David Lynch Didn't Want People To Watch The Mulholland Drive TV Pilot For One Reason

Although "Mulholland Drive" is widely considered one of the best movies of the 21st century, nothing about its production implied it would be any kind of success at all. The film started off as a TV pilot David Lynch had directed for ABC, but the network executive who watched it apparently hated it so much they canceled the project on the spot. A year later, Lynch expanded the pilot into a movie, bringing its actors back to shoot what would become the film's final act. The result was something almost completely unlike what the original TV show was expected to be, with an overall plot that none of the actors involved could even make sense of. Despite all of this, "Mulholland Drive" became a major favorite amongst both Lynch fans and cinema lovers in general.

The original pilot version of "Mulholland Drive" has never been made available on any official streaming service, although a copy was previously uploaded in full onto the Internet Archive. Nowadays, you can indeed watch the pilot for free, but Lynch himself would've preferred if you didn't. As the filmmaker once explained to Premiere magazine:

"All I know is, I loved making it, ABC hated it, and I don't like the cut I turned in. I agreed with ABC that the longer cut was too slow, but I was forced to butcher it because we had a deadline, and there wasn't time to finesse anything. It lost texture, big scenes, and storylines, and there are 300 tape copies of the bad version circulating around. Lots of people have seen it, which is embarrassing, because they're bad-quality tapes, too. I don't want to think about it."

Most fans who've seen the original pilot would agree: it's just not the same as the finished film. Instead, the whole thing is awkward and uninteresting, and it spends a lot of time setting up storylines for characters who have their roles cut or diminished in the actual movie. It also doesn't include the scene in Winkie's Diner, which features arguably the greatest jump scare in movie history and signals early on that the film is truly something special.

Another thing that made "Mulholland Drive" seem less than promising early on was that it began as a "Twin Peaks" spin-off rather than an original series (although those plans were scrapped after "Twin Peaks" was initially canceled). As "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost explained to Yahoo! Entertainment for the outlet's 30-year anniversary oral history of the making of the show in 2020:

"['Twin Peaks' co-creator David Lynch and I] had considered spinning off the Audrey character and setting her loose in Hollywood, in a modern noir. We had very preliminary talks; it drifted away, and then six years later, I hear it's going be a pilot at ABC."

That original project falling apart was frustrating for fans of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), a fan-favorite character on "Twin Peaks" whose potential was sadly squandered in the show's aimless second season (which Lynch couldn't stand either). Many Audrey fans were similarly disappointed by the 2017 revival series "Twin Peaks: The Return," where Audrey only briefly appeared and was never allowed to share the screen with the rest of the series' returning cast.

"I know Sherilyn was eager to do ['Mulholland Drive'] at the time," Frost explained. "She was ambitious, and we probably could have built a show around her. I don't know exactly how it went from there to a pilot script without her. [...] Maybe because 'Twin Peaks' had crashed and burned, there wasn't much appetite for spinning off a series from it. I wasn't involved, and frankly, I needed a break from working with Lynch at that point."

Although Fenn never got to lead her own Lynch movie, she did at least briefly star in his 1990 film "Wild at Heart," playing a young woman who suffers a serious car accident. She also apparently got to influence how Audrey's storyline played out in "The Return." Speaking to Fox 59 ahead of her appearance at the 2019 Days of the Dead convention in Indianapolis, Fenn revealed that Audrey was originally the owner of "some lame hair salon" in Twin Peaks and had "nothing to do" in an early iteration of "The Return." As she explained further:

"I told [David Lynch] I can't do this. This is crazy. I don't even know what this has to do with who Audrey was. I don't understand any of this, and I don't like it at all. So, I left crying, and he got really mad at me because he had to rewrite it. [...] After we shot it, David said he was sorry and that I was right and that he was so glad that he rewrote it. And that made me happy."