David Lynch Almost Made a Body-Swap Comedy With Steve Martin and Martin Short
The late David Lynch wrote a “masterful script” called One Saliva Bubble that Steve Martin nearly starred in during the early 1980s, Martin once relayed in an interview.
“1989,” corrected Martin Short.
“Were you offered that?” Martin asked.
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Short sighed. “We were going to do it together.”
“Oh really?” said Martin, living his own Lynchian dream sequence. “I don’t remember that.”
Lynch and his Twin Peaks collaborator Mark Frost wrote One Saliva Bubble, an absurdist body-swap comedy that would have been the weirdest thing Short or Martin had ever done. Like many Lynch films, it would have been set in Small Town America. The plot: Chaos ensues when a tiny saliva bubble escapes a security guard’s mouth and floats into a secret government weapons system, setting off a chain reaction that causes the town’s residents to switch identities with one another.
In other words, Lynch told David Breskin, “All kind of wacko hell breaks loose. An out-and-out wacko dumb comedy. Clichés one end to the other. Mark and I were laughing like crazy when we wrote it.”
The screenplay is even weirder than Lynch makes it sound — here, read it for yourself.
What stopped the world from getting a chance to see it? Lynch blamed producer Dino De Laurentiis, whose production company went belly up before filming could begin. “We had all our scouts, had it cast, was right there ready to go. Dino kept delaying it, delaying it, delaying it. It became obvious it wasn’t going to happen: There wasn’t any money. Shortly thereafter his company went bankrupt. We saw the writing on the wall.”
But Lynch also pointed the finger at himself. “Every time I get ready to commit to it, I think the problem for me is that there’s not enough meat to it,” he said. “I feel like a lot of people could do it.”
Besides the bizarro script, there’s a good reason Short remembers the unmade comedy. In 1989, he and his wife bought a just-out-of-their-reach home in the Pacific Palisades, made possible by the income he was set to make for his next two films. “You can guess what happened next,” Short wrote in his memoir, I Must Say. “Practically the second that Nancy and I signed the mortgage, one of the two movies, a David Lynch film with Steve Martin entitled One Saliva Bubble, fell through. I was in a panic.” (Don’t worry, Short landed other jobs.)
While the world never got to see One Saliva Bubble, a few of its plot lines and jokes got recycled in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Kyle Maclachlan’s dimwitted Dougie, that ludicrous doppelganger of Agent Dale Cooper? That storyline was lifted and recycled from One Saliva Bubble’s body-switch narrative.
That taste of One Saliva Bubble didn’t stop Lynch fans from wondering about what could have been. What would a straight-up movie comedy from Lynch, Short and Martin have looked like? “It was a great script,” Martin sighed. “I still dig it out every once in a while and read it again.”
