About : standard furniture black friday
Title : standard furniture black friday
standard furniture black friday
[vehicles passing] garcãa: when i read the script,i did not get it at all. i don't think anyone reallyunderstood david's intention unless they had worked with him. and even wheni was shooting the pilot, i still wasn't quite sure whati was shooting and what he wanted. we really didn't knowwhat we were creating, because this was truly an imaginationof both david lynch and mark frost. and mark really is an unsung heroin that he did a lot of storytelling,
and that allowed david's imaginationto take off on the set. maclachlan: we figuredit would be just a one-off, and, uh, that no onein their right mind would, uh, ever considermaking this a series. it was one of those, uh, serendipitousthings where you really feel some hands are at work hereputting this thing together. so we're just gonna buckleour seat belt and go for the ride. i had met david lynchin '86, i believe. we were introducedby a mutual agent of ours
who thought that we'd, uh, get along. and we did. we just kind ofhit it off right away. i think blue velvet hadjust come out about that time, and i'd admired david'swork for years, and we started working ona couple of features together. um, there was one kind of notoriouslyunproduced screenplay of ours called one saliva bubblethat nearly got made in 1987. and we were looking aroundfor other things to do. and then the same agent at caa,a young guy named tony krantz,
sat us down and said, "i want you guysto come up with a television idea. there's interest in having youdo something." and he said,"the place i'd like to take it is abc." at that time,abc was languishing in last place. this was really before fox.there were only the three networks. and he said, "they're willingto take a chance on something, so why don't you go inand pitch an idea?" so we kicked it around. we didn't really have somethingthat we were completely settled on,
but we took the meeting, and told them about this strangetown in the northwest, and a murder that happens. and i remember davidsaid something about, "and there's the wind in the trees,"and he moved his hands a certain way. and they all kind of leaned forward,and i kind of knew we had them. um, so sure enough, they made usan offer to write this pilot. and a few weeks after that,the writers guild went on strike, so it fell into the cracks,
and that was a long, uh,kind of acrimonious strike. and after it all resolved, we were allworking on different things. and one day tony krantzcalled up and said, "remember that, uh,meeting we had at abc? they'd like to have you come back inand talk about it again." and we really had to sit down and askeach other, "what did we tell them?" because i didn't have any real memoryof what they'd bought. so we developed it a little furtherand went back in, and that led to the first draft.
i think our initial title for the showwas northwest passage. um, and we started to developthe idea of this town and this thing that had happened. and we hit on the ideaof the murder of a young girl who'd been the homecoming queen and was kind of a public personathat everybody knew, but in fact, uh, had a life that wasfull of secrets and mystery, and led you into the underbellyof this town's, uh, reality. david and i had developeda writing style
because we'd written thesefeature scripts before where we just kind of sat in a roomand batted things back and forth. i sat at the computer and typed. he didn't know how to type,or professed to not know how to type. and we would just kind of...we had a vague outline in mind, but mostly it was justsitting down and starting and going scene by sceneand line by line, and we'd knock thingsback and forth. and i remember we sat downand i drew a map of the town.
i wanted to have the geography, um,of the town in my head as we were writing it. and there were these two mountainson either side of the map that kind of framed the townthat was nestled between them. so we decided tocall the town twin peaks, and that became the titlefor the show. it was the only timei'd ever collaborated as a writer, and i think the only time he had. um, and we just enjoyed the process.we laughed a lot, we had fun, uh,
we amused each other,and, uh, we liked the result. so we had no expectation that abcwould give this thing a second thought, um, because it waskind of out-there. given what network television wasdoing at the time, it was off the charts. so, um, they said they wantedto make the pilot, and nobody was more surprisedthan we were. and at every step, we had made itvery clear from the beginning, "look, we're not doing this justbecause we need to do a tv show. we're both very involvedwith other things.
but if you want us to do it,you have to leave us alone. we have a visionfor what this should be. we think it's gonnabe different and strange and unlike anythingyou've seen before." and to their credit,they did leave us alone. they let us dokind of what we had in mind. latt:what i think mark was looking for was to make david feel comfortablein a television environment, which he knew would bemore constricted.
um, although ultimatelywe were able to obtain for david, both creatively with abc and then withthe financial structure of the show, was complete freedom. i mean, he didn't have to take notes. he cast it the way he wanted to. we did the productionin a way that he wanted to do it. so we really created an environment in which he was the masterof his own work. how i prepare for casting for davidis i go through all my files,
looking, you know,and gathering up pictures for everybody who i thinkis right for the role. and, um... and then i spend, you know,an hour or two up at his house. he goes through the pictures, and rarely does he pickmore than two or three, you know, when it's a lead role.and, uh... he just, you know, he knows. a guy like richard beymer,for instance,
who we knew from west side story and some great moviesin the early '60s, but hadn't really seen muchof him since then. and he came in and was justperfect for ben horne, so, you know, we thought,what a thrill. and then we had this kind ofsmallish part for the, uh, psychiatristwho worked in town, dr. jacoby. and russ tamblyn came in, and wejust looked at each other and grinned. i mean, the idea of havingthe two of them together again
was so fantastic, we couldn't resist it.so guys like that. i think we were surprised whenpiper laurie came in and wanted to do the show. she was somebody whose workwe'd both really admired. and she had a kind of weight and gravitas for that characterthat was fantastic. once david's picked the actorsthat he would like to meet, then he just talks with them. he doesn't have them reador anything.
he just goes by his instinct. mostly he just talked to me abouthow i would feel about being in freezing cold water, and then being wrappedin plastic for hours. and i said, "fine." and then at the end, i think he said,"well, okay, let's do this, then." and i remember thinking, i don't und...i didn't know what just happened. because i was so youngand i was so nervous, and i thought maybe he saidi just got the job, but, ha, ha. i didn't...
so the casting directorfollowed me out, and i said, "what just happened?"and she said, "well, you got the job." we just talked about, uh,you know, rather ordinary, everyday, mundane thingsthat we both had interest in, and after about 15 or 20 minutes,he said that was it, and, uh, "that was great.we'll see you, ray." i said, "well,nice to meet you, david." and, um, then i got a call a couple,three days later, uh, that, uh, he was very interested in mefor the role of leland palmer.
and all this time,in the back of my mind, i had sheriff truman in my head.you know, i thought, "yeah, i'd make a goodsheriff truman." but, no, david saw leiand paimer,so i had to look back at the script and see again who leland palmer wasand what he had to do. and i looked at it, and it said that, uh,he gets a phone call, he finds out his daughterhas been killed, and he cries. he goes to, uh, the morgueand identifies his daughter's body. and he cries. um...
a detective is up in his daughter'sbedroom looking for articles and leland's sitting on the bed, crying. and i thought to myself, my goodness,this guy, all he does is cry. i think it was my sister who said, um,"you need to call mom and dad, because they heard that yougot this job with the director who didblue velvet, and i think they just saw it,and i think you need to talk to them." [laughs]
i called up my friend bryan and said,"i'm gonna audition for david lynch. i gotta watch blue velvet. i gottawatch it fast, i gotta watch it fast. i can't be ignorant, you know. and i gotta write downall the questions." um, so we watched itand wrote down all the questions, which i don't remember now,but there was a lot. that's probably why i got the part,because i was so interested in him that he thought i was interesting. i guess.
if he sees something sometimesin an actor that he really likes, sometimes he'll just tailor the rolefor that actor, when in actual fact,it didn't really call for anyone, you know, like that specific actor. i read the script and i knewthat i was this person who, um, isabella rossellinicould have played. i mean, it was probablywith her in mind almost. um, this outsider in a veryincestuous small town. i mean, it wasn't writtena chinese woman from hong kong.
she was written asan italian woman. i just felt it was perfect,it was just perfect for me. and i'm so happy that, um, the producers and the directorwere open to me playing her. bobby:here's a tune for you, gals. norma. i'll see you in my dreams. we wanted to kind ofrecreate the feel of a movie likerebel without a cause.
it was finding young, attractive,interesting people that you hadn't seen before. and one after another,they showed up. again, johanna and her assistants had really surveyed the whole youngactors scene, and so we found people. like james marshalland lara flynn boyle, who was brand-new at that point,and madchen amick. um, in fact, madchen came inand we liked her so much that there wasn't reallya role for her,
and we kind of created the role, um,of shelly out of nothing, because we liked, uh, what shebrought to the party so much. shelly:it's happy hour in france. - come on, cowboy, light my fire.- right. we hadn't found an agent cooper yet.that was, like, a hard nut to crack. and i think i suggested kyle one day.you know, they'd done dune together. and david really liked the idea,and it turned out kyle was so perfect for this kind of nutty,quirky character that we'd created. i sat down with markand we had a nice meeting together.
