When I read the script, I did not get it at all.
I don't think anyone really understood David's intention
unless they had worked with him.
And even when I was shooting the pilot
I still wasn't quite sure what I was shooting and what he wanted.
We really didn't know what we were creating
because this was in the imagination of both David Lynch and Mark Frost.
And Mark really is an unsung hero
in that he did a lot of storytelling
and then allowed David's imagination to take off on the set.
We figured it would be just a one-off
and that no one in their right mind would ever consider
making this a series.
It was one of those serendipitous things where you really feel
there's some hands at work here putting this thing together.
So we're just gonna buckle our seatbelt and go for the ride.
I had met David Lynch in '86, I believe,
we were introduced by a mutual agent of ours
who thought that we'd get along.
And we did, we just kind of hit it off right away.
I think Blue Velvet had just come out about that time.
And I've admired David's work for years.
And we started working on a couple of features together.
There was one kind of notoriously unproduced screenplay
where it's called One Saliva Bubble that nearly got made in 1987.
And we were looking around for other things to do.
And then this same agent at CAA, a young guy named Tony Krantz,
sat us down and said, "I want you guys to come up with a television idea.
There's interest in having you do something."
And he said, "The place I'd like to take it is ABC."
At that time, ABC was languishing in last place.
So it was really before Fox, there were only the three networks.
He said, "They're willing to take a chance on something.
So, why don't you go in and pitch an idea?"
So we kicked it around, we didn't really have something
that we were completely settled on but we took the meeting.
And told them about this strange town in the Northwest
and a murder that happens.
And I remember David said something about,
"And there's the wind in the trees," and he moved his hand a certain way
and they all kind of leaned forward
and I kind of knew we had them.
So sure enough they made us an offer to write this pilot.
And a few weeks after that, the Writer's Guild went on strike.
So it fell into the cracks.
And that was a long, kind of acrimonious strike.
And after it all resolved, we were all working on different things
and one day Tony Krantz called up and said:
"Remember that meeting we had at ABC? We'd like to...
They'd like to have you come back in and talk about it again."
And we really had to, like, sit down and ask each other:
"What did we tell them?"
Because I didn't have any real memory of what they bought.
So we developed it a little further and went back in
and that led to the first draft.
And I think our initial title for the show was Northwest Passage.
And we started to develop the idea of this town
and this thing that had happened
and we hit on the idea of the murder of a young girl
who'd been the homecoming queen
and was kind of a public persona that everybody knew.
But in fact, had a life that was full of secrets and mystery
and led you into the... Kind of the underbelly of this town's reality.
David and I had developed a writing style...
Because we've written these feature scripts before
- where we just kind of sat in a room
and 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,
so... And we would just kind of... We had a vague outline in mind.
But mostly it was just sitting down and starting
and going scene by scene and line by line.
And we knocked things back and forth.
And I remember we sat down and I drew a map of the town.
I wanted to have the geography
of the town in my head as we were writing it.
And there were these two mountains on either side of the map
that kind of framed the town that was nestled between them.
So we decided to call the town Twin Peaks
and that became the title for the show.
That was the only time I'd ever collaborated as a writer
and I think the only time he had.
And we just enjoyed the process. We laughed a lot. We had fun.
We amused each other
and we liked the results.
So we had no expectation
that ABC would give this thing a second thought.
Because it was kind of out there.
Given what network television was doing at the time,
it was off the charts.
So they said they wanted to make the pilot
and nobody was more surprised than we were.
And at every step, we had made it very clear from the beginning:
"Look, we're not doing this just because we need to do a TV show.
We're both very involved with other things.
But if you want us to do it you have to leave us alone.
We have a vision for what this should be,
we think it'll be different and strange
and unlike anything you've seen before."
And to their credit, they did leave us alone.
They let us do kind of what we had in mind.
What I think Mark was looking for
was to make David feel comfortable in a television environment
which he knew would be more constricted.
Although ultimately, we were able to obtain for David
both creatively with ABC
and then with the financial structure of the show was complete freedom.
I mean, he didn't have to take notes.
He casted the way he wanted to.
We did the production in the way he wanted to do it.
So we really created an environment
in which he was the master of his own work.
How I prepared for casting for David
is I go through all my files
looking, you know, gathering up pictures for everybody who's...
Who I think is right for the role.
And then I spend, you know, an hour or two, up at his house.
He goes through the pictures
and rarely does he pick more than two or three,
you know, when it's a lead role.
And just, you know, he knows.
A guy like Richard Beymer, for instance, who, you know,
we knew from West Side Story and some great movies in the early '60s
but hadn't really seen much from since then.
And he came in and was just perfect for Ben Horne
so we, you know, we thought, "What a thrill."
And then we had this kind of smallish part
for the psychiatrist who worked in town, Dr. Jacoby.
And Russ Tamblyn came in and we just looked at each other and grinned.
I mean, the idea of having the two of them together again
was so fantastic, we couldn't resist it.
So guys like that we were... I think we were kind of surprised
when Piper Laurie came in and wanted to do the show.
She was somebody whose work we both really admired.
And she had a kind of weight and gravitas for that character
that was fantastic.
Once David's picked the actors that he would like to meet
then he just talks with them.
He doesn't have them read or anything,
he just goes by his instinct.
Mostly he just talked to me about how I would feel
about being in the freezing cold water
and then being wrapped in 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..." I didn't know what just happened.
Because I was so young and I was so nervous.
And I thought maybe he said I just got the job. But...
So the casting director followed me out and I said:
"What just happened?" She said, "Well, you got the job."
