A Rare and Intimate Look Inside David Lynch’s Unmade Film ‘Ronnie Rocket’

W hen the prodigious director and painter David Lynch died unexpectedly in late January 2025, the world didn’t just grieve a filmmaker whose world-building changed cinema’s visual language. Lynch, who passed a few days before turning 79, grappled with health issues following his lifetime of smoking cigarettes. Yet from his home in the Hollywood Hills, Lynch was still actively chipping away at cinematic projects, including newer ideas and films he’d been nurturing for decades. His close friend, the actor Naomi Watts, recently told The Los Angeles Times that the last time she saw Lynch back in November she was struck by how much he was aching to go back to work. “He was not, in any way, done,” she said. “I could see the creative spirit alive in him.”

One project that Lynch returned to periodically – and as recently as a few years ago – germinated in the late 1970s around the time he started working on his debut film, Eraserhead. Due to funding difficulties, this film, titled Ronnie Rocket, never got off the ground. Even with decades of financial roadblocks, Lynch always retained hope that he could eventually launch this passion project. Lynch developed Ronnie Rocket enough to not only elicit several drafts of the script, but also concept illustrations by Ron Miller, a science-fiction author and illustrator who first worked with director on his adaptation of Dune (1984).

A rare copy of David Lynch’s screenplay Ronnie Rocket, accompanied by original drawings made by the surrealist filmmaker, is headed to auction from the collection of science-fiction author and illustrator Ron Miller. — A rare copy of David Lynch’s screenplay *Ronnie Rocket* is headed to auction from the collection of science-fiction author and illustrator Ron Miller. Estimate: $5,000-8,000

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This remarkable and rare piece of Lynch’s legacy, detailing how the director and illustrator collaborated on the first-ever visualizations of the unproduced Ronnie Rocket, is included as part of Sotheby’s auction “There Are Such Things:” 20th-Century Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy on Screen. The lot includes a copy of the revised Ronnie Rocket script that Lynch gave Miller for illustration reference, 11 drawings created by Lynch illustrating floor plans from different locations in the story and 22 sketches that Miller also made about the project in progress – all culled from a 1988 meeting at Lynch’s home about Ronnie Rocket.

Chaia Mascall, a Cataloguer of Pop Culture at Sotheby’s, says that although Lynch’s artwork has been sold before, nothing quite like this has ever come to auction until now. “Pre-production and archival materials from Lynch’s filmmaking, which is the way that most people have experienced his work, is really unprecedented and super exciting,” she says. A portion of the proceeds from the Ronnie Rocket lot will be donated to the David Lynch Foundation, an institution aimed at furthering education about Transcendental Meditation, which Lynch practiced daily for much of his life.

“With the pages of illustrations directly by Lynch and Miller’s companion illustrations – it’s almost like you’re in the room with them that day in 1988.”

- Chaia Mascall, Cataloguer of Pop Culture, Sotheby’s

Even by Lynchian standards, the unrealized Ronnie Rocket stands out. “I think it would have been the best project he ever did in his entire life,” Miller says of Lynch’s unfinished film. “Every year I reread this script because I loved it so much.” Miller explains the plot of the “fairy tale” as concerning “a strange child named Ronnie Rocket, who was basically kept alive by all these implants, and becomes a major rock star – especially when they discover if they plug his implants into a wall socket, he shoots around the room, shooting sparks out of himself like a rocket.” According to Variety, the film was also set to star Michael J. Anderson, who Lynch worked with on Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and Mulholland Drive (2001).

While initially discussing the film in the late 1980s, Lynch and Miller got to work sketching out some of the locations that would be important to the story of Ronnie Rocket, including a psychiatrist’s office, a diner named Hank’s and a piece of giant scaffolding with a neon sign spelling out “Filadelfia.” Lynch’s former life as an art student in 1970s-era Philadelphia later came to have a deep impact on his filmmaking, particularly in Eraserhead. The city’s hold on Lynch is also evident in the Ronnie Rocket script, which describes “Filadelfia” as “an endless dark night city” with “massive plain buildings, electricity and smoke.”

The script also offers glimpses of Lynch’s lean and highly visual writing style, by turns unsettling and humorous. In one brief scene, for instance, he describes The Detective character as suddenly floating into the holes of an open electrical socket “beneath the plug leading to Ronald’s electrical apparatus. The socket holes loom huge like tunnels. There is a moaning wind.” Another scene calls back to Lynch’s frequent fascination with dreams, describing that “perhaps [Ronnie’s] lost in a dream” as a shorthand for his appearance.

The lot includes a copy of the revised Ronnie Rocket script that Lynch gave Miller in 1988, 11 drawings created by Lynch illustrating floor plans from different locations in the story and sketches that Miller also made about the project in progress – all culled from the meeting at Lynch’s home about Ronnie Rocket. — The lot includes a copy of the revised *Ronnie Rocket* script that Lynch gave Miller in 1988, 11 drawings created by Lynch illustrating floor plans from different locations in the story and sketches that Miller also made about the project in progress – all culled from the meeting at Lynch’s home about *Ronnie Rocket.*

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Miller tells Sotheby’s that Ronnie Rocket probably would have been “unfilmable” back then from a production standpoint. “But as technology got more complex and sophisticated, especially with digital and CGI, Ronnie Rocket would have been more and more feasible every year,” he says. Perhaps sensing this, Lynch revisited Ronnie Rocket in between his other projects, even discussing in interviews that he still held out hope about getting it off the ground. Miller continued hashing out artwork for the project “up until a couple of years ago” with digital drawings as well.

The back and forth between Lynch and Miller also distinguishes the Ronnie Rocket lot from other noteworthy scripts in the film sale, including George Miller’s stab at Contact before Robert Zemeckis ended up directing the film. The 1988 Ronnie Rocket script is the only copy in the auction bearing hand-drawn annotations directly from the mind of the screenwriter, in conversation with the illustrator, as the idea was being shaped in real time. “With the offerings that Ron was so generous to consign with us – pages of illustrations directly by Lynch, and then with his companion illustrations – it’s almost like you’re in the room with them that day in 1988,” Mascall says

To see these doodles in tandem with the script showcases the symbiotic relationship that Lynch fostered with his close contributors, and hints the collaborative environment he maintained on set with crew and cast members. In this way, Mascall says, the Ronnie Rocket lot acts as “just another contributing factor to Lynch’s ethos of true compassion.”