With David Lynchâs passing came the reminderââwhich not all of us neededââthat his final decades were often spent attempting projects that were eventually rejected by studios, Netflix chief among them. Though theyâd accepted a pitch for his series Unrecorded Night, COVID served as a stopgap to further development; as Lynch said when describing Snootworld, an animated feature the studio had also let die on the vine, itâs âa different world now and itâs easier to say no than to say yes.â Whether Ted Sarandos was being honest by claiming Netflix was prepared to make the series post-COVID (I have my doubts), Lynchâs emphysema more or less ensured the series, once shot, wouldnât have existed per its intended form.
On a very short list of those lucky enough to experience any iteration of Unrecorded Night is Peter Deming, who served as Lynchâs cinematographer from the oft-forgotten TV series On the Air through Twin Peaksâ third season. Ahead of Film at Lincoln Center screening Lost Highway on Thursday, I had the fortune of speaking with Deming. While discussing the nearly ten-year gap from INLAND EMPIRE (on which Deming provided some assistance) to Twin Peaks, a litany of unmade titles familiar to Lynch acolytes arose: Dream of the Bovine, Ronnie Rocket, and Unrecorded Night. Said Deming:
âShortly before he passedââwell, like a year, because it was pre-COVIDââthere was Unrecorded Night, which he had written. Iâd read it, and we actually went on one scout, looking at locations. Then COVID hit, so everything shut down and it never rekindled.â
When I proposed different rumors that had swirled around itââan original series, a set of feature-length standalone episodes, a Twin Peaks continuationââDeming elaborated:
âItâs definitely its own original thing, and how it was formatted, I donât really know. It was going to be a lot of episodes, because David really liked what he called âthe continuing story.â Because I tried to⊠you know, I really love the feature stuff, but he was like, âIâm not going to make any more movies. Iâm just going to make longer stories because I love the longer story.â In fact, Twin Peaks: The Return, we werenât really sure how many episodes there were going to be until it got into post-production, because it wasnât 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, itâs too bad. [Laughs] It really is. Because it wouldâve been good.â
Though I of course pressed him on story details, Deming was respectfully withholding:
âYou know, I have to talk to [Laughs] Sabrina about thisâare we letting this cat out of the bag or not? I donât want to be premature about that, but thereâs definitely⊠I mean, I kind of saw it as⊠you know, he loved to make films about Los Angeles. He wasnât trying to hide the setting. Lost Highway, while not implicit, was certainly implied. Mulholland Dr. 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.â
Much as the mind swims at all these hintsââa project of comparable length with Twin Peaks, an LA story with echoes of the cityâs pastââthat strand of conversation ultimately ended there. But itâs perhaps not the end of this story; one struggles to imagine Unrecorded Night remaining a perpetual mystery. (Needless to say we are ready to detail the whole thing per Sutherlandâs wishes and at her first command.) Return in a few days for my full interview with Deming.
Revu twin peaks s3
Ăa a une autre saveur en enchainant un peu les episodes et en sachant Ă quoi sâattendre. On apprecie mieux sans attendre que « dougie » redevienne cooper Ă chaque episode. Câest franchement une tuerie de chaque instant. Les images sont trop belles. Les seuls trucs un poil relou ce sont les scenes repetitives avec audrey. Sinon jâaime bien le dernier episode qui tranche vraiment avec tout le reste.
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mais oui câĂ©tait incroyable Ă tous les niveaux 
