The Metamorphosis At some point in the 1980s, Lynch adapted
Franz Kafka's novella
The Metamorphosis into a feature film screenplay. The project never came to fruition due to concerns about the cost of realizing Lynch's vision of the insect the story's protagonist transforms into and also Lynch's eventual reluctance to adapt the novella, saying it was "better left as a book".
Frances Pleased after his work on
The Elephant Man,
Mel Brooks sought Lynch as the director of a film project on the life of troubled actress
Frances Farmer for his company
Brooksfilms. Though he was supposedly interested in the project, Lynch could not stay with it as he had recently signed an agreement with
Universal.
Graeme Clifford instead took on the position; the resulting film, entitled
Frances, released in 1982.
Love in Vain After
The Elephant Man, Lynch read a screenplay by
Alan Greenberg based on the life of blues musician
Robert Johnson, and he had mentioned wanting to direct a film of the screenplay in the decades since. As of 2012, Lynch was trying to produce and direct the film with French financing. In 2013, Lynch said: I'm a 30-year fan of the screenplay Alan Greenberg wrote for
Love in Vain. I would very much like to direct it someday. But a number of things would have to fall in place before that would occur.
Dune II Lynch had planned to follow
his adaptation of Dune with a sequel based on
Dune Messiah. A partial script of
Dune II developed by Lynch with notes by Frank Herbert was discovered in summer 2023 at Herbert's archives at
California State University, Fullerton. Based on the novel, the film had some differences from the novel's story, much like the first film had. After the critical and commercial failure of
Dune, the sequel did not proceed.
The Happy Worker After the completion of
Blue Velvet, Lynch gave his editor
Duwayne Dunham the script for a film he was sent called
The Happy Worker, wanting him to direct it. It was based on a stage play by S. E. Feinberg. According to
Bobcat Goldthwait, whom Lynch had approached to play the lead role, the film centers on a bunch of people who are digging a hole, and when one man questions why, he gets promoted to management. Afterward, "everybody resents him and his whole life goes to hell and then at the end of the movie he starts digging his own hole." Lynch apparently began scouting locations and found a "giant hole in
Mexico that he liked" and wanted to use for the production. The project was developed over three decades. The film was finally released in 2025 under the title
Legend of the Happy Worker. Lynch is posthumously credited as an executive producer.
Red Dragon Following
Blue Velvet, Lynch briefly developed a film version of
Thomas Harris's
Red Dragon for
Dino De Laurentiis, but decided to drop the project, citing distaste for working on another major studio film, which he said has "no redeeming qualities". The film was eventually made and titled
Manhunter, released in 1986. Its plot centered around the small town of Newtonville, Kansas, where a secret government project goes amok when a guard's tiny saliva bubble shoots out of his mouth and into a weapons system. This sets off a chain reaction that discombobulates the entire town when the residents begin to switch identities with one another, causing "all kind of wacko hell [to break] loose", as Lynch said. "Clichés one end to the other." Characters included a Swiss scientist, an
assassin, a
car salesman, a black
jazz musician, a white
floozy, Chinese
acrobats,
Heinz 57 convention attendees, and the "world's stupidest man." In the chapter "Marty Throws a Party Just to Sing" of his 2014 autobiography,
I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend, Short wrote, We bought the house on the basis of the income I was about to make from two pending movies. You can guess what happened next. Practically the second we signed the mortgage, one of the two movies, a David Lynch film with Steve Martin entitled
One Saliva Bubble fell through. Lynch said he had intended to direct the film through
Dino De Laurentiis, who was facing bankruptcy at the time: We had all our scouts, had it cast, was right there ready to go. Dino kept delaying it, delaying it, delaying it. It became obvious it wasn't going to happen: there wasn't any money. Shortly thereafter his company went bankrupt. We saw the writing on the wall. The film was to be a mystery, but no script was written.
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up In the late 1980s, Lynch mooted a film adaptation of
Eric Knight's 1938 mystery novel
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up. The story follows a man dealing with luck, death, and irony. Lynch can be seen working on the script for the film in the 1989 documentary ''Don't Look at Me'', but he dropped it before its completion.
The Lemurians Before making
Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost pitched a television series they called
The Lemurians, based on the story of the lost continent of
Lemuria, which sank to the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean. It would have featured "a lot of poems" and "detectives tracking extraterrestrials", among other things.
NBC turned them down. ==1990s==