David Lynch made Eraserhead while a student at the American Film Institute, after a planned 45-minute script was replaced by a surreal idea about a man's head taken to a pencil factory. The film's budget was tiny, so production stretched over years: Lynch delivered newspapers to fund it, his friends and family donated money, and one shot of a character opening a door was filmed a year after the earlier scenes. Sound designer Alan Splet spent almost a year on the soundtrack, layering up to fifteen sounds at once, and some effects were made by putting a microphone in a plastic bottle floated in a bath. A poor test screening led Lynch to cut twenty minutes, bringing the film to 89 minutes.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.