"Mulholland Drive" may seem like a reflexive response in the opposite direction after the experience of making "The Straight Story," but in fact it was in development around the same time as "The Straight Story" and was shot shortly thereafter. Its genesis is unique for a major studio release: The current version is a two-hour, 27-minute retooling of a script originally shot as a 94-minute pilot for a TV series; ABC, which had approved the script, chose not even to air the pilot once it was done, despite Lynch's efforts to cut the project to their liking.

It was a strange and frustrating decision: It seemed as though they made a deal with Lynch and were then shocked -- shocked -- when he turned out something weird. What did they expect from a man who has been called (among other things) the Wizard of Weird, the Sultan of Surrealism and the Boy Next Door (from Mars)?

So a feature-length work by one of America's premier directors was left in a legal limbo: ABC owned it, but didn't want to show it.

"I was so happy with the cast and all the people involved with that show," Lynch said when I spoke to him by phone recently. "It was so much fun, I can't tell you. But they weren't behind that, not one little bit. It could have had a life, and people might have enjoyed it."

Of course, what had Lynch himself expected? After "Twin Peaks" crashed and burned, ABC had also ordered up (and then rapidly abandoned) "On the Air," an intensely strange sitcom.

I ask Lynch why, given these experiences, he would ever want to work in TV again. Hadn't he learned his lesson? "You do learn from your past, but sometimes it's like, you're a dog, and you love chocolate, and you get sick from chocolate, but you're going down the street, and you smell that chocolate shop, you're gonna go in there again. And then you don't think about the painful side of the past. You just get kinda euphoric about going there again.

"I mean, I'm a sucker for a continuing story. That's one of my problems. And that's why I wanted to do it as a series. I had no frustrations with it until ABC saw the pilot and hated it and in a sense killed it."

I tried to get him to snap at ABC, but he wouldn't take the bait. "Looking back," he said, "I see that they did me a huge favor. Number one, by allowing it to get going as an open-ended pilot. And number two by killing it. Then we were at a very strange place, because we had this open-ended pilot and a desire to turn it into a feature. But my friend Pierre Edelman of Canal Plus [the French production company] saw the pilot, saw the possibilities, knew of my desire to turn it into a feature and got Canal Plus to work over the next year to get the rights.

The buyout gave Lynch the wherewithal to turn the pilot into a feature, and apparently allowed him to put the original story into one of his "Lost Highway"-like puzzle boxes. "I was very fortunate," he said. "I sat down one night, and these ideas came into me, showing me how to do it. Up until that point, I didn't know what I was gonna do. And so the ideas that came in were only possible because it had started open-ended. It's strange how what went before was so necessary to the final form. And I don't think it would have been the same at all if it had started out being a feature. So it's an interesting trick of the mind."

So in the long run, is he basically happy that the show didn't get picked up?

"Oh," he said, in his most endearing Jimmy Stewart stammer. "I'm ... I'm ... I'm ... next door to euphoric!"

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Lynch had engaged in a similar process on "Twin Peaks": For a European theatrical release, he added extra footage to the American broadcast pilot to "wrap up" the mystery. (Curiously, in America, the European version is available on video. But in Taiwan, you can buy the American version. Go figure.) He eventually recycled some of that material for the series, most notoriously the first of the "Red Room" sequences, with the dancing dwarf and the backward-sounding dialogue.

Lynch said: "One of the greatest experiences of my life was getting the idea for the Red Room and what that led to finally. So you never know where ideas are going to lead."

Recent Stories