David Lynch’s unmade movie with Madonna: “There was some conflict with the men”
There’s uncompromising, and then there’s David Lynch.
He was a creative who absolutely would not conform to any expectations, or to usual filmmaking practices, to narrative arcs, or even to not randomly have white horses wandering around in his TV shows. Now, can you imagine what would have happened if he’d been made to work day in, day out with someone as driven and creative as Madonna?
That was very nearly the case back in the 1990s, and one can only imagine the carnage that would have ensued had two of the most fearsomely unique entertainers in the business gone head to head.
Even before that, however, Madonna was linked to a project with David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, which would have eventually become the hugely controversial Boxing Helena starring Sherilynn Fenn. It would have originally been called Boxing Hanna and starred the singer who was at that time in her ‘Vogue’ era.
But it wasn’t to be, Madonna pulled out of the project and ended up starring in her own erotic thriller, 1993’s widely-panned Basic Instinct rip-off Body of Evidence. Kim Basinger was due to replace her, but she also backed out of the film, leading Jennifer Lynch to huff: “Their bravery is not to be lessened, but perhaps they had not anticipated how difficult making this movie would be.”
But Madonna’s refusal to work with David Lynch’s daughter didn’t put him off a potential collaboration with the pop star, as his long-time working partner, the author Barry Gifford, explained. He told Empire: “[Lynch and I] talked about many other projects which never came to fruition. There was one that Madonna was supposed to star in. This was after Wild At Heart; (producer) Monty Montgomery wanted me and David to come up with a story that she could do.”
Again, it sadly never came to pass, for one, it would have been fantastic to see Lynch and Madonna in their peak arguing over the best way to shoot a scene. As a producer, Montgomery was known for inserting music stars into movies, so it did make sense. He had cast Mick Jagger in an easily forgotten film from 1978 called Wings of Ash, and Blondie’s Debbie Harry in 1980’s neo-noir Union City.
While the Lynch/Madonna pairing didn’t happen, there was still an outline for what the feature might have been. Gifford added: “I wrote a story about a woman who worked in a bar in the countryside, and there was some conflict with the men she consorted with.” There was also, he revealed, “a project about a battery that could last forever. It had something to do with aliens.”
Gifford and Lynch came together when the director adapted Gifford’s book Wild at Heart for the big screen. They then went on to co-write the screenplay for Lynch’s much-loved thriller Lost Highway in 1997. A surreal vision of horror, the movie tells the tale of Bill Pullman’s musician who begins to receive strange videotapes of his own house before being accused of killing his wife, played by Patricia Arquette. It was also the last time that frequent Lynch collaborator Jack Nance of Eraserhead fame was seen on the big screen.
Before that, the trio of Lynch, Montgomery and Gifford also worked on the HBO mini-series Hotel Room in 1993, which was an anthology show featuring a different cast for each episode, and each story unfolded in a New York hotel room numbered 603. Despite featuring the likes of Harry Dean Stanton and Back to the Future’s Crispin Glover, feedback was very mixed on the show, and it wasn’t renewed after the initial three episodes.