We just talked about...
You know, rather ordinary, everyday, mundane things
that we both had interest in and after about 15 or 20 minutes,
he said, "That was it and that was great, we'll see you, Ray."
I said, "Well, nice to meet you, David."
And then I got a call a couple three days later
that he was very interested in me for 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 good Sheriff Truman."
But no, David saw Leland Palmer
so I had to look back at the script and see again
who Leland Palmer was and what he had to do.
And I looked at it and it said that
he gets a phone call, he finds out his daughter has been killed.
And he cries.
He goes to the morgue and identifies his daughter's body
and he cries.
That Sherr... A detective is up in his daughter's bedroom
looking for articles and Leland's just 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:
"You need to call Mom and Dad
because they heard that you got this job
with the director who did Blue Velvet
and I think they just saw it and I think you need to talk to them."
I called up my friend Brian, I said:
"Brian, Brian, I'm gonna audition for David Lynch.
I gotta watch Blue Velvet. I gotta watch it fast.
I can't be ignorant, you know."
And I gotta write down all the questions.
So we watched it and 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 some things sometimes in an actor
that he really likes,
sometimes he'll just tailor the role for 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 knew that I was this person
who Isabella Rossellini could have played.
I mean, it was probably with her in mind almost.
This outsider in a very incestuous small town.
I mean, it wasn't written a Chinese woman from Hong Kong.
She was written as an Italian woman.
I just felt that it was perfect, it was just perfect for me.
And I'm so happy
that the producers and the director
were open to me playing her.
Here's a tune for you gals.
Norma,
I'll see you in my dreams.
We wanted to kind of re-create the feel of a movie
like Rebel 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,
like, surveyed the whole young actor scene.
And we... So we found people
in, like, James Marshall and Lara Flynn Boyle,
who was brand new at that point and Mädchen Amick.
In fact Mädchen came in, we liked her so much
that there wasn't really a role for her.
We kind of created the role of Shelly out of nothing.
Because we liked what she brought to the party so much.
It's happy hour in France.
- Come on, cowboy, light your fire. - You're right.
We hadn't found an Agent Cooper and 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 Mark, we had a nice meeting together.
I think there was some concern about my age,
which when I look back and watch some of the episodes
I too am kind of, "I was pretty young to play this character,"
but above and beyond all that, I thought the character was great.
Had one of the greatest introductions, I think, I've ever had into the piece.
Just sitting in that car, driving up the mountain.
Got my Dictaphone thing, talking to Diane
about tuna fish sandwiches or cherry pie... Whatever it was.
And what I'm gonna do, it was great
because it was giving a little bit of story, a little bit of plot
but it really established the character.
So you got a sense of, "Man, this guy is very different, you know,
he's got all these different things going on."
And that was true all the way through it.
All those thing were there, were written in, you know.
He just jumped off the page and I think off the screen as well.
He was just written so well.
Oh, Diane, I almost forgot
I got to find out what kind of trees these are. They're really something.
So the casting was a pretty intrinsic part of the process.
And they contributed a lot to the look and flavor of the show.
We went up and did a scout in the Seattle area together.
And I remember we drove around
three or four days looking for the right small town that we had in mind.
And, you know, we'd written something very specific
with all the kind of icons that people later knew about the town.
They were all there in the script.
And we'd found nothing that resembled what we were looking for
until on the final day we rolled into this little area,
Snoqualmie, Washington and Issaquah.
And it was spooky because everything 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 hotel that had the waterfall,
we'd written all that. It was as if we've kind of seen it in a dream
or something, it was pretty spooky.
So we knew right away that was where we were gonna shoot the show.
And I think a few weeks later we went into pre production up in Seattle
in the winter of '89, I believe.
And had quite an adventure making the pilot as well.
We filmed the pilot, the entire pilot,
in the Seattle area and I'm from Yakima.
So it was really familiar territory to me.
A lot of the little towns that we filmed that were off... Just off a highway
that I would travel between school and home when I'd go back home.
I mean, it was really a little strange
because you're looking at it now in a kind of different way.
Kind of through David's eyes and Mark Frost's eyes.
And kind of what they were seeing and what they were trying to do
with this idea of these fantastic Douglas fir trees
and the mysteries of the forest.
And some of the darker themes.
We were in the reality of this town, Twin Peaks.
It was cold, huge trees wherever we were.
And I remember one night, that first night I got there,
we didn't know what we were getting into, the snow was falling.
It was just silent.
It was just that eerie feeling that Twin Peaks usually gave viewers,
and that's the feeling we had.
I just remember
that we all sort of had interesting dreams when we arrived there,
you know, it's this old spiritual Indian land.
And I think it's the atmosphere of 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 environment was special for me.
I used to go into that area to be a traditional dancer.
So I knew a lot of people in that whole area up there.
And, you know, you can just... You can feel, you know,
I'm the most un-new age person in all of... I live in the Berkeley area
But you can feel the presence of the indigenous people.
You know, it's still... Especially up in Snoqualmie in the falls up there.
It's a very powerful, powerful place, you know.
Native people believe in the power of nature.
So being around those falls was something that I could feel.
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 to live on one of those islands.
It was like a vacation actually.
And since my part was small, it was...
You know, I had a lot of time off. It was nice.
The people of the small towns surrounding Seattle,
Snoqualmie, Carnation, North Bend,
were I think grateful for some of the business of having a film crew.
Not exactly understanding what we were doing,
which put us all kind of in the same boat.
I'm not aware of any other filmmaking that was going on in Seattle.
