<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p>\nMarc Almond and Gene Pitney have knocked Jason and Kylie off the top of the UK charts. Reagan has just left the White House. The last Soviet tanks are rolling out of Afghanistan. Madonna is filing for divorce from Sean Penn. Ayatollah Khomeini has slapped a $3million bounty on Salman Rushdie\u2019s head. The poll tax that will bring down Margaret Thatcher is a month away from being introduced. <\/p>\n
Oblivious to these international convulsions, a small grey-brown wren, native to Washington State, cocks its head. A sawmill belches smoke. Machines whirr, giant rusty cogs spin, sparks spray. A forlorn town sign, crudely painted with two mountaintops, stands against a background of Douglas Firs. Music swells. Water falls. <\/p>\n
Lumberjack Pete Martell says goodbye to his indifferent wife and steps outside their lakeside lodge into the crisp North Western morning. \u201cThe lonesome foghorn blows,\u201d he murmurs to himself. On the shore, next to a massive fallen tree bleached to concrete by the elements, Martell sees a white bundle. He edges closer. The package has come unstuck like some vile, abandoned birthday present. It’s a human parcel, tied with string round the torso and at the knees. A golden spray of hair tumbles from the nearest end. Martell begins to shake uncontrollably. He calls the sheriff’s office, trying to figure this thing, this terrible thing, but can’t find the words. \u201cShe’s \/\/de-e-ead\/\/,\u201d he cries in a wavering voice. \u201cWra-a-a-apped in pla-a-stic…\u201d<\/p>\n
So begins the pilot episode of Twin Peaks.<\/em> The director is David Lynch. The girl is Laura Palmer. And, as of the show\u2019s debut on ABC in April 1990, not only is she Homecoming Queen of the local high school and the apple of her father\u2019s eye, she’s the most famous corpse in television history. Each week, millions will tune in to watch FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) find her killer\u2026 <\/p>\nLynch and screenwriter Mark Frost were struggling. For three years the pair had been working on a film adaptation of Goddess<\/em>, the best-selling biography of Marilyn Monroe. After a trio of dark, challenging outings (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man<\/em> and Blue Velvet<\/em>) Lynch was keen to edge towards something a little more mainstream \u2013 and Goddess fitted the bill. But it just wasn’t gelling. \u201cI loved the story of this woman in trouble,\u201d says Lynch, \u201cbut I didn’t know if I liked it being a real story.\u201d <\/p>\nWhen the studio refused their script, the duo\u2019s agent, Tony Krantz, had an idea. Frost had been involved with the hit cop series Hill Street Blues<\/em>, and Krantz suggested they collaborate instead on a TV project. At the back of Krantz\u2019s mind was Peyton Place \u2013 the torrid 60s soap juggernaut in which illicit passions, insanity, murder and secrets ran amok. Lynch and Frost loved the idea of a soap opera with bite, and came up with a new idea they called Northwest Passage<\/em>, which they took to ABC in 1988. \u201cWe just described a murder-mystery loosely set in a small town in the Pacific north-west,\u201d says Frost. \u201cAnd that was about all we had at that point. We said we wanted it to have the feel of a lush 50s melodrama; David made some strange motions with his hand as he described the wind. And they seemed to like that.\u201d<\/p>\nSix months later, ABC greenlit the pilot. And in a booth at DuPar’s coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard in downtown LA, Lynch and Frost came up with the newly christened Twin Peaks<\/em>\u2019 most enduring image: a girl\u2019s body bound in plastic sheeting. \u201cWe developed the town before the people,\u201d explains Frost. \u201cWe drew a map. We knew it had a lake and a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.\u201d Lynch continues: \u201cWe knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.\u201d Frost admits that it took them a while to solve the murder: \u201cWe had to know the town before we could make up a list of suspects. Only after we knew most of its people was the killer revealed to us.