Now everyone is going to think that I'm left-handed.
That's good. My true identity will be concealed.
I don't want to give too much away.
No. Keep it secret.
- We had the phone in our hands... - Yeah, we were waiting
- Because remember the... - Got a dial tone now.
I was going to say that's kind of annoying.
I called the number of the hotel.
And we're waiting, waiting, waiting...
- And Frost was in New York. - That's right.
I went through a couple of things.
I looked at "Superman", where he flies around the World Trade Center.
I looked at the opening sequence of the "Sopranos"
and there was a big shot of the World Trade Center.
And "X-Men" - at the end when they're on the Statue of Liberty.
You can see the World Trade Center. A little bit, not that much.
That's so prominent in any New York cityscape from the past 30 years.
Sound OK now?
I'll pretend. I'll dial 555 because that's not a real number.
Can I speak to Mark Frost please?
The first question is a general question about the genesis of "Twin Peaks".
Tell us a little bit about how you and David Lynch started crafting the series.
David and I started talking about the show at the behest of our mutual agent at CAA,
a fellow named Tony KrantZ, who now runs lmagine Television.
I was finishing "Hill Street Blues".
David and I had worked on a couple of films together.
And he thought, why don't you guys come up with a TV idea?
There may be places that are amenable to something a little out of the ordinary.
So we noodled that around and we ended up going into ABC.
This was just before the writer's strike that took place, I believe it was 1988.
We had a meeting maybe two or three days before the strike began
And, with really no expectation of anything coming from it,
in fact, not really having much of an idea at that point.
We described a kind of murder mystery,
loosely set in a small town in the Pacific north west.
And that was about all we had at that point.
We wanted to have the feel of a kind of 1950s,
lush, "Peyton Place" style melodrama
and David made some strange motions with his hands as he described the wind.
And they seemed to like that.
Then the strike happened and six months went by.
A day or two after it was settled, we got a call from ABC saying,
"Can you come back? We'd like to talk to you about this strange idea you had."
At that point we started to work in earnest
and had a sale when we walked into the room.
People have mentioned the '50s feel of the show,
and when you and David did "On the Air", you actually did set the show in the '50s.
Did you consider making "Twin Peaks" a period piece?
Or was it always going to be set in the present?
We always felt it should be in the present but it should have a timeless feel,
as small towns in America often do,
that is removed from the desperate search for the cutting edge
that television always seems to be clinging to and put it in a place...
where time has stood still for a while.
One actress told us during an interview, when they were in the pilot,
that they doubted that ABC was going to pick up the series.
When you delivered the pilot to ABC, were you confident that they would pick it up?
I felt that, because we'd left it open-ended,
and I thought the pilot really worked,
they were going to want us to come back and do a sequel to it...
another two hours or so to wrap it up.
The most we hoped for was a limited series for the summer.
That's in essence what we got. We got seven additional hours.
Did you and Lynch have Kyle MacLachlan in mind for the Cooper role,
when you were writing the pilot?
No, we didn't. We were just going along creating the character.
Then when we were done we sat down and started thinking about actors.
Kyle's name came up and we both instantly said, "Yeah, he's the guy."
He was the first piece of character we put in place.
Cooper is a fascinating character, part mystic and part rational detective.
Given your interest in Arthur Conan Doyle,
did you envisage Cooper as a modern Sherlock Holmes?
Yes, that's exactly it. I don't know if I used those exact words,
but when you come down to it, the art of the detective
is pretty basic to whatever period you are in.
It's ratiocination and deductive and inductive reasoning,
and then a smattering, sometimes mysteriously, of intuition.
We pumped up the intuition in Cooper, more than people were used to seeing.
And brought in the Tibetan influence and his belief in examining his dreams.
So he became a Freudian Jungian Holmesian detective,
which may be part of the reason why people were so attracted to the character.
Yeah. MacLachlan seems like he was a perfect match for that role.
Did you have any other actors in mind for any of the various roles?
Or was it just open casting?
It was open casting from that point.
We took a lot of time, we met actors for weeks.
We didn't have them read, we just had them meet with us.
We would talk to them to get a sense of their personalities,
and what they'd be like to work with.
You know, one by one they came together.
The last person we cast was Michael Ontkean.
We had a lot of trouble finding a Sheriff Truman.
Robert Forster, at one point, was a strong contender.
We came very close to putting him in the show.
But he'd made a prior commitment to a friend who had a pilot.
He said, "I'm going to regret this.