We weren't competing with other film...
Other production companies.
But we were competing with the real world situation
of mills that needed to cut wood and trucks that needed to drive by
and Washington state at the time wasn't used to filmmaking.
So for us to come in and go to a local police department
to say we wanna control
this access road or shut down this area,
it took a lot of doing.
So that was in another part of their pre-production process
that took more time than...
Well, certainly than in L.A. Because everybody knows how things are done.
But you'd have to explain to people:
"This is what you'd do when you're shooting a scene,
it's gotta be quiet, you have to control access."
So that was part of what we had to deal with logistically.
We ended up shooting in the middle of the worst winter in Seattle
in like 20 years.
We didn't see the sun for three months. It just went away.
And then during filming, we got hit with
this kind of a hundred year freak weather.
We were out in Snoqualmie and we were at the cafe, I remember,
and suddenly, this noise started 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 beginning of a blizzard.
There was a period where we were out
shooting in a kind of remote location.
It was all the nighttime stuff. It was up on the top of this mountain.
And the crew actually got snowed in for like 48 hours.
The roads were impassable, the freeway shut down.
And they didn't even have enough film to like, get through the last day.
They were shooting what are called short ends
which is what you end up with at 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 David was like,
just shooting short rounds, trying to grab a shot here and there.
David was amazing. Nothing stopped him.
He just...
It didn't matter, he was gonna do what he needed.
Incredibly inventive about how to get the material shot.
But it was extraordinarily difficult.
The weather just didn't stop getting terrible.
It snowed, it rained, it hailed.
It was extraordinarily bad.
But I think the weather really contributed to the mood of the show.
There was one scene in particular, it was one frozen night up
on top of the mountaintop.
The final scene between James Marshall and Laura Flynn Boyle,
which... Basically all you can see are their faces.
And I mean, he could have shot it in a soundstage against a black curtain
and you would have 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 that you could see their breath on camera.
And there was a kind of desperation in them both
that pumped up the emotion in the scene.
That never would have happened on a stage.
It was truly an effect that he got out of putting them through this ordeal
of shooting in... You know, it was 15 degrees at 2:00 in the morning.
And people were just, you know, dying.
And he wouldn't let them go in and get warmed up.
He wanted to get this feeling he was going for.
It was just interesting watching them take these two young actors
and push them.
You know, just to see what he could get from them emotionally.
Even beyond their willingness as actors.
Sort of get to who they were as people.
And that was very interesting to watch. Very interesting.
That was a moment, I remember, looking at the monitor and thinking,
you know, "He's really got something special here."
Particularly in the chemistry between those two.
And I remember feeling that that was a moment
that was gonna really catch people.
One particular morning, on a Sunday morning, we weren't shooting,
David asked me to have breakfast so we went
and had, you know, lots of coffee
and pancakes as I recall.
Lots of syrup. And just kind of out of nowhere, David says to me,
he says, "Say, what would you think about a guy who has some sort of,
you know, some sort of mysterious tattoo on his arm
and he wants to get rid of the tattoo so he saws his arm off."
I'm thinking, "You've had too much syrup," you know, "this is not healthy."
Well, what I didn't realize is that this was all part of a process.
To me, this was disjointed. It had no connection to anything in reality.
It didn't mean anything to the movie we were working on
until David... Somebody at ABC said, "You 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 aired as a stand-alone film
and it must have an ending."
Because we had this weird confidence
that the show was gonna get picked up,
we didn't really put a lot of thought into it.
We just thought, it's something that's probably never gonna be seen.
We've set so many things in motion it's really ridiculous
to try to wrap it up in 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 idea that it was actually a demon.
And so David went to work, creating this weird way of shooting it,
where he's shooting people speaking backwards,
moving backwards and then reversing the film.
He cast Mike Anderson as the little man.
And brought the character of this mysterious dwarf into the mix.
I remember we shot it on one day at a little sound stage in Hollywood.
I remember watching it thinking:
"This is truly the strangest thing I've ever seen in my life."
I just remember being in the editing room late, late at night
and film rushes come in from the lab.
And I would put it up on the machine and I'd start looking at it:
"What in the heck is this?
This is not in the script, what is it?"
The one-armed man and they're down in this, you know, furnace area
and they're lightning candles, you know, and all this stuff.
And I think back on the, you know,
the breakfast with the sawing the arm off.
It was pretty creepy stuff.
I started looking over my shoulder and thinking, "Well, I don't..."
So I finally... I called David up, "What is this stuff?"
Said, "Oh, that's the closed ending we're gonna have to do that.
Just, you know, don't worry about that now.
We'll do that when we get back to L.A."
So we came back to Los Angeles.
And the movie had been tested.
And ABC, the report back was everybody hated the movie.
And, you know, David should be locked away
and never allowed to work again and, you know,
sort of the familiar thing with the release of one of David's projects.
And then all of a sudden
word came that, you know, "Okay, put the closed ending on it."
It's truly bizarre and way too short
and clearly just something you kind of tacked on to the end
to put it all together. But in the seeds of this idea
developed the notion
of the possession of Leland Palmer.
Whether he was actually possessed by a demon
or whether he was just, in fact, crazy and believed it was a demon
was a question we never really felt compelled to answer.
So that was an idea we kind of went with.
I personally think that the pilot episode of Twin Peaks
is a magnificent movie.
We had an opportunity, we screened it at 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 experience to see it up on the big screen.
We all gathered to see this thing and it was mind-boggling
to realize that the little pieces that we all had been a part of
had been put together in such a beautiful way
to tell this very sad story of 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 years when I got Twin Peaks.
