THE LYNCH MOB STRIKES BACK!

TV may have bulldozed Twin Peaks, but its demented denizens burn up the big screen in Fire Walk With Me.

by Dean Lamanna

"I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods."
- David Lynch

For one extraordinary year, beginning in the spring of 1990, the rest of the country did, too. David Lynch´s television series Twin Peaks - at once a piquant grotesquery of the soap opera and a pastoral ode to the Pacific Northwest - alternatively enthralled, angered and befuddled complacent boob-tubers who couldn´t imagine a realm more darkly mysterious than Murder, She Wrote or more wickedly comic than Cheers. But what was unanimously hailed as a ground-breaking drama fell out of favor before it finished two short seasons - the victim of ping-pong scheduling, backsliding network executives and its own choking excesses. Today, Twin Peaks is considered little more than a curious bump in the defiantly flat road of TV programming. "If you look at this fall´s schedule," says former Peaks scripter Robert Engels wistfully, "it´s like the show never existed."

Hard to believe that it´s only been a dozen or so months since FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and company were strafed from the airwaves. But in that time, Engels and Lynch have written - and Lynch has directed - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a big-screen salvo that reunites much of the series´ cast and details the events that precipitate the death of troubled homecoming queen Laura Palmer. Returning are Kyle MacLachlan as Cooper, Sheryl Lee as Laura and Ray Wise as Leland Palmer, along with Dana Ashbrook as the drug-dealing football star Bobby Briggs, James Marshall as the brooding biker James Hurley and Mädchen Amick as the physically abused waitress Shelly Johnson. Several new supporting players - David Bowie, Kiefer Sutherland and singer/songwriter Chris Isaak as FBI agents, and Harry Dean Stanton as a trailer park manager - lend additional marquee value to the project.

Many other familiar faces - among them Joan Chen, Michael Ontkean, Piper Laurie and Jack Nance - are not returning, although they were in the original script. Engels acknowledges that several scenes were trimmed to get the film down to a still-overlong 135 minutes. "We had to shape the story towards Laura Palmer," he explains. "Obviously, a number of the actors [who were cut] are disappointed.]" Adds Catherine E. Coulson, who´s reprising her role as the Log Lady; "It must be really devastating for some of them. But the spirit of all of the characters is in the film."

A few who had the opportunity to renew their Peaks citizenships simply did not or could not. Lara Flynn Boyle (Wayne´s World), whose Donna Hayward became a major part in the movie, flat-out refused to re-up (her replacement is Moira Kelly, last seen in the ice-skating drama The Cutting Edge). "I could say something catty and self-serving," says Engels. "But I don´t know why Lara didn´t want to do it. If anything, she should have taken it out of gratefulness for what the series did for her." And sadly, due to Sherilyn Fenn´s prior acting commitments (Diary of a Hitman, Ruby), the saddle-shoed seductress Audrey Horne sashays no more.

Those disappointments didn´t faze Lynch and his flock, who flew north to Snoqualmie, Washington, for six rigorously scheduled weeks of location shooting last September and October. The $9.5 million budget for Fire Walk With Me was anteed up by CIBY Pictures, a French film company where Lynch has a four-flick/five year deal. "With this picture´s money-making potential, we could have gone anywhere," says Engels. "Even though our last show was ranked 72nd, it was still seen by 10 million people. And if those 10 million people go to the movie, it´s a hit."

"PEAKS" AND VALLEYS

Although its two-hour pilot was one of the highest-rated TV programs of 1990, Twin Peaks´ preoccupation with damn fine coffee failed to stimulate the Nielsens as the series settled into its weekly grind. Most of the non-Lynch episodes - despite the hypnotic aural cohesion provided by Angelo Badalamenti s mood music - lacked style, and the storyline´s strikingly casual weirdness became forced. Some viewers resented the show´s myriad plot tangents. "A lot of times we got creamed because people thought, 'Those assholes! What´s that now?!'" Engels says. "But we were never trying to goof anybody up. I mean, every time we showed the wind blowing through the trees, then cut to a shot of the stoplight, somebody would start another doctrine."

There was an even larger problem: The central mystery - Who Killed Laura Palmer? - dragged on interminably beyond the end of the first seven installments. By the time the critics settled down and the series launched its second season (with an unusually dull and directionless two-hour pilot from Lynch), the honeymoon was over. Twin Peaks had had its day in the sun.

