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Lost Highway (1997)
Starring Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty, Patricia Arquette, and Robert Blake. Cinematography by Peter Deming. Edited by Mary Sweeney. Produced by Deepak Nayar, Tom Sternberg, and Mary Sweeney. Written by Barry Gifford and David Lynch. Directed by David Lynch.
Fred Madison, a jazz musician, suspects his wife, Renee, of being unfaithful. Strange situations and people start to dominate Fred’s life until one day he discovers Renee brutally murdered in their bedroom. Fred is tried and convicted for the crime and eventually sentenced to death. One morning the prison guards find that a young man named Pete Dayton has replaced Fred in his cell. Pete has no recollection of how he got there and, having committed no crime, he is set free. Pete resumes his normal routine as a mechanic, but remains disoriented from the strange event. When things begin to settle down, he paid a visit by a wealthy client named Mr. Eddie. Mr. Eddie introduces Pete to his girlfriend Alice, who unbeknownst to anyone else, looks exactly like the murdered Renee. Pete and Alice start a dangerous affair and things quickly spin out of control.
From the late 1970’s to the early 1990’s, David Lynch had become the most renowned and respected of abstract American filmmakers. His surreal film projects like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet had won him respect and acclaim world wide. He had also become the only experimental filmmaker to be nominated twice for a best director Academy Award. In the 1990 he introduced an entirely new genre to television with his series “Twin Peaks”. In that same year his film Wild at Heart had taken the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival, but oddly enough that’s when things started going downhill. Despite the fact that it came home with the Golden Palm, Wild at Heart was a box office failure. His follow-up feature film to “Twin Peaks”, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, was another financial bomb. Later, two more attempts at television failed within the first two months. So years past by and Lynch faded into the background, biding his time and waiting for the right inspiration to jump back into the film game. Five years later that inspiration would be called Lost Highway.
Lost Highway would be the first film in the three picture deal Lynch signed with CiBy 2000 back in 1991; an arrangement that would allow him full creative control over his projects. To help assemble his intricate neo-noir story, Lynch once again called upon writer Barry Gifford. Gifford had authored the novel that Lynch eventually molded into Wild at Heart and the two artists had worked together on the short lived television program “Hotel Room”. Gifford’s passion for the genre can be confirmed with his own non-fiction cinematic guide called Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir. The resulting collaborative effort would be slightly Kafkaesque, mildly Hitchcockian, but ultimately totally David Lynch. Unfortunately, like nearly all of his pictures, Lost Highway ended up being a critical success and a box office disappointment. But most Lynch fans agreed that Lost Highway was exactly what they were looking for in his comeback project. Lynch was back on top.
Budget: $15,000,000
Total US Gross: $3,796,699
Genre: Film Noir
Runtime: 135 Minutes
US Release Date: 2/21/97
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Awards: none
Tagline: Who Shot What? Who Killed Whom? What Time Is It?
Quote: “I like to remember things my own way, not necessarily the way they happened.”
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