I knew Fred Ward a bit from a movie that Jeanne had produced and John Binder had directed a few years prior called UFOoria, which starred Fred and Cindy Williams (who had been Shirley of Lavern and Shirley). They shot it primarily up in the Lancaster area and I’d just driven up to hang out with Jeanne and John for a few days.
The first night, I went with Jeanne to see the dailies — the footage that had been shot that day. The screening room was pretty basic, just a screen and six or eight chairs in a couple of rows. Up on the screen we’re watching this scene and that scene. Then I see footage of this totally hot guy walk into a room, rugged and fit, and I blurted, “Whoa — who is that?”
From behind me in the darkness I heard a slow chuckle. When I turned around, there sat Fred. The guy I’d just seen on the screen. So, that was our introduction.
As in Tremors, Fred is cast in a lot of good old boy or rough-and-tough roles because of his looks but in fact the guy is an intellectual — we’re talking Ph.D. smart. There’s often such a funny disconnect between the actor and the part and Fred is a prime example.
I also enjoyed working with Kevin Bacon, who is talented, has a strong work ethic, and gets the job done — a real pro. His wife, Kyra Sedgwick, who I found down-to-earth and engaging, was only on set a few times as she was pretty far along in her pregnancy. When we’d wrapped filming, we had a party and she was out on the dance floor nine months pregnant putting on some pretty flashy moves. After their baby was born, when I got home I sent a gift and a note of congratulations. About a week later the phone rang and the caller said, “Hi, it’s Kevin.”
I said, “Who?”
“Kevin.”
“Kevin who?”
“Kevin Bacon.”
It never occurred to me that he’d call, which I thought was awfully nice given everything else he had going on. But like anyone with good social skills he had picked up the phone to say thank you for the gift. He and Kyra are into each other and into their family, both have had long careers in film and television and yet you never see then popping up on the cover of a supermarket tabloid looking trashed or sick and bloated or sneaking out on each other. I have a lot of admiration for actors like that whose careers and reputations are based on their work rather than going for the easy, trashy, look-at-me, sex-tape kind of PR options that are out there.
Michael Gross, who’d made a name for himself as Michael J. Fox’s television father on the show Family Ties, by contrast, was such a pain on that shoot. In Tremors, he played the gun-nut survivalist, married to country singer Reba McEntire, in her first film role. Michael was an actor who questions everything, everything, everything, wanting to shoot and re-shoot again and again. I saw Reba after a day of filming the scene in which the Graboids bust into her and Michael’s basement weapons lair. She was exhausted after spending the day with Michael and his fussiness.
But here’s the problem with being irked at Michael — he was great in the film. When I saw the final version I just groaned inwardly because he’d been right. He’d added subtle touches, found moments, and pushed the script in ways that make his character and those scenes absolutely shine.
The lesson here is that there are times that being a pain is what it takes. It’s not the way I work. Give me my lines, I’ll do that character. Done.
But there are times, such as this movie, when his way gets superb results.
He was the same way when I worked with him again on Tremors 3. This was a movie that we all knew was going straight to video and yet the Michael Gross work standard remained ridiculously high.
A couple of years ago I saw him at a Tremors reunion in L.A. and he was such a sweetheart. He was so fun, so genuine, and so happy to see me and the rest of the cast. I realized I’d never gotten to know him away from the set and had really missed out. I was glad to see him after all these years and hope to see him again one of these days.
Shooting in Lone Pine gave me a chance to decompress. It was remote and so quiet. At night — unlike in Los Angeles — you could see stars thick and full in the sky. They looked like heaps of white Christmas lights against the vast blackness of the universe. I’d brought with me the audio version of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and I would lie outside looking up, listening to one of the greatest minds of our time talk about its mysteries.
It’s funny, I was very much by myself but I wasn’t lonely or unhappy. For so many years I’d either been married, living with a guy, or sleeping with someone I found momentarily interesting — the shiny new penny. Here I was, in my late 40s, sober, without anyone in my life. And yet I’d lie out there in the desert and I did not feel alone. Instead I had the real sense that something or someone bigger than me was out there and had my best interest at heart.
I would need to hold on to those feelings in order to get me through the challenges ahead that would shake me to my core.
When I came home from Lone Pine, I went through the stack of mail awaiting and to my surprise found a card from Victor French. I’d stayed in touch with Victor after Little House, mostly through his girlfriend, who was my manicurist. She had two girls and the four of them made a great little family.
On the cover of the card was a photo of Victor with a lampshade on his head. I snorted. Typical Victor.
Once I opened it up, I had to read the card two or three times before I was able to process what I was reading.
It was an invitation to his funeral.
No one had known Victor had been dying of lung cancer. But in wild, loving Victor fashion he’d used his final days to plan out his farewell down to the last moment — food, band, guest list, and a surprise or two along the way.
The funeral was held in the open-air courtyard at the Gene Autry Museum in Griffith Park in Los Angeles and after a few people had spoken, Victor’s attorney got up and said, per Victor’s wishes, anyone who cried would be thrown out.