\u201d <\/p>\nThough its roots were in the soaps of the past, the action would take place just one year before Twin Peaks<\/em> aired; in this fictional world, Laura Palmer drew her last breath in the early hours of 24th February 1989. \u201cWe always felt it should be in the present,\u201d says Frost, \u201cbut that it should have a kind of timeless feel, as small towns in America often do. This is a place where time has stood still for a while.\u201d Having grown up in a succession of Montanan small towns, Lynch was only too familiar with the atmosphere it needed. \u201cI love a small town,\u201d he smiles. \u201cBut it has to be a certain size<\/em>. It can’t be too<\/em> small. It has to be big enough so that you don’t know everybody and yet there’s these pleasant places and then strange secrets and sickness there as well.\u201d <\/p>\nThe crime-solving elements came from Frost, a longtime fan of Arthur Conan Doyle. Thanks to him, the series\u2019 hero emerged as Agent Cooper, Sherlock Holmes with Bryl-cremed black hair and a biscuit-coloured macintosh. \u201cWhen you come down to it,\u201d ponders Frost, \u201cthe art of the detective is pretty basic. Whatever period you’re in it’s ratiocination, deductive and inductive reasoning, and then a smattering \u2013 sometimes mysterious \u2013 of intuition. Though I think we pumped intuition a little bit more than people were used to seeing!\u201d Cooper\u2019s unorthodox methods of investigation involved mystical Tibetan and Native American shamanism, and visions in his bedroom of a helpful giant in a bow-tie.<\/p>\n
The Twin Peaks<\/em> pilot was written in just nine days and shot in 23. Lynch embraced the chaos of such a fast turnaround. Mistakes ended up in the show \u2013 like a flickering fluorescent light that distracted one extra so much that when McLachlan asked him to leave the room he inexplicably answered, \u201cJim\u201d, his real name. Lynch loved that. But not as much as he loved a scene in which Laura Palmer’s mother Sarah (a skull-faced Grace Zabriskie) looked into her daughter’s bedroom. Set-dresser and sometime actor Frank Silva had been moving furniture, and Lynch shot some footage of him crouched at the foot of Laura’s bed. At this point, Lynch had no idea what he’d be doing with it. Later, he shot a scene in which Sarah Palmer wakes up screaming. It was ruined because a crewmember was visible in a nearby mirror. The crewmember was Silva; and the film’s supernatural villain, Bob, was born. <\/p>\nLynch always planned Twin Peaks<\/em> to be the soap to end them all; a show so twisted that even its own soap-within-a-soap, Invitation To Love<\/em>, was eventually phased out because it exhausted the writers. \u201cI really like soap operas,\u201d he explains. \u201cI got hooked when I was printing engravings at art school. This lady I was printing with was so completely addicted to two particular soaps \u2013 Another World<\/em> and The Edge Of Night<\/em> \u2013 that I got hooked as well. I dug them. But the frustrating thing about them is that they draw the smallest torments out forever. It works, but it’s frustrating.\u201d <\/p>\nFor Twin Peaks, Lynch didn\u2019t want drawn-out torments. He wanted detail. And lots of it. He daydreamed about a mysterious red curtained room, which he put into the show. There, Agent Cooper encounters the Man From Another Place, a dwarf dressed in a red three-piece suit and brown cowboy boots, who dances a funny little jive, feeding Cooper lines like \u201cWhen you see me again, it won’t be me\u201d and \u201cThat gum you like is coming back in style\u201d. To achieve the strange-sounding dialogue, diminutive actor Michael J Anderson had to say his lines backwards for them to be flipped around in the edit. For most performers it would have been a Herculean task but, bizarrely, Anderson had actually used backward-speak as a secret language with his school friends. What Anderson did have a problem with, however, were last-minute scenes that he believed had \u201cno context\u201d. He even claims to have heard Lynch in the edit suite whooping, \u201cI’ll betcha that’s what I meant by that!\u201d <\/p>\n