and i think there was someconcern about my age, which when i look back and i watchsome of the early episodes, i too am kind of, "boy, i was prettyyoung to play this character." but above and beyond all that,i just thought the character was great. had one of the greatest introductionsi think i've ever had into the piece. you know, just, uh, sitting in that car,driving up the mountain. got my dictaphone thing,talking to diane about tuna fish sandwichesor cherry pie or whatever it was, and what i'm gonna do.
it was great because it was givinga little bit of a story, a little bit of plot, but it really established the character,so you had a sense of, "man, this guy is very different. and he's got these differentthings going on." and that was trueall the way through it. all those things were there,were written in. he just jumped off the page,and i think off the screen as well, because he was just written so well. cooper:oh, diane, i almost forgot.
i've got to find out what kind of treesthese are. they're really something. so the casting was a pretty intrinsicpart of the process, and, uh, it contributed a lot to the lookand flavor of the show. we went up and did a scoutin, um, the seattle area together. i remember we drove aroundfor three or four days looking for the right small townthat we'd had in mind. and we'd written somethingvery specific, with all the kind of iconsthat people later knew about the town. they were all there in the script.
and we'd found nothing that resembledwhat we were looking for, until on the final day,we rolled into this little area of snoqualmie, washingtonand issaquah, and it was spooky, becauseeverything that was on the page was suddenly right in front of us. there was the little diner,there was the railroad station, there was the great hotelthat had the waterfall. i mean, we'd written all that. it was as if we'd kind of seen itin a dream or something.
it was pretty spooky. um, so we knew right away that waswhere we were gonna shoot the show. and, um, i think a few weeks later,we went into pre-production up in seattle in the winterof '89, i believe, and, um, had quite an adventuremaking the pilot as well. maclachlan: we filmed the pilot,the entire pilot, in the seattle area. and i'm from yakima, so it wasreally familiar territory to me. a lot of the little towns that wefilmed in were just off the highway that i would travel between schooland home, when i'd go back home.
i mean, it was a little strange, because you're looking at it nowin a kind of a different way. kind of through david's eyesand mark frost's eyes, and kind of what they were seeingand what they were trying to do with this idea of these fantasticdouglas fir trees and the mysteries of the forestand some of the darker themes. we were in the realityof this town, twin peaks. uh, it was cold,huge trees wherever we were. and i remember one night,that first night i got there,
we didn't knowwhat we were getting into. the snow was falling, and it wasjust silent. it was just silent. it was just that eerie feelingthat twin peaks usually gave viewers, and that's the feeling we had. i just remember that we all sort ofhad interesting dreams when we arrived there. you know, it's this old,spiritual, indian land. um, and i think it's the atmosphereof just this forever wetness that we were in.
it was just...it gave all of us strange dreams. interesting, weird, strange dreams. well, being in that environmentwas special for me. i used to go in that area.i used to be a traditional dancer, so i knew a lot of peoplein that whole area up there. and you can just feel, you know... i'm the most un-new-age personin all of... i live in the berkeley area. but you can feel the presenceof the indigenous people, you know. the spirit is still there, especially upin snoqualmie in the falls up there.
it's a very powerful,powerful place, you know. native people believein the power of nature. so being around those falls was, uh,something that i could feel. laurie: i knew the northwest.i'd been up there. when i was in my teens,i took a train ride and fell in love with it. and i thought, one day i'd like tolive on one of those islands. uh, it was like a vacation, actually. and since my part was small,it was... you know, i had a lot of time off,and it was nice.
the people of the small townssurrounding seattle, snoquaimie, carnation, north bend, were, i think, grateful for some ofthe business of having a film crew, not exactly understandingwhat we were doing, which put us all kind ofin the same boat. i'm not aware of any other filmmakingthat was going on in seattle. we weren't competingwith other film, um... other production companies. but we were competing withthe real-world situation
of mills that needed to cut woodand trucks that needed to drive by. and washington state at the timewasn't used to filmmaking. so for us to come inand go to a local police department to say we wanna control thisaccess road or shut down this area, it took a lot of doing. so that was another partof the pre-production process that took more time,well, certainly than it'd be in l.a., because everybody knowshow things are done. but you'd have to explain to people,
"all right, this is what you dowhen you're shooting a scene. it's gotta be quiet,you have to control access." so that was part of what we hadto deal with logistically. we ended up, heh, shooting inthe middle of the worst winter in seattle in like 20 years. we didn't see the sunfor three months. it just went away. and then during filming, we got hitwith kind of 100-year freak weather. we were out in snoqualmieand we were at the cafã©, i remember,
and suddenly this noisestarted happening. and we realized it started to hail. but the hail wasn't even normal size,it was literally as big as baseballs, and vehicles were getting damaged. and then that was the beginningof a blizzard. frost: there was a periodwhere we were out, um, shooting in a kind of remote location. um, it was all the nighttime stuff whichwas up on the top of this mountain. and the crew actually got snowed infor like 48 hours.
the roads were impassable,the freeway shut down, and they didn't even have enough filmto, like, get through the last day. they were shootingwhat are called "short ends," which is what you end up withat the end of a 10-minute magazine. you might have 30 seconds,60 seconds of film left, but not enough for a single take. so there was a day there where davidwas, like, just shooting short rounds, trying to grab a shot here and there. i mean, david was amazing,nothing stopped him. he just...
it didn't matter.he was gonna do what he needed. uh, incredibly inventive abouthow to get the material shot, but it was extraordinarily difficult. the weather just didn't stopgetting terrible. it snowed, it rained, it hailed. uh, it was extraordinarily bad. frost: but i think the weather reallycontributed to the mood of the show. there was one scene in particular, it was one frozen nightup on top of the mountaintop.
it's the final scene betweenjames marshaii and lara flynn boyie, which, basically,all you can see are their faces. and, i mean, he could have shot itin a soundstage, uh, against a black curtain,and you would've had the same effect, but what you ended up getting, they were both freezing to death,and that was what the scene called for, and you could see their breathon camera, and there was a kind of desperationin them both that pumped up the emotionin the scene,
and it never would have happenedon a stage. it was truly an effect that he got out of putting them throughthis ordeal of shooting in... you know, it was 15 degreesat 2:00 in the morning. and, uh, people were just,you know, dying. and he wouldn't let them go inand get warmed up. he wanted to get this feelinghe was going for. it was just interesting watching themtake these two young actors, um, and push them,
you know, just to see what he couldget from them emotionally. even beyond their willingnessas actors, sort of get to who they wereas people. and, um, that was very interestingto watch. very interesting. that was a moment i rememberlooking at the monitor and thinking, "you know, he's really gotsomething special here." uh, particularly in the chemistrybetween those two. and i remember feeling thatthat was a moment that was gonna really catch people.
one particular morning, on asunday morning, we weren't shooting, david asked me to have breakfast,and so we went and had, you know, lots of coffeeand, um, pancakes, as i recall. lots of syrup. and just kind of out of nowhere,david says to me, he says, "say, what would you thinkabout a guy who has some sort of...? you know, some sort of mysterioustattoo on his arm, and he wants to get rid of the tattoo,so he saws his arm off?" [chuckling] i'm thinking,"you've had too much syrup.
this is not healthy." well, what i didn't realize is thatthis was all part of a process. to me, this was disjointed. it hadno connection to anything in reality. it didn't mean anything to the moviewe were working on. until david... somebody at abc said,"you've gotta have a closed ending." you know, it was an open-ended,"who killed laura palmer?" we don't know.we don't answer that question. but the studio said,"if we don't pick it up as a series, then it's going to be airedas a standalone film,
and it must have an ending." because we hadthis weird, uh, confidence that the show was gonnaget picked up, we didn't really put a lotof thought into it. we just thought it's somethingthat's probably never gonna be seen. we've set so many things in motion,it's really ridiculous to try to wrap it upin one two-minute sequence. but if that's what they want,we'll give it to them. we'll create a killer.
and, you know, we had this ideathat it was actually a demon. and so, david went to work, uh,creating this weird way of shooting it, where he's shooting peoplespeaking backwards, moving backwards,and then reversing the film. and he cast, uh, mike andersonas the little man, and brought the characterof this mysterious dwarf into the mix. and i remember we shot itin one day, i think, at a little soundstage in hollywood,and i remember watching it thinking, "this is truly the strangest thingi've ever seen in my life."
