Just to clarify what I wrote before, Blue Velvet is my number one film of all-time and The Elephant Man is in my top twenty; although that was
then, and this is
now.
As some may know, Mulholland Drive was originally in production at ABC as a TV series starring the then-unknown Naomi Watts (King Kong). When the network finally passed on the project, it soured Lynch quite a bit on the whole business of TV & Film if one does not have their own company.
From there, he started making digital shorts at his L.A. home with a Sony PD150 and posting those at
www.DavidLynch.com. Those experiments have led down the road to Inland Empire.