The late David Lynch wrote a “masterful script” called One Saliva Bubble that Steve Martin nearly starred in during the early 1980s, Martin once relayed in an interview.

“1989,” corrected Martin Short.

“Were you offered that?” Martin asked.

Short sighed. “We were going to do it together.”

“Oh really?” said Martin, living his own Lynchian dream sequence. “I don’t remember that.”

Lynch and his Twin Peaks collaborator Mark Frost wrote One Saliva Bubble, an absurdist body-swap comedy that would have been the weirdest thing Short or Martin had ever done. Like many Lynch films, it would have been set in Small Town America. The plot: Chaos ensues when a tiny saliva bubble escapes a security guard’s mouth and floats into a secret government weapons system, setting off a chain reaction that causes the town’s residents to switch identities with one another.

In other words, Lynch told David Breskin,...