David Lynch’s Unmade Projects: 10 Films and Shows the ‘Twin Peaks’ Creator Almost Directed

Audrey Horne “Twin Peaks” Spin-Off

Audrey Horne’s strange marriage to Charlie (and affair with Billy) is one of the strangest and most memorable side plots on “Twin Peaks: The Return.” But if Lynch had initially gotten his way, the fan favorite character would have had a very different ending. After ABC cancelled “Twin Peaks” in 1991, Lynch and Mark Frost plotted a spin-off that would have followed Sherilyn Fenn’s character as she moved to Los Angeles and became caught up in a complicated noir saga. The project was later retooled as an original pilot without a connection to “Twin Peaks,” and ultimately became Lynch’s classic film “Mulholland Drive.”

“I lived on Mulholland Drive at the time and I thought it was a great title,” Frost said in an interview with IndieWire. “We had considered spinning off the Audrey character and setting her loose in Hollywood, in a modern noir. We had very preliminary talks; it drifted away, and then six years later, I hear it’s going be a pilot at ABC.” —CZ

“Wisteria/Unrecorded Night”

In late 2020, rumors began to swirl that Lynch would be returning to television to write and direct a 13-episode Netflix series with the working title “Wisteria/Unrecorded Night.” The series had a reported budget of $85 million. While plot details were never disclosed, many speculated that the project could have something to do with “Twin Peaks,” as 13 untitled scripts for the series were registered under Lynch and Frost’s company Twin Peaks Productions. Obsessive fans of “Twin Peaks: The Return” were quick to note that there is a road in Odessa, Texas called Wisteria Street… which happens to have a diner on it. While the series never materialized at Netflix, Lynch collaborators like Kye MacLachlan and Mark Frost have continued to stoke the rumors by posting pictures of wisteria flowers on their personal social media accounts as recently as June 2023. —CZ

“Venus Descending”

Before they created “Twin Peaks” together, David Lynch and Mark Frost attempted to adapt Anthony Summers’ book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe” into a film titled “Venus Descending” in the late 1980s. Much like Andrew Dominick’s “Blonde,” the film would have been a highly fictionalized account of the late star’s life, even changing her name to Rosilyn Ramsey to avoid legal issues. The script, which never got off the ground, was rumored to feature “Ramsey” being assassinated by a fictionalized version of Bobby Kennedy. —CZ 

“Dream of the Bovine”

One of the stranger lost projects of David Lynch is “Dream of the Bovine,” an unmade film that Lynch said was about “three guys, who used to be cows, living in Van Nuys and trying to assimilate their lives.” Lynch wrote the script with “Twin Peaks” writer Robert Engels, and briefly cast Harry Dean Stanton as one of the former cows in the 1990s. 

The script sounds like another example of Lynch toying with the idea of an un-belonging spirit living amongst others unnoticed. According to his memoir, Lynch approached Marlon Brando for a role in “Dream of the Bovine” before he was turned down by the prestigious actor who felt the script was “pretentious bullshit.” —MF

“Ronnie Rocket”

Coming off the success of his first feature film “Eraserhead,” Lynch drafted multiple versions of an equally terrifying screenplay “Ronnie Rocket.”  The story follows a three-foot tall man named Ronald d’Arte who gains comic book-like abilities to control electricity after receiving an experimental surgery at a strange hospital. Luckily Ronnie chooses to use his new body and powers for good, investing time into becoming a musician. Lynch considered revisiting the script multiple times in subsequent decades, with Mel Brooks and Francis Ford Coppola interested in producing the film at various points, but the stars never aligned for the doomed project. —MF

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” Sequels

Lynch initially hoped that his groundbreaking prequel “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” would be the first of several films that continued the ABC series without the restrictions of network television. While the film has since been reappraised as one of Lynch’s best works, its unapologetic portrayal of sexual violence turned off many fans and critics who preferred the show’s soapier tone. Lynch also had trouble convincing many cast members — including Kyle MacLachlan — to reprise their roles after the poorly received second half of Season 2. The obstacles combined to prevent Lynch from making more “Twin Peaks” films in the 1990s, but many of his scrapped ideas eventually went into “The Return.” —CZ

“Antelope Don’t Run No More”

David Lynch hasn’t directed a feature film since 2006’s “Inland Empire,” and at this point it seems highly unlikely that he’ll make another one. The auteur has openly criticized the state of the film industry and seems content to work on television and visual arts projects in recent years, but he did attempt to develop one last feature film in 2010. In his very Lynchian pseudo-memoir “Room to Dream,” he revealed that he wrote a script called “Antelope Don’t Run No More” that apparently featured “space aliens, talking animals, and a beleaguered musician named Pinky.” Unfortunately it never got off the ground, and Lynch soon turned his attention to “Twin Peaks: The Return.” —CZ

“The Metamorphosis”

A devoted fan of German novelist Franz Kafka, Lynch jumped at the opportunity to adapt one of the author’s books into a screenplay. In typical Lynchian fashion, he dove into adapting “The Metamorphosis,” a story about a man’s unexpected transformation into an insect. The dark sense of humor Kafka used in his storytelling is something Lynch related to and showcased in his own work claiming to “identify a lot with” the story’s main character, Gregor Samsa. But despite his passion and vivid vision going into this project, the logistics didn’t work out. The high cost and lack of technology available to filmmakers in the late 80s, made it prohibitively difficult to build a gigantic and believable bug monster. Rather than compromise on his vision, Lynch moved on to other projects. His 1993 book and collection of interviews “Lynch on Lynch” outlined the director’s thoughts on the matter.

“If you told me you could build a perfect beetle then I would concentrate,” Lynch said. “I would sit down and really concentrate on the story and reading it and … might solve the problem.” —MF

“One Saliva Bubble”

Coming off of the success of “Blue Velvet,” Lynch partnered with Mark Frost, who would go on to be his co-creator on “Twin Peaks,” to draft the script for this dark slapstick comedy. The story follows victims of a secret government project in Newtonville, Kansas which causes a noticeable shift in their personalities after a single saliva bubble from a nearby security guard froths out of his mouth entering the small town. The plot of “One Saliva Bubble” touches on reoccurring Lynchian themes like uncertain or concealed identity and shifted consciousness. The film was set to star Steve Martin and Martin Short for the lead role before production fell through. Lynch described the goofy nature of the story to be a “feel-good movie” in his 2018 memoir. —MF

“Gardenback”

When David Lynch first moved to Los Angeles to study filmmaking at the American Film Institute, he began developing a surreal film horror called “Gardenback” that — you guessed it — featured a man growing a garden with a large insect living inside it on his back. The film was ultimately scrapped when Lynch’s financial backers asked him to make the script more conventional, and he soon pivoted to working on “Eraserhead.”

“My first year at the Center was spent rewriting a forty-five-page script I wrote called ‘Gardenback,'” Lynch said in an interview. “The whole thing unfolded from this painting I’d done. The script had a story, in my mind, and it had what some people could call a ‘monster’ in it. When you look at a girl, something crosses from her to you. And in this story, that something is an insect.” —MF