But did ABC give the show a fair shake? "Not at all," says Frank Silva, who´s back Fire Walk With Me as the ethereally evil Killer Bob. "They never liked us. [ABC Entertainment president] Bob Iger was behind us, but he´s on the West Coast and all the decision-makers are back East. They kept preempting us, moving us around the schedule."

Engels agrees. "We got shoved around a little. But we didn´t listen to the network as much as we should have, either. We got off-tack in the story-telling, and by the time we put in Windom Earle [Cooper´s psychotic former partner] and got going again, it was too late."

Indeed, as new characters piled up and plot threads dangled, ABC urged Lynch/Frost Productions to fine-tune the series in order to stave off cancellation. "Too many things were being introduced, and the essential characters - those the show started out with - were being ignored," says Silva. "I wish David would have storyboarded all the episodes, although there were some wonderful directors."

Well, it was a mixed bag: The various helmers hailed from editing, commercials, features, you name it. "We were all going, 'Were are these guys coming from?'" says a former production assistant on the series, who adds that Diane Keaton was among the best: "She was very artistic and visual, whereas some just came in and blammed them out like any old TV series."

One of the quirkiest was Tina (Zelly and Me) Rathborne, whose miniskirt-and-leggings directorial attire reportedly caused a stir on the set. "Whenever she would bend over," recalls the P.A. with a laugh, "the grip department would sneak behind her and take Polaroids. It was unbelievable."

Rathborne, according to the P.A., also had a zest for multiple takes - which, for the outrageous funeral scene in the forth episode, reportedly numbered close to a dozen: "Ray [Wise] had to ride Laura´s casket up and down and up and down repeatedly as Grace Zabriskie [playing Sarah Palmer] wailed, 'Leland, don´t ruin this too!'" Wise himself says the experience was "not something I´d want to do again. It was like a mechanical bull gone insane. I had to suppress the urge to giggle."

Most of those involved with the series agree that, of all the directors, Lynch was by far the most popular. "He makes the whole process a great deal of fun," says Wise, who has worked with his share of auteurs - notably Paul Schrader, Wes Craven and Paul Verhoeven. "He has an all-American, cornfed-boy approach to humor that´s infectious. His sets are never uptight." Indeed, one source from the series says they´re just the opposite: "David has great hair, and it drove some of the makeup girls wild. Sometimes he would just sit there and smile innocently as he let them run their fingers through it."

DAVID AND GOLLY-IATH

It´s no secret that Lynch appreciates the company of women - which makes the perennial charges that he exploits them in his films seem all the more ludicrous. "I´ve never seen him treat a woman without respect," says Sheryl Lee, who suffered plethora of onscreen indignities as both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddie in Twin Peaks and endures several more in Fire Walk With Me. "I´ve spoken with others who have worked with him who feel the same."

Lee witnessed Lynch´s sensitivity up-close while shooting a scene for the film set in the seedy back room of a truck stop, where Laura sheds her duds and performs sexual acts. "Everyone told me the nudity would be easy after the first take, but it wasn´t for me," she says. "David knew that, and he and the crew were very respectful - closing off set as much as possible and explaining to me why those who were present had to be there."

Lynch, to most, appears to be the model of politeness: Wielding a lexicon laden with chummy words and phrases like "neat," "supercool" and "by golly," he slays the imposing image that accompanies the title of Director. "It´s like working with Mr. Rogers," says Michael Anderson, who returns as the diminutive, backward-speaking Man From Another Place.

"His work is so unsettling that I think he´s also compelled to be that way so that people aren´t afraid of him personally." Chimes Catherine Coulson: "He´s really a very regular guy who has handled fame gracefully."

Mel Brooks may have called him "Jimmy Stewart from Mars." And his garb may consist of khaki pants, a gray baseball cap and a dark blazer worn threadbare. But the 46-year-old Missoula, Montana, native is no pushover. "He has a wonderfully excited, loud voice that is similar to Gordon Cole´s [the character Lynch played in the series] and makes you listen," Coulson says. "He says things in a very definitive way that´s almost amusing." Not so amusing to some is Lynch´s penchant for using a megaphone on the set - regardless of his distance from the person he´s addressing. Recalls the anonymous P.A.: "One time he used it while I was standing right next to him. I jumped three feet."

Spontaneity and improvisation are givens on every Lynch shoot. "David almost always knows what he wants," Coulson says. "But when he doesn´t, he´ll sometimes get all the actors together in a room, stand up on a ladder and say, 'You say this, and and you say this' - even though he´s got a script. Mike Ontkean described it once as 'being in a big sandbox.'"

