Naked Lynch

PHOTOGRAPH BY LARRY FINK

In the basement of a high school near Seattle, David Lynch was building an altar. Not a full-fledged altar - just a little mound of dirt and a pile of found objects and candles designed to look, says Lynch "some strange ceremonies have been taking place here."

The strange ceremonies were supposedly performed by the fiend who had tortured and killed high schooler Laura Palmer. In much the same way that the discovery of a human ear draws a sheltered young man into the seamy underside of a Northwest lumber town in Blue Velvet, the discovery of Laura Palmer´s corpse exposes the dark secrets of a similar small town in Twin Peaks, the new television series from the director of Blue Velvet and Eraserhead.

This scene - in which the local sheriff and an FBI man corner the killer, who is dancing around his bizarre altar - had to be shot quickly, because the cast and crew had a ferryboat to catch or they´d lose a full day´s shooting. So Lynch wandered through the basement, picking up little pieces of metal and knickknacks and adding them to the incense and candles that he´d brought to the set himself. Then he stepped back to inspect his handiwork.

Actor Michael Ontkean, who plays the sheriff, happened to be standing next to Lynch. "Just before we were ready to shoot," says Ontkean, "he reached into his pocket and pulled out the ear from Blue Velvet. And this look came over his face of utter delight. It had nothing to do with the macabre, and it nothing to do with selfreference. It had to do purely with his sense of play, and his joy at the connection. It wasn´t like he did it with a great flourish or anything, and it´s not something people will notice on TV. But it was quite a moment, you know?"

Later, David Lynch begs to differ with one detail from Ontkean´s description: "It wasn´t the ear from Blue Velvet; it was just an ear that somebody sent me in the mail." He says it mildly, as if every movie director gets body parts through the post. "And I just happened to have it in my pocket."

"I don´t know why," he adds. "I keep lots of things in my pocket."

The latest macabre object to come out o Lynch´s pocket is Twin Peaks. It is like nothing on television. Or maybe it is like everything else on television, but with a twist that makes it seem completely new. The two-hour pilot, which airs this month and will be followed by seven hour-long episodes, occupies a middle ground somewhere between Falcon Crest and Blue Velvet: It can be seen as a soap-opera about greed, murder and sex in a Pacific Northwest lumber town, or as a mystery, or as a moody satire that wickedly mocks the conventions of its genre. "A Kabuki-style Peyton Place on peyote buttons," Ontkean calls it.

In Twin Peaks, nothing feels quite right. A dead girl´s body washes up on the shore of a lake. An investigating policeman sobs as he takes pictures of the corpse, and the exasperated sheriff - whose name is Harry S. Truman - snaps, "Is this gonna happen every damn time?" When FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) arrives in town, he dictates every last thought into a microcassette recorder: "Hello, Diane. ... I´ve never seen so many trees." There´s a town meeting to brief the citizens on the progress of the murder investigation; when Cooper sees a woman standing at the back of the room holding a log, he asks, "Who´s the lady with the log?" and is told, "We call her the Log Lady." The owner of the big lumber mill in town is an Asian woman (Joan Chen, from The Last Emperor) who inherited the plant from her late husband and hasn´t quite mastered English slang: When she wants to shut down the operation, she says, "Push the plug."

One by one, almost two dozen characters emerge over the course of the pilot, with a cast that includes members of Lynch´s usual stable (MacLachlan, Jack Nance), relative newcomers (Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn), veteran actors best known for film (Chen, Piper Laurie) and for TV (Peggy Lipton, from The Mod Squad, Ontkean form The Rookies) and even - coincidentally, Lynch says - two stars of the film version of West Side Story (Russ Tamblyn and Richard Beymer). But despite all the characters, things move at a deliberate, dreamlike pace: Lynch holds shots several seconds longer than you´d expect, cut to unexplained shots of a traffic light changing and cues everything to the ghostly strains of Angelo Badalamenti´s music. The Twin Peaks pilot is enormously disquieting; it´s also funny as hell much of the time.

"Some people," says writer Mark Frost, who is also the show´s associate producer, "think of the thing as one big inside joke, and have a ball with it, and see it as some ironic commentary on the history of soap operas, which it really isn´t to be. And many people see it very solemnly as an in-depth exploration of the life of a town, and get involved in the lives of these people. And I´m hoping that we can pull those two audience segments into one big viewing group."

