'Twin Peaks'

A SAP OPERA

Stephen Saban // Photographed by Lex Remlin

L.A. - The Studio Coffe shop on North Seward in Hollywood looks as if it might have popped full-blown out of Twin Peaks, so excessively wood-paneled is it. But the reason David Lynch chose to meet there was simply convenience - he was editing Wild at Heart across the street at Todd-A0. It was 12:30 in the afternoon. David ordered from the waitress an appropriat lunch of tuna fish on whole wheat toast with Swiss cheese, lettuce and mayo, french fries, diet Coke with lemon. It was so in synch with the decor of the diner that it could have been whipped up by the props department.

"The decor is perfect," David said. "It´s a woodsy kind of place. I really dig it."

Photographer Lex Remlin began a coughing up a storm and Louie, the colorful proprietor of the diner, suddenly appeared, bottle in hand. "Hi, honey," he said. "You don´t feel well? I´ll give you a brandy."

To please Louie, Lex downed a shot-glass of the stuff, and then stopped coughing. Louie, the diner, the coughing, the brandy, the sandwich. Maybe you had to be there, but it was all to Lynchian.

I told David I´d seen the pilot for Twin Peaks and that it was the best thing I´d ever seen, made for television or otherwise.

"Really and truly?" he said.

"It´s like TV for the Nineties," I said. "I don´t think people are ready for it."

"Well, we´ll see, you know?" he said, pouring ketchup. "I really like it and I think it´s entertaining. I think it´s a world that people would like to go into with characters that they´d like to get to know and a mystery they would like to see get solved. And so it´s got a great, you know, pull."

"Would you say it´s a spoof of Falcon Crest or Dynasty?" I said.

"No. No no no. No. Not at all," he said, getting his point across rather well and almost coming apart at the seams. "Not at all. It´s a real thing. It´s not a spoof, it´s not anything else. It´s just Twin Peaks. It´s its own thing. And it´s a real thing."

"Okay," I said. "I´ve only seen the first episode, but everybody seems to be having an affair with everybody else."

"Like I say," David said,"it´s just like real life."

I laughed.

"What is it?" he said.

"Nothing. I just thought this was going to take longer. To get to this point. But you went right to...."

"We´ve had these interviews before, Stephen," David said, smiling. "You did my very first interview."

That was right after the release of Eraserhead, when I´d tried in vain to get him to tell me how he´d created that unfortunate baby. Then there was The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet. (Dune doesn´t count; he´d rather not discuss the truncated mess that was released. "It´s like a car that´s been compacted," he told me during a subsequent interview. "It´s still a car but you can´t drive in it.") Lynch has just finished shooting his latest film, Wild at Heart, based on Barry Gifford´s novel and starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe, which will be released this fall.

But the reason I was having lunch with him in this crazy little diner was Twin Peaks, the prime-time continuing drama he´s co-written, co-executive produced and directed for television, which ABC has slated for a mid-season replacement beginning in March. It´s like nothing you´ve ever seen on television. The story of the grisly murder of a high school homecoming queen in small sawmill town in the Pacific Northwest, it has the awesome beauty and elegance with that heart of darkness we´ve come to expect in the work of David Lynch. Which makes it both appealing and appalling simultaneously. Snowcapped mountains, Douglas firs, plaid flannel, drugs and death. The cast includes Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Richard Beymer, Lara Flynn Boyle, Peggy Lipton, Jack Nance, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie and Russ Tamblyn. As the story develops, as clues are revealed, the seemingly composed and respectable logging community is slowly turned upside down, exposing its disturbingly sordid underbelly. There´s a two-hour premiere directed by Lynch, followed by seven one-hour episodes, one directed by Lynch, others directed by such auteurs as Tim Hunter, Caleb Deschanel and Twin Peaks´ cocreator Mark Frost.

But who is Mark Frost and why is Lynch getting involved in TV?

"Mark´s a friend of mine who I started writing with," David said. "He´d worked on Hill Street Blues. We have kind of a mutual agent, Tony Krantz, who was trying to get us into television. Now, Mark didn´t want to go back to television and I didn´t want to go in the first place. But then we started getting these ideas for this thing, Twin Peaks, and started falling in love with this world. And one thing led to another and there I was up in the Great Northwest directing this TV pilot. And I really had a blast."

"You have an amazing talent for making us think we´re seeing more than we really are," I said. "I felt voyeuristic watching Twin Peaks, as if I were watching something obscene, although I wasn´t seeing anything that couldn´t be shown on network television. It´s very very dark but I can´t figure out why that is."

