Items from David Lynch’s personal estate and archive sold for a total of over $4.5 million at a white-glove auction hosted Wednesday by Julien’s Auctions and Turner Classic Movies. The famed filmmaker died in January at the age of 78.
Standout lots in the auctioned collection included Lynch’s director’s chair, which sold for $70,000, a 35-millimiter print of his 1977 surrealist classic Eraserhead that went for $40,000, and a personal copy of the script to the Oscar-nominated Mulholland Drive which sold for $98,000.
Lynch was know to drink over 20 cups of coffee a day at one point, and his personal La Marzocco GS/3 Home Espresso Machine sold for $35,000.
The prize of the night, however, was a set of screenplays related to Lynch’s most infamous unfinished film: Ronnie Rocket: The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence. The project, originally begun by Lynch in the late 1970s, is the mythical lost film of Lynch’s lifetime. Described by Lynch as a movie “about electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair,” the director repeatedly came back to the screenplay and script, writing and rewriting Ronnie Rocket but never finding adequate financial backing to fully develop the project.
In 2013, Lynch told writer David Breskin that Ronnie Rocket was not a dead project. “No, no, no, no, never, not in a million years,” Lynch emphasized. “I’m waiting for the next step to happen to do it, if there is a next step. I’m waiting for a time where I don’t really care what happens, except that the film is finished […] It might be a picture that I would love, but I don’t know if too many other people are going to dig it. It’s very abstract.”
“Ronnie scripts have gone through all sorts of permutations over the years,” An Kroeber, the wife of Eraserhead and Elephant Man sound designer Alan Splet, said of the project. “I suspect that Ronnie Rocket is David’s most thought-about story and may just never be made not because the production company didn’t want to shoot it, they and several others were willing, but David wasn’t.”
The collection of manuscripts sold for a stunning $150,000.
“Every object in this collection served as a window into Lynch’s surreal and uncompromising creative world — whether from his groundbreaking films, television work, or personal studio,” Catherine Williamson, Managing Director of Entertainment at Julien’s Auctions, said in a statement. “The global response to the auction speaks not only to the cultural importance of his legacy, but to the profound admiration and reverence he inspires among fans, collaborators, and collectors alike.”