And I was used to going to the screenings of the movie.
And leaving before the lights came up because I was so horrified.
And when Twin Peaks was 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 up and I was still sitting in my seat.
I was just floored and I've never been in anything that cool since.
I remember sitting there wondering,
you know, "Is it more than even I think it 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, we were having a great time.
We had a ball every... Showing 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 received.
And I really
was a little bit amazed
at the reaction to it. I was just, you know, blown away.
David had held the whole thing stylistically together
in a way that I had never seen before.
And I knew we were gonna deliver something really unique.
Whether they liked it or not would be another question
but they certainly got their money's worth.
And it turned out they were just as mesmerized
as I'd hoped they would be.
And, you know, we were off and running.
It was unique.
It came at a time when 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 it on television.
Absolutely nothing like it.
I was stunned. You know, that never happens,
that a pilot becomes a series.
And the people involved,
I didn't think any of them really wanted to be in a series.
And I didn't think I particularly wanted to be in one myself.
But I had signed a contract.
And there I was, so I showed up and I had a lot of fun.
We all had a sense that we were doing something new.
Something that hadn't been done before.
And we all felt, I think, very privileged to be there.
ABC had seen the pilot and they'd liked it.
They were puzzled by it, they were intrigued by it.
So they wanted to do a kind of provisional order of seven episodes
and see what happened. It was, you know, not a full vote of confidence,
but it was a partial vote of confidence.
And so we said, "Great, we'll go make the seven hours."
It seemed to me that word of the pickup on the pilot
came in, probably, May. Sometime early May.
And I believe that we started shooting Twin Peaks, the series,
sometime in July or August, is my guess.
So it was very short preproduction.
I called Mark. I got his number in the phone book, I called him up,
I said, "How are you? This is Richard Hoover.
Remember me? I worked with your dad."
And he said, "What are you doing?"
I said, "Well, I'm out here slugging it out,
trying to be a designer."
And he said, "No, what are you doing today?"
He said, "We're doing a series this week, we gotta get going."
To do the show economically
we couldn't go back and shoot in Seattle.
So we looked around
and not a lot of companies were doing this at this time,
we just rented a warehouse in the North San Fernando Valley,
about 50,000 square feet,
and said, "This is where we're gonna build the town of Twin Peaks."
All the interiors are gonna be in these... There's one large stage
and one small one.
So we went to work creating the interiors.
The sound stage, we were the first people to ever use it.
It was an old milling warehouse
on Balboa Boulevard in San Fernando Valley.
It's been used for many shows since, but we were the ones who broke it in.
So we had to soundproof it to begin with
and we had to deal with all the issues
of just turning a place into a sound stage to begin with.
Richard Hoover did a wonderful job with the sets
and making them feel real and like they belonged
and that they were old and made of wood.
We didn't want to use anything that was fake.
So we used real pine and real logs as much as we could.
And then we had to spray for termites,
but, you know, it gave it a much stronger gestalt, in a way,
and an energy that we couldn't do with painters,
it would take days to fake.
And I think that energy was percolated
throughout every set we tried to do.
The warehouse was full of all 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.
And there was the Art Department somewhere else.
And so, as I said, it's just Twin Peaks- land.
You just walked around from, you know,
one part of Twin Peaks world to another part.
Then, you know, within a day, you'd kind of covered a lot of ground
and you'd been in the diner,
and you'd been in the Great Northern lodge
and you'd been in Agent Cooper's room.
And, you know, so you were around that.
The only thing that was missing
is the outside ambiance of the great Northwest.
So the next challenge was,
how do we find enough exteriors in Southern California
to match what we had found when we were shooting in Seattle?
We shot at Malibu Lake.
It was one place we found that kind of doubled for Seattle a lot in that area.
And up in the Coldwater Canyon
where the TreePeople are, out here in Los Angeles.
A lot of the stuff we 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 call the zone of production in L.A.,
that could help us create that illusion.
And so we set off making 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 had any 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 pacing of that story
better than anybody else.
So it was kind of a natural selection
because I could work with any of the actors
and bring them back to where they were.
Because it 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 extremely beneficial for the actors,
to bring them back to the world that they occupied
when David shot that pilot.
I ended up going to the premiere of the pilot
with the casting director, Johanna Ray.
And she and I were friends,
and she had just cast a 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 doing series TV
but this is so unique.
If there's any way he would even consider me,
please, please, I would love to do it."
I have only been in Twin Peaks a short time.
But in that time, I have seen decency, honor and dignity.
Murder is not a faceless event here.
It is not a statistic to be tallied up at the end of the day.
Laura Palmer's death has affected each and every man, woman and child
because life has meaning here. Every life.
That's a way of living I thought had vanished from Earth.
But it hasn't, Albert. It's right here in Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks became a show that directors really wanted to work on.
And, you know, we got some great talent to come in and do episodes
who weren't people you would normally expect
to be doing them at that point in their careers.
There was something so unique about Twin Peaks
because unlike other series where you have seven days of crap
and then you shoot,
directors were coming in,
you know, a month before, two months before
and hanging out and soaking in the experience.
And, you know, Twin Peaks, when you first saw it,
was this ever really gonna make it on the air?
I mean, I don't think anyone knew
if it was really gonna be aired, you know?
So that original seven shows,
I don't know if I ever thought mine would be on television.
I just wanted to be a part of the whole experience.
I loved the world, I loved the music and the characters.
And I thought it was this fascinating look
through almost life through a key hole.