Episodes of the show are being directed by Frost and such guests as River´s Edge director Tim Hunter and noted cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. But the show´s sensibility belongs to David Lynch, who directed the second episode as well as the pilot. When you ask him about the show, he insists that none of it is really strange.

"I still don´t see what the great difference is," he says. "At all. To me, it´s a regular television show."

Incidentally, Lynch also says he wants to do a spinoff series that would be devoted to the Log Lady. He´s even decided on a title for it: I´ll Test My Log With Every Branch of Knowledge.

He probably thinks that would be a regular television show, too.

The setting is a small, dingy coffee shop tucked away on a back street in Hollywood. In a corner booth is David Lynch, fresh from another day of editing his film Wild at Heart, which is due out this summer. And somehow, things seem a little off.

For starters, there´s Lynch´s voice. He´s forthright and cheerful, but he´s got a slight twang that doesn´t seem to fit with somebody who was born in Montana, grew up in Washington State and moved to Virginia at the age of fifteen. (Now, two failed marriages and two children later, he lives in Hollywood and is romantically linked to actress Isabella Rossellini, who starred in Blue Velvet.) At times, he seems to have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting or an Andy Hardy movie. "You were born in Washington?" he says, without a trace of a put-on voice. "Faaan-tas-tic! I was born in Montana!" Mel Brooks, whose company produced Lynch´s film The Elephant Man, may have nailed it when he called Lynch "Jimmy Stewart from Mars."

And now, even the waitresses are acting strange. One of the starts to take his order, then abruptly stops and decides to trade tables with the waitress at the next booth, who´s halfway through her order. The two stitch, and the new waitress spends a minute painstakingly erasing the order she´s just taken. Then she starts again, writing in letters so large that Lynch´s order - tuna fish and Swiss on whole wheat, fries and a Diet Coke with lemon - takes up the entire sheet.

"Well, her eyesight´s going, you know?" says Lynch with a shrug as the waitress walks away. This diner has become a frequent stop since he´s been editing Wild at Heart, a movie starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as lovers on the run. Lynch, of course, is used to regular dining patterns: For years he ate at Bob´s Big Boy every afternoon, ordering the same thing. His obsessions are the stuff of legend. "Once he decides he likes something," says Kyle MacLachlan, who has worked with Lynch on Dune, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, "it goes beyond obsessiveness with him - and sort of like an artist, he just examines and reexamines it."

"Oh, that´s nice," says Lynch upon hearing MacLachlan´s observation. When asked about his current obsessionss, he pauses for a long time, then speaks slowly. "I´m really getting into ... power tools," he says. "Yeah. That´s my next thing, I think. Power tools."

Working with them, or collecting them?

"Well, first I gotta get them," he says. "And then work with them."

One obsession of Lynch´s that made its way into the Twin Peaks pilot, say those involved, was doughnuts. Near the end of the pilot, MacLachlan and Ontkean walk into a room where the conference table has been covered with four dozen doughnuts, meticulously separated by type and arranged in little piles and rows. In the script, the work is attributed to Ontkean´s manically efficient assistant; in real life, Lynch did it. "I kinda got into chocolate doughnuts with chocolate frosting," he says. "And man, they are so good."

When Lynch talks about his career, he talks about pressure. It took him six years to raise enough money to finish his first film, Eraserhead, which was released in 1978. After a series of odd jobs, his opportunity to get back into the movie business was the 1980 film The Elephant Man, an extremely high-profile production. His next project, the 1984 film Dune, had a huge budget and a long, grueling shooting schedule.

But then he hit his stride with Blue Velvet - which, like Twin Peaks, drew on his days living in the Pacific Northwest. "I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods," he says. "And it just seemed to me that people only told you ten percent of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other ninety percent."

That´s what Blue Velvet was about, and with that film Lynch secured his reputation and his place in Hollywood. Since then, it should have been smooth sailing - except that one after another, projects he was ready to work on fell through. He couldn´t get financial backing for Goddess, a film based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. One Saliva Bubble was ready to go with Steve Martin and Martin Short, but the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group went bankrupt six weeks before shooting was due to start. He had a passion for a project titled Ronnie Rocket, but he couldn´t get it off the ground.

