Few movie artists who've emerged in the last thirty or so years excite so much curiosity about what they're working on--and about what they've worked on in the past and been forced to abandon--as David Lynch. And none are more vocal about their mixed feelings, or worse, about that kind of curiosity. Lynch, who famously abhors the inclusion of directors' commentaries and even chapter stops on DVDs, wants his work to be experienced only in its final, polished form, and he doesn't appreciate having cultists root around in the tangle of his false starts and wrong turns. When someone in the audience of a live Q & A asked Lynch about an early version of the script for Blue Velvet that he'd come across, which ended with Dorothy Vallens jumping off a roof, Lynch curtly responded that the question showed why all the copies of all the early drafts of anything ought to be burned. The true Lynch fanatic is likely to end up feeling a little like Max Brod wrestling with Kafka's instructions to him to destroy his letters and other unpublished writings, torn between wanting to respect the great man's wishes and the desire to know and share as much as possible about what been up to. Because Lynch is principally a movie director, that includes whatever traces we have of what he might have done if he'd had not just more time but all the funding opportunities in the world.

For Lynch freaks, the great white whale of unproduced Lynch projects is Ronnie Rocket, a script that goes back to the late 1970s. Described by Lynch as being "about a three-foot tall guy with red hair and physical problems, and about 60-cycle alternating current electricity", the project was originally intended as Lynch's follow-up to Eraserhead. When that didn't work out, it was going to be his follow-up to The Elephant Man, and then his follow-up to Blue Velvet. After Twin Peaks, he began to talk about it as a starring vehicle for Michael Anderson, the dwarf actor who played The Man from Another Place in that series and later appeared in Mulholland Drive. Lynch has rewritten and rewritten the script, and at that same Q & A, he told Elvis Mitchell that after every project he completes, he tries to get Ronnie Rocket a green light. Some people, though, think that the movie will never get made because Lynch is past the point of being able to make it. It might be one of those long-deferred dream projects that directors sometimes fuss over and fantasize about until it takes up permanent residence in some remote corner of their minds, from which it can never be successful dislodged. And some of us who used to anticipate what the director of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet's ultimate dream project might look like are less excited about the prospect of seeing it made now by the director of Inland Empire, the man who, in interviews, seems less interested in pushing the boundaries of the audio-visual possibilities of film than in embracing new technology that mainly offers him the pleasures of greater convenience.

Ronnie Rocket is Lynch at his most intensely personal. One Saliva Bubble, which was written in 1987, around the same time that Lynch was reportedly close to making Ronnie with a cast that would have included Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Brad Dourif, and Jack Nance--the Blue Velvet All-Stars--is a relic of a very different phase in Lynch's career, a period when he teamed up with Mark Frost, a writer best known for his work on Hill Street Blues and the 1987 horror movie The Believers, and tried to meet the mainstream halfway. Based on the results, the idea behind the partnership must have been something like this: the two of them would work bring their weird conceits to the table and decide on which ones they both liked, after which Frost would press them into some commercially viable form that might get the green light from a studio or network, after which Lynch would wrap them in Style. Before hitting pay dirt with Twin Peaks, Frost and Lynch worked on The Lemurians, a projected TV series with roots in a variant of the Atlantis myth that figured in the cosmos of Madame Blavatsky, and Goddess, a movie spun from the notion that Robert Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe rubbed out, but only One Saliva Bubble is known to have made it to the completed screenplay stage. At the point where it seemed likeliest that it might get beyond that, it had Steve Martin and Martin Short attached for the leads.

The script begins in "a top-secret, experimental, offensive/defensive military installation hidden away in the countryside outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." In the first scene, some scientists are exposing the innards of a computer system while a trio of security guards "who appear to be refugees from the Neolithic period" stand off to the side, exchanging crude jokes. The title refers to Frost and Lynch's version of the butterfly effect: one of the guards blows a raspberry, and in the process "jettisons a perfect saliva bubble" which floats "past the unknowing, refined, well-groomed Scientists and down into the microscopic copper wires, creating a tiny, seemingly insignificant electrical short circuit," which in turn causes some kind of satellite missile-defense system to emit a beam that strikes the small town of Newtonville, Kansas. The effect of the beam is to cause several citizens to trade bodies, or merge their personalities, or something like that with other citizens. A gang of rowdy, out-of-shape Texans swap places with a troupe of Chinese acrobats; a Britishy matron takes over the body of a black blues musician. And the hero, Wally, "a forty year old milquetoast salesman", trades places with Horton, a ferocious hit man. This is '80s high concept, Lynch style.