i just remember beingin the editing room late, late at night, and film rushes come infrom the lab. and i would put it up on the machine,and i start looking at it and think, "what in the heck is this?this is not in the script. what is this?" the one-armed man,and they're down in this furnace area, and they're lighting candles,and all this stuff, and i think back on the breakfast,uh, with the sawing the arm off. and it was pretty creepy stuff. i started looking over my shoulderand thinking, "well, i don't..."
so i called david, i go,"what is this stuff?" he said, "oh, that's that closed ending.we're gonna have to do that. just don't worry about that now.we'll do that when we get back to l.a." so we came back to los angelesand, um, the movie had been tested, and abc, the report back waseverybody hated the movie, and david should be locked awayand never allowed to work again. you know, sort of the familiar thing with the release ofone of david's projects. and then all of a sudden, um,
word came that, you know,"okay, put the closed ending on it." frost:it's truly bizarre and way too short, and clearly just somethingyou kind of tacked on to the end, uh, to put it all together. but in the seeds of this ideadeveloped the notion of the possession of leland palmer. that whether he was actuallypossessed by a demon, or whether he was just in fact crazyand believed it was a demon, was a question we never reallyfelt compelled to answer.
so that was an ideawe kind of went with. dunham: i personally think thatthe pilot episode of twin peaks is a magnificent movie. we had an opportunity, we screened itat the directors guild one night, a cast-and-crew screening,and it was beautiful on the big screen. just those kind of copper tones, and the movement, and the sound,and the world. and, you know,it was all captured very well. and it was a beautiful experienceto see it up on the big screen.
we all gathered to see this thing,and it was mind-boggling to realize that the little piecesthat we had all been a part of had been put togetherin such a beautiful way to tell this very sad storyof this young woman's death. but it had a lot of humor. and we had a great time watching it. i had already been acting for 10 yearswhen i got twin peaks. and i was used to goingto the screenings of the movie and leaving before the lights came up,because i was so horrified.
and, um, when twin peakswas screened at the directors guild, i picked out a really great outfit,a little white dress, lime-green shoes,and a lime-green leather jacket. knowing that i would leave in the dark,at least i'd look cute. so the lights came upand i was still sitting in my seat. i was just floored. and i've never been in anythingthat cool since. i remember sitting there wondering, "you know, is it more than even i thinkit is, or anybody else thinks it is?
is it something, you know,really special?" i knew that as we were doing the pilot,that it was something very special. i was with a great group of people, and working with david,and we were having a great time. we had a ballshowing up for work every day. but you never really know, you know,what the final product is gonna be, and how it's gonna be, uh, received. and i really was a little bit amazedat, uh, the reaction to it. frost:i was just, you know, blown away.
david had pulled the whole thingstylistically together in a way that i'd never seen before. um, and i knew we were gonna deliversomething really unique. and whether they liked it or notwould be another question, but they certainly gottheir money's worth. and, uh, it turned out they werejust as mesmerized as i'd hoped they would be, and, uh, you know,we were off and running. stewart:it was unique.
it came at a timewhen television was boring. it was on during the week, so the next day,people at work could all talk about it. i mean, there was nothing like iton television. absolutely nothing like it. laurie: i was stunned. i really...you know, that never happens, that a pilot becomes a series. uh, and the people involved, they... i didn't think any of themreally wanted to be in a series.
i didn't think i particularlywanted to be in one myself. but i had signed a contract, and there i was, so i showed upand i had a lot of fun. ferrer: we all had a sensethat we were doing something new, something that hadn't been donebefore, and we all felt, i think,very privileged to be there. abc had seen the pilot,and they liked it. they were puzzled by it,they were intrigued by it.
so they wanted to do a kind ofprovisional order of seven episodes and see what happened. it was, you know,not a full vote of confidence, but it was a partialvote of confidence. so we said, "great, we'll go makethe seven hours." it seemed to methat word of the pickup on the pilot came in probably may,sometime early may. and i believe that, um,we started shooting twin peaks, the series,
sometime in july or august,is my guess. so it was very short pre-production. i called mark.i got his number in the phonebook. i called him up. i said,"how are you? it's richard hoover. remember me?i worked with your dad." and he said, "what are you doing?" i said, "well, i'm out hereslugging it out, trying to be a designer." and he said,"no, what are you doing today?"
he said, "we're doing a series of this.we gotta get going." to do the show economically, wecouldn't go back and shoot in seattle. so we looked around... and, um, not a lot of companieswere doing this at this time. we just... we rented a warehousein the north san fernando valley. about 50,000 square feet. and said, "this is where we're gonnabuild the town of twin peaks. all the interiorsare gonna be in these..." it was one large stageand one small one.
so we went to workcreating the interiors. the sound stage, we werethe first people to ever use it. it was an old milling warehouse on balboa boulevardin the san fernando valley. it has been usedfor many shows since, but we were the oneswho broke it in. so we had to soundproof itto begin with. we had to deal with all the issues of just turning a placeinto a sound stage to begin with.
richard hoover did a wonderful jobwith the sets in making them feel real and like they belonged, and that they were oldand made of wood. hoover: we didn't want to useanything that was fake, so we used real pine and real logsas much as we could. and then we had to spray for termites, but, you know, it gave ita much stronger gestalt in a way, and an energy that we couldn't do with painters,it would take days to fake, uh, the...
and i think that's... that energy was percolatedthroughout every set we tried to do. peyton: the warehouse was fullof all of the sets that we know as twin peaks. and then on a second floor,where mark's office was, bob engels, david's and myself,gregg fienberg, we had all our offices. then there wasthe art department somewhere else. but... so...it was just twin peaks land. you just walked around from one partof twin peaks world to another part
and, you know, within a day,you'd kind of covered a lot of ground, and you'd been in the diner, and you'd beenin the great northern lodge, and you'd beenin agent cooper's room and... you know, so you were around that. the only thing that was missing is the outside ambianceof the great northwest. frost:so the next challenge was: how do we find enough exteriorsin southern california
to match what we had foundwhen we were shooting in seattle? we shot at malibou lake, was one place we found the kind ofdouble for seattle a lot in that area. and up in goldwater canyon, where the tree people arehere in los angeles. a lot of the stuff we'd do at night,for the mystery obviously. so it turned out there were, you know,a good half-dozen places we could go within what they callthe "zone of production" in l.a. that, um, could help us createthat illusion.
and so we set offmaking the first seven episodes. okay. okay. all right. all right. where would you start? i was chosen to do the first episode. not because i hadany directing experience at all, but i think as the editor of the pilot, outside of david and mark,i probably knew the nuances and knew the characters
and the feel and the pacingof that story better than anybody else. so it was kind of a natural selection because i could workwith any of the actors and bring them backto where they were. because this was a long time off between shooting the pilot and then the series coming back, and since it was all the same actors,
it was easy for me to remind people. and so i think that was extremelybeneficial for the actors to bring them backto the world that they occupied when david shot that pilot. i ended up going to the premiereof the pilot with the casting director,johanna ray. she and i were friends, and she had just casta hbo movie for me. so we went together, and i flipped.
i mean, after the screening, i thought, "oh, my goodness, i've never thought about doingseries tv, but this is so unique. if there's any wayyou would even consider me, please, please, i would love to do it." i have only been in twin peaksa short time. but in that time, i have seen decency,honor and dignity. murder is not a faceless event here. it is not a statisticto be tallied up at the end of the day.
laura palmer's death has affectedeach and every man, woman and child, because life has meaning here,every life. that's a way of livingi thought had vanished from the earth, but it hasn't, albert,it's right here in twin peaks. twin peaks became a showthat directors really wanted to work on. and, uh, we got some great talentto come in and do episodes who weren't people you would normallyexpect to be doing them at that point in their careers. glatter: there was somethingunique about twin peaks,
because unlike other serieswhere you have seven days of prep and then you shoot, directors were coming inmonths before, two months before, and hanging out and soaking inthe experience. you know, twin peaks,when you first saw it, was this ever reallygonna make it on the air? i mean, i don't think anyone knewif it was really gonna be aired. so that original seven shows... i don't know if i ever thought minewould be on television.
i just wanted to be a part of the wholeexperience. i loved the world. i loved the music and the characters, and i thoughtit was this fascinating look through almostlife through a keyhole. so i just wanted to be a part of it. david would, uh, allow directorsto really stay involved in the show all the way through post, which i later found outwas absolutely not the norm. twin peaks remainsone of the most director-driven shows.
