Peter Deming Shares New Details of David Lynch’s Unrecorded Night

With David Lynch’s passing came the reminder––which not all of us needed––that his final decades were often spent attempting projects that were eventually rejected by studios, Netflix chief among them. Though they’d 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, it’s “a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.” Whether Ted Sarandos was being honest by claiming Netflix was prepared to make the series post-COVID (I have my doubts), Lynch’s emphysema more or less ensured the series, once shot, wouldn’t 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 Lynch’s cinematographer from the oft-forgotten TV series On the Air through Twin Peaks’ 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:

“Shortly before he passed––well, like a year, because it was pre-COVID––there was Unrecorded Night, which he had written. I’d read it, and we actually went on one scout, looking at locations. Then COVID hit, so everything shut down and it never rekindled.”

When I proposed different rumors that had swirled around it––an original series, a set of feature-length standalone episodes, a Twin Peaks continuation––Deming elaborated:

“It’s definitely its own original thing, and how it was formatted, I don’t really know. It was going to be a lot of episodes, because David really liked what he called ‘the continuing story.’ Because I tried to… you know, 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.’ 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. [Laughs] It really is. Because it would’ve been good.”

Though I of course pressed him on story details, Deming was respectfully withholding:

“You know, I have to talk to [Laughs] Sabrina about this—are we letting this cat out of the bag or not? I don’t want to be premature about that, but there’s definitely… I mean, I kind of saw it as… you know, he loved to make films about Los Angeles. He wasn’t 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.”

Much as the mind swims at all these hints––a project of comparable length with Twin Peaks, an LA story with echoes of the city’s past––that strand of conversation ultimately ended there. But it’s 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 Sutherland’s wishes and at her first command.) Return in a few days for my full interview with Deming.

The post Peter Deming Shares New Details of David Lynch’s Unrecorded Night first appeared on The Film Stage.