THE FIRST VISUALIZATIONS OF DAVID LYNCH’S RONNIE ROCKET—THE GREATEST FANTASY FILM NEVER MADE—INCLUDING 11 SKETCHES IN LYNCH’S OWN HAND
Comprised of 11 sketches by David Lynch, 22 sketches by Ron Miller, and a bound photocopy of the screenplay Miller was provided for illustration reference—the present lot are the first physical interpretations of David Lynch’s unproduced film, Ronnie Rocket.
The idea for Ronnie Rocket came to David Lynch—the late auteur filmmaker, visual artist, musician, writer, and longtime practitioner of Transcendental Meditation—at the very beginning of his inimitable five-decade-long career. Lynch originally conceived of “Ronnie Rocket: The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence” as a follow-up to his debut feature Eraserhead (1977) and planned for the film to be his first produced in color. Ronnie Rocket is a split-narrative, following both a detective in a failing industrial city known as ‘Filadelphia’ who is trying to discover a second dimension and a teenager whose life is sustained only through connection to electrical power. One of Lynch’s most ambitiously surreal ideas, Lynch wasn’t able to secure funding to develop the project and eventually moved on to other works.
Lynch would return to the idea of Ronnie Rocket throughout his career, including during a meeting with Ron Miller—science fiction author and artist—at his home Los Angeles in 1988, in which the illustrations in the present lot were produced. Ron Miller and Lynch first collaborated in 1984 on Dune, where Miller was the production illustrator and designer of several key elements of Lynch’s sprawling science fiction epic. During this meeting, Miller and Lynch reviewed the screenplay while Lynch sketched out floor plans of locations described in the story. These sketches by Lynch served as Miller’s source material when he returned to his studio to create more detailed illustrations of characters and specific scenes.
Even as Ronnie Rocket was ultimately never brought to screen, Miller and Lynch kept in touch about the project for forty years following their 1988 meeting.