"He´s not afraid to take risks," says Frank Silva. "What´s brilliant about him is that something may spark something in his head that totally goes off on another tangent. When you read a David Lynch script - eh, no big deal; it´s what he does with the written page. The visual that comes out is 190 degrees removed."

Peaks co-creator Mark Frost - Lynch´s business partner and executive producer of Fire Walk With Me (Frost was too busy with another film, Storyville, to work on the Fire script) - once termed writing with the director a "Vulcan mind meld." "David and Mark work very fast together - it´s almost electric," says Engels, who wrote for the Ken Wahl series Wiseguy before joining Lynch/Frost three years ago. "Our collaborations are more relaxed. We walk around, talk a lot - pretty much waste of time."

According to Engels, he and Lynch wasted little time devising an outline for the movie. "We liked these people and liked being in the place," he says. "We just sort of got caught up in it." Once the series was officially dead at ABC, and potential deals to revive it on a cable channel ("not enough money could be raised to cover the $1.2 million-per-episode budget") and Fox Television (studio chieftain Barry Diller "always felt that Twin Peaks was the series they should have done") fell through, the pair quickly tapped out the screenplay.

Why did they go with a "prequel" instead of a sequel? "This may sound like bullshit, but there really wasn´t a conscious decision about which was the coolest story," says Engels. "It was just kind of what we arrived at. The challenge was that everyone already knows how it ends. We had to turn that into a strength - as opposed to people sitting there thinking, This is kind of dumb. It gave us more freedom to create suspense than you´d initially think."

TALES FROM THE SCRIPT

Twin Peaks spawned enough red herrings in its 28 installments to stock Pudget Sound, and most of them - including the Bookhouse Boys and that silly business about UFOs - won´t be reeled in by the film. However, Dale Cooper will have a close-range exchange with the unseen Diane. "We pondered whether or not we should let people see her," Engels chuckles. "But I don´t want to let that one out."

Ah, but we do. Although FILM THREAT didn´t get a screening of Fire Walk With Me, it got the next best thing - the script. In a scene set in Gordon Cole´s FBI office, Dale Cooper is shown standing in a doorway conversing with Diane. But Diane remains offscreen and her voice is rendered unintelligible in a way that recalls the weird "wa-wa-wawa-wa" speech of Charlie Brown´s schoolteacher.

Shot through with similarly bizarre, if deliberately baffling, touches (many involving the eerie Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, who, in the series, gave Donna Hayward a memorable psychic goosing along Laura Palmer´s Meals-on-Wheels route), the script opens with a familiar image: a body, wrapped in plastic like a macabre bouqet, bobs in a river. But the year is 1988, and the corpse is that of Teresa Banks, a young drifter who´d been living in a trailer park in Dear Meadow, Washington. Enter hard-of-hearing FBI bureau chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch), who puts G-men Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) on the case.

When Desmond disappears mid-investigation, Cole summons Special Agent Dale Cooper to follow his tracks - which lead to a dead, and decidedly supernatural, end. The action then jumps one year forward and shifts to the idyllic town of Twin Peaks, commencing a seven-day countdown to Laura Palmer´s demise through a succession of wrenching episodes that depict her intensifying bouts with drugs, promiscuity and the all-consuming Bob. A few brief visits are also paid to that hotel lobby from hell, the Red Room (though nothing happens therein that can top the outrageous dopplegang-bangers in the third and final episodes of the series).

It appears that some of the film´s best moments will play out through dialogue in the dysfunctional Palmer household, particularly during a tense dinner scene in which Leland - infected with the spirit of Bob - berates Laura for not washing her hands. "There were several transitions there that were difficult to negotiate emotionally," says Ray Wise (who, as a senatorial campaign manager in the forthcoming political satire Bob Roberts, must deal with an equally capricious, though somewhat less malevolent, Bob). "I had to show little flashes of Bob, and I had to do it just right - or else would look phonier than hell."

Engels says moviegoers "should be able to enjoy the film without having seen the series." To ensure that the screenplay stood firmly on its own while remaining true to Twin Peaks, the script was flagged by several non-viewers as well as die-hard fans. In addition, a researcher was hired to check the storyline´s consistency with The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, "Diane..." The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper and other literary spinoffs.

