Film, the measure of all things

Ben Barenholtz kept Eraserhead playing in theaters at midnight for week after week and month after month before the film finally found its audience, thereby launching the career of David Lynch. There were only twenty-­five people in the theater on opening night in New York’s Cinema Village in 1977, twenty-­four the second night, but Barenholtz persisted and kept the film running for almost a year. A year later, Barenholtz opened it again in New York at the Waverly, where it more than doubled its first run — playing ninety-nine weekends through mid-­September 1981, a run that ended only when the theater closed to build a second screen. According to Lynch himself, there was never a single point when the film simply “took off”: “It was a very gradual incline.” But it proved that persistence of this kind — which is possible only in independent theaters, at least according to the way most chains are run — can eventually reap spectacular dividends, especially when it comes to creating and developing new markets.