"I think the show I'm going to do is terrible
"and your show is going to work.
"But I've got to be loyal to my friend." So we respected that.
Then David was away. I forget where - maybe scouting locations.
This is the week before we started shooting.
ABC called and said,
"We have Michael Ontkean under contract for a development deal.
"And he loves the script!"
So I met with him and thought he was just right for the role,
he's such a straight ahead, no-nonsense guy.
That was it. Mike jumped on board and we were all set.
The first season contains a strong narrative and a richly developed world,
that demands much more of the viewer than the average show.
Did you worry that these demands would drive some of the audience away?
Yeah, I felt that we were telling a story that was very dense and textured,
and was going to need and require people to actually pay attention.
It was almost as if I was trying to test what people's endurance was,
for the ability to hold story strands in their head.
But once we started going in that direction, there was no real reason to stop.
We had the opportunity and, at least in that first season,
the stories all paid off.
They were all pointed in the right direction.
I likened it to filming a novel page by page,
where you were showing the life of a town, on a grass roots level,
and getting into the lives of upwards of 35 to 40 people
On the flip side, part of the appeal was the complexity of "Twin Peaks".
And once it was established and on the air, would it have succeeded
had it been watered down, had it been less complex?
I shudder to think what TV Executives today would make of it or try to do to it.
We were given an unprecedented level of control,
because that was the ground rules that we wanted to agree to before we started.
We said, "There's only one way to do this show -
"it's to take your control issues and back away."
That's what we told the network.
"And let us see if we can make something different and interesting."
They were in last place. They were desperate for an audience.
And we caught them on the one day they said "yes" to an idea like this.
That's interesting because we once wrote that
"Twin Peaks" reflected the indulgence of its creators,
the willingness of Lynch and Frost to let their imaginations run free,
with little regard for the economic forces of network TV.
Did you initially consider "Twin Peaks", an experiment in alternative entertainment?
And did you feel a sense of freedom in that first season?
We did. The main thing was that David and I were the studio.
We didn't align ourselves with one of the big powerful television producing factories
and rely on them to deficit finance our show.
We made a deal with a foreign distributor to pick up the deficit on the show.
And we were our only disciplinary forces in terms of how much money we spent.
There were no creative pressures coming from a studio
and that only left the network.
So, once we'd crossed that hurdle with them,
we were left to do pretty much what we wanted.
From that point we said, "Why should we deny ourselves anything creatively?
"Lets just go for it."
And I think that's evident, certainly when you watch that first season.
I have a question about the European ending to the pilot,
which is really the only part that wasn't intended to air,
but then it was incorporated into the dream sequence.
Why did you decide to take that material,
which you were contractually obligated to do for European release,
and put it into the series.
We had cooked up this wrap-up ending for the pilot,
as you said, for a contractual obligation to our foreign distributor,
because they wanted to release the pilot as a two hour movie on video in Europe.
It was a ridiculous thing to try to do,
to wrap up a very complicated show in about three minutes.
And we had to do it in a sort of deus ex machina fashion.
But the stuff that David came up with, stylistically, was so cool and weird,
that we felt we should try and incorporate it into the show
and in it was the strand with the idea of the demon killer, Bob,
which became an important part of the second season.
We thought why let three good minutes of film go to waste?
Lets figure out a way to incorporate it into the main flow of the story.
Did you intend for that dream sequence, which occurs early in the first season,
to drive the narrative for the rest of the first season?
Or was that something that you were still leaving open to definition?
I'm not sure that we really saw that far ahead with it.
We felt it would contribute and add another layer of mystery
and then we just let the chips fall where they may.
I have a question about that first season finale.
We've talked about the freedom you had.
You expressed that freedom with the cliffhanger endings of that episode.
It was as if you were trying to break the cliffhanger convention rule.
What was the intention in your approach to all those incomplete cliffhangers?
There really is no resolution to the story at this point in the series.
I had two objectives in mind when I wrote the last episode of the first season.
One was, create as many cliffhangers as humanly possible within a 43 minute story.
On one hand to upset and play with the convention
that the night-time soap had fallen into at that point.
And number two, to extort ABC to bring us back for a second season.
So they would get the answers to all the questions...
and unresolved stories that we left hanging.
Then it was just a question of making that work stylistically.
That's all the questions we had. We appreciate the time you've given to us.
- We look forward to talking to you soon. - OK, see you soon.
- Thanks. - Thanks again, bye.
That's that!
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