So I just wanted to be a part of it.
David would allow directors to really stay involved in the show
all the way through post,
which I later found out was absolutely not the norm.
I say, Twin Peaks remains one of the most director-driven shows.
You were invited to every color-correction.
I have the schedule in here.
They would tell you when every color-correction was,
when every sound-effects spotting.
I mean, you don't understand how odd this is for television.
Every ADR session, every telecine. And I went to all of them.
You know, because it was like, yeah, this is mine.
If you're gonna offer me this sense of ownership,
I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna do it. And I think most of us did.
They were all people who had a certain kind of sensibility.
A lot of them came from the indie world,
a lot of them had done kind of edgy films before.
I felt those were the people
who could really kind of grip the wheels
of what we'd set in motion and run with them.
And to a person,
I was never disappointed by the work they did.
They really hit the mark and made a big contribution
to the way the show evolved.
What was wonderful about being on the show
is you could really make it your own.
It was very much approached
that these were all separate movies and you made it your movie.
And whatever iconic imagery you came up with,
whether it's a full moon or the raven's eye,
you were encouraged to use every part of your imagination.
And that was incredible fun.
Unlike a lot of shows, I wanted to give them some creative latitude
to bring their own kind of talent and imagination to the show.
So consequently, each episode
took on its own importance,
its own significance
and could almost stand alone
as an individual kind of entity, you know.
Each and every episode was like a one-hour movie.
So again, along the line that we were encouraged
to come up with different ways of telling the story,
in the Great Northern Hotel dining room,
this was the scene with Dale Cooper and Sherilyn Fenn.
Their breakfast together.
And I thought, you know what?
Let's have some sort of convention going on in the background.
If anyone notices, fine, and if they don't...
So I made it an American Indian Movement...
An AIM convention.
So it's all Native Americans in the dining room.
And, you know, if someone notices, fine.
But then the next show, I thought,
you know what, I'm going to have a cheerleader-and-band convention.
So Kyle walks out of an elevator filled with cheerleaders and tuba players.
And this became something that people started to do,
which was come up with some sort of convention
of what's going on in the hotel at the time.
And that was great fun to come up with.
And so with Twin Peaks,
it was a unbelievably creative 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 directors that we worked with
and people that would come and go, and some would come back again,
for me, it was the best when David was there.
I feel like David
encourages one to go into dark places inside of them
and see what's going on.
And to embrace them. That that's beautiful. That that's good.
He goes off onto places that I can't even imagine.
I don't even know how he's able to do that
or tap into that or make the imagery that he uses so profound
by how he takes it and translates it to cinema.
But he does and we're lucky to have that.
And I'm very lucky to have the experience of 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 think it's supposed to be like.
That's what was so wonderful about
working on Twin Peaks and with David,
was that you were just allowed to explore.
And it certainly made you wanna get up
and go into work every day.
So it became a sort of bizarrely special place
where you'd have these wonderful directors coming in
and all these great actors.
It was a fantasy and short-lived,
but a tremendous one. It was really, really great.
When Twin Peaks debuted on television,
you know, I had a party at my house.
And bear in mind, this is the two-hour pilot
that I had nothing to do with.
I mean, you know, I wasn't even involved in the show
when it was produced.
And I remember sitting there and watching and just going,
"Oh, my God, this is so great," you know.
And everyone in the room was stunned.
And there were people there...
There was one friend in particular who was an L.A. Law guy.
And you could see it in them too.
It was like, "Okay, what just happened to TV?"
The numbers were kind of shocking for the pilot.
It got numbers that they'd be happy for the Super Bowl to get today.
It was way up there.
And we instantly knew, okay, we're in business.
And then all this anecdotal kind of response started to drift in,
with people just being obsessed about the show
and this run on cherry pie that had happened around the country.
It was just, you know, we'd caught a wave.
It was one of those shows that everybody watched at the time.
It was really sort of a cultural phenomenon.
Certainly because in those days there were only three networks.
So everybody generally tended to watch, you know, one show.
And people would always be talking about it the next day.
You'd always be having lunch somewhere
and hear people at the next table talking about what had happened,
what was going on.
People would meet around 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?" Like, "What was that all about?"
So it was this cultural phenomena
that people were fascinated with this storyline in this world
and these characters.
A lot of conversation between people took place by the water cooler,
you know, in every office 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 bigger question on TV, in a weird way.
Everyone, "Who killed Laura Palmer?"
I'm not even sure David and Mark knew who killed Laura Palmer.
I still don't know who 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 everybody was so piqued.
Everybody's interest was so piqued and they would ask me.
I mean, I do remember, you know,
strangers or friends who would, "What do you know?
What's gonna happen?" And "Who killed Laura Palmer?"
The funny thing is, everybody thought I knew the answer.
I knew nothing. I don't think any of us knew anything.
We had maybe ideas or a sense about something like that.
I had no idea.
I just thank God that we didn't actually know,
because I wasn't lying.
I didn't have anything. I didn't know anything.
I think I would have 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 thought that we knew
and we just got such a giggle about the fact that we had no idea.
We weren't hiding anything. We literally didn't know.
All I know is, as great as all the hubbub was at the time,
I was just praying that it wasn't me.
Making that series, we didn't understand the ramification
of what a cult following around the globe that it would gather.
We didn't realize. We didn't know.
- We were just working. - We were asked as a cast
to go to this affiliate dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel.
Because all the other shows were there with their casts,
and they introduced us, and nobody...
They had only seen the pilot, I think, at that point
and people were kind of awestruck that we were there,
but we didn't get it.