you were invitedto every color correction. i have the schedule in here. they would tell youwhen every color correction was, when every sound-effects spotting... i mean, you don't understandhow odd this is for television. every adr session, every telecine... and i went to all of them. you know, because it was like...it was like, "yeah, this is mine... if you're gonna offer methis sense of ownership,
i'm gonna come in and i'mgonna do it." i think most of us did. they were all people who had a certainkind of sensibility that... a lot of themcame from the indie world, a lot of them, um,had done kind of edgy films before. i felt those were the peoplewho could really kind of grip the wheels of what we'd setin motion and run with them. and, uh, to a person, i was never disappointedby the work they did. they really hit the mark
and made a big contributionto the way the show evolved. what was wonderfulabout being on the show is you could really make ityour own. it was very much approachedthat these were all separate movies, and you made it your movie. and whatever iconic imageryyou came up with, whether it's the full moon or the raven's eye, you were encouraged to useevery part of your imagination.
and that was incredible fun. unlike a lot of shows, i wantedto give them some creative latitude to bring their own kind of talentand imagination to the show. so consequently, each episodetook on its own importance, its own significance, and could almost stand aloneas an individual kind of entity. each and every episodewas like a one-hour movie. so again, along the line that we wereencouraged to come up with different ways of telling the story,
in the great northern hoteldining room, this was the scene with dale cooperand sherilyn fenn. their breakfast together. and i thought, "you know what? let's have some sort of conventiongoing on in the background. if anyone notices, fine,and if they don't..." so i made itan american indian movement... an aim convention. so it's all native americansin the dining room.
and, you know,someone notices, fine. but then the next show, i thought: "you know what? i'm going to havea cheerleader and band convention." so kyle walks out of an elevator filledwith cheerleaders and tuba players. and this became somethingthat people started to do, which was come up with some sort ofconvention of what's going on in the hotel at the time. and that was great funto come up with. and so with twin peaks,
it was a unbelievablycreative, uh, environment. you could run into a writer's office,or to another director and go, "i have an idea about this.what do you think?" it was quite unique. out of all the directorsthat we worked with, and people that would come and go,and some would come back again, for me, it was the bestwhen david was there. i feel like david encourages oneto go into dark places inside of them and see what's going onand to embrace them,
that that's beautiful,that that's good. he goes off onto placesthat i can't even imagine. i don't even knowhow he's able to do that, or tap into that, or make the imagery that he uses,um, so profound. how he takes itand translates it to cinema. but he does,and we're lucky to have that. i'm very lucky to have the experienceof working with him and being kind of a conduit,i guess, in some ways,
or maybe a guide through his world. creatively, he's wonderful.it's a wonderful place to go. to sort of go outside of what you thinkit's supposed to be like. that's what was so wonderful aboutworking on twin peaks and with david, was thatyou were just allowed to explore. and it certainly made you wannaget up and go into work every day. so it became a sort of bizarrelyspecial place where you'd have thesewonderful directors coming in and all these great actors.
pfft. it was a fantasy. and short-lived,but a tremendous one. it was really, really grand. when twin peaksdebuted on television, i had, like, a party at my house. and bear in mind this is the two-hourpilot that i had nothing to do with. i mean, i wasn't even involvedin the show when it was produced. i remember sitting thereand watching, just going: "oh, my god. this is so great."
and everyone in the roomwas stunned. and there were people there... there was one friend of minewho was an l.a. law guy. and you could see it in them too,it was like: "okay, what just happened on tv?" frost: the numberswere kind of shocking for the pilot. it got numbers that they'd be happyfor the super bowl, to get today. it was way up there. and we instantly knew:
"okay, we're in business." um... and then all this anecdotalkind of response started to drift in with peoplejust being obsessed about the show, and this run on cherry pie that hadhappened around the country and... um, it was just, you know...we caught a wave. it was one of those showsthat everybody watched at the time. it was really sort ofa cultural phenomenon. certainly because in those days,there were only three networks,
so everybodygenerally tended to watch, you know, one show. and people would alwaysbe talking about it the next day. you'd alwaysbe having lunch somewhere and hear people talking about whathad happened, what was going on. dunham: people would meetaround the water cooler or the coffee machine and they would talk about: "did you see that episode last night?"
"what do you make of that?" "what was that all about?" so it was this cultural phenomena that people were fascinated with this storyline and this worldand these characters. a lot of conversation between peopletook place by the water cooler, you know, in every office, heh, in america that next morning. and then, of course, you know,to answer that question:
"who killed laura palmer?" i don't know if there's been a biggerquestion on tv in a weird way. everyone,"who killed laura palmer?" i'm not even sure david and markknew who killed laura palmer. i still don't knowwho killed laura palmer. harry, it's cooper. meet me for breakfast, 7 a.m.,the hotel lobby. i know who killed laura palmer. i do remember that everybodywas so piqued.
everybody's interest was so piquedand they would ask me. i mean, i do remember you know, strangersor friends who would: "what do you know?what's gonna happen? who killed laura palmer?" the funny thing is, everybody thought i knew the answer,or that... i knew nothing.i don't think any of us knew anything. we had maybe ideasor a sense about something,
but i had no idea. i just thank godthat we didn't actually know. because i didn't... i wasn't lying. i didn't have any...i didn't know anything. i think i would've felt pressure if i had actually known something. but thank god we didn't.and so in that sense, it was just funny. it was just so many people thoughtthat we knew. we just got such a giggleabout the fact that we had no idea.
we weren't hiding anything.we literally didn't know. all i know is, um, as great as all the hubbub wasat the time, i was just praying that it wasn't me. making that, um, series,we didn't understand the ramification of what a cult followingaround the globe that it would gather. we didn't realize. we didn't know. i mean, we were just working. we were asked, as a cast,
to go to this affiliate dinnerat the century plaza hotel. it was all the other showswere there with their cast, and they introduced us, and nobody... they had only seen the pilot,i think, at that point. and people were kind of awestruckthat we were there. but we didn't get it. in fact, that was beforethey would send cars for us. so my husband and iwent to this with our volvo, uh, kind of conky and dirty,
and we pulled upin front of the century plaza hotel, and suddenly there were all theseflashbulbs going off. now, i'd been acting all my life, but suddenly the flashbulbsand people shoving, and i said, "what do you think that is?" and marc,the man i'm married to now, said, um: "i think that might be for you." then roseanne barr walked acrossthe parking lot and screamed: "it's the log lady!"
and i thought, "wow, i've reachedanother plateau in my career." it was very strange for me to be out and have to learn how to, you know, deal with all that, with being recognized,or having your anonymity gone, or having to go on talk shows,even that, that was... oh, my gosh. so nervousso much of the time. well, here they are.
it is the most talked about,most written about, most controversial showon television this season. please welcome the castof twin peaks, right here. amick:it was a real frenzy. it was just this clamoringto get a piece of it. because i think in the frenzy, people knew that it wouldbe a part of history somehow. it was... it really, um... it was that impactfulon the american viewers.
the people at sesame streetdid an episode called "twin beaks" where every muppet had two beaks, and there was alistair...cookie monster was eating cherry pie, and they had the kind of musicthat angelo would compose, and it took place in a diner, and my character came outwith two beaks, carrying a log, and the log talked. and it was an amazing experience,because my 3-year-old said: "mommy,there's a bird who looks like you."
and i came running into the room, and there was somebodywith kind of my voice and my glasses, but it was a muppet. coffee shops were having twin peakspie sales and things like that. there were twin peaks partiesat, uh, fraternity houses and things, where people would eat pieand drink coffee and watch the show. they would have, uh,these fake funerals, these laura palmer funeralswhere hundreds of people would go and lay down wrapped in plastic.
and that for me was just like,"wow, that's..." i mean, it just was wacky. they made a line of t-shirts of, um, you know,a piece of cherry pie ã la mode, a big doughnut... a whole series of t-shirtsthat were being sold in westwood. and i didn't know about thisuntil somebody, uh, told me that, um, they had come outthat day and... so i was in westwood, and i sawa woman coming down the street...
and i happen to have this with me. ... wearing my face on her chest. it was such a moment of... whoa. how did this happen? she happened to havevery large breasts, so my face was a little distorted, but it was an amazing experience. there was as much to dowith managing the attention that the showwas gathering
as there was to make the show itself. it was a huge distraction in a way. more and more magazineswould come to the set and we would do photo sessionsfor them. you know, i remember the cast, you know,having to do pictures together for different magazines, or for tv guide and, um... it just got more and more that way.