And all the while, Lynch´s agent, Tony Krantz, was encouraging him and Mark Frost - who wrote the script for Goddess and co-wrote One Saliva Bubble with Lynch - to do TV. "I kept telling him, 'David, you don´t want to do television,'" says Frost, a former writer and story editor for Hill Street Blues. "I said, 'There´s only one way that it would be a palatable experience for us, and that´s to have our own company, to own the shows and not to have the studio breathing down our neck.'" So that´s what they did, Frost-Lynch Productions.

For Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost started with a title, Northwest Passage, then changed it when they named their fictional town. They drew a map, and the topography suggested a story line - and when they sat down to write that story, Lynch says, they didn´t feel confined by the medium.

"There is something that you can create that could only be done with paint," he says. "Then there´s something that photography can do - really, it´s made to do that, and that´s a valid thing. And TV´s a valid thing, too. So you try to think of something that would go on a small picture tube. Not to say that Twin Peaks is the perfect thing for television, but I like this thing of a continuing story.

"You sort of put on your TV hat and your TV jacket," he says, "and it won´t allow you to think beyond certain bounds. And you know, we´re just perfectly happy working in a world where you can´t say certain things or show certain things. I don´t mind that world one bit."

Lynch says that he saw some of the constraints of network television as a challenge. "Just thinking about breaking the show in seven different places... That´s this form, and once you get the hang of it, it´s kind of interesting. But if you think about it another way, it´s totally absurd. It would be so absurd to have a big symphony going, and after every little movement, four different people come in and play their own jingle and sell something, and then you go back to the symphony. It´s a very weird thing that we´ve cooked up for television. Of course, it´s what makes the whole thing work, but it´s pretty weird."

At this point the manager of the diner walks by, knocks twice on the table and shouts, "Knock knock!" Lynch looks up, laughs and says, "Hey, how are you doing?" But the manager´s already walking away, shouting "Who´s there?" over his shoulder as he goes.

Lynch gets back to thinking about how he deals with the world of television. "The beginning credits have to be a certain way," he says absently, "and then there´s the credits over the beginning of the show, but you really have to start your show, or you´ll be all day in the credits. Then you have to do ending credits, and they have to be an exact amount of time. Then you have to divide the show into eight parts. And then" - his voice raises to deliver the punch line - "on top of that you have to worry about what the show´s about."

Television, MacLachlan suggests, worked out well for Lynch. "I would not want to be David´s producer," he says, laughing. "You wanna allow him his creativity, ´cause that´s why you hired the guy, but at the same time, sometimes David tends to get involved in something, and the day just sort of slips away. And I think that television, just by virtue of the fact we had limited time, forced that creativity to come within a certain framework. It was sort of the best of all possible worlds."

Lynch agrees. Maybe. "It was real close to making a film," he says, "except a lot less money and less time. Whih was real good for me."

Then he stops to clarify that. "Not the money part."

The big question, of course, is, will it play in Peoria? Or, for that matter, anywhere? Is Twin Peaks so good that it´ll capture a mass audience or so weird that it´ll never catch on in a network time slot?

"I think that´s a question we ask ourselves for virtually every project we´re involved with," says Roger Iger, president of ABC Entertainment. "It´s the nature of the business. And I would be fooling you if I said I wasn´t asked that question more with regard to this project than perhaps anything we´ve done. But when something like this come along, and is as good and as different as it is, I think we owe the public a chance to judge it for themselves."

ABC ordered seven more episodes after seeing the pilot - not as many as the usual midseason show, which shoots thirteen episodes. "I admire ABC for doing it," says MacLachlan. "I mean they didn´t want to go way out on a limb, but they went halfway out on a limb."

ABC pays a standard licensing fee for the right to show each episode twice; that fee covers most of the cost of production, and the rest is covered by an international distribution agreement with World Vision. That´s why they had to shoot an ending to the pilot, so that it could be sold in Europe as a videocassette movie. But that ending - which Michael Ontkean says involves "a midget, and people talking backwards, and a little bit of time travel and all kinds of stuff" - isn´t the ending that will be on the American series. In fact, even when the series reveals whodunit, says Frost, they´ll put a dozen more cliffhangers into the season´s final episode.