In fact, that was before they would send cars for us.
So my husband and I went to this with our Volvo, kind of clunky and dirty,
and we pulled up in front of the Century Plaza Hotel
and suddenly there were all these flash bulbs going off.
Now, I've been acting all my life, but suddenly the flash bulbs
and people shoving and I said, "What do you think that is?"
And Marc, the man I'm married to now, said,
"I think that might be for you."
Then Roseanne Barr walked across the parking lot and screamed:
"It's the Log Lady."
And I thought, wow, I've reached another 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 was... Oh, my gosh.
I was so nervous so much of the time.
Well, here they are. It is the most talked-about,
most written-about,
most controversial show on television this season.
Please welcome the cast of Twin Peaks, right here.
It was a real frenzy.
It was just this clamoring to get a piece of it.
Because I think, in the frenzy,
people knew that it would be a part of history somehow.
It really was that impactful
on the American viewers.
The people at Sesame Street did an episode called "Twin Beaks,"
where every Muppet had two beaks, and there was an owl stare...
Cookie Monster was eating cherry pie,
and they had the kind of music that Angelo would compose.
And it took place in a diner
and my character came out with 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 somebody with kind of my voice and my glasses,
but it was a Muppet.
Coffee shops were having
Twin Peaks pie sales and things like that, you know?
There were Twin Peaks parties at fraternity houses and things
where people would eat pie and drink coffee and watch the show.
They would have these fake funerals,
these Laura Palmer funerals,
where 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, you know,
piece of cherry pie ŕ la mode, a big doughnut,
a whole series of T-shirts that were being sold in Westwood.
And I didn't know about this until somebody told me
that they had come out that day.
So I was in Westwood
and I saw a 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 have a very large breasts
so my face was a little distorted.
But it was an amazing experience.
There was as much to do with managing the attention
that the show was gathering as there was to make the show itself.
It was a huge distraction in a way.
More and more magazines would come to the set
and we would do photo sessions for them, you know.
I remember the cast, you know, having to do pictures together
for different magazines or for TV Guide.
It just got more and more that way.
Everything gets out of hand.
Everything sort of...
Suddenly the four girls were on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Growing up as a musician's daughter
it was a huge deal for me.
And, again, I went to it with, you know, big open eyes.
"Wow, this great photographer and great hair and makeup"
and this and that.
But while I was there
I learned that there are other layers
to publicity, and that I didn't learn the lessons yet.
And that what position you're in when you're amongst other people
is 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 of just excited to be there.
I'm like, "Hey, just throw me in the background," you know.
And having a blast doing it, but it was great.
It's great to have that cover and to be a part of that.
So it goes from, you know, trying to just create a series
to suddenly you're wrangling people, you know.
Because they wanna go away, you know.
And Kyle went and did Saturday Night Live.
So then suddenly when you always had Kyle from Monday to Friday,
suddenly you had him Monday till Wednesday.
"Where is he on Thursday?"
"He's in New York, they're rehearsing Saturday Night Live. "
They're doing their opening skit, you know, making fun of the show.
And it's that strange moment
when your work is suddenly reflected back at you
through this fractured mirror of 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 looked down
and he was on the cover of Time.
I looked down and I looked up and we just kept talking.
It was like as surreal as the television series, you know?
David Letterman called
and asked for David, he couldn't do it.
Kyle, he couldn't do it.
Kimmy, who 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 later to do David Letterman
and I did it twice.
But I think the second time I was really snotty
and he never had me back.
All that stuff that happens when a series becomes successful
happened times ten, you know, in Twin Peaks.
It was really unusual, unlike anything I'd ever experienced,
and it was great fun to be a part of.
Sheriff, it's time.
Excuse us, we have got a funeral to get to.
The public seemed to love Twin Peaks. It was all the rage.
Everybody was talking about Twin 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.
It was a great ceremony.
It was great for all of us that were nominated,
or all of us that were associated with the show.
I remember going and being sort of excited,
and it was all new and different to me,
and being in the lobby before the Emmy ceremony began
and I was standing with Bob Engels and Mark, we're waiting for David
in our little corner
and I looked across the lobby and there were all the other guys.
All the other shows, thirtysomething, whatever.
And I realized that we really weren't part of that world
in any way, shape or form.
And then as the show went on
I realized just how much we weren't a part of their world.
You get the feeling it's not gonna be our night when you lose the first one.
I had predicted this. You know, the Emmy academy,
the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences
or whatever they call it,
is a very traditional, very kind of hide-bound organization.
And they do not welcome or reward innovation.
And if you look at the pattern of shows that have broken the mold,
it's usually taken three, four, five times
before they're ever actually handed their award.
So everybody went with very high expectations.
I told everybody ahead of time, "I think we're gonna get stiffed.
I think this is not gonna turn out what you might think it's gonna be."
So I wasn't particularly surprised.
I know a lot of people were disappointed.
To me it kind of reaffirmed our status as an outside, rebel sort of show.
We weren't trying to be conventional with it.
So why should we expect conventional awards?
That was my perspective on it.
And I imagine if the show had lasted two or three or four more years
and we had been able to maintain,
like, the standard that we'd had,
that very likely would have come, but it wasn't to be in that first year.
And I, for one, wasn't that surprised or disappointed.
Actually, we did win two Emmys that night.
I won an Emmy for editing the pilot
and Patti Norris won for production design.
I got to be in the National Enquirer as Worst Dressed Actress.
I was wearing a black velvet bustier with beads and rhinestones
and cut off jeans with fringe bobby socks
and some really cute black platform shoes.
