Goddess (aka Venus Descending)

Based on a book by Anthony Summer, this was the first collaboration between Lynch and Mark Frost in 1987. Goddess revolved around the last few months in the life of Marilyn Monroe, though the character's name is changed to Rosilyn Ramsay for legal reasons. The story made the claim that Bobby Kennedy (changed to Phillip Malloy, again for legal reasons) killed Marilyn. Once the producers heard that, they dropped the project.

One Saliva Bubble

One Saliva Bubble was an early project of Lynch and Frost, almost a year before Northwest Passage (the TP pilot) was written. It centers around the small town of Newtonville, KS, where a secret government project goes amuck. The result is an exchange of identities of several of the townsfolk. The script is mostly a comedy, which it was rumored Martin Short and Steve Martin would star in.

One Saliva Bubble Screenplay (183k)

Ronnie Rocket

Ronnie Rocket was a screenplay originally written by Lynch and possibly to star Michael Anderson (The Man From Another Place in "Twin Peaks" and the Woodsman (Twin #1) in " Industrial Symphony #1"), who would have played Ronnie. This was the first film Lynch offered CIBY 2000 as a part of his former three picture deal, but they elected to pass on it.

More information from Ann Kroeber, the late Alan Splet's (Lynch's sound designer) wife:
"Actually Ronnie Rocket was written LONG before David ever set eyes on Michael Anderson. The first RR script I read was written before "The Elephant Man" was made. He used to talk with my late husband (Alan Splet) and I , any chance he could get, about Ronnie during breaks of shooting "The Elephant Man." Ronnie Rocket was the subject that was near and dear to his heart."

"Ronnie scripts have gone through all sorts of permutations over the years. I suspect that "Ronnie Rocket" is David's most thought about story and may just never be made not because that production company didn't want to shoot it, they and several others were willing, but David wasn't."

There are two drafts available, one called Ronnie Rocket and an earlier version called Ronny Rocket
Ronnie Rocket Screenplay (215k)
Ronny Rocket Screenplay (185k)

Dream of the Bovine

Co-written with Robert Engels in 1994, this was to be comedy about three people who once were cows. They still behave like cows, but look like humans. Peter Deming described it as an "existential Marx Brothers." Originally it was planned as a television series for Comedy Central, but was later adapted to a feature format. Lynch wanted Harry Dean Stanton to play one of the cows, as well as Ed Wright (Del Mibbler from Twin Peaks) and Max Perlich (best known from Homicide : Life on the Street). The script hasn't been completely scrapped, but Lynch is not currently working on it.

Dune Messiah

Lynch was in the process of writing the sequel script to Dune, but the box office failure of the first film killed the project. From the Inner Views Lynch interview, "...I was really getting into Dune II. I wrote about half the script, maybe more, and I was really getting excited about it. It was much tighter, a better story."

Gardenback

One of Lynch's earliest ideas, this project was a part of his application for enterance to the American Film Institute. It was about a bug that grew in a guy's attic, eventually driving him from his home. It was a very abstract film, much like The Grandmother. A producer was interested in funding the project, but only if Lynch expanded it to a feature. Lynch passed.

Metamorphosis

Based on the Kafka story, Lynch was working on the screenplay to this film as far back as the early 80's. At the time, the cost of creating a believable bug (and the technology involved) pretty much put the possibility of the film on hold. However, with the modern advances in CGI, it might be possible now. No word on if Lynch still has the rights to the story though, but he does have a script finished for it.

Lynch on Metamorphosis: "It's a story that millions of people have read and about a hundred-thousand people have written about, and each one has seen it from a slighly different angle. But...it's just rich with things. But there's a certain kind of dark humor that I love about Kafka and it is his stuff that thrills me to my soul. It's just a completely perfect mood and story and characters. I like pretty nearly everything about it."

Up At The Lake

This was one of the last projects pitched to Dino De Laurentiis before his company went out of business. Little is known about it, other than that it was a mystery.

You Play the Black, and the Red Comes Up

An adaption of the story by Eric Knight, Lynch can be seen working on this in the doccumentary "Don't Look at Me". But he wasn't all that interested in the story and the script was never finished.

The Lemurians

A collaboration with Mark Frost, it was planned as a TV program about the lost continent of Lemuria, which was so evil it sunk into the ocean. An explorer finds the continent and awakens the Lemurians, which puts the rest of the world in jeapordy. The project never made it to the script stage of development.

"Woodcutters From Fiery Ships"

David Lynch was to team with anime producer Bandai and two Japanese partners to produce a digital adventure to be released on DVD-ROM, the Internet, and in novelization form. The project was tentatively entitled "Woodcutters From Fiery Ships".

Unfortunately, the project never came about. Lynch says it was "blocked from the get-go." The game was going to be a "conundrum thing.. a beautiful kind of place to put yourself. You try to make a little bit of mystery and a bit of a story, but you want it to be able to bend back upon itself and get lost ... Ceratin events have happened in a bungalow which is behind another in Los Angeles. And then suddenly the woodcutters arrive and they take the man who we think has witnessed these events, and their ship is... uh, silver, like a 30`s kind of ship, and the fuel is logs. And they smoke pipes."