Alongside the Twin Peaks review, I was also told to write two accompanying articles for Paste, one of which would cover the director’s less-known works on television while the other would cover the lengthy impact the series had on the entire medium. These would both be that most hated/beloved of internet-genres, listicles, though for once the format made sense for the topic (though moreso here than in the other list). While I was paid for these, neither article ran, though I was never made clear why. Given that I’d been paid, and was largely moving onto other projects, I pretty much shrugged and moved on, but thought I might as well toss them up here as a little curio. I’ve long been fascinated in the side-projects artists create between their better-known works, and Lynch has an incredibly vast output that often gets forgotten altogether due to lack of accessibility and, frankly, interest.
While there’s plenty of publicity surrounding the Blu-Ray release of Twin Peaks, less well-known is that it’s only one of David Lynch’s many strange projects for television. Most of these never got further than the conceptual stage, but in any case Lynch was interested in working on the small screen for a long time both before and after Twin Peaks‘ success. In fact, he’s been surprisingly prolific there for a man who once painted the words “I WILL NEVER WORK IN TELEVISION AGAIN” on a plywood board. To keep this list reasonable, we’re not including music videos or commercials he’s directed, though many of them are also well worth searching out
1. I’ll Test My Log with Every Branch of Knowledge
As strange as it may sound, the Log Lady from Twin Peaks dates back further than any other part of the show. Catherine Coulson, who played her, was a longtime friend of Lynch’s who also helped him with his first feature, Eraserhead During that long and difficult production, Lynch had his first idea for a television series, with Coulson as the star of a show titled I’ll Test My Log with Every Branch of Knowledge. In it, she’d play as a widow coping with the grief of her husband’s death in a forest fire and trying to educate her son in various fields by using her log as a cypher. Lynch described its basic plots as, “Maybe on this particular day she calls a dentist, but she makes the appointment for her log. And the log goes in the dental chair and gets a little bib and chain and the dentist X-rays the log for cavities, goes through the whole thing, and the son is also there. Because she is teaching her son through his observations of what the log is going through. Then sometimes they go to a diner and they never get to where they’re going. That was the idea. You’d learn something each week, see?” Although this was never more than a goofy idea, it stuck with Lynch, as did the idea of going into television.
2. Ruth Roses and Revolver
Although David Lynch didn’t direct this BBC Four television program, it’s still very much a Lynch project. In 1987, Arena asked Lynch to present on surrealist cinema, and this program features clips of movies such as Blood of a Poet, Man with a Movie Camera, The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart and Discs accompanied by Lynch’s explanations of how they affected his own work. More of a DVD extra than anything else, it’s still an intriguing look at how Lynch feels about surrealist cinema and offers a brief crash course for those who, unlike him, don’t have years to study it at the AFI Film School.
3. The Cowboy and the Frenchman
Following the success of Blue Velvet and the revival of his career, a French newspaper commissioned Lynch and four other film directors to make episodes of its television series The French, as seen by . . ., with other episodes directed by Werner Herzog, Andrzej Wajda and Jean-Luc Godard (who apparently represented France itself, despite being Swiss). The result was a strange, not entirely successful slapstick-ish comedy that plays off the stereotypes of cowboys, native Americans, and Frenchmen. Most notably, it was the first time Lynch worked with Harry Dean Stanton, as well as Michael Horse, who went on to play Hawk in Twin Peaks. Stanton’s role was a deaf cowboy, which prefigured Lynch’s own deafness as Gordon Cole soon afterwards. That being said, the episode is slow and only intermittently funny, and though it has a few memorably Lynchian touches, it’s not one of his better works.
4. Twin Peaks
Soon after that, Lynch teamed up with Mark Frost to co-create a pilot for NBC. The pair never thought the show would be picked up, and neither did the network, who asked them to add on a closed ending in case it never made air (this could then be sold to foreign markets). Because of their belief that the show would never be seen by anyone else, Lynch and Frost made what they wanted to with no attempt at creating a work palatable to mainstream television audiences. Their result was unlike anything on the air and went on to change the direction of the medium. Read more about it <a href=”https://www.seangandert.com/twin-peaks-review/”>here</a>.
