by David Lynch
Robie points out, “Before Twin Peaks you didn’t see work that was multi-layered on television. It would be a comedy or drama or a thriller, but it would never be all those things at once. You could see the humor in Twin Peaks right away, but David would also show you the pain and fear and sexuality without losing what was funny. I used to arrive on set thinking I knew the material pretty well, but David always saw so much more.”
Brandon Stoddard, who’d ordered the pilot for ABC, left the network in March of 1989, a month after the Twin Peaks shoot began, and it fell to programming executive Robert Iger to shepherd the show onto the air. “We knew it was something special when we were shooting the pilot,” said Ray Wise, “and I remember going to the first screening at the Directors Guild and thinking, Wow, this is amazing. How all the people who watch ABC were going to take it, though, I had no idea.”
Iger liked the pilot, but he had a tough time persuading the ABC brass to air it, and a final showdown occurred during a bicoastal conference call between Iger and a room full of New York executives. Iger won, and in May of 1989 ABC finally picked up the series as a mid-season show and ordered seven more episodes. Budgeted at 1.1 million dollars each, the shows were all written and completed months before the pilot aired.
“David and I wrote the first two episodes of the first season together, then I started developing a writing staff that included Harley Peyton and Robert Engels,” said Frost. “When other writers came in they were given ground rules and detailed story lines, and we’d talk about what the content and tone of the scenes would be. We’d record those sessions and give the tape to the writers so they could refer to it as they worked.”
Lynch’s participation was limited because the month after ABC picked up the show, he headed to New Orleans to shoot his fifth film, Wild at Heart. Lynch is good at keeping several balls in the air, and shortly after Wild at Heart wrapped in the fall of 1989 he went to New York to work on the film’s score with Badalamenti.
Apparently Lynch figured that as long as he was in New York he might as well stage a theater piece, and on November 10th he presented Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A collaboration with Badalamenti produced on extraordinarily short notice, Industrial Symphony was a masterpiece of cross promotion, and the forty-five-minute program included an array of disparate elements: There was a film clip of Wild at Heart stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern portraying a couple breaking up on the phone, and actor Michael J. Anderson played a character called the Woodsman, who patiently sawed a log of wood onstage. Julee Cruise performed four songs from her 1989 debut album, Floating into the Night, which had been released two months earlier and was produced by Lynch and Badalamenti, who wrote all the songs for it.
John Wentworth produced the BAM show and remembers it as “an amazing experience. I was recording sound effects for Wild at Heart while I was working on Twin Peaks, and then all of a sudden we were doing Industrial Symphony, too—BAM offered him a slot on their schedule and David said okay. He didn’t even know what we were going to do when we arrived there, but he turned his vision on and we pulled that whole thing together in two weeks. It turned into a gigantic production, too. There were Vegas showgirls, people on stilts, midgets, lawnmowers—it was crazy. All of David’s projects are wonderful, but that one was really special because it was this idiosyncratic gestalt thing, and it was a blast.”
The featured performer in the piece, Julee Cruise, said, “I really can’t tell you what Industrial Symphony was about. I was in a harness floating around in prom dresses and this awful Afro wig, and David was calling it live on set off the top of his head, sweating bullets. We did a quick run-through and then we did two performances of the piece. It was chaotic but really fun.” (A DVD of the show was subsequently released by Propaganda, which co-produced it.)
Lynch’s entrée into the music business with Cruise’s album Floating into the Night was engineered by CAA music agent Brian Loucks, who contacted him while Blue Velvet was in production, hoping to assist with music for the film. “David said, ‘I’ve got my guy Angelo,’ ” said Loucks, who continued to check in with him periodically.19 Then, in 1987, Lynch told him he was interested in making a record with Julee Cruise, and Loucks helped get him signed to Warner Bros. Records.
Lynch was producing work at a dizzying pace during this period, and a few days prior to the performance at BAM, the music video he’d directed for Chris Isaak’s song “Wicked Game,” which is featured in Wild at Heart, was released. Before the year was out he’d directed four commercials for a Calvin Klein fragrance and had an art exhibition at the N. No. N. Gallery in Dallas.
Meanwhile, the Twin Peaks pilot had become bogged down in a quagmire of network programming indecisiveness, and an entire year passed between its completion and its premiere at 9:00 P.M. on April 8th, 1990. By the time the show finally aired, the audience for it was already in place. “There were advance screenings and some writers who saw it flipped for it, so there was a drumbeat for the show before it aired,” recalled Frost. “By the time it went on the air there was real anticipation, and it debuted to gigantic numbers.
“The whole thing moved really fast,” Frost continued. “Twin Peaks was like riding a bull in the eye of a hurricane, and it was enormously destabilizing for everybody involved. Being under that much scrutiny is a ridiculous thing to go through, and it wasn’t just in the States—it was global. It became a real distraction in the second year, when we were trying to make the show at the same time that it had this other life as a cultural phenomenon, and those forces were often at odds with each other.”