Part of what makes it Lynchian is that everybody in Newtonville, and outside it too, seems buggy and warped even before the transformation takes place. It's also marked by a strange mixture of sweetness and darkness. When Wally is trundling around in Horton's menacing form, his love life and overall place in the scheme if things improves, but--and this is probably the most winning idea in the whole script--the bloodthirsty Horton steps into Wally's life and discovers that he loves being a family man, especially since his wife and son love the new, scary version of their family provider. The warmest, and just about the wordiest, passage in the script comes when Horton has to deal with a bully who's been messing with junior. "I know what a hard life you've lived," he tells the kid, "what with your folks divorce and your father's alcoholism. It wasn't so long ago that I didn't know the meaning of a family either. Victor, I know about the loneliness, lying awake at night, feeling like no one in the world cares for you. I know what this can do to you; the rage and frustration. And I just want you to understand you've got a friend here and his name is Wally Newton. By the time he's finished, there isn't a dry eye in the schoolroom. Meanwhile, the military is discussing whether to cover the whole mess up by going with a plan to "reduce Newtonville to a smoking pile of ash, litter the area with sheep with their eyes sewn shut and blame it on UFO's."

One Saliva Bubble reads as if it must have been fun to write. It has an antic, anything-goes tone, "anything" including comical Chinese who say things like,"Herro, Gentremen, how may I herp you?", animated-cartoon tricks involving dogs freezing in the air in mid-pounce and doors that fling themselves open at the sight of the fearsome Horton, cute comic gangsters, broadly drawn cariactures of blustery generals that would strike Buck Turgidsen as a tad much, and an ending that is unintentionally summed up by the stage direction: "The crowd is totally bewildered." Humor has always been a major element in Lynch's work; certainly it had a lot to do with the success of Twin Peaks, especially in the first season, when it was easier to separate the intentionally funny from the other kind. There, the funny moments arose naturally out the characters and situations. But, trying to write a comedy, he seems less interested in story or character than in piling silliness upon silliness. And because Lynch can't seem to help himself from minting a strange, idiosyncratic world even when he populates it with silly accents and fart jokes, there's an abstract, weirdly cerebral feel to the whole thing, like seeing a star MIT student's experimental design for the world's greatest homemade beer bong. Although the film was never made, there may be a clue as to what it would have looked like in Lynch and Frost's follow-up TV series, the short-lived behind-the-scenes radio sitcom On the Air, where the farcical plot turns and slapstick pratfalls were so unfunny they were borderline creepy. The show played like charades night at the Black Lodge. (In turn, Saliva Bubble may provide hints of what might have been in store for us if Lynch had realized another of his ideas for a comedy: Dream of the Bovine, which would have starred Harry Dean Stanton as one of three cows who are reincarnated as people but still think of themselves as cattle.)

With the early, phenomenal success of Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost proved that there was a mass audience for a crowd-pleasing serial entertainment served up with the kind of craft, visual imagination, and double-edged with that Lynch brought to the project. But they also wound up demonstrating the corrupting influence of mass success, a corruption that in their case was self-defeating. If they had fulfilled the expectations they'd set up and solved the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder in that first season, they might have been unable to lure their audience back for whatever they did next, but they could have gone out in glory; instead, by trying to extend the plotline beyond the breaking point, they wore out their welcome with the audience and betrayed their implicit pledge to keep Twin Peaks from turning into just another TV show, playing by the same nothing-ever-really-changes rules. After On the Air and the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me (on which Frost had an executive producer credit but no input on the script), they went their separate ways, and it would take Lynch a while to regain his bearings. In his collaborations with Frost and also in Wild at Heart, the movie that was released between the first and second seasons of Twin Peaks, he had begun showing the strain of trying to match up to the way the industry seemed to see him: not as a major artist trying to capture his own way of seeing on film, but as some guy standing by the side of the road holding up a hand-lettered sign reading, "WILL WRITE WEIRD SHIT FOR FOOD."