David Lynch's frequent collaborator, cinematographer Peter Deming, has revealed new details about the late director's unmade Netflix series, Unrecorded Night – and it was an original mystery with a hefty script.
The show (which originally had the working title Wisteria) was shelved due to COVID and never got back off the ground due to Lynch's emphysema diagnosis, which he made public in 2024. The filmmaker died this past January.
"It’s definitely its own original thing… It was going to be a lot of episodes, because David really liked what he called 'the continuing story,'" Deming explained to The Film Stage. "I really love the feature stuff, but he was like, 'I’m not going to make any more movies. I’m just going to make longer stories because I love the longer story.'"
He continued, "In fact, Twin Peaks: The Return, we weren’t really sure how many episodes there were going to be until it got into post-production, because it wasn’t really written that way; it was written as a 550-page film. So how that was sliced and diced really was a post-production question. Unrecorded Night was the same way. It took me three sittings to read it because it was so thick, but it was definitely not Twin Peaks. It was definitely a really interesting… mystery, I would say. Yeah, it’s too bad. It really is. Because it would’ve been good."
Deming worked with Lynch on his movies Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, as well as on all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return. And it sounds like Unrecorded Night had something in common with the former as well as the latter: an LA setting.
"He loved to make films about Los Angeles. He wasn’t trying to hide the setting," Deming added. "Lost Highway, while not implicit, was certainly implied. Mulholland Drive was obvious. Inland Empire was obvious. To me, this was another LA canon for him, and one that sort of mixed in filmmaking and Old Hollywood a bit, and it was just, maybe, number four in that line of products."
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