everything gets out of hand.everything sort of, uh... you know, suddenly the four girlswere on the cover of rolling stone. amick: growing up as a musician'sdaughter, it was a huge deal for me. and again,i went to it with big open eyes, and, wow, this great photographer,great hair and makeup, and this and that and, um... but while i was there, i learnedthat there are other layers to, um, publicity.
and that i didn't learn the lessons yet. and that what position you're in when you're amongst other peopleis a big deal. and i sort of went, "oh, so there's,like, a whole other world that you gotta sort of watch out for and learn what's going on." to me, i just was sort ofjust excited to be there. i'm like, "hey, just throw mein the background." you know, and having a blast doing it.but it was... it was, uh, great.
it's great to have that coverand to be a part of that. so it goes from, uh, you know,trying to just create a series to suddenly you're wrangling people,you know? because they wanna go away,you know? kyle wentand did saturday night live, so then suddenly when you'd alwayshad, uh, kyle from monday to friday, suddenly you had himmonday to wednesday. you'd say,"where is he on thursday?" "he's in new york because they'rerehearsing saturday night live."
they're doing their opening skit,making fun of the show and, uh... it's that strange moment when your work is suddenlyreflected back at you through this fractured mirrorof popular culture, and you realize,"yeah, we've really hit a nerve." dave was standing by a desk talking,and i'm talking to him, and there's a magazine on the desk,and i look down, and he was on the cover of time. he looked down, he looked up,we just kept talking.
it was like... it was like as surrealas the television series. david letterman calledand asked for, um, david, he couldn't do it.kyle, he couldn't do it. kimmy was his third choice. and i could do it, but then at the last minute,i couldn't do it. so then dana was the first one to go. i ended up going laterto do david letterman. i did it twice.
but i think the second timei was really snotty, and he never had me back. all that stuff that happenswhen a series becomes successful um, happened times ten,you know, on twin peaks. it was really unusual. unlike anything i'd ever experienced, and it was just...it was great fun to be a part of. sir, it's time. excuse us,we have got a funeral to get to.
dunham: the public seemed to lovetwin peaks, it was all the rage. everybody was talking abouttwin peaks. "what do you make of it?what's going on?" and then, it came emmy season,award season, and we were very blessed.i think we had 14 nominations. um, it was a great ceremony. it was great for all of usthat were nominated, or all of us that were associatedwith the show. i remember goingand being sort of excited,
it was all new and different to me. and being in the lobbybefore the emmy ceremony began. i was standing therewith bob engels and mark, and we were waiting for davidin our little corner. i looked across the lobby,and there were all the other guys, all the other shows,thirty something, whatever. i realized that we really weren't part ofthat world in any way, shape, or form. and then as the show went on, i realized just how muchwe weren't a part of that world.
you get the feeling it's not gonna beour night when you lose the first one. i had predicted this. you know,the, uh... the emmy academy, the television academy of artsand sciences, whatever they call it, um, is a very traditional,very kind of hidebound organization, and they do not welcome or rewardinnovation. and if you look at the pattern of showsthat have broken the mold, it's usually taken three, four, five times before they're ever actuallyhanded the reward. so everybody wentwith very high expectations.
i told everybody ahead of time,"i think we're gonna get stiffed. i think this is not gonna turn outwhat you might think it's gonna be." so i wasn't particularly surprised. i know a lot of peoplewere disappointed. to me, it kind of reaffirmed our statusas an outside-rebel sort of show. we weren't trying to be conventional, and so why should we expectconventional rewards? that was my perspective on it. and i imagine if the show had lastedtwo or three or four more years
and we had been able to maintain,like, the standard we'd had, that very likely would've come. but it wasn't to be in that first year, and i, for one, wasn't that surprisedor disappointed. actually, we did win two emmysthat night. i won an emmy for editing the pilot, and patti norriswon for production design. i got to be in the national enquireras worst dressed actress. i was wearing a black velvet bustierwith beads and rhinestones
and cutoff jeans with fringe bobby socks and some really cuteblack platform shoes. and i think i had a little black jacket. and leeza gibbons asked mewho i was wearing, and i said: "oh, oh! uh... i don't know, i got it at the mart." and then i went,"no, no, no. no, wait, i got it..."
and then i said the nameof the person, because i didn't knowyou had to do that. "who are you wearing?""oh, it's such and such." later, i found out that you could actually wear somethingand give it back. shooting twin peaks was the ultimate"be here now" experience. one never really knewwhat would happen next. and after a while,we didn't get the entire script, because there was so much secrecyabout who killed laura palmer.
and so we became viewers wondering what was gonna beput together and what was gonna air. so we would all gatherand sit down and watch it, you know, from week to week and wonderwhat's really gonna happen. we'd all get together at a sports bardown on la brea and watch the show. because toward the end,we didn't even have scripts. we had our scene and that's all. we didn't even knowwhat happened in the show.
so we would all get togetherand kind of try to piece it together. i remember one night,we were at dana ashbrook's, having a spaghetti dinner. it was the last episodeof the first season, and we were so excited. it was so full of promise,and everybody was so excited. and it comes to that last scene, and agent cooper opens the doorand he gets shot. [thud]
oh, my god, we thoughtwe had all lost our jobs. ha-ha-ha. my vision of that, uh,last episode in season one was we need a selling toolto get them to buy a second season from us. because clearly there's morewe wanna do here. so i tried to pack in every possiblecliffhanger i could think of but the kitchen sink, or a lady being tied to railroad tracks, from the historyof the nighttime soap.
but in a way, it was a send-upof the idea of the cliffhanger. but in the kind of stylethat we developed for the show, it was also sort of real. i mean, the stakes were realand heightened at the same time. and i directed that last episode,so i was consciously trying to create as much edge-of-the-seat tensionin the network executive as i possibly could, in the hopes of getting themto invite us back for another year. and so, you know, we took itto sort of absurd lengths,
but, uh, it was kind of fun too. i mean, that was the joy of plottinga show like that, was it was so intricateand there were so many moving parts, to try to line up all the pieceswas a real challenge. and that last episode kind ofbrought a lot of things to a head. got a trout on the line, hawk. this one's a keeper. i met david lynch, uh, in 1986. um, at that time,he was shooting blue velvet.
i wrote "the mysteries of love"and i got julee cruise. and then he said, "would youlike to do the score as well?" that was the start of the relationship.as a result, "angelo. uh, i've got this television show." and then invited me to dotwin peaks. angelo is a perfectionist. he's one of the best musiciansi've ever met. his music can make you cry. badalamenti:julee is such a gifted artist.
she's got remarkable flexibility. [singing]falling falling there's a dark elementin all of that music, and that is from david. david actually wasthe primary influence in... in... in setting... in verbalizing a mood to me. this is the keyboard that all the majorthemes were created for twin peaks.
it's an old fender rhodes,and, um, kind of beat-up. and david would sit right over here,right to the right of me. and we would put a little cassettejust about over here on this keyboard, just keep it in record,just keep it playing. david would sit here and i'd say, "well, what do you see, david?what is...? just talk to me." and david would say,"okay, angelo. ahem. we're in a dark woods now. and there's a soft wind blowingthrough some sycamore trees.
and, uh, there's a moon out. and there's some animal soundsin the background. and you can hear the hoot of an owl,and you're in the dark woods. just get me into that beautifuldarkness with the soft wind." and i started playing: and david would say, "angelo, that's great.i love that. that's a good mood. but can you play it slower?" and i'd say, "slower, david? okay."
and i'd go: he says, "that's it.that's a good tempo. just keep it going slow like that. just keep that going for a while." and in david's mind, you can just seethat he was visualizing the description that he envisioned. then he would say, "okay, angelo,now we gotta make a change, because from behind the treein the back of the woods, there's this very lonely girl,
her name is laura palmer,and it's very sad. but get something thatmatches her." and i just segued into this: and he'd say, "well, that's it.it's very beautiful. i can see her. and she's walking towards the cameraand she's coming closer. just keep building it.just keep building it. and she's getting close.now reach some kind of climax." and i would go:
and he'd say, "oh, that's it.oh, that's so beautiful, angelo. oh, that's tearing my heart out. i love that. just keep that going. now she's starting to leave,so fall down. keep falling.keep falling. keep falling. now go back into the dark woods. that's it. keep going. just keep it going. very quiet and mysterious."
david got up and gave me a big hug. he said, "angelo, that's twin peaks." i said, "okay, david, i'ii go homeand i'll work on it." he said, "angelo, don't do a thingand don't change a single note. i see twin peaks." that's how it was done. [humming] may we have this dance?
