Mulholland Drive stylized as Mulholland Dr. Its plot follows an aspiring actress Naomi Watts who arrives in Los Angeles , where she befriends a woman Laura Harring who is suffering from amnesia after a car accident. The film follows several other vignettes and characters, including a Hollywood director Justin Theroux who encounters mob interference while casting for his latest film.
Lynch's tagline for the film is "a love story in the city of dreams". The film was originally conceived as a television pilot for ABC , with footage shot and edited in as an open-ended mystery. After viewing Lynch's cut, however, television executives cancelled the proposed TV series. Lynch then secured funding from French production company StudioCanal to make the material into a feature film, writing an ending to the project and filming new material.
The resulting surrealist narrative has left the film's events open to interpretation. Lynch declined to offer an explanation, leaving audiences, critics, and even the film's own cast to speculate on its meaning. He was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for the film. The film boosted Watts' Hollywood profile considerably, and was the last feature film to star veteran Hollywood actress Ann Miller. Mulholland Drive is often regarded as Lynch's magnum opus and as one of the greatest films of all time.
It earned the No. A woman is about to be shot by her chauffeur, but is saved when a car crashes into them at night on Mulholland Drive. The woman is the sole survivor. Dazed, she hides in a vacant apartment. The next morning, Betty Elms, an aspiring actress from Deep River, Ontario , arrives at the apartment, which her aunt has lent her. She finds the woman, who has amnesia but remembers she is in danger.
For convenience, the woman adopts the name "Rita" from a Gilda poster featuring Rita Hayworth. Betty and Rita discover a large quantity of cash and a blue key in Rita's purse. At Winkie's diner on Sunset Boulevard , a man tells his friend about a recurring nightmare in which a horrific figure waits for him in the alley behind the diner.