Luckily for the writers, there were few logistical problems. "The pilot was so loaded with stuff, so marvelously ambiguous, that we could always find a place to get around things," says Engels. "We were helped by the fact that Cooper wasn´t on the Teresa Banks case [referenced several times in the series], and that he said he wanted Albert [Rosenfeld, played by Miguel Ferrer] - not Sam Stanley - when he drove toward Twin Peaks in the pilot. That allowed us to open up the Banks story."

Engels says there were few advantages gained doing Fire Walk With Me for theatrical release rather than TV broadcast. "We didn´t have to worry about 14-page acts, which enabled us to control the pace and create a broader story. But what was unique about the series was that we did just about everything we wanted on it. The murder of Maddie by Leland, for instance, was definitely R-rated."

THE SECRET DIARY OF SHERYL LEE

If some of the scenes that made it onto the TV show were rated "R," then the nightmares Sheryl Lee suffered while making Fire Walk With Me might be classified "NC-17." "Working with a character like Laura Palmer, your brain does some strange things to you," says the 25-year-old actress, who recently finished a stint on Broadway in the title role of Oscar Wilde´s Salome, alongside Al Pacino. "I was constantly having nightmares about Bob, of being killed in the train car."

The climatic scene set in the rusted-out Pullman is indeed a doozy - filled with phantasms, guttural cries and stomach-churning violence. What´s more, it was completed under a set of strangely coincidental circumstances: Because of delays, Laura´s murder ended up being shot on Halloween - which also happens to be the shared birth date of Frank Silva and Michael Anderson, who play Laura´s tormentors, Bob and the Man from Another Place, respectively. "What´s also weird about it is that I´m Taurus, which is the astrological opposite of them," Lee shudders. It all seems very symbolic."

Such mystical conjunction are almost commonplace on Lynch projects. "David definitely works from the sixth sense," says Lee. "When you do a project with him, you check into another world. Most people I talk to pick up his work on a subconscious level."

Lee says fleshing out the cocaine-and-sex addicted Laura in Fire Walk With Me unearthed longburied, unpleasant memories of her own high school years. "I saw drugs being used all the time. People would say to me when I was that age, 'Oh, these are the happiest years of your life.' And I kept thinking, Then I am in big trouble."

Did Lee have similar vices when she was Ms. Palmer´s age? "If I tell," she stammers, "and if my parents read this article...." Okay, scratch that. Is she closer to the Bad Laura or the Good Witch, her role in Lynch´s Wild at Heart? "I wish I could say the Good Witch," she finally laughs. "But definitely Laura."

Unlike Laura Palmer, however, Lee loves asparagus. And she doesn´t date often - partly because she refuses to become a rung on someone else´s ladder. "It´s hard to trust people," she says. "They start asking you things like, 'Could you get a script to David Lynch?' Without sounding like I´m feeling sorry for myself, the business is as lonely as you hear it is."

Aw, it can´t be all that bad being the Lynch-pin of both a landmark TV show and a potentially big film, can it? "I feel really thankful," answers Lee, who was sorry to see the series end - even though both of her characters ended up corpses. "I´m really fortunate to have David in my life."

"THE GREAT NORTHERN EXPOSURE"?

Twin Peaks´ fashionably rustic lodge, the Great Northern, was barely shuttered when CBS Northern Exposure - another hour-long drama peopled with offbeat characters and filmed in the wilds of Washington State - became the new darling of media critics. Although the two series are quite different - Exposure favors frothy, message-filled storylines, whereas Peaks preferred a murkier, more cynical tone - some have pointed out their surface similarities. Bob Engels, for one, finds Exposure´s claims to originality offensive. "I like [the people behind the show], and I don´t mean to say they´re copycats. But to think that Northern Exposure would exist at all without is preposterous. I mean, they have a waitress named Shelly - they´ve had a couple of things in there that really were a little out of line, that they shouldn´t have done. But the real tragedy is that there aren´t more shows like these on TV."

Well, there´s always the movies. And while the reviews that came out of Cannes last spring for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - much like those for Wild at Heart in 1990 - were decidedly mixed, the actors and technicians who have worked with David Lynch are proud that they´ve helped define the term Lynchian. Says Catherine Coulson: "David himself told me he´s never been happier shooting a movie, despite the fact that it deals with the shadow side of life."

Engels believes that the director (who had a baby boy, his third child, with Fire editor Mary Sweeney last May) would also be happy to know that he has set the new standard for weirdness. "If anyone gave him credit for making the avant-garde accessible - for bringing it into place where people could appreciate it - I don´t think he´d apologized for it. If that´s what Lynchian means, he´d probably say, 'That´s aces, man.'"