Broadcast internationally, the show was hugely successful, and in October of 1990 Lynch appeared on the cover of Time magazine; the accompanying article hailed him as “the Czar of Bizarre.” The cottage industry of Twin Peaks merchandise was no small thing, either. There were bow ties, action figures, dioramas, a coffee-scented T-shirt, throw pillows, key chains, coffee mugs, posters, greeting cards, tote bags, and jewelry, among other things. Jennifer Lynch wrote The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, which was published on September 15th, following the first season and prior to the second. In a matter of weeks it made it to number four on The New York Times paperback-fiction bestseller list. John Thorne and Craig Miller launched Wrapped in Plastic, a fanzine for Twin Peaks fanatics that ran for thirteen years.
ABC seemed determined to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, though. From the start, the engine of the show was the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” This mystery was central to the narrative tension that fueled every episode, but midway through the second season the network insisted that the identity of the killer be revealed. Things went downhill from there. “We fought to keep the mystery alive, but we got a lot of pushback from the network,” Frost recalled. “ABC had been bought by Capital Cities, which was as conservative a media outlet as there was anywhere in the country. I think the show made them intensely uncomfortable, and that’s part of the reason they moved it to Saturday night for the second season. That was a horrible move, given what the show had done for them in its original slot.”
Lynch returned to write and direct the first and last episodes of the second season and also directed two additional episodes, but the bloom was off the rose by then. “Some of the air went out of the tires after the identity of the killer was revealed,” said Frost. “Then television was kind of hijacked by the Gulf War, and we were preempted by the war for six out of eight weeks. People couldn’t keep up with what was a complex piece of storytelling when they could only see the show sporadically.”
Moving the show to an inferior time slot where it aired irregularly didn’t help things, but the show had other problems. “There were certainly some weaknesses in the storytelling in the second season,” Frost admitted. “David was off doing Wild at Heart, and I’d signed up to direct a movie called Storyville, so we were stretched too thin, plus we’d
stupidly listened to our agents and sold another show to Fox, called American Chronicles. There weren’t enough hours in the day to do all these things the right way.”
The cast of the show was acutely aware of the fact that the series was disintegrating during the second season. “When David left I felt like he abandoned the show,” Kimmy Robertson said. “This isn’t on the people who worked on the second season—they did what they were supposed to do, and I honestly don’t know whose fault it is. All I know is that I didn’t like the constant bringing in of new women and abandoning the original story lines. People would come in and put a kaleidoscope on the camera and say, ‘Oh, look how Lynchian.’ Nobody liked where the show was going.
“I remember sitting in the dressing room, waiting to do another scene where Lucy’s angry at Harry—she was angry at him endlessly,” Robertson continued. “They wrote her that way because she was no longer seen as a valuable part of the show. David and Mark valued Lucy, and there was no way the show could work unless they were there together.
“David’s got a connection to God, the universe, and the creative highway, and there are all these on-ramps and off-ramps in his head leading to files and rooms and libraries, and he can go to all of them at once,” Robertson added. “Mark is the librarian. He’s up there checking things in and out and saying, ‘No, you can’t take those all out at once, but we can do it in a certain sequence.’ It had to be the two of them together for the show to work, and they weren’t there as a team for the second season.”
On June 10th, 1991, a week after the fifteenth episode of season two placed eighty-fifth out of eighty-nine shows in the ratings, ABC put the show on indefinite hiatus. “The network treated the show very badly and the audience had fallen off, but David did a brilliant job of rewriting and redefining the last episode, which brought the Red Room into play,” said Frost. “He did something extraordinary in the last episode, and that gave them pause about saying no to a third season, which they ultimately did. But by that point I think David and I felt like we’d had our run and done our thing, and it was on to the next thing.”
Reflecting on the demise of the show, Krantz said, “I don’t know if David thought through what would happen to the show when he left to do Wild at Heart. He knew enough about the way television works to know that the show had to go forward, and although they needed his magic dust, they couldn’t stop production if it came late, because they had to move on.”
There was no shortage of talent involved with the second season of Twin Peaks, but there was no denying that friction had developed between Lynch and Frost. “The tension was partly attributable to the frustration Mark felt about the fact that the show was seen as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks,” said Krantz. “They created the show together, and what Mark brought was an approach to storytelling that allowed David’s art to exist on television, and that was a critical piece. One doesn’t exist without the other, and they were a perfect unit. But Mark felt that David was getting all the credit, and his ego got in the middle of it.
“Mark got the recognition he wanted with the second season, when he was sort of in charge and had an opportunity to finally make Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks,” Krantz continued. “He and Harley Peyton created new stories for the second season that introduced new characters rather than focusing on the core series regulars. David wasn’t happy with the scripts, though, and there were story lines he hadn’t pre-approved. It was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute, you’re misperceiving the dream that made the first season of Twin Peaks so great. You’re mimicking and making faux versions of them.’
