David Lynch first came up with the idea for the story [of Mulholland Dr.] in the early 1990s, when his television show "Twin Peaks" (1990) was still on the air. Would the show have continued for a third season, Lynch would have entered into talks with ABC to spin-off the character of Audrey Horne, who would have survived her being trapped inside an exploding building in the Season 2 cliffhanger. The character(s) that Naomi Watts plays was originally intended to be Audrey; David Lynch has never revealed if Audrey would have had the same fate as Naomi Watts' character(s) in the film.

This is what was reported on IMDB. I don't know if it's something true or not, but it surely rises curiosity and leads me to think what would the story of Mulholland Dr. have sounded like on a seriality basis and having at its roots the great and complex background story that Twin Peaks is.

"Did they scoff the whole damn Smörgåsbord?" (Audrey) 

"Gimme a donut!" (Coop)

From Lynch on Lynch (reprinted in the R2 booklet): "And what is so remarkable about the film is precisely how certain elements that were meant to settle in over a season or tow on television are made to give a plausible account of themselves from scratch in a two-hour movie. It's a striking example of emergent evolution at work, as if Lynch had been forced to jump directly from the TV pilot episode of Twin Peaks to the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me- without the benefit of all the intricate plot and character development in between. "

I can see Betty as Audrey the Detective from Season 1. And, using the MD as FWWM anaology, I could see the displaced character, who was relatively safe and streetwise in the town of Twin Peaks, becoming easy prey for BOB v2.0 (the Winkie's bum) in a city with even more seductive, dangerous facades. Yet I often wonder if the lesbian romance would have figured into the series. Sure, Laura had lesbian tendencies (an aspect of her dark side), but it really seems like Adam Kesher would have been the love interest, had the series progressed.

I've never heard this before, and--call me jaded--I am really skeptical.  The Lynch on Lynch quote posted above does nothing to address the issue of the imdb claim's viability, but maybe that's obvious already.  Again, jaded.  I would be interested to see where this info comes from.  imdb, of course, is full of user created content like wiki, so anyone and their crazy grammaw can post anything there.  Were there any references to back it up?

If it's helpful to anyone's ruminations over the Rita/Betty romance... I have read that Lynch thought up the lesbian angle only after he was approached by the French film company to turn the already-shot MD pilot into a full film.  In case that's helpful.  Who's to say, though, that it wouldn't have later occurred to him had the series been picked up?  Certainly not me!

And in other news... I really don't agree with the BOB/Winkie's Bum comparison above.  Not at all.

I was neither confirming nor denying the truth of the imdb thing, just commenting on the possibility.

But since you're asking for journalistic evidence, here ya go:

A quote from Lynch in The Complete Lynch says:

"Mulholland Drive began as a collaboration between Lynch and Joyce Eliason, the celebrated television write of such lavish productions as The Last Don and its sequel. 'We started working together,' Lynch says. 'It was a kind of thing where we were gonna see how it was gonna work, and there were a lot of other people pushing it to work, and it didn't work,' he reveals. 'It started when it was gonna be kind of a spin-off of Twin Peaks, in the very beginning, but didn't go anywhere. Just the words 'Mulholland Drive' always got something going, but I never knew what.'" -pp.237

Wikipedia cites Dennis Hensley's "Fenn and Now" interview with the actress in Movieline as the source of the Fenn quote about her refusing to do a spin-off (1997).

In the same MD booklet I quoted above, Lynch said that during Twin Peaks, "Mulholland Dr." was just a title with no story attached, not mentioning Fenn.

Can we safely deduce this was the same spin-off? Guess you'd have to sit down with someone who was there.

Killing the two characters that are, possibly, the most beloved makes sense to me in that wonderful chaos of episode... I know, it's left ambiguous, but I've always preferred the death scenario. It's up to the viewer to decide their fate... I'm glad they didn't show their corpses of that they did survive and certainly I'm glad MD is not about Audrey...

"Did they scoff the whole damn Smörgåsbord?" (Audrey) 

"Gimme a donut!" (Coop)

I bet professional writers have an informal term they use to refer to putting a character into limbo for non-diegetic purposes (possibly named after an early textbook case of this happening).  I'm dying to know if this is the case, and what they call it...