Mike Landon, who was a very emotional guy and had been Victor’s dear friend, was standing next to me and grabbed my hand at this and hung on for dear life. I’ve never seen a man fight tears so hard in my life.
“Now,” said the attorney, “There’s one final message from Victor for you all.” And he pointed skyward. We looked up and there above us a small plane pulled a banner that read, “Eat Shit, Love Victor.”
Mike held on tight and I squeezed right back, caught between laugher and a flood of tears that wanted to boil over.
It was the last time I’d ever see Mike. And I’m so grateful that if I had to say good-bye to him, had to have a final moment, that that was it — holding hands, looking up at that message from our friend, dear Victor, in the sky.
The two-hour Twin Peaks pilot aired on April 8, 1990, and I was always so thrilled that the whole odyssey starts with Jack as the mild, hen-pecked Pete Martell, a totally normal middle age guy, who just loves fishing, finding Laura Palmer’s body wrapped in plastic on the shores of the lake.
The pilot drew a massive audience ending up being the most-watched movie on television that year. To the total shock of ABC executives, it turned out there was a big young audience that didn’t want the same old, same old. They wanted something new and Twin Peaks gave it to them.
The overwhelming success of the pilot gave David a lot of money, confidence and free-reign (at last) from the network heads, who couldn’t begin to grasp what he was doing.
David had directed the pilot and first episode and then parceled out writing and directing duties to people he knew and trusted. This allowed him to divide his time with Twin Peaks and prepping and then shooting his next film Wild at Heart, which starred Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern.
David cast a few people from Twin Peaks in the film in small parts. I remember Sheryl Lee (who plays the dual role of Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson) was so excited to play a Glinda-the-Good-Witch type role while Sherilyn Fenn (Audry Horne) was cast in a haunting part as a traumatized accident victim.
For about five minutes David considered casting me in th
e role of Laura Dern’s Wild at Heart mother. I was at a dinner with David, Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, and Jack when at some point I realized they were all looking at me. I glanced back a little weirded-out, until I realized they that were talking about casting for the part of the mom. Apparently my name was in the hat and they were picturing me in the part. It would’ve been a great character to play since she was completely bonkers. But David went with Laura’s real life mother, Diane Ladd, who was flat-out terrific, and I think it was fun for audiences to see interaction of an actual mother and daughter on screen.
David cast Jack in a small but very memorable part, which I watched him film. The scene was shot outside a rundown hotel in the San Fernando Valley. An intense, surreal moment, straight out of the subconscious.
Jack got right up in Nick Cage’s face and with squinty, twitchy intensity ad-libbed the line: “Mentally you picture my dog, but I have not told you the type dog which I have. Perhaps you might even picture Toto from The Wizard of Oz. But I can tell you, my dog is always with me.”
He was perfectly sober. David loved it of course and it’s one of the more memorable moments in a very classic Lynch film.
Jack was in a good place at that point in his life. Besides the work he was getting with David and the new life he’d been given through sobriety, he’d met someone he was crazy about, a woman who was also in alcohol recovery named Kelly Van Dyke, the daughter of comedian and actor Jerry Van Dyke who in turn was Dick Van Dyke’s brother. Personally, I wasn’t crazy about Kelly but Jack was, so I tried to be happy for him. She was all over Jack all the time, clingy and girly, coy, posing and giggly. Like Betty Boop. She seemed to have an insatiable need for attention, always very exposed and cleavage-y and done up in a lot of crazy jewelry. I remember once she showed up with Jack at a Twin Peaks screening in a fully see-through hey-everybody-here-are-my-tits top. It was a bit hard to take at times.
For Jack this was all new — a sexy woman, 15 years younger than him, who just couldn’t seem to get enough of him.
Not my cup of tea, but I wished them well.
Back on Twin Peaks I was in familiar territory. In part because, obviously, I’d worked with David on Eraserhead, but also in a sense from appearing in nighttime soap opera-style dramas such as Murder in Peyton Place. Twin Peaks was a marriage of both, or, perhaps more accurately it used the framework, character types, and conventions of traditional TV drama as a Trojan Horse that later opened up and Lynch-world invaded your television.
I think what people remember of the show now were the later and more surreal story elements — the Red Room, the Owls, and so forth. The pilot episode by comparison was pretty tame and doesn’t venture all that far from the conventions of TV drama of the 1970s and ‘80s.
The brilliance of the first season is how it takes a measured pace into the surreal. Where in Eraserhead David had submersed the viewer in a starkly strange place from the first frames, here he took his time. By the fourth episode you have Special Agent Dale Cooper describing a dream to Sherriff Harry S. Truman that he is convinced is the key to solving Laura Palmer’s murder and Leland Palmer dancing by himself at the lodge and screaming, “Someone dance with me!” Now we were in Lynchland.
I loved playing Betty Briggs, the determined optimist, whether she’s picking a cigarette out of a piece of meatloaf during a contentious dinner at home to wearing a happy face button to Laura Palmer’s funeral.
