Did Michael Jackson’s candy company scam David Lynch?
It should come as no surprise that some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmaking minds also happen to be some of the most eccentric. Just look at the likes of Werner Herzog, a man who ate his own shoe after he failed a bet, John Waters, who ordered his castmember to eat real dog excrement, or David Lynch, who carries out daily weather reports and posts his mundane findings to his YouTube channel.
Indeed, as well as being one of cinema’s greatest and most innovative filmmakers, transforming the independent circuit with such classic gems as 1977’s Eraserhead and his seminal TV series Twin Peaks, Lynch is just as strange off-screen as his peculiar cinematic narratives. Such goes back to his early days as a painting enthusiast, who didn’t leave his dorm for two weeks when he first arrived at college.
Yet, one of the director’s most obscure tales revolves around the late musician Michael Jackson, an iconic figure whom Lynch had worked with previously, directing a promotional short film for him back in 1991 for the release of the album Dangerous. After having collaborated with the star, Lynch took the rather curious decision to invest $5,000 in what he thought was Jackson’s soda company, Chewy Nougats.
“One day I was at Dino De Laurentiis’s company and Dino had a guy who was on the business side,” Lynch told Vulture, “He seemed very intelligent. I had in my pocket $5,000 in cash that I’d saved from my per diems. I used to love carrying money around in my pocket. I don’t carry money around now because people find out you carry cash and you get rolled. But I passed this guy’s office and he said, ‘David, listen to me. Listen to me. You can get in on the ground floor: This is Michael Jackson’s company: Chewy Nougats. You can buy in now’”.
Continuing, Lynch recalled: “So I said, ‘Well, I got this five grand right here.’ My thinking was that I’d double it at least, so I put $5,000 into Chewy Nougats. I followed it for a while and the Chewy part left and it was just called Nougats. Then the Nou was gone and it was called Gats. Then it all disappeared…I don’t even know what it was. I think it was candy. I never really knew. I just knew that if it was Michael Jackson, it was gonna be big”.
With no record of Jackson ever owning a candy company, less still one named ‘Chewy Nougats’, it seems as though Lynch was scammed by a group claiming to represent the king of pop. Just stick it in the file of other strange things Lynch has done with his life.
Take a look at his promotional video for Jackson below.