5. American Chronicles
Because of Twin Peaks‘ success, Mark Frost and David Lynch stayed together as a production company and began putting other projects together. The most obscure of these by far (even most biographies of Lynch pretend it doesn’t exist) was <em>American Chronicles</em>, a documentary television series that aired on Fox. The show was really more Frost’s baby than Lynch’s, and he took sole creator credit while Lynch acted as an uncredited executive producer. Lynch’s influence on the show was still evident, though, in the odd camera angles and moody music used for its montages… but that couldn’t save what was to be the biggest disappointment of Lynch/Frost Productions.
American Chronicles had the distinction of being the lowest-rated television show during the period it aired, literally dead last, which is completely understandable, especially given its place on Fox rather than PBS. While the show purported to offer edgy takes on odd subjects (e.g. carnivals, bikers, truck stops), in reality episodes were just a showcase for cinematographers with little information or redeeming value, despite narration from Richard Dreyfuss. Nevertheless, Lynch and Frost purportedly co-directed one episode of the show, titled “Champions,” but American Chronicles was cancelled before it had a chance to air. Ironically, it only aired on Channel 4 in Britain, and even then only one time. As a result, it’s essentially a lost film, since aside from any personal copies that might be owned by the creators no extant version is believed to exist. That being said, given the quality of other episodes in the series (including one that was turned into a feature film about Hugh Heffner), that’s no big loss.
6. On the Air
According to Lynch, he was inspired to create On the Air while mixing sound for an episode of Twin Peaks‘ second season, so it’s no surprise that On the Air is itself about creating a television. He and Frost banged out a script before the end of 1990, and filmed it March of the next year with a healthy doses of the Twin Peaks‘ cast playing new roles. Oddly enough, despite, Twin Peaks and ABC having large disagreements at this point with the show’s future in jeopardy, ABC decided to pick up On the Air‘s pilot and ordered six more episodes. By the time they were shot, though, ABC was thoroughly finished with Lynch/Frost and delayed the show until June 1992, only airing three of them during the middle of the summer and with essentially no publicity. Unsurprisingly, few watched the show, and that first batch of episodes were the only ones made.
That being said, it’s difficult to be too unhappy about the cancellation. The pilot episode, directed by Lynch and co-written by him and Frost, is almost too clever to be funny. Although there are gags, most of these are pretty childish, slapstick affairs, and it’s the angry satire and the strangely avant-garde surrealism of the episode that made for a compelling end product. As a stand-alone affair it’s an excellent episode, far more successful than any of Lynch’s other attempts at full-on comedy, but it was made to set up the show’s formula, which largely rides the same jokes and situations as the first episode, to vastly diminishing returns. By the end of the season, it feels like the show was put out of its misery, and even Lynch’s return to co-writing the finale does little to help the ailing program. As gags from the first episode repeat again and again, it’s clear that Lynch and Frost had a clever idea, but wanted that clever idea to return every episode. It’s a bleak idea of what exactly a sit-com entails, and while the first episode is worth searching out online, the rest of the series is better left unwatched.
7. The Lemurians
Although Lynch/Frost Productions created a great deal of work during its brief years of existence, its only commercially successful product remained Twin Peaks. After the failure of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and a slight falling out between the show’s co-creators due to Lynch’s insistence on creating a prequel rather than a sequel, the pair disbanded the company. As a result, their other proposed television project, The Lemurians, never got more than a script treatment.
That being said, the project might have been too weird for television. In it, Jacques Cousteau inadvertently found his way to the sunken continent of Lemuria and disturbs the Lemurian race, who through their evil threaten the entire world. “There were a lot of poems in it,” Lynch said, and the project was planned as a comedy. In hindsight, it may be better this show was never made.
