With feature credits like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, and
Blue Velvet- a body of work offering an indelibly bizarre flow of
images and themes- David Lynch is one of the most highly regarded
filmmakers in America: a brilliant, eccentric, avant-garde auteur.
His renown lies in a gift for depicting life's more pitiably
grotesque and banal creatures-the tormented, loaf-haired title
character of 1977's Eraserhead or the monstrously deformed Elephant
Man-with a probing, affecting tenderness. Now, on ABC rom 9 to 11
p.m. on April 8, comes Twin Peaks, created by Lynch and his partner,
Mark Frost. Twin Peaks is a fictional mountain town in the Pacific
Northwest, shrouded by fog, Douglas firs, and all manner of Lynchian
intrigues-sexual, criminal, and financial-lurking beneath its cozy,
idyllic surface.
The pilot plot kicks in when a high school girl, Laura Palmer, is
found murdered, wrapped in plastic, on a shore. An FBI agent (played
by Kyle MacLachlan, a Lynch "ensemble" regular from Dune and Blue
Velvet) arrives in town and teams with the sheriff (Michael Ontkean)
to find the killer. It's soon evident that nothing in this weird
place-or in the surreal cinema of David Lynch-is as it seems.
One thing that sets the pilot apart from most network fare is that
after two hours the murder remains unsolved; that's only one of many
questions left unanswered. There aren't the tidy wrap-ups and rescues
of television's hour- long dramas; loose ends are all over the place.
Everyone in town seems to have at least one illicit fling going, and
there are hints that Laura, known as a model of innocence, was
somehow linked to cocaine and an X-rated singles network. The only
truly crazy guy in town is the wild-eyed shrink who had seen the dead
girl in therapy. (See Ken Tucker's review, page 6.)
This new series bears all the Lynch signatures: spare but elegant
visual textures; fresh, quirky writing; deadpan, absurd humor; fluid,
lingering, close-up camera work that heightens the tension; music by
Angelo Badalamenti that shifts from a jazzy, finger-snapping '50s
sound to an ominous synthesizer motif when the action reverts to the
murder investigation; and strong performances from an ensemble that
includes Grace Zabriskie (The Big Easy), Joan Chen (The Last
Emperor), Peggy Lipton (The Mod Squad), Lara Flynn Boyle (Jennifer
Levin in TV's The Preppy Murder movie), and Sherilyn Fenn (Two- Moon
Junction). And for Lynch diehards, there is a tie to the cultish
past: Jack "Eraserhead" Nance plays Pete Martell, the plant foreman
who finds the body. (Nance also worked in Dune, Blue Velvet, and Wild
at Heart, Lynch's new movie.)
Prime-time network TV would seem off-limits to a purist like
Lynch, what with the hang-ups of standards-and-practices departments
and commercials cutting minute by minute into his filmic vision.
But as it turns out, Lynch was "gung ho" from day one, Frost
recalls. "He'd always been a big soap opera fan." Lynch was drawn
to what Frost calls a "big canvas" serial so he could create a
continuing story, a sense of place and characters to return to week
after week.
Lynch says he even enjoys his part in the ratings war: "That's
part of the fun of it. It's a very tricky business. You could be here
today and gone tomorrow. Word of mouth up front is very critical.
Those beautiful Nielsen families are in the driver's seat."
Lynch didn't even seem to mind structuring his story around
commercials. "You do have these breaks every 11 minutes or so," he
says matter-of- factly, "and so if you can make the scenes work and
put a couple together, you hit a commercial and then it's a whole new
ball game when you come back. You do find yourself thinking in terms
of making these little 11-minute movies, and it's kinda neat."
(Actually, there will be five commercial breaks in the Twin Peaks
premiere instead of the standard seven.)
ABC Entertainment president Robert A. Iger, who inherited the
project, calls the Lynch experiment "a case of a network having the
desire and guts to try different television forms, in part to
continue to maintain a dominance over the overall TV world. We are
always looking to break new barriers and find the breakout program.
(ABC also recently signed creative powerhouse James L. Brooks (the
movies Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, the Fox network's
Tracey Ullman Show) to develop three comedy series.)
"Sure, there is some risk involved whenever you do something as
different as this," Iger says. "And the feel of this program is
unlike that of any other program on TV. But even to say 'risk'
implies a lack of confidence I have in the show, which wouldn't be
correct."
The task of translating Lynch's mystique into a prime-time pitch
was eased somewhat with Frost-who had been a writer and story editor
on Hill Street Blues-on board as the proven Mr. Inside.
