The loss of David Lynch‘s genius is still being mourned amid new details of yet another shelved project from the late auteur. Lynch died at age 78 in January 2025. His frequent collaborator Naomi Watts has shared that she and Laura Dern were ready to collaborate again with Lynch in late November 2024; now, Lynch’s longtime cinematographer Peter Deming is revealing the genre of one of Lynch’s many outstanding scripts: “Unrecorded Night.”
Deming previously worked with Lynch on “Twin Peaks” and the early series “On the Air,” plus “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive.” According to the DP, Lynch’s would-be Netflix series “Unrecorded Night” would’ve been a mystery tonally along the lines of his classic L.A.-set films.
“Unrecorded Night” was first shelved due to COVID and later stalled once more after Lynch’s emphysema diagnosis. Lynch had planned to write and direct 13 episodes of the series, which was first developed under the working title of “Wisteria.”
“Shortly before he passed, well, like a year, because it was pre-COVID, there was ‘Unrecorded Night,’ which he had written,” Deming told The Film Stage. “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.”
He continued, “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, [with] ‘Twin Peaks: The Return,’ we weren’t really sure how many episodes there were [g]oing 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.’”
Deming added, “It was definitely a really interesting…mystery, I would say. Yeah, it’s too bad. It really is. Because it would’ve been good.”
When asked about plot details, Deming could only go on record to say that “Unrecorded Night” would be set in L.A. “You know, I have to talk to [longtime producer] Sabrina [Sutherland] about this — are we letting this cat out of the bag or not? I don’t want to be premature about that…He loved to make films about Los Angeles,” Deming said. “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 L.A. 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.”
Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos cited that the studio was “all in” on making “Unrecorded Night” in an Instagram tribute to Lynch after his passing.
“He came into Netflix to pitch a limited series, which we jumped at,” Sarandos wrote. “It was a David Lynch production, so filled with mystery and risks, but we wanted to go on this creative ride with this genius. First COVID, then some health uncertainties led to this project never being produced, but we made it clear that as soon as he was able, we were all in.”
