Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive is a street and road in the eastern Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California. It is named after pioneering Los Angeles civil engineer William Mulholland. The western rural portion in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties is named Mulholland Highway. The road is featured in innumerable movies, songs, and novels. David Lynch, whose film Mulholland Drive is suffused with the atmosphere of the road, once said that one can feel "the history of Hollywood" on it.

History

The main portion of the road, from Cahuenga Pass in Hollywood westward past Sepulveda Pass, was originally called Mulholland Highway and was opened in 1924. It was built by a consortium of developers investing in the Hollywood Hills. DeWitt Reaburn, the construction engineer responsible for the project, said while it was being built, "The Mulholland Highway is destined to be one of the heaviest traveled and one of the best known scenic roads in the United States."

Geography

The 21-mile long mostly two-lane, minor arterial road loosely follows the ridgeline of the eastern Santa Monica Mountains and the Hollywood Hills, connecting two sections of U.S. Route 101, and crossing Sepulveda Boulevard, Beverly Glen Boulevard, Coldwater Canyon, Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Nichols Canyon Road, and Outpost Drive.

Mulholland Drive (film)

Mulholland Drive (stylized onscreen as Mulholland Dr.) is a 2001 American neo-noir mystery film written and directed by David Lynch and starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and Justin Theroux. It tells the story of an aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Watts), newly arrived in Los Angeles, California, who meets and befriends an amnesic woman (Harring) hiding in an apartment that belongs to Elms's aunt. The story includes several other seemingly unrelated vignettes that eventually connect in various ways, as well as some surreal and darkly comic scenes and images that relate to the cryptic narrative.

Originally conceived as a television pilot, a large portion of the film was shot in 1999 with Lynch's plan to keep it open-ended for a potential series. After viewing Lynch's version, however, television executives decided to reject it. Lynch then provided an ending to the project, making it a feature film. The half-pilot, half-feature result, along with Lynch's characteristic style, has left the general meaning of the movie's events open to interpretation. Lynch has declined to offer an explanation of his intentions for the narrative, leaving audiences, critics, and cast members to speculate on what transpires. He gave the film the tagline "A love story in the city of dreams".