8. The Dream of the Bovine
David Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels spent more than a year working on a film script for this absurd comedy about three human characters who used to be cows. But before that, Lynch conceived of The Dream of the Bovine as a four-part television mini-series for the Comedy Channel. After writing three episodes, though, they decided the story worked better as a feature and began working on a new version of the project. However, the television show structure got in the way and after many rewrites the idea was abandoned altogether, leading Lynch to begin working on <em>Lost Highway</em>.
9. Hotel Room
David Lynch collaborated with Monty Montgomery, the producer of Wild at Heart, in this attempt at creating an anthology series in which every episode took place in the same hotel room but with different characters and time periods. However, only the pilot episode of the series was ever shot, a feature-length portmanteau film that contains two shorts by Lynch and written by Barry Gifford (the author of the book Wild at Heart was adapted from and co-screenwriter of Lost Highway) and one directed by SNL‘s James Signorelli and written by Jay McInerney. Originally the show was to have one of segment by David Mamet, but Montgomery didn’t like Mamet’s contribution so Lynch/Gifford had two shorts rather than one.
Despite being on HBO, each of the stories is essentially a filmed play, to the point that they not only have a unity of time and space, they’re also staged theatrically and are shot in obvious sets. As such, they’re perhaps the least Lynchian-looking things that Lynch ever directed, with none of the unsettling camera angles or editing that make up the rest of his work. Instead, Lynch focused on performance and the dialogue, which fortunately came out very well due to his use of his usual stock company, including Harry Dean Stanton and Freddie Jones in the the first short “Tricks” and the fantastic Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt in “Blackout.” McInerny’s short is kind of the odd man out and, while not terrible, feels a bit out of place with its Sex in the City-style conflict surrounded by Lynch and Gifford’s bleak misery.
“Tricks” oddly prefigures themes of mistaken identity that Lynch and Gifford would explore soon afterward in Lost Highway, as two men soliciting a prostitute end up switching places by the end of the story. However, “Blackout” is a much more interesting short, taking place in 1936 during a city-wide blackout and focusing on a couple’s co-dependent method of coping with their only child’s death through psychosis. Oddest of all is the note of hopefulness that arrives at the end of the short, making it one of the few works Lynch has ever created that can be said to have a happy ending. Unfortunately, despite its pedigree Hotel Room has long been out of print (and when it was, in the states it was only on VHS), but is worth seeking out for more than just completionism.
10. Rap Factor
Some time after the book by Delacorta was published, David Lynch purportedly planned on doing a television adaptation. The book’s protagonist, Zulu, is a P.I. educated at Yale investigating the death of a beautiful rapper found dead in her apartment. It seems unlikely this project got any further than an option or maybe script treatment.
11. Mulholland Drive
What became arguably David Lynch’s most successful feature began life as a television series for ABC. Once again, Lynch’s agent (at the time) Tony Krantz was instrumental in getting the project started. Kranz remembered the pitch for a series Lynch had told him back in 1990 and never truly let go of it. (Sherilyn Fenn later claimed it originated as a spinoff for her character in Twin Peaks, Audrey Horn). He asked Lynch to write a two-page treatment of the story and brought him in to speak with the studio’s executives, who picked up a 90-minute pilot version for the extraordinary amount of $4.5 million dollars.
The resulting pilot was brilliant. However, the executives at ABC disagree, and refused to pick up the show despite their already heavy investment. In response, Lynch tried to make Mulholland Drive fit with their expectations, editing it down from more than two hours to just 88 minutes, but at the end of the day he felt he’d compromised too much and they felt he hadn’t compromised enough. After sitting on the shelf for a year, the picture was rescued by StudioCanal, who bought the rights from ABC and gave Lynch new funding to finish the project as a movie, which Lynch thereafter considered fortunate as the change of medium inspired him to turn his old footage and story into something else entirely.
The result is almost too neatly split in half, as if Lynch was telling the story once in the language of television and once in the language of film. The darker side of Mulholland Drive was shot later and this contrast between the two forms, which Lynch by now knew all too well, was both relevant to the story and a meta-textual comment on the feature’s own creation. By combining styles from both mediums, Lynch created something more interesting than either, a strange amalgamation that’s rarely, if ever, been done before or since.