david said, "do you have anyonethat can sing like an angel?" i knew julee cruise becausewe worked on a show together. and julee was primarily,as far as i knew, a show singer. angelo and i hit it off in a way that he knew i knew music, and that i coulddo just about anything. she came up into the officeand i said: "julee, do you know any singerthat can sing like an angel? a female? i need it to do this song and movie."
and she says,"let me think about it." she called me back the next day,she says, "i don't know of anyone, but maybe i could, you know, put myvoice and sing delicately up there." so i said, "okay, come on in." so she came to my officeon 57th street across carnegie hall. i had a small office therewith a keyboard. and we got a key for her, and she put her tessitura, her range,just in that upper register, and just whispered this thing.
and i said, "well, we gotta go into a studio and just lay this down." and i remember having her very closeon the mic, and she just nailed this. i had a synth track.she sang on top of it. did a mix, brought it to david,and he said, "wow, that's it." working with juleewas just incredible. probably one of my favoritesis "the world spins." [sings]a dog and bird are far away julee just created a sound unto itself. singing david and angelo's music,
i wanna curl up in a fetal positionafterward and just go like this: it takes so much energy out of meto sing "the world spins," to sing "falling." how can you not cry whenyou're singing "the world spins?" maybe it's off key a little bit. that's what makes it different. because i'm choking. because i can't...i don't know what comes first, the drama or the music.
she was just unbelievable. he asked me, and i don't wannashatter people's dreams, but he asked mewhen i was singing "falling"... and i just got married. ... to sing to the person i lovethe most in the world. and that song is sung about rudy, my cocker spaniel. my challenge, you know,was in a very short period of time to write different kinds of music,
and yet as i was writingclassical or jazz or... i try to keep my angelo badalamentiidentity and sound. and there are a few techniquesthat i use. and one, in musical terms,is the use of suspension figures that david, when he heard it,just absolutely loved. he just feels that those...my inner voices... you have something on top,you have something on the bottom, but what you do in the middle,it's kind of beautiful dissonance that sometimes get resolvedand sometimes it doesn't.
[thunder rumbling] it's, uh, quite a compliment to know uh, that you're evokinga special world. and through the years,some people have told me that it was impossible to thinkof twin peaks without hearing the music. well, that really blows my mind. [jazz music playingon speakers] god, i love this music.
isn't it too dreamy? cruise:fame does something to you. they would be in their... in the booth, with their legs up, crossed,talking to hollywood, and i'd be doing like the 80th take of: and it would drive me crazy,and one time i threw a chair, you know, through the windowof the sound booth. and david came in and he said,"julee, i don't like your attitude." [laughing]
he could get me calmed downbetter than anybody. but it would drive me crazy. [sings] tell your heartyou make me cry we had a falling out at one timebecause i said, "i'm not singing with you anymore." because i wasn't allowed to write. i wasn't allowed to do other things. and it took us seven years. i called and i said, "is david there?"
and i said, "this is juiee cruise." and i heard,"david, it's julee, it's julee." and i heard thisclomp, clomp, clomp. and he went, "julee!" and i went, "david, i'm sorry." and he said,"no, no, no, i... no, i'm... no, julee, i'm sorry.i'm sorry. i didn't respect you." and i said, "no, no, david, i'm sorry. i didn't show you the proper respectafter all you've done for me.
i'm really, really sorry. i had an over-inflatedsense of self-worth. you see your name in the paperand you think you're somebody." "no, i'm sorry." "no, i'm sorry.""no, i'm sorry." "no, i'm sorry." and we started laughing. ha, ha. but it was quite emotional. [singing] i want yourocking back inside my heart i want yourocking back inside my heart there are so many funny storiesabout twin peaks.
and my favorite is, uh, when i wasworking with paul mccartney. i got a call from his officesaying that paul would like me to come to abbey roadand work with him, and do an arrangement orchestrationon one of his songs. so i go out to the studioson abbey road, and it's just me and paulin the studio with an orchestra. and as i'm rehearsing,paul comes over to me and says, "angelo, stop the orchestra,i must tell you this story." he said, "i was asked bythe queen's office
to perform 35 minutes of my music to help celebrate her birthdayat buckingham palace. so i'm very excited about it,and here comes the night, and, um, i'm about to go on. and the queen kind of walks by meand says, 'oh, mr. mccartney. it was just so lovelyto see you tonight."' and he says, "well, your highness,i am so delighted that you invited meto help celebrate your birthday. and i'm now going to perform for you35 minutes of my best works."
she said, "oh, mr. mccartney,i'm sorry, but i can't stay." and paul says,"but, your highness..." "oh, mr. mccartney, don't you see?it's five minutes of 8. i must go upstairsand watch twin peaks." and paul... paul turned around, and i was standingon the conductor's stand, and he punched mewith his right arm right here. and he made me... and he useda few choice english words. ha, ha. he said, "because of yourblah, blah, blah show, twin peaks,
i could not perform for the queen." fantastic story. i was very happy to get two or threeemmy nominations. and this was very funny,because we were at the emmy's, me and my wife and david. and david was greatwhen it came to the announcing, "okay, and now for the best musicof a television show, series..." and david was unbelievable.he sat next to me, and he gets up, and he says,"okay, everybody, get up, get up.
um, uh, let's make way for angelo,because angelo is gonna go up there." and he's moving chairs. the bottom line is another televisionshow wins, you know? but then came the grammy's,and i'm happy to say that i won the grammy,and that was especially exciting, you know, becausei was up against stanley jordan, phil collins, and quincy jones,so, uh, i didn't think i stood a chance. being nominated is fun and it's great,and i think most people would say we psyche ourselves or we trulybelieve it's great to be nominated.
but there ain't nothing like winning. it just... it's a whole other kind of thing.it was great. just being a part of twin peaksis enough for me. it's enough.i already made my mark. i don't have to try. it just happened. you never knowwhat's gonna come along. you plan your life out, you never knowwhat's gonna come along. [singing]then i saw
your smile badalamenti:twin peaks, i think, will always endure, because twin peaks is a beautiful, dark, strange, off-center world that you can enterand wrap yourself up in, and yet knowing that you'resafe and secure as you're watchingthis disturbing dream while you're lyingon your living room couch.
it was a great experienceworking with david. and on a one-on-one level, what a fantastic mentor to have. i made television history. and i was a little part of it,but i was a part of it. are we falling in love? andy [over phone]:agent cooper? it's andy. can you hear me?
dunham: season two was differentthan season one. season one hadthis kind of momentum. this force was moving twin peaks,and it was... every script was newand interesting and crazy and... you know, who killed laura palmer? then season two came along. and i'm not quite sure, you know,where the wheels fell off the cart, but it sort of did. it felt like there was justa lot of people pulling and pushing,
and i think paying almosttoo much attention to it. fienberg: they sort of forceda creative issue upon mark and david that really was unfair and probablywas the undoing of the show. david and i kind of knewfrom the beginning that leland was the murderer. i mean, that was never really,um, that big an issue for us. we'd never told anothersingle person. it was one of those, you know,kind of boy scout blood oaths we just knew we had to keep.
and keeping it through the whole startof the second season became more challenging. we would only get pieces of scripts,so that we didn't have the burden to keep the secret,which i think was really smart. it was weird how people feltthey were entitled to know. this was a trade secret. this wasn't like something thatyou just casually let slip. so we took extraordinarymeasures to protect it. i had all sorts of ways of doing this.we had to number the scripts.
i actually wrote some fake scenesthat i circulated around. a lot of times you would shoot things,and you didn't know if it was the real scene thatwas really gonna be put in it or not. so it sort of created for us actors, too,that we became viewers. i was just as much an audienceand a fan as anybody else, even though i was workingon the inside. and so when we did find outand it was revealed who it was, it was almost likeit had to have a release in a way. you know, we had to find out.
as an audience, you know,as a culture, we needed to knowat that point in time. it was a well-guarded secretthat was hung on to a long time, but i know that the whole psycheof the nation was gonna burst if somebody didn't tell us who it was. [screaming] in that very powerful episode,the first episode of season two, when we didn't find out, i thinkthere was a little backlash from people being disappointed thatthey had to hang on and not know.