And although ABC may wonder how well this kind of stuff is going to work in Middle America, adds Frost, he and Lynch have been able to proceed with very little input from the network. "We told them we were going to give them a two-hour, moody, dark soap-opera murder mystery, set in a fictional town in the Northwest, with an ensemble cast and an edge," he says. "And very early on, after we delivered the pilot, they said that we´d given them exactly what we said we were going to give them. And that what we´d done was so foreign to their experience that they couldn´t presume to tell us how to do it any better or any different. Basically, they said, 'Guys, you go and make the series, and we´ll be real anxious to see what it looks like.'"

Lynch thinks the show will catch on, because he loves the characters. Frost has tried to empty himself of expectations but thinks the show can succeed because it "changes and enlivens and complicates in very interesting ways" and because the pace picks up after the pilot. "Coming into a season where there´s been the chorus of complaints about the blandness and the sameness and the lack of risk," he says, "that´s a great platform for us to jump onto and say, 'If you´re dissatisfied with that, take a look at this.'"

The scene comes early in 'Twin Peaks,' when Dale Cooper and Harry Truman first inspect the corpse of Laura Palmer. They walk into a spare examining room in the morgue, the body laid out on a table and the lights flickering overhead. "I have to apologize for the fluorescent lights," says the morgue attendant. "I think it´s a bad transformer."

Under this intermettent lightning, they examine the body. "Would you leave us, please?" Cooper asks the morgue attendant, who looks confused. Apparently thinking they´ve asked his name, he replies, "Jim."

The lights continue to flicker during the examination, which culminates when Cooper takes a nail file and digs under the body´s fingernails for an excruciatingly long time, finally extracting what looks like a tiny piece of newsprint bearing the letter R. This was just sleight of hand on MacLachlan´s part, but ABC`s standards-and-practices department wanted the scene shortened; it´s a moment when a good portion of the audience might well turn away from the screen. But Lynch and Frost disagreed - "It´s the point where you really feel what happened to this girl," says Lynch - so they went back to the network, which overruled standards and practices. "In a way," says Frost," that shot is very much what the show is about. Getting under your skin."

Other parts of the morgue scene reveal a lot of what David Lynch is about. The flickering lights, for instance, were not in the script. "We got to the room on that day," says Michael Ontkean, "and there was a problem with the lights in the room. And everybody was very apologetic to David, running up to him and saying, 'Oh, gee, we´ll get it fixed as soon as we can.' And David just sort of sat there, and then he said, 'Well, I kinda like this.' So he just incorporated it into the scene - and not only that, but he actually rode the lights during the scene. He was flicking them on and off manually during rehearsals and during the takes."

Ontkean says Lynch shares some traits with other great directors he´d worked with: Orson Welles, George Roy Hill, Claude Chabrol, Mike Nichols and Paul Mazursky. "They all have a tremendous sense of humor," he says. "And they could also make time stand still. You know, making a movie is like taking a cab ride with the meter running, only it´s a couple hundred thousand dollars a minute. But they all had the ability, in the midst of 200 or 500 or 10,000 people, with all the focus being on them and the money boys breathing down their necks - in the midst of all that, they were all able to absolutely stop time and climb inside of a sandbox of their own creation and play like a child."

That same spirits accounts for the exchange with the morgue attendant. The guy they hired to play the part was a local actor who hadn´t seen the script; in the first rehearsal, he didn´t understand what MacLachlan was saying when he asked him to leave the room. Confused, he blureted out his name - and Lynch, delighted, kept that in the script.

"I wanna work with that guy again," says Lynch. "That guy´s phenomenal. You can´t write those things. I mean, if they happen to you, you can write them. But you don´t make them up really. And in TV, you´re working very fast, and you kinda have those things and fit them in as fast as you can."

Lynch beams. "It was one of those beautiful, happy accidents. That´s the thrill of it, those little things that are so stupid, and so fantastic.

"And it makes it like real life," he adds, "in the coolest sorta way."