David Bowie based the plot of 2015 musical Lazarus on Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, which Bowie himself starred in. Both projects remain as bizarre and high concept as anything Bowie produced in his lifetime.
However, a recently released GQ article from novelist Michael Cunningham reveals Bowie’s Lazarus could have taken an even more idiosyncratic turn. Cunningham said he and Bowie collaborated for a year on a musical involving aliens, poet Emma Lazarus, a mariachi band and a “stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died”. Bowie himself would have written and produced the fake Dylan songs.
The duo’s basic plot centered on a humanoid alien who falls in love with an Earth woman.
“They reach a point of intimacy at which he feels he must show her his true form, which is quite different from the mildly handsome guy in his 30s she thinks she’s been dating,” Cunningham wrote of the story. “Let’s just say that the sight of her new lover’s actual appearance is … challenging for the young woman.”
Cunningham’s worked intermittently with Bowie a decade prior to the legend’s death. After Bowie suffered a heart attack in 2004, work on the collaborative musical ceased permanently. The duo had scripted roughly half of the first draft, but had yet to fully incorporate all of Bowie’s disparate themes.
“I managed, in rough form, the first third of the book of a musical that did, indeed, involve an alien, Emma Lazarus, and a mariachi band,” Cunningham wrote. “I hadn’t yet figured out a way to work the undiscovered Dylan songs into the plot.”
Cunningham, a faithful Bowie fan since college, provided intimate details of his time with Bowie. Notably, he highlighted the humorously mundane aspects of Bowie’s character, in particular his love for office supply chain Staples.
“How starstruck, after all, can anybody feel after the object of one’s veneration says, early on, without a trace of irony, that he was excited to start a new project because: ‘Now I get to do one of my favorite things: Go to a stationery store and get Sharpies and Post-its!'” Cunningham wrote.
Cunningham physically met with Bowie only “once or twice” following Bowie’s surgery, and corresponded infrequently via email. The novelist watched Lazarus on opening night, and said the only similarity the finished product had to the original was that it was “that it centered on an alien.
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