Ronnie Rocket

is the name of a movie that David Lynch very badly wanted to make but for which he was never able to get funding. It was first optioned by Zoetrope Studios (Francis Ford Coppola's production company) and might have been produced by DeLaurentis Entertainment Group (Dino de Laurentiis had also produced the Lynch pictures Dune and Blue Velvet) had DEG not gone bankrupt.

I first heard about the script in an article in premiere magazine entitled "Ten Scripts that Great Directors Can't Get Made". Among them was "Ronnie Rocket" - and it came across as the most intriguing of the projects. People who were thinking about funding it would read the script and afterwards have very disturbing dreams.

The script is now easily available on the net - do a search for "Ronnie Rocket" and script. Another promising starting point might be: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2093/index.html

Lynch's description of the script:
"I've been writing it for ten years, since I finished Eraserhead. It's an absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence. It's about electricity."

Also:
"It's an absurd comedy, the story of a midget with red hair and physical problems. It's the absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence. Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell will probably be in it. I don't think Kyle MacLachlan will be in Ronnie Rocket because he looks too normal for that film."

The movie was supposed to have starred Mike Anderson ("The Man from Another Place" from "Twin Peaks"),Isabella Rosellini, Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, Jack Nance, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, and Dennis Hopper.

It would have been shot on location in Hoboken, New Jersey.

I won't go into the details of the script - to avoid spoiling it, and because it's all in the details and I don't remember many of the details. There are two parallel stories, one dealing with a small adult male (who would probably have been played by Mike Anderson) who ends up going to a high school where he becomes the singer for a band - despite his grotesque appearance, he has a serene, angelic voice, something along the lines of Julee Cruise. The other story concerns a detective trying to stop a man in his city from running an energy machine which pulls out all the energy from the surrounding citizens. The closer you get to the machine, the weaker you get. Only in the last few scenes do we get a sense of the connecting thread between the two stories. It's enough to say that one Lynch theme that keeps being used over & over in his movies (especially in the last ten years) shows up here as well.

The purpose of this node is not to give a summary of the movie - but to intrigue you enough to want to read the script and make you angry that it was never made.

A good deal of the information for this node comes from the excellent David Lynch fan site "The City of Absurdity", found at: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2093/index.html.

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