to be logical. It gives you the motivation of each character; you know why something has happened; there’s a resolution to the story.

There is another kind of logic, one with gaps, spaces and silences; the images and sounds are primary; they evoke rather than explain. This is, I believe, key to understanding Lynch’s films. They are not trying to resolve plot logic in the usual way. They are exploratory, mysterious and strike one as modern Grimm’s fairytales. In a Grimm fairy tale, the story logic can be pretty weird, strange things happen. They are evocative of deeper mysteries and unresolved tensions between different aspects of life. They are conceived and flow from a different cognitive process, one that is inspired by the logic of dreams, by intuition and an artistic feel for what is right, what makes sense. It is similar to the way we understand an abstract painting as making sense.

A very important element here is the mystery of it all. And mystery can be found in the mundane. In a coffee shop full of ordinary characters there is an ocean of mystery under the surface, sometimes full of celestial beauty, sometimes full of the grotesque and monsters created by dark compulsions.

The juxtaposition of these elements, along with a plot driven by dream logic, produces compelling, unsettling and revelatory films. It’s not as if one walks away with an understanding of the story so much as an unshakable recall of powerful moments of satori, revelation and insight.

The idea that you can tell a story in an hour and a half and everything makes sense the entire time, is a fiction. Real stories are like magical realism – they are rational in part, always incomplete, only make sense to a certain degree, and barely manage to float on the ocean of mystery.

What we often experience in life is confusion about what is going on, the meaning of it all. Why did that perfectly sweet individual that I am dating do the crazy thing that just happened? And why did it coincide with going to the supermarket and somebody buying me a pet panda bear? There is a god of mystery isn’t there?

In David Lynch’s films, what we understand on the surface are just shining fragments floating on the great ocean of mystery. It’s better to drift in the current rather than try to swim.

Joanna began her career as Founder and President of Radiance Films International, a foreign sales and film distribution company. She co-produced and sold hundreds of films at the Cannes, Milan, and other international film festivals into the burgeoning worldwide home entertainment market.

Joanna produced the inspiring documentary Saving the Disposable Ones with the David Lynch Foundation, and was Executive Producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary My Reincarnation about a Tibetan Buddhist master and his son, which achieved world-wide distribution. More recently, she is Executive Producer of Rooted in Peace, a journey about inner transformation, which will be released in 2016 and is presently being exhibited in film festivals throughout the world.

Joanna works with many philanthropic organizations through the Plafsky Family Foundation. In addition, she is a teacher of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program, has collaborated with David Lynch Foundation-TV on several projects, and serves on the board of the David Lynch Foundation to help bring TM to schools and the less fortunate members of society in the United States and abroad.

Joanna’s recent mission has been to establish a more conscious form of filmmaking education. In 2014 she founded the new David Lynch Masters in Film Program at Maharishi International University and actively serves to bring industry leaders to teach and mentor filmmaking students.

Graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Joanna has a Master’s Degree in Film from Boston University.

He has published twelve middle grade novels with HarperCollins and developed book properties with Alloy Entertainment, now a subsidiary of Warner Bros. His novels have sold over half a million copies worldwide. Since moving to Los Angeles in 2015, he has worked closely with his wife, TV writer and executive producer Jenny Lee, editing the nationally best-selling YA novels Anna K and Anna K Away, pitching to major studios including Disney+ and Universal, and assisting with the development of multiple television and feature projects for MAX, Netflix, Paramount+ and Apple International.

When he’s not writing and editing, you can probably find him shooting baskets at Rustic Canyon Park while his Newfoundland dogs look on with great curiosity, throwing darts in the West LA dart league, catching a movie at Century City or renting one (yes, he still rents physical media) at CineFile Video.