"I can´t help you there," David said.

"I understand that none of the actors know yet who the murderer is. And today the last episode is being shot. Only you and Mark Frost know."

"Right."

"If the actors don´t know who did it, isn´t it a little difficult for them to act?"

"No, only for one of them. The rest of them would just act the same, ´cause they don´t know what happened. You know, when someone gets murdered around town you don´t act funny."

"Everything about it is the most amazing thing I´ve ever seen on television."

"Cool," David said. "I´m glad you like it."

"I don´t like it, I love it." Was I too complimentary? I didn´t care. Unassuming guys with no attitude like David Lynch should be heaped with praise. But. "I´m just afraid that people are going to turn it off after the first commercial," I added.

"Why?" he said.

"I think they´re not ready for it," I said again. "It´s true you have that dead body right in the beginning and the suspense builds from there, but it´s very slow and I don´t think people have the patience.... They´ll switch to whatever´s on another channel."

"There´s a difference between slow and boring," he said.

"I know the difference," I said, "and I don´t think it´s boring. I´m just talking about people."

"But we are people." He had a point.

"I don´t think we´re enough people, though."

"Um...we´ll see. You know, I can´t argue with you. I don´t know the scene out there. I just know that sometimes if you get hooked into something, there´s a mood and a pace that´s very very pleasing and it´s not fast cutting that keeps you watching it. It´s a mystery that keeps you, and a need to know and loving the process of knowing it. It´s like sex and it takes time."

"You´re a genius," I said.

"Well, bless your heart."

"Why did you cast Lara Flynn Boyle as Donna?" I said. "Did you know her or did you see her in something?"

"Johanna Ray did the casting and she tells me if people are good, you know, or not. So I met Lara and, see, she´s my idea of the girl next door, the same way that Laura Dern was in Blue Velvet. She´s smart and sexual but has, um, high moral fiber."

What more could you ask for in a girl? "You know, we all need a little fiber in our diets," I said.

"Right, we could all stand a little more of that."

"Are you as easygoing a director as you are a person?"

"I believe that really good things can only come out of a certain kind of environment, you know, where you´re not afraid to make mistakes. So I try to make people feel comfortable so we can do something, you know, and I don´t agree with this kind of yelling at people to trick ´em into getting a performance and that kind of crap."

"Twin Peaks seems quintessentially you," I said, "in that it has those absurdly innocent and funny moments, but is basically deeply disturbing. It´s like you´re two distinct personalities. Right?"

"I guess so," he said.

"Would you say they´re in conflict?"

"They live happily side by side," he said.

David had finished his lunch break, we´d been inundated with coffee and it was time to go. We left him outside the Studio Coffee Shop, squinting in the sun as he crossed the street for Todd-AO and more editing. "See you again when Wild at Heart comes out," I said.

"Okay, Stephen."

Lex and I took the San Diego Freeway north about thirty minutes to Van Nuys, where the last episode of Twin Peaks was being filmed on a soundstage off a highway behind a sign that said PUBLIC STORAGE. We found Lynch/Frost Productions´ publicist, Michael Saltzman, and toured the many sets that were sprawled seemingly everywhere. One minute we were in the Great Northern hotel lobby, engulfed in wood paneling, antlers and Eskimo art, the next we were in the Palmers´ living room, sitting on the very couch where Mrs. Palmer could barely control her grief. There was a side trip to psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby´s oddly Polynesian/psychedelic office. I took a little nap in the jail cell where Bobby Briggs barked at James Hurley. In Dr. Hayward´s dining room I could see Lara Flynn Boyle and Sheryl Lee in dressing gowns, blocking a scene as their characters, Donna Hayward and Madeleine Ferguson, listened to a tape of the dead Laura (actually Sheryl Lee in another role) talking to her psychiatrist, Russ Tamblyn as Dr. Jacoby. On the tape, which could be heard by everyone on the set, Laura was about to name the person who was probably the murderer. "You know that mystery man I told you about?" the disembodied voice said. "Well, his name is...." I think I may have even leaned forward at that point. "No," Laura said coquettishly, "I don´t think I´m gonna tell you yet." The entire assembled cast and crew erupted into laughter and applause. They had been waiting to find out too, apparently, and were as exasperated as I was. As you will be.