After the pilot, which was nearly all shot in Washington State, we began to shoot most of the show in Los Angeles. The interiors that had been shot around Snoqualmie were perfectly recreated on sound stages located not far from the Van Nuys airport. So many of the exterior shots took place at night that it was easy work to make L.A. locations work as stand-ins.
Much like my role on Little House, my part as Betty Briggs was not a full-time job. I’d be called in to shoot a scene or two once a week or so. My daily life was still working at Lantana, which gave me the chance to see and experience the build of its insane popularity.
Twin Peaks was the “water cooler show” of the season. And I worked in a place where people did literally stand around the water cooler the next day and talk about the previous night’s episode — debating who Bob really was, the meaning of the Red Room, whether the One-Armed Man was the murderer, the meaning of the owls and doing impressions of Catherine as The Log Lady or the dance of The Man from Another Place.
The nation fell into the grip of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” fever just as much as it had been driven crazy by the mystery of “Who Shot JR?” on Dallas 10 years earlier.
As the scrutiny of fans and media focused in on the show and specifically the details of the murder, things began to change on set. Now instead of getting full copies of the script for an episode you were in, you would only get the pages for the scenes in which your character appeared. This made it trickier, as an actor, to gauge your performance so that it fit with the overall story. But of course you make it work. The other change was that now we were only allowed on the set when you were filming a scene you were in. This meant the end of the summer camp. The fun of just hanging out with crew and fellow cast members was over and actors like myself were only privy to the same kinds of rumors that everyone else was hearing.
As problems go, this was a good problem to have. It was all about the show’s runaway success. The theories of who killed Laura Palmer — what were real leads, what were red herrings — could go on and on. Friends would ask me and I could honestly answer that I didn’t know. And secretly I wondered if David knew.
Each week a bunch of us from the show — Dana, Kimmy Roberts, Sheryl Lee, Sherilyn Fenn, Jack and others — would take over a bar and watch that night’s episode, often just as shocked as any viewing audience at home. For the season finale we got together at Dana’s house and when Agent Dale Cooper is shot we all gasped — stunned — and wondered if we had all just lost our jobs.
Not only did we not see this coming but David had filmed the scene three different times with different actors so no one knew the ending until it aired.
When the 1990 Emmy nominations were announced, everyone in the cast and crew were over the moon. Twin Peaks had been nominated in 13 categories and in the category for Outstanding Writing, has been nominated twice.
Kyle was nominated for Lead Actor in a Drama Series, Piper Laurie for Lead Actress in a Drama Series, David was nominated for Outstanding Direction, he and Mark Frost were nominated for Outstanding Writing, and Angelo Badalamenti was nominated for Music Composition and for Main Title Theme. The list went on and on including editing, costuming and more. Wow.
To me it felt like the start of a revolution on network television. David’s vision of storytelling, his characters, the worlds only he could create, which had begun in obscurity as an art student in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, looked poised to re-write the playbook for American TV.
The Emmy awards that year were held on September 16 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, a place I knew well as it is located about four or five blocks from the Pasadena Playhouse. With so many nominations, the contingent from Twin Peaks was pretty large. I wasn’t among them — I was watching it at home — but it was great fun to see David, Dana, and everyone looking so elegant and snazzy in tuxes and evening gowns. I even got to see Michael Landon, looking very dashing, among the attendees as a movie he’d directed was up for an award.
The Emmys, unfortunately, turned into a big bust. In category after category, the nominations were read and the Emmys went to shows such as LA Law, China Beach, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Thirtysomething — all great — but very much “the usual suspects” in terms of award-winning network fare. The one light moment came when the camera focused on Catherine Coulson in character as The Log Lady and she did a short scripted bit in which it sounded like her log needed to use the restroom.
Well. That’s show business. The industry giveth and the industry taketh away.
The revolution, as they used to say, would n
ot be televised.
While filming the second season I got to work with a lot of different directors, including one of my favorites, Caleb Deschanel, father of Zooey Deschanel, and a friend of David’s from AFI. They were graduates, along with Terrence Malik, of AFI’s first class.
As much as I liked a lot of the people brought in to propel the show forward, I missed having David at the conductor’s podium. I knew he had a lot of TV and film projects he wanted to tackle but in that second season I began to feel his absence.
About halfway through that season, something happened on set that had never taken place in anything I’d ever done with David: I had to stop the filming and call something into question (uh-oh, I was becoming Michael Gross!). But without David right there, I didn’t feel things were on the same sure footing.
Episode eleven opens with Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman questioning Betty Briggs about the disappearance of Major Briggs. The way the script was originally written, it indicated that Betty didn’t know where her husband had gone and so couldn’t give them any information.
This wasn’t in keeping at all with the relationship between Betty and her husband, so I asked to speak with the writer.
I had the sense that the second season of the show there were a lot of story elements hurtling off in a lot of different directions — I just wanted to be sure this subplot with the Major was being carefully crafted. When I spoke to the writer, I argued that I thought Betty did know when Major Briggs had gone, where he was, and that she could not possibly share that information with the FBI or local law enforcement. When the writer and director agreed with me, that’s how we shot the scene.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 23