we didn't ever want to give it away,and i think the network was finally like, "you gotta reveal who killedlaura palmer," and it was like... it may have been the death knellof the show. you know, because it was reallymaybe a question that never should havebeen answered. i know david wanted to hold offas long as possible. i mean, that's become sort ofthe storyline about that. but i think the two of themreally had a plan and they stuck to it. harry, when albert finishes upat the great northern,
we'll meet back at the station. i'm ready to lay the whole thing out. - rocks and bottles?- chalk and blackboard will be just fine. we had planned to shootthree different endings, revealing three different killers. and i believe it was gonna berichard beymer, leland and dr. jacoby. jacoby. i didn't figure he had anythingto do with this at all.
i remember taking the three of theminto my office and sitting them down and saying,"the killer is in the room here with us." we didn't even tell themwho it was gonna be, but we did tell themthat it was one of the three. it was like an episode ofi've got a secret. and they were all kind of stunnedthat it could be them. and i think we went so faras to even shoot the scene where each of them was revealed. so i went on to shoot that show,
where my character of lelandkills maddy, and also the characterben horne kills maddy, and also bob kills maddy. because david and markdidn't want any of the crew even to know who the real killer was. so we all threehad to kill her that day. and poor sheryl lee,i mean, she got, uh... she got pummeledfor about 14 hours that day. lee:that was a long day of work.
that was a very long physical, um... physical day of work. thank godi was working with such great actors that were so, sort of, respectfulin that kind of a situation. because it does emotionally...after being beat up and killed all day, it kind of gets under your skina little bit. we had to edit both endings. we had to cut the negativewith both endings. and we mixed the showwith both endings. and i believe thatthe decision was made
after we had mixedand color-corrected both versions that one ending was cutonto the show before it was delivered to the network,and that was it. finally i think we sat down with rayand told him it was him alone. i remember when he went there,it was a sad day, because you realizeit's not just that he learned that he killed laura palmer,which was a parlor game, but also that he was leaving the show,because his character was dying. so i think that there was...you know, that was...
and i think david wassomeone who loves actors, and they return that love, and that was not a conversationthat he was eager to have. david just leaned over and he put hishand on my knee and he said, um, "ray, it's you. it was always you." and i remember hearing that, processing it for a second,and then thinking, "oh, no. no, no, no." i'll never forget the look on his face.he was absolutely astonished
and kind of horrified. i mean, he'd really...you know, he'd... he bit into that rolewith a kind of ferocious dedication, and, um, the realization that he hadkilled his daughter hit him pretty hard. at that time,i had a baby daughter of my own. we had my daughter in 1987. and, um, the thought of my being the killer of my own daughteron the show was almost incomprehensible to me,
and was certainlysomething very distasteful to me. and, uh, so i didn't want it to be mein the worst way. it was crushing. i didn't want it to be me. i knew that if it was me,i would have to leave town. and, uh, at that time,the series was still quite popular, so, you know, i didn't wanna wavebye-bye to a great character and a wonderful gig,a wonderful job. the kind of job that comes alongmaybe once in a lifetime in a career.
so all those thoughtsare going through my head. and i remembermaybe verbalizing a little bit of, "oh, man, no.i was hoping it wouldn't be me." david said, "but don't worry,ray, don't worry. we have it all worked out." he said, "it's gonna bea beautiful thing. it's gonna be a beautiful thing." and then he proceededto tell me a little bit about, uh, the way we would indeedhandle the end of leland palmer.
and, um, it did soundvery good to me. i still think his performancein those final few hours was one of the best thingsthe show ever did, and honestlyone of the best performances of any actor i've ever worked with. it was just... it was aferociously committed performance. laura. i killed her. oh, my god, i killed my daughter.
i didn't know. forgive me. so, you know, there it was.there was the... there was the coin of the realmkind of finally revealed. and i think ray really lived upto what we'd had in mind, and i felt that that storyline really hadthe payoff that it kind of demanded. maclachlan:ray was so good. that was a pretty heavy... it felt like that's the show.we'd finished.
and all of us kind of going,"gee, do you really think we should be solving this murder?" ehh. maybe not. amick:as much as i heard everywhere i went, i don't think anybody was very happyto find out who it was. they liked to want to know,not necessarily to know. for me, the best showswere up until that point. up until when laura palmer'smurderer was revealed.
you know, because you havethis incredible sense of suspense and secrets untoldand what was gonna be revealed, but to me, after that,it didn't have the same driving force. engels: laura palmer's deathor murder made everybody suspect. so everyone's reaction to itmade it fascinating. and i think by solving the murder,you took the whole bottom out of it. it took laura palmer out of the picture,and that was such an idealized thought that i think when that disappeared,um, it lost the tension, the dramatic tension therethat was hard to recapture.
i knew we were gonna kind offall off a cliff after this had happened, that there had been so much interestand it had been such a consuming part of why the showhad appealed to people, um, that it was gonnabe almost impossible to find somethingof equal interest right away um, to get you going again. we did have a story arckind of mapped out of a consummation of a relationshipbetween cooper and audrey horne. and that was gonna bethe next big thing.
and then for reasons that i don'twanna go into, that didn't work out. my name is audrey horne. federal bureau of investigationspecial agent dale cooper. i think that was not gonna happenfor interpersonal... heh. the intramurals of the show. uh, that wasn't gonna happen. they made the decisionto switch things around, which i was really disappointed, because i was not interested in kyleas a man, but audrey loved him.
you know, i was really intobeing in those scenes, and i thought we hadfun chemistry, so, um... i don't know, i guess chalk it upto unrequited love. i wasn't really kind of crazywith that idea. i thought if we're gonna sell the ideathat she's in high school, i thought, "well, ha-ha-ha, mm, that might not really bethe best place for cooper to go." that isn't to say he didn't think about it.i mean, she was pretty sexy, but... i didn't feel likeit was really quite appropriate.
frost: so we had to come upwith something else. so, uh, we turned to this old adversaryof cooper's, windom earle. mark came in and told us,"this is what we do next. we have this character,windom earle, and then bob's friendis gonna come in." so that's really how that happened. and he was fun to write becausehe was such a bizarre character, and sometimes i thinkprobably too bizarre. but it was always a pleasureto write for him,
because you were writingthese kind of insane speeches that were very kind offlorid and rhetorical, and as a writer,that's always fun to do. and easy to do too much of,i suppose. i cannot tolerate peoplewho do not play by the rules. - people who shirk the standards!- unh! many people are going to regret this. deschanel:i thought the show had sort of
changed its tone to some extent, and had sort of veered offinto another direction that i didn't find nearly as interesting. you know, i supposeit was inevitable once you found outwho killed laura palmer, you needed to developother episodes. but i just thoughtthere was such a wealth of... you know, of sort of underpinnings to a lot of the characterswho'd been developed
that could have been,you know, expanded and changed. i mean, we were talking earlierabout the idea, "well, maybe audreybecomes pregnant, or maybe she would become...maybe she were killed, or one of the other charactersran away and something." i mean, i thought, you know,rather than expand it and add new characterswho were being abducted by aliens and developedsuperhuman strength, i thought you could takea lot of the original characters
and follow their stories and developsomething much more interesting than i thought where the showwas going towards the end. yeah, people were frustratedas we got into the second season and as the second seasonprogressed, i think, um... i remember watching the showswhen they would come on, when they would air, and after about, you know,three minutes of guest-star cast list, i would be really,you know, frustrated. and i said, "you know, we had sucha phenomenal core cast of people,
why don't we just stay in town,if you know what i mean?" robertson: i thought the wholesecond season pretty much sucked. i didn't... i stopped watching. because i didn't knowwho anyone was. who was that lady that jameswas with, and who was the...? huh? there was that little animal,the pine weasel. the little pine weasel is about to becomea household word. oh, no.
