The best Katharine Towne’s thriller movies

Blonde Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman's identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project.

Grocery store clerk Simon occasionally sells drugs from his cash register at work, so when soap opera actors Adam and Zack come looking for Ecstasy on a quiet Christmas Eve, they are surprised to find Ronna covering his shift. Desperate for money, Ronna decides to become an impromptu drug dealer, unaware that Adam and Zack are secretly working for obsessed narcotics officer Burke.

When Claire Spencer starts hearing ghostly voices and seeing spooky images, she wonders if an otherworldly spirit is trying to contact her. All the while, her husband tries to reassure her by telling her it's all in her head. But as Claire investigates, she discovers that the man she loves might know more than he's letting on.

Initially, "Mulholland Dr." was to mark David Lynch's return to television. It is a retooling of a script originally shot as a 94-minute pilot for a TV series (co-written with TV screenwriter Joyce Eliason) for the channel ABC, which had approved the script, but chose not even to air the pilot once it was done in 1999, despite Lynch's labours to cut the project to their liking. It was left in limbo until 18 month later French company Studio Canal Plus (also producer of 'The Straight Story') agreed to pay ABC $7 million for the pilot, and budget a few million more to turn the pilot into a two-hour, 27-minute movie. The cost of the film doubled to $14 million as sets had to be reconstructed and actors recalled.

A mentally disturbed young woman takes a job at a posh country club and falls in with a clique of wealthy college kids where she's taken under the wing of the clique's twisted leader, who harbors some dark secrets too terrifying to tell.