‘The Traveler’: David Bowie’s mysterious and failed movie starring Flo & Eddie
In the mid-1970s, David Bowie was working on a script that he wanted to turn into a film. The movie, conceived as a comedy, would star Bowie and the duo known as Flo & Eddie, otherwise known as Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of the fabulous Turtles. Volman and Kaylan are funny dudes, and Bowie felt they were the guys to help make his film a cinematic success.
In late March 1976, Bowie flew Volman and Kaylan to New York City to meet and discuss his script notes, which were several hundred pages long.
The Traveler was Bowie’s most surreal never-made movie—equal parts Cabaret, Kafka, and cruise ship delirium. Unlike The Man Who Fell to Earth or Just a Gigolo, this wasn’t just another eccentric art film for Bowie to float through. The Traveler was him. It was a cracked mirror reflection of the Thin White Duke persona, filtered through a kind of intercontinental existential prank. Think: David Bowie as his own shadow, drifting in and out of identities on ocean liners, charming heiresses and swindling diplomats, never quite real and never quite fictional either. He wasn’t writing a movie. He was trying to trap a myth in a script.
In his autobiography, Shell Shocked, Howard Kaylan wrote about the Bowie project. “Bowie flew Mark and me into New York at the end of the month to meet about his screenplay,” he explained. “It was a first-class journey that wound up at his Madison Square Garden concert, backstage. Then we went to the Village for more of the same. Limos took us everywhere, although we got to see David for all of about ten minutes. Still, I don’t think there were any complaints about the trip. Whatever Bowie wanted”.
Of course, Kaylan and Volman weren’t just random comedic sidekicks—Bowie saw them as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to his unhinged Hamlet. The plan, loosely sketched, was that The Traveler would follow the Duke and these two washed-up rockers as they pinballed from one bizarre incident to the next.
“There was a screening of The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring Bowie, at a theater in Westwood,” Kaylan continued to explain. “David had sent us our invitations in a large cardboard box. What the hell? Ah, also enclosed were two copies, some 750 pages each, of David’s screenplay notes for a feature film to be called The Traveler. The film was to deal with the very real alter ego that Bowie had created for himself, that of the Thin White Duke. Eschewing air travel, David would only travel to and from American via ocean liner where, once aboard, he would assume a disposable two-week identity where his lines between fact and fiction blurred and he regaled the other passengers with amazing tales of his conquests and heroics”.
That mountain of script notes, though, wasn’t really a script. It was more like a psychic dump—750 pages of dream logic, blackout poetry, and sketchy dialogue that felt equal parts espionage thriller and glam cabaret. Bowie was using the Duke as a psychic avatar, a mask he could hide behind while exposing things that no interview would ever touch. It wasn’t clear if The Traveler was supposed to be funny, tragic, or completely unnerving. Probably all three. “Outline” was generous. “Stream-of-consciousness confessional with footnotes” would’ve been more accurate.
Kaylan added, “There was a lot to take and it offered a great many opportunities for fantasy and wordplay. I was excited. It took many hours to read this ‘outline’, as David called it”.
The second meeting at the Mayfair Hotel didn’t provide much more clarity. Bowie, pale and floating somewhere between jazz vampire and ghost of Noël Coward, talked at length about symbolism and archetypes, then abruptly shifted into stories about oceanic reincarnation and past lives on cruise ships. Volman and Kaylan did their best to keep up with him. They still thought the movie could be brilliant—if it ever materialised. The three spent the next couple of days hanging out, culminating in Volman and Kaylan interviewing Bowie for the Canadian TV program 90 Minutes Live. But after the interview, Bowie vanished into the ether like he always did. No calls. No script revisions. Just radio silence and that lingering, maddening feeling that you’d almost glimpsed something brilliant… almost.
The duo never heard another word about The Traveler.
A portion of the 90 Minutes Live interview is embedded below. The segment aired stateside on The Midnight Special in April 1978.