“Then the network forced him to reveal who killed Laura Palmer, and he was right to resist that,” Krantz added. “It was clearly a mistake on ABC’s part, but there were other reasons the second season didn’t succeed. There has to be some creative responsibility, and David and Mark’s creative relationship had been destroyed. There was a restaurant called Muse that David, Mark, and I used to go to, and one day I was there with them and I said, ‘You guys just got seventeen Emmy nominations.’ Then I literally took their hands and brought them together and said, ‘You need to hold hands and be a team.’ ”
The relationship between Lynch and Frost wasn’t over, but they needed a break from each other, and Lynch shifted his attention to other things. “We did several commercials together and a public-service announcement about rats for the city of New York,” said Montgomery. “I think David had fun doing them—David loves shooting anything, and if you put him in a room with some materials, he’s ingenious enough to come up with something. David can adapt to whatever the limitations might be, and lots of people can’t do that.”
Meanwhile, as Twin Peaks was limping to the finish line, Wild at Heart came, conquered, and went. Lynch’s love for the world he’d created with Frost was undiminished, however, and the mark he left on the actors in Twin Peaks is immutable.
“With David it’s always soulful,” said Ontkean, “and it’s always some form of homemade circus transformed into an offbeat pagan ritual. Blue Velvet confirmed that David is some kind of ancient alchemist and out of thin air he creates a palpable, enduring atmosphere. You don’t see the strings or the wires or the rabbit unless David wants you to.”
Sheryl Lee said, “I used to joke that it was as if he was hypnotizing me, because David has a way of taking you in a direction that may not seem logical at first, but he breaks down your resistance and you wind up in a wonderful world of play where you’re not overthinking things. You know when you step on set with David that you’re going to do something you’ve never done before, and that’s thrilling.”
The actors in Twin Peaks are indebted to Lynch in terms of their careers, but he affected them on a personal level, too. “David cares deeply for people and knows about the lives of the people he works with, and that’s what touches me the most about him,” concluded Mädchen Amick. “I feel so lucky that I was touched by this beautiful star shooting through our galaxy, and I cherish our relationship. He set me on a path and taught me to keep my standards high, but nothing’s measured up to the experience I had with David.”
OFFERS FOR WORK weren’t pouring in after Blue Velvet. I did turn down one thing called Tender Mercies, which starred Robert Duvall and turned out to be a great film, but I didn’t think it was right for me. Rick wasn’t encouraging me to do anything in particular—he was always really good that way.
I started living a bicoastal life after Blue Velvet, and I didn’t like that. I liked being in New York with Isabella and I loved being in Europe when I went there, but I’m way more of a homebody. When you’re moving around all the time you don’t get any work done. Still, some really cool things happened during that time. One time I was in Italy with Isabella when she was doing a movie with some Russian director, and Silvana Mangano was in the film, too, and I knew her really well. They were shooting south of Rome in the most magical places. The ground there seems to rise up into these plateaus where there are these dreamy, minimal Italian mansions with staircases going up to beautiful terraces—they’re incredible.
One night Silvana invited Isabella and me to dinner and we went to this outdoor restaurant with twinkling lights. It was mushroom season, so the entire meal was mushrooms—the mushroom for the main course was huge and thick as a steak, and there were all these mushroom courses that all tasted different. There’s Silvana, me, Isabella, and also at dinner was Marcello Mastroianni. I have to admit I was a little starstruck. He and Silvana went way back and were good friends, and he’s the nicest guy and he’s telling stories—it was just the greatest thing. Somewhere in there I told him that Fellini and I were born on the same day and that I was a giant fan of Fellini. My favorite Fellini film is 8½, but I love La Strada, too, and there’s great stuff in all of them. The next morning I walk out of the hotel and there’s a Mercedes and a driver who tells me, “I’m taking you to Cinecittà. Marcello has arranged for you to spend the day with Fellini.” So we driv
e into Rome, where Fellini is shooting Intervista, and he welcomes me and I get to sit with him while he works and we became kind of pals.
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Way later, like years later, I was at Isabella’s place on Long Island—Bellport, I think it’s called—and one night we went out with friends of hers for a ride on their boat. They had a runabout, kind of like a wooden jeep that I loved, and I asked them where they got it and they said, “We got it from Steen Melby.” So I went and met Steen Melby, great guy, boat restorer, and knowledgeable like crazy. He said, “I’ve got a boat for you—it’s called the Little Indian,” and I see this thing and it was way beautiful, and I had to have it and I got it. It was a 1942 Fitzgerald & Lee runabout designed by John Hacker, and they used boats like that for taxis in the Thousand Islands lake region of New York.
One day Isabella said, “We’re going crab fishing,” and the plan was for her to go with her friends on their boat that could pick her up right near her house. I was going to go in the Little Indian and meet them at this place to fish. They gave me directions how to get there and this was a magical afternoon, just beautiful, and I’m excited. So I get into the Little Indian and go up the river, then I pass through this kind of St. Louis arch. By then you’re out quite a ways and you start seeing buoys. They told me, “Go out that line of buoys, then the buoys will end and you turn right. Go along another line of buoys, then turn left and you’ll see us.”
So I get there in, say, a half hour and we go crab fishing. They have these metal cages they drop in the water and the crabs grab on to them and you bring them up. It’s, like, what is this all about? I guess there’s some people like that, people who just hang on when they shouldn’t.
