God, hes left as on aur oun.
We don’t stop here.
Well, the way they pick teevee shows is, they make one show. That show’s called a pilot. Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show, they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen, and become television programs. Some don’t, and become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.
Mulholland Dr. was originally intended or devised or dreamt up or at least pitched as a television series, a serial along the lines in more ways than one of Twin Peaks (as a for instance)—the film we got was cut together from and with additions made to what had originally been a pilot: a show for the people who pick shows, to see if more such shows would at all be what they’d want.
Turns out, not so much.
But that original pilot is available via the Internet Archive:
The quality’s not stellar, but it’s worth watching. At an hour-and-a-half (just enough time for a two-hour movie premiere, with commercials), it’s an hour shy of the film’s runtime, but a large part of the story’s largely there, scenes playing out much as they do in the film, some cuts here, some extensions there, an extra scene with Robert Forster’s laconic anti-Cooper cop, a phone call with a procrastinating writer whose dog, Murph, is mysteriously menacing, there’s some different musical cues, perhaps the most notable difference: some brashly atonal percussive stings adjacent to the Castigliane brothers; the director, Adam, tools up to the corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon to the drum solo from “Take Five”; there’s a stab at a light-hearted theme for Betty, all tremulous strings and tinkling piano, best perhaps left behind—but, nonetheless, the basic beats play out as they do in the film, right up to the discovery of Diane Selwyn’s body, Rita’s attempt to cut her hair, “Let me do it,” and then the revelation of the blond wig in the mirror: “You look like someone else.” There’s no Club Silencio, and there’s no Winkie’s, though there is the dumpster behind the Winkie’s, and the figure behind the dumpster, far more melancholic, almost placid, than terrifying, sat there, waiting, as the pilot ends.
Not so different insofar as that goes, and yet completely different, because of the context, because of how it’s situated, because of the haunting expectations that cling to it, the mighta beens and what would theys. —A television show, a series, a serial, of which this might’ve been the first installment, it’s episodic, it continues, it’s therefore open-ended, expansive, not elusively claustrophobic, not hermetically sealed, not done-in-one, not—a film. We would have gotten more—but with the terrible foreclosure of the film’s ending, it’s tantalizingly impossible to make any kind of a guess as to much of what any of that more would’ve been.
More behind-the-scenery of the movie industry, sure; more to limn the shadowy armature of power stretching from Mr. Roque and the Cowboy through the Castigliane brothers, and all those unknown, unseen phone callers to the bumblingly competent Joe Messing; director Adam Kesher would’ve been more of a co-protagonist with Betty and Rita—but Rita probably wouldn’t’ve been Camilla, and Betty almost certainly wouldn’t’ve been Diane. The tension of that sort of doubling and reveal, that’s not a long-haul sort of mystery. There’s a necessary finality to it, that just doesn’t fit in a serial shape.
And I really don’t know how Naomi Watts’ incandescently saccharine performance would’ve worked in weekly installments, without that counterbalance. Her audition—closer to the end of the pilot, rather than the middle of the film—suggests a direction, of course, but the plucky kid detective, at once Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan, becoming in her own way very much like the woman who stumbles, injured, from the woods, is a very different story than the one in which the pluck turns out already to have stumbled, on her own, and no detective anywhere in sight.
I like a continuing story. There’s something about a soap opera that’s fantastic because it just keeps going and going. Theoretically, you can get very deep in a story and you can go so deep and open up the world so beautifully, but it takes time to do that.