And I think I had a little black jacket.
And Leeza Gibbons asked me who I was wearing and I said,
"Oh, I don't know, I got it at the mart."
And then I went, "No, no, no, wait. I got it..."
And I said the name of the person,
because I didn't know you had to do that.
"Who are you wearing?" Oh, it's such and such.
Later, I found out that you could actually wear something
and give it back.
Shooting Twin Peaks was the ultimate be-here-now experience.
One never really knew what would happen next.
And after a while, we didn't get the entire script
because there was so much secrecy about who killed Laura Palmer.
And so we became viewers,
wondering what was gonna be put together and what was gonna air.
So we would all gather and sit down and watch it from week to week,
and wonder, you know, what's really gonna happen.
We'd all get together at a sports bar down on La Brea and watch the show.
Because toward the end, we didn't' t even have scripts.
We had our scene and that's all.
We didn't even know what happened in the show.
So we would all get together
and, you know, kind of try to piece it together.
I remember we were at Dana Ashbrook's,
we were having a spaghetti dinner.
It was the last episode of the first season
and we were so excited, you know.
It was so full of promise and everybody was so excited.
And it comes to that last scene
and Agent Cooper opens the door and he gets shot.
Oh, my God, we thought we'd all lost our jobs.
My vision of that last episode in season one
was we need a selling tool to get them
to buy a second season from us.
Because clearly, there's more we wanna do here.
So I tried to pack in every possible cliffhanger I could think of
but the kitchen sink, you know,
or the lady being tied to railroad tracks,
from the history of the night-time soap.
But in a way, it was a send-up of the idea of the cliffhanger.
But in the kind of style that we'd developed for the show,
it was also sort of real.
I mean, the stakes were real and heightened at the same time.
And I directed that last episode,
so I was consciously trying to create as much edge-of-the-seat tension
in the network executive as I possibly could,
in the hopes of, you know, getting them to invite us back for another year.
And so, you know, we took it to sort of absurd lengths,
but it was kind of fun too.
I mean, that was the joy of plotting a show like that,
was it was so intricate and there were so many moving parts,
to try to line up all the pieces was a real challenge.
And that last episode kind of brought a lot of things to a head.
Got a trout on the line, Hawk.
This one's a keeper.
I met David Lynch in 1986.
At that time he was shooting Blue Velvet.
I wrote the "Mysteries of Love" and got Julee Cruise.
And then he said, "Would you like to do the score as well?"
That was the start of the relationship. As a result, Angelo...
I've got this television show.
And then invited me to do Twin Peaks.
Angelo is a perfectionist.
He's one of the best musicians I've ever met.
His music can make you cry.
Julee is such a gifted artist.
She's got remarkable flexibility.
Falling
There's a dark element to all of that music
and that is from David.
David, actually, was the primary influence
in setting...
in verbalizing a mood to me.
This is the keyboard
that all the major themes were created for Twin Peaks.
It's an old Fender Rhodes
and kind of beat up.
And David would sit right over here, right to the right of me.
And we would put a little cassette just about over here on this keyboard,
just keep it in record and just keep it playing.
David would sit here and I'd say,
Well, what do you see, David? Just talk to me.
And David would say, "Okay, Angelo,
we're in a dark woods now.
And there's a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees.
And there's a moon out
and there's some animal sounds in the background.
And you can hear the hoot of an owl and you're in the dark woods.
You know, just get me into that beautiful darkness with the soft wind."
Then 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 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 see that he was visualizing
the description that he envisioned.
Then he would say, "Okay, Angelo, now we gotta make a change
because from behind a tree in the back of the woods,
there's this very lonely girl.
Her name is Laura Palmer.
And it's very sad, but get something that matches her."
And I just segued into this:
And he'd say, "Oh, that's it. That's very beautiful.
I can see her.
And she walking towards the camera and 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 said, "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, to fall down.
Keep falling, keep falling. Kept 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'll go home and I'll work on it.
He said, "Angelo, don't do a thing and don't change a single note.
I see Twin Peaks. "
And that's how it was done.
May we have this dance?
And David said, "Do you have anyone that can sing like an angel?"
And I knew Julee Cruise because we 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 could do about anything.
She came up into the office, I said,
Julee, do you know any singer that can sing like an angel? A female.
You know, I needed to do this song in movie.
And she said, "Let me think about it."
She called me the next day and she said,
"I don't know of anyone but maybe I could, you know,
put my voice... and sing delicately up there."
So I said, okay, come on in.
So she came to my office on 57th Street across Carnegie Hall.
I had a small office there with 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 just lay this down.
And I remember having her very close on the mic and she just nailed this.
I had a synth track, she sang on top of it, did a mix,
brought it David and he said, "Wow, that's it."
Working with Julee was just incredible.
Probably one of my favorites is "The World Spins."
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 position afterwards and just go like this.
It takes so much energy out of me
to sing "The World Spins,"
to sing "Falling."
How can you not cry when you sing "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 wanna shatter peoples' dreams,
but he asked me when I was singing "Falling" and I just got married,
to sing to the person I love the most in the world.
And that song is a song 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 writing classical or jazz,
I try to keep my Angelo Badalamenti identity and sound.
And there are few techniques that I use
and one is... In musical terms, is the use of suspension figures
that David, when he heard, just absolutely loved.
And he just feels that those were my inner voices,
you know, 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 gets resolved and sometimes it doesn't.
It's quite a compliment to know
that you're evoking a special world.