Cap Cities/ABC didn't flinch when Lynch and Frost brought in their
idea. "They would have been concerned with my image," Lynch admits,
"had I come in on my own. Mark took the edge off and made me more
presentable. Helped me stay on the highway."
Brandon Stoddard, Iger's predecessor, ordered the two-hour pilot
for a possible fall '89 series. He then left the
entertainment-division presidency in March 1989, as Lynch went into
production.
Iger and his creative team took over from Stoddard and saw dailies
and met with Frost and Lynch to get the "arc" of the stories and
characters. By late May, Iger had seen the rough cut of the pilot and
ordered the remaining seven hours.
Lynch directed the pilot a year ago on locations near Seattle at a
cost approaching $4 million. (The hour-long episodes took a week each
and averaged $1 million.) The absorbing, atmospheric pilot was
written by Lynch and Frost, who first teamed up to write a script
that was never produced based on Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn
Monroe.
"David doesn't type too well," Frost says, "so I sit at the
keyboard and we literally write every word together. We'll talk for a
while and then find some way to avoid working and get a cup of
coffee, the usual routine."
The process was the same for the second episode, which Lynch also
directed. Lynch then went off to finish Wild at Heart, while Frost
wrote the remaining segments, with revising and shaping help from two
writers. Frost directed the final hour, and five other
directors-including Tim Hunter (River's Edge) and Caleb Deschanel
(Crusoe)-did one each, with Lynch popping in as story consultant.
Peaks epitomizes the fundamental conflict facing prime-time
programmers. As a high-ranking non-ABC-network exec says, "Most
people here do not expect that Peaks will work. The critics and
audiences give us signals like 'We're tired of what we've seen
before; don't give us more of the same.' But when you venture out
there, there are not a lot of indications that they're embracing
what's different.
"It's like a wife-mistress thing. 'Yeah, we wanna get it down and
dirty, I want that choice in my life, but I wanna come home to a good
mother.' In some ways, maybe what David will be is the martyr who
will push the boundaries-expand what (network) TV can do and should
do-without being wholly successful."
One member of the Lynch ensemble, often said to be the director's
screen alter ego, doesn't necessarily subscribe to the martyr theory.
"Knowing David a little bit," actor Kyle MacLachlan says, "I think
it's exciting to combine him with television. Any new media where he
can create pushes him forward. I absolutely think this will be
controversial; it will be watched."
For all of Lynch's enthusiasms about television and Twin Peaks, he
says he "had some misgivings in the beginning. It's real important
for me to do something a certain way without someone else coming
through after you're done and changing everything. There haven't
been any of the horror stories you hear on this show-yet."
Lynch's worries about TV work were understandably rooted in the
twin piques faced by most writer-directors in a medium subsidized
largely by advertising revenues: censorship and corporate meddling.
But he sailed through. The standards-and-practices people, Frost
reports, found just one objectionable scene in all nine hours of
film: an extreme close-up in the pilot on MacLachlan's hand as he
slides a tweezer under the corpse's fingernail and removes a tiny
"R," a clue to her murder.
Says Frost: "They wanted (the scene) to be shorter. They said it
made them uncomfortable." But the creative team dug in its own nails,
and the scene remained.
Lynch praises the network for letting him go about his work with
uncompromised autonomy. "I might as well have had final cut," he
says. "I got to do the film I wanted and direct it the way I wanted.
They treated the show with a lot of respect."
The picture on the small screen is looking bigger and sharper
every day to Lynch. He and Frost have signed with the Fox network to
cocreate and codirect what Frost describes as a series of
reality-based "docu-poems," such as the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Their first segment will air later in the spring. This time, Frost
says, "it's MTV meets 60 Minutes in 30 minutes."
Next: 30 seconds. Lynch recently made his debut as an ad director
on a new spot for Yves Saint Laurent's Opium fragrance. "It's got an
Oriental theme, a woman opening the bottle. It's a very sensual
commercial," Lynch says with typical exuberance. "You'd know it if
you saw it. I really had a blast doing it. I've also done a public
service announcement for New York City on trash and rats. It's in
black and white. And I had a really good time doing that."
Lynch, in fact, seems capable of having a pretty good time on
almost any creative project as long as it doesn't smack of being too
safe. Even if Twin Peaks is not a commercial success, the director
deserves considerable credit for taking a chance. "Look," he says,
"everything we do in this business is a risk. The more success you
have, the more you second-guess all your future projects. You have to
be ready to fail and try these things. It's kind of a diabolical
thing but you can't really think about it. And I didn't. I lucked
out."
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