Officially, their rationale was that the program was "too violent" for television. Absolutely hated it.Īs soon as Lynch screened the pilot, the programming executives immediately pulled the plug and canceled all plans for future episodes. It was extremely promising, and could have grown into a fascinating television drama. Like most of his works, the episode had a multi-layered, twisty storyline peppered with quirky characters and surreal touches. The story was part classic film noir, part behind-the-scenes showbiz satire, and entirely infused with Lynch's signature style and thematic preoccupations. Inspired by the possibilities of developing another long-form narrative, the director shot a two-hour pilot (a little over 90 minutes without commercials) about a naïve Hollywood starlet named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) who meets an amnesiac brunette calling herself Rita (Laura Harring) and stumbles into a bizarre 'Nancy Drew'-meets-'Blue Velvet' psychosexual mystery in the City of Dreams. Despite his lingering feelings of resentment over the cancelation of both 'Twin Peaks' and his sitcom ' On the Air', and perhaps against his better judgment, Lynch allowed himself to be lured back by promises that the corporate culture had changed in the intervening years, and that he would be allowed greater artistic leeway this time around. Even though his last feature, ' The Straight Story', had been a financial failure, key players at parent company Disney were impressed enough by it (and by the fact that noted iconoclast David Lynch could produce a mainstream-friendly movie within the studio environment) that they invited him to work with the ABC network again. 'Mulholland Drive' started life as the pilot episode for what was originally to be a new primetime TV series. Personally, I find it a very uneven, problematic work that grasps for (and occasionally reaches) greatness, but also shows clear signs of the artistic decline that the filmmaker would soon plunge into.Īdmittedly, part of the problem may be my own cognitive inability to separate what the film is from what it almost was, or how it came into being. The word "masterpiece" gets tossed around a lot in reference to 'Mulholland Drive'. After a three successive box office flops and nearly a decade spent relegated back to the fringes of the film scene, director David Lynch (' The Elephant Man', ' Blue Velvet') returned to prominence in 2001 with a new movie that netted him a Best Director trophy at Cannes, an Academy Award nomination for the same title (his third), and a level of both critical and popular respect that he hadn't experienced since the heyday of ' Twin Peaks'.
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