[continues screaming] oh, god. that seemed liked itsort of came from the wrong show, but, you know, that's what happens. the storyline started to spiralin all kinds of different ways, and i don't know what caused that. i know that mark's attentionwas somewhat taken by his project storyville. i know david was... his attention, uh,you know, was taken by wild at heart and other endeavors as well.
and i think people startedlosing interest. i think the public startedlosing interest, and i think some of usstarted losing interest. what struck meimmediately was, um, how everybodyseems to be in a trance. and first i thought, "oh, that'sdavid lynch doing his thing." and afterwards i realized it was justbecause everybody was so overworked working day and nighton this project. i'm dog tired.
a man can only go so longwithout submitting to a period of rest. for as we know from experiments conducted on american gi'sduring the korean war, sleep deprivation is a one-way ticketto temporary psychosis. and i'm working on a three-day jag. television is really difficult. i mean, it's a lot of work, you know,to put on a show every week. and, you know, the people who do thathave a real obsession with television. i think david was much moreinterested in getting back
into doing the featuresthat he really was great at doing. and, uh, you know, he probablyhad tired of these characters. i mean, who knows?i mean, you'd have to ask david. but the reality is that, you know,it's a real killer schedule for people, and unless you're really obsessedwith doing that television, you know, and working 24 hours a dayfor nine months out of the year to get these shows outand supervise them and make sure that they sort ofrepresent your vision of it, it's pretty hard to do,and i think david probably tired of it,
and it was easier to turn it overto some other producers who maybe didn't havethe same vision that he would have hadif he had been supervising it. they really weren't therethe way they had been at the very beginning of twoand season one, you know. they were all going onto their next creative challenge. and it became a very hard show,i think, to keep together. to be perfectly honest,it became more like a tv show. it became more like...
david wasn't that involvedwith it anymore, and he pours so much... i mean, the first seven episodesare basic little films. i mean, he's pouring his heartand soul into this thing. and so you could tell,the quality just went, whoo. and then as the episodeskind of kept going, it got a little more jokey and hokey, and, in my opinion,a little less believable. i think sometimes peoplecame on to the show
and would just do "weird" thingsfor the sake of being weird. and i don't think... i feel that that partof david's work is soul-based and it's a part of his truthon some very personal level, and it's not, "let's just shock-valueand be weird for being weird." the show wouldn't have beena success if that's what it was about. it had a bottom of truth. i think as it went on,it became closer to... you know, to the television that you...the normal experience of it, where it seems suddenlynot to have quite that sense
and feeling of creativity and timeand anything was possible. and so i think everybodywas getting weary and tired. and so i guess, you know, from that point of view,i didn't know if it would continue. i know you wanna hope for the best,but you ought to prepare for the worst. oh, dear. abc had always beenuncomfortable with the show. it had never really fit into their moldof what a tv show should be. you know, they'd been boughtby cap cities at that point,
and i think the executivesat that company, which were very conservativeand very traditional, were very uncomfortablewith the show. so we faced a lot of pressureand a lot of uphill battles. abc was never, ever readyfor twin peaks. and, um, i don't thinkthey really knew what they had, and i certainly don't thinkthey knew quite how to handle it. one of the few thingsthat i think of in bitterness about my film careerwas the way abc treated twin peaks
by shuffling it around the schedule and basicallybringing about its demise. they moved it from thursday night,to that kind of water-cooler effect where people could get togetherat the office on friday and talk about it, to saturday night,and it didn't go over so well, because then we didn't havethat next-day phenomenon. they kept moving it around.no one knew when it was on. so all the people,the public would say to us, "we can't watch it,because it's not on."
"yes, it is.it's on sunday mornings at 8 now." "oh, okay.we'll watch before we go to church." that coincided with this weird thingthat we ran into with the start of the gulf war,which pre-empted us for, if i'm not mistaken,something like six out of eight weeks. and it became very, very difficultto sustain the same kind of momentum when people couldn't pick upthe threads of the story again. so, you know,we had some problems on our end in ramping up a new storyright away.
and that combined with beingpre-empted a lot during that period, there was a falloff in the numbers, and that was kind of the beginningof the end with abc. the audience, it's so difficult.once you lose them, you know, pfft. it's hard to get them back. if i'd had a chance todo it over again, i think i would've gone backand tried to restructure that to get earle as a bigger, broader,more threatening presence in episodes ten, 11, 12,to try to bridge that gap of interest,
because i think that's partlywhere we kind of let our audience down a little bit. that we didn't just come inwith guns blazing on the second story. we tried to introduce itkind of gradually. and we had a lot of funny stuff,we had a lot of interesting stuff, but we hadn't really hit on the kind ofriveting spine that the show needed until the windom earle storyreally kicked up. and then i think we really hitanother kind of stride with the show late in that season.
now, i had gone offto direct a movie. david had been goneto direct a movie. and, you know, we hadn't been thereto shape it for a few episodes. so it got...it went a little bit off-track, and we really felt a needto pull it back, um, toward the end. and i felt like we'd done that, that the last couple of hours inthe second season are pretty powerful. and, um, what we had set upwas a great dilemma for season three, with cooper becoming in effect,you know, the hero and the villain,
which is where we weregonna go with it. coop? coop. struycken:the very last episode was the wildest pieceof movie-making or tv-making that i have ever witnessedand i think will ever witness. as far as i could tell,it was completely improvised. we shot through the night. i think we were done somewherein the morning or so.
and there were all these strangethings happening on the set. david devised this idea of us,you know, speaking backwards. once we got to the other sideof the curtain, you know, and the sort of hellish place,you know. and mike andersonwas the expert on that. apparently he had made a study of itin junior high school, and he taught all his friendshow to speak backwards. and it's not easy, because... you know, you might think it is,but when you come to a diphthong
and there are three or four differentsounds in a vowel to reverse that,you really have to think about it. otherwise it comes backand it doesn't sound like anything. they're reciting the linesphonetically backwards. they're moving backwards. and david just knew what thiswas gonna look like somehow. maclachlan:that was one where we just sort of put our trust in david, really. and said okay and, you know...
somehow your mind sort ofdoesn't flow that way, obviously. so it was like,"okay, i gotta end up here, then i gotta be here in the middle,back here at the end, and i gotta make surethat everything is backwards, and how do you...?"so it became kind of a mental puzzle. if you give me your soul,i let annie live. i will. i think there was a sense, you know,based on ratings or whatever, that this may be the last one.
but david certainly went out thereand just, pfft, blew the doors off and did the episode, becausethe script that we had put together, i don't know if he threw it outor just put it on a table, but, i mean, what he didwas much different, and again brilliant. so i think maybe davidon some level may have known, "this is how i'm gonna go out." we just sort of threw in thekitchen sink again in that last episode and said, "well, if we're gonna go out,we're gonna go out with a bang, and again try to createa sort of cliffhanger
that people are gonna wannacome back and see what happens." and that's what we did.we did our part. and, you know, then it, um... then it died a slowand inglorious death. i never thought there would be aseason one, let alone a season two. i'm not sure... i don't think anybodyever imagined a season three. i don't think we thoughtthere was gonna be a third season. i think... you know,you make plans for it, we had some interesting thoughts,
everybody had interesting thoughtsabout what to do for a third season. but i think... i think, um... i think we were done. you know, david and ihad both been kind of distracted during parts of the second season that we would have come backto season three with a kind of reneweddedication to it. and i had started to map out,um, some territory that i thought would have beenpretty interesting
for where the show would go,that would have brought us back to what people had likedabout the show originally, which was it's really an examination of the nature of good and evilin people's hearts, and how you don't have togo to a big city or famous charactersto find that kind of divide, that the human heart is capableof incredible goodness and remarkable darkness. and that's a theme that david and i
have both exploredin other work that we've done, and, you know,really examined it here together. season three, i think, would have gonefurther into that heart of darkness, in looking at what happenedwith agent cooper, with a guy who had beenthe personification of kind of the light side of things,having to confront that within himself. and i was always disappointedwe never got a chance to do that. it would have been a lot of fun,and i know fans of the show would have really gottena kick out of it.
the thing that i think is extraordinaryis that the show, even though it sort of lost its way andgot a little fragmented and fractured, began to come back together againtowards the end, but by that time it was too late. but that the power of thosefirst few shows and some of the other onesfrom the second season were such that peopleremember that, you know, and it still has a huge resonance. neel: it wasbreakaway television. it was, um...
it had a style all unto its own.it was very distinctive. the characters were all,uh, really well-defined, and really, you know,just interesting to look at, and the story was... you know, the story was unusual, but it was mostly the charactersand the style that i think carried it. just the whole combinationwas so radically different than anything else thatwas on television at the time, and that's what i thinkis good for television.
it helps it to be breakaway,it helps it to be different, it helps it to be, uh, non-formulaic. and twin peaks, you know,was not a formula show at all, and it was still highly successful. i'm very proud to be a part of it,because i really, um, feel that it influenced televisionso drastically from the time that it was on till now,we're still seeing echoes of it. i think all of us have a sense of pridefor working on the show. i mean, it's been 15 years,and i still... people still...
i told them what i'd been working on, and when i say twin peaks,their faces light up. and my face lights up still. wise:i've always sort of felt that twin peaks was meant to burn very brightlyfor a short period of time. almost like a comet,you know, that goes across the sky. very hot, very intense,very passionate. and then burn out and disappear. that's our man.