"RONNIE ROCKET BY DAVID LYNCH" ZINE

"There is a dark land where mysteries and confusions abound, where fear and terror fly together in troubled cities of absurdities."

David Lynch's Ronnie Rocket may be one of Hollywood's most notorious unproduced screenplays. Lynch began working on Ronnie Rocket immediately following the release of Eraserhead in the late 1970s, with the idea being it would be his next picture. It was at this time that Lynch became very interested in sugar, which he called "granulated happiness", and would sit in Bob's Big Boy Restaurant every day and drink chocolate milkshakes and coffee, working on story ideas.

Ronnie Rocket is, in Lynch's words, "about electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair". More specifically, it follows two distinct but related stories; a detective attempting to travel into the depths of into a dark, post-apocatyptic city, and a small, man-made boy who can control electricity and becomes the world's most popular rock 'n' roll star.

Progress on Ronnie Rocket continued in fits and starts over the next ten years, entering into production multiple times before being cancelled each time over producer cold-feet or lack of funds. After the success of Blue Velvet, Lynch got his first serious opportunity to shoot Ronnie Rocket. He signed a three picture deal with the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, of which Ronnie Rocket was one of the planned films, and began pre-production work almost immediately.

In the titular role he cast Michael J Anderson, with a supporting cast of Lynch past and future regulars including Isabella Rossilini, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Brad Dourif and Dean Stockwell. He even assembled a band and began writing music with them for Ronnie's performances.

Unfortunately, DEG made some extremely poor decisions in the late 80s and filed for bankruptcy before Ronnie Rocket could begin shooting. Although Lynch has always maintained he would still love to make the film one day, the rights still technically belong to De Laurentiis, so the likelihood of it every actually happening are slim.

Elements of Ronnie Rocket have since popped up in many of Lynch's later projects. Michael J Anderson would later star as The Man From Another Place / The Arm in Twin Peaks, the band Lynch put together for Ronnie Rocket would write and perform the music for the Pink Room nightclub scene in Fire Walk With Me, and many references to themes, lines of dialogue, and visual elements from Ronnie Rocket would show up again in later Lynch projects (especially Twin Peaks: The Return).

This zine reproduces Ronnie Rocket in its final completed form. Taken from a late '80s draft of the screenplay, it has been meticulously reformatted from the ground up for readability and presented with the utmost respect for the original work. 100 pages.