David Lynch, photo by Heather Kaplan

David Lynch has been keeping plenty busy in recent years, what with the Twin Peaks revival, his memoir Room to Dream, and expanding his annual Festival of Disruption to New York City. Just last week, he released an album of songs from the ’90s he composed with his longtime musical collaborator Angelo Badalamenti under the moniker Thought Gang. Nevertheless, fans of the surrealist filmmaker will undoubtedly fail to be fully satisfied until the creative finally makes a proper return to the silver screen. And it looks like a return to filmmaking may indeed be in the works.

Lynch has not directed a feature-length film since 2006’s Inland Empire, and given an oeuvre containing such classics as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, it’s natural that any signal of a new project would be greeted with fervor. There have been a few indications as of late that something is on the horizon, including Lynch being sighted in talks with Netflix.



The latest development comes from a Vulture article in which novelist Jeff Jackson recommends a number of rock music novels. In a blurb about Alan Greenberg’s Love in Vain: The Life and Legend of Robert Johnson, Jackson casually notes that Lynch is apparently in the midst of raising funds to realize Greenberg’s famously unproduced screenplay based on the 1983 book.

Sharing the Love in Vain title, the script tells the half-fable, half-non-fictional story of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. Lynch has been a longtime fan of Greenberg’s screenplay, having said in 2013 that he would “very much like to direct it someday.” At the time, he qualified his interest by saying “a number of things would have to fall in place before that would occur.”

Well, have those things finally fallen in place? We cannot say for sure given the mysterious paths his projects often take to realization, but this latest tidbit gives us something to believe in.

Until we learn more, you can listen to the Thought Gang album below.