While we waited for Lara to come out of her hair, makeup and wardrobe, Michael told us some of the in-jokes that will make Twin Peaks a VCR-rewind favorite. The character of Laura was named after Gene Tierney´s role in the film Laura, the counter-top jukebox in the diner is meant to remind viewers of a William Shatner episode of Twilight Zone, the art on the walls of Dr. Jacoby´s office is actually by Russ Tamblyn, Sheriff Harry S. Truman sports the same name as the sheriff who disappeared on Mount St. Helens, and so on. David Lynch, Michael said, is such a great director that he knows his characters so well he can tell you what they had for breakfast and what unscripted thing they did on the way over.

Lara Flynn Boyle, nineteen, beautiful and vivaciously poised, led us to her trailer, a gleaming Fifties Airstream bullet that actually belongs to her boyfriend Kyle MacLachlan. "He´ll lease it out to them and actually make money off of it," she said. "You know, it´s a good idea." She apologized for its not being properly decorated, that she´d bought material with cowboys and Indians printed on it to make curtains. We settled in and she lit up a Marlboro.

I asked her how she got the part and she said, basically, "They needed a girl who would cry a lot. I was like, 'Great.'"

"Is this a part you really wanted because it was David Lynch?"

"No," she said, leaning back on the comfy trailer sofa. "I didn´t know who he was."

Okay, I was shocked, I´ll admit it. "You didn´t know who he was?"

"No. Well, I´m from Chicago and I´m not, you know," she started to explain. "Blue Velvet, all those movies, are very big and that, but I was raised very much more mainstream, like families from Iowa, you know. So I didn´t know who he was. After I´d gone in [for the part] my agent called and said, 'Well, what is he like? Is he weird?' And I was, like, 'He´s okay.' And she was, like, 'Were you nervous?' And I was, like, 'No.'"

"You still haven´t seen his films, like Blue Velvet at least?" The one starring your boyfriend?

"No."

Oh well. "How do you think Twin Peaks is gonna be accepted into people´s homes?"

"We talk about this a lot," she said. "They wanna watch ALF, you know, and The Cosby Show. Everybody out there - the cast and people I meet - keep saying it´s gonna go great, that it´s gonna get picked up. I think it´s gonna go great out ther with the twenty people who watch David Lynch in the business, that really respect him. He has tons of followers but I think that many of his followers are the ones who don´t watch TV. That´s why I think the one saving grace is that it´s also some form of soap opera."

"I hate to say it," I said anyway, "but I think it´ll be a critical success that no one watches."

"Yeah, like Blue Velvt. What - number one movie of the Eigthies? I went to a performing arts high school and nobody ever talked about it. So I think in terms of that it´ll be, like, 'Oh, great TV, very innovative.'" She took a drag of her cigarette. "Plus I think that TV audiences like to have cues when they should laugh and when they should cry. I´m very much like those audiences. When I went to see the pilot - and I´m in it - things that these people were laughing at I didn´t think were funny. When I say to James, 'James, those are sirens,' the audience was roaring. I must be stupid because I never thought that was funny, you know."

"You´re working for a genius," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "I´m starting to realize that as good an actor as you are, it also takes a really good director. If a director doesn´t have any relationship with me where he can, like, give and take, then I´m going to stink no matter what scene I´m in. There´s something magical. With [David], for the first time, I really forgot completely that I was being watched. That´s never happened to me before. I don´t know what exactly he does, and I think he does it so you don´t know what exactly he does for the actors. Shooting a whole scene for, like, five hours. I mean, that´s me too, but it takes a good director to do it."

"Do you know who the murderer is?" I asked Lara. "Come on."

"I have no idea," she said innocently. "I really don´t."

I believed her. But she´s an actress. "But today´s the last day of the last episode."

"Let´s just say that every single actor - and there are fourteen other regulars - is a suspect. But a lot of us have a pretty good idea who it is. But, um, it ends differently than you think."

There was a voice at her trailer door: "Lara, two minutes!"

"Do you have to go?"

"No, I have two minutes," she said.

"Did you meet Kyle on Twin Peaks?"

"Yes, and we started dating."

"But you didn´t have any love scenes together. You´re supposed to fall in love with James Marshall who plays James."

"Yeah, right," she said. "It´s very funny because sometimes I´ll have, like, this huge kissing scene with James and, like, Kyle´ll be sitting in the trailer like this, you know?" she said, impersonating a man in turmoil.

"He doesn´t understand that you´re just acting?"

"Oh, we do," she said. "I understand that, he understands that, but, still, I don´t like somebody else touching my boyfriend and he doesn´t like somebody...."

Just then, of all people, James Marshall appeared at the door of her and Kyle´s trailer. "We´re ready to go now," he said.

And our two minutes were up.