McLachlan, who had previously starred in Dune<\/em> and Blue Velvet<\/em>, knew Lynch better than anyone. \u201cWhenever David would come in and do an episode,\u201d he remembers, \u201cthe script would just end up being destroyed. He would take out pages, we\u2019d rearrange scenes, we\u2019d change dialogue. I mean, we\u2019d just completely bastardise what we had. And that was fun. It really felt like the inmates were taking over the asylum for a week, which he enjoyed as well. But it was always with a purpose.\u201d<\/p>\nWhen it came to the Twin Peaks<\/em> score, Lynch was just as purposeful. He brought in composer Angelo Badalamenti \u2013 Isabella Rossellini’s music coach from Blue Velvet<\/em> \u2013 and together they created a nightmarish wall of sound, alternately mournful and playful, with 50s fingerclicks, Roy Orbison guitar licks and snare-drum shuffles. \u201cDavid would say that the music should begin very dark and slow,\u201d recalls Badalamenti. \u201cHe said, \u2018Imagine you’re alone in the woods at night and you hear only the sound of wind, and possibly the soft cry of an animal.\u2019 I’d start playing and David would say, \u2018That’s it, that’s it! Now keep playing for a minute, but get ready for a change because now you see a beautiful girl. She’s coming out from behind a tree, she\u2019s all alone and troubled, so now go into a beautiful melody that climbs ever so slowly until it reaches a climax. Let it tear your heart out…\u2019\u201d Not a single note was ever changed.<\/p>\nWhen it debuted in April 1990, facing off against Cheers<\/em> in a Thursday-night slot that had been tough to Dynasty<\/em> and killed off The Colbys<\/em>, the pilot took a third of the available viewing audience. This show had everything; deliberately steeped in teenage sex, it made instant pin-ups of the sultry Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), the demure Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and the moody bad-boy Bobby (Dana Ashbrook). At its height it was watched by 35 million Americans. \u201cWe were in exact the right place, at the right network, at the right time,\u201d believes Frost. <\/p>\nInevitably, though, the moment couldn’t last. Frost and Lynch had resisted constant network pressure to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer, ensuring that Twin Peaks<\/em> was commissioned for a second season. And then \u2013 in episode 16 of series two \u2013 they caved in. \u201cThe question of what happened to Laura Palmer was the goose that laid the golden egg,\u201d Lynch says. \u201cThen ABC asked us to snip the goose’s head off, and it killed the goose. And there went everything.<\/p>\n\u201cThe murder of Laura Palmer was the centre of the story,\u201d he continues, \u201cthe thing around which all the show’s other elements revolved, like a sun in a little solar system. It was not supposed to get solved. The idea was for it to recede a bit into the background, and the foreground would be that week’s show. But the mystery of the death of Laura Palmer would stay alive. And it’s true: as soon as that was over, it was basically the end. There were a couple of moments later when a wind of that mystery, a wind from that other world, would come blowing back in, but it just wasn’t the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lynch\u2019s hunch was right. With the murder solved, the audience lost interest. And so did ABC, who finally put it on \u201cindefinite hiatus\u201d in February 1991. Bowing to massive fan demand, the network agreed to six more shows, including a brilliantly baffling final episode in June 1991, directed by Lynch. It was both too much and not enough. Lynch being Lynch just walked away. \u201cI left it because you can’t do everything,\u201d he shrugs. \u201cI have misgivings about the way it went but I still \u2013 and always will \u2013 love that world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Words:Damon Wise<\/p>\n
A full version of this article first appeared in<\/em> Wonderland #17, Feb\/Mar 2009<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On February 24th 2009, it\u2019s twenty years since the body of Laura Palmer was found in a plastic shroud on a lonely lakeshore. Dwarves, tight angora sweaters, cherry pie, one-armed men and talking logs\u2026 Welcome To Twin Peaks: Population 51,201. Wonderland revisits the best TV series ever made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9416],"tags":[161,191,84,168,193,192],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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