And through the years, you know, some people have told me
that it was impossible to think of Twin Peaks without hearing the music.
Well, that really blows my mind.
God, I love this music.
Isn't it too dreamy?
Fenn does something to you.
They would be 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 window of the sound booth.
And David came in and he said, "Julee, I don't like your attitude."
He could get me calmed down better than anybody.
But it would drive me crazy.
Tell your heart, you make me cry
We had a falling out at one time
because I said I'm not singing with you anymore.
Because I wasn't allowed to write.
I wasn't allowed to do my other things.
And it took us seven years.
I called and I said, Is David there?
And I said, This is Julee Cruise.
And I heard, "David, it's Julee. It's Julee." And I heard:
And he went, "Julee."
And I went, David, I'm sorry.
And he said, "No, no, no. Julee, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I didn't respect you." No, I said, no.
No, David, I'm sorry. I didn't show you the proper respect
after all you'd done for me, I'm really, really sorry.
I had an over inflated sense of self-worth.
You see your name in the paper and you think you're somebody.
"No, I'm sorry." No, I'm sorry. "No, I'm sorry."
And we started laughing.
But it was quite emotional.
I want you Rocking back inside my heart
There are so many funny stories about Twin Peaks.
My favorite is when I was working with Paul McCartney.
I got a call from his office
saying that Paul would like me to come to Abbey Road and work with him
and do an arrangement orchestration on one of his songs.
So I go out to the studios in Abbey Road
and it's just me and Paul in the studio with an orchestra.
And as I'm rehearsing, Paul comes over and he says,
"Angelo, stop the orchestra. I must tell you this story."
He said, "I was asked by the queen's office
to perform 35 minutes of my music to help celebrate her birthday
at Buckingham Palace.
So I'm very excited about it. And here comes the night.
And I'm about to go on and the queen kind of walks by me
and says, 'Oh, Mr. McCartney, it was just so lovely to see you tonight."'
And he says, "Well, Your Highness, I am so delighted that you invited me
to help celebrate your birthday.
And I'm now going to perform for you
35 minutes of my best works."
She says, "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 eight.
I must go upstairs and watch Twin Peaks. "
And Paul turned around and I was standing on the conductor's stand
and he punched me with his right arm right here and he made me black.
And he used a few choice English words.
He said, "Because of your... show Twin Peaks,
I could not perform for the queen."
Fantastic story.
I was very happy to get, you know, two or three Emmy nominations.
And this was very funny because we were at the Emmy's,
me and my wife and David.
And David was great when it came to the announcing.
"Okay. And now for the best music of a television show," you know. "Series."
And David was unbelievable. He sat next to me and he gets up
and he says, "Okay, everybody get up, get up.
Let's make way for Angelo because Angelo is gonna go up there."
And he's moving chairs.
The bottom line is another television show wins, you know.
But then came the Grammys
and I'm happy to say that I won the Grammy.
And that was especially exciting
and, you know, because I was up against Stanley Jordan,
Phil Collins and Quincy Jones.
So I didn't think I stood a chance.
Being nominated is fun and it's great.
And I think most people would say
we psych ourselves or we truly believe it's great to be nominated.
But there ain't nothing like winning.
It's just... It's a whole other kind of thing. It was great.
Just being a part of Twin Peaks
is enough for me.
It's enough. I already made my mark.
I don't have to try.
It just happened.
You never know what's gonna come along.
You plan your life out and you never know what's gonna come along.
Then I saw your smile
Twin Peaks, I think, will always endure
because Twin Peaks is a beautiful,
dark,
strange,
off-center world that you can enter and wrap yourself up in.
And yet knowing that you're safe and secure
as you're watching this disturbing dream,
while you're lying on your living-room couch.
It was a great experience working 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.
Falling
Are we falling in love
Dale. Dale? Can you hear me?
Season 2 was different than Season 1.
Season 1 had this kind of momentum.
This force was moving Twin Peaks and it was...
Every script was new, and interesting, and crazy, and...
You know, who killed Laura Palmer?
Then Season 2 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 just was a lot of people pulling and pushing
and, I think, paying almost too much attention to it.
They sort of forced a creative issue upon Mark and David
that really was unfair and probably was the undoing of the show.
David and I kind of knew from the beginning
that Leland was the murderer.
I mean, that was never really that big an issue for us.
We'd never told another single person.
And 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 start of 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 it was really smart.
It was weird how people felt they were entitled to know it.
This was a trade secret.
This wasn't like something that you just casually let slip.
So we took extraordinary measures to protect it.
I had all sorts of ways of doing this. We had to number the scripts.
I actually wrote some fake scenes that I circulated around.
A lot of times you would shoot things
and you didn't know if it was the real scene
that was 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 audience and a fan as anybody else,
even though I was working on the inside.
And so, you know, when we did find out, you know,
and it was revealed who it was,
it was almost like it had to have a release in a way.
You know, we had to find out. As an audience, as, you know,
as a culture, we needed to know at that point in time.
It was a well-guarded secret that was hung onto a long time.
But I know that the whole psyche of the nation
was gonna burst if somebody didn't tell us who it was.
In that very powerful episode, the first episode of Season 2,
when we didn't find out, I think there was a little backlash from people.
Not... Being disappointed that they had to hang on and not know.
We didn't ever wanna give it away and the network was finally like,
"You gotta reveal who killed Laura Palmer."
It was like... It may have been the death knell of the show.
You know, because it was really...
Maybe a question that never should have been answered.
I know that David wanted to hold off as long as possible.
I mean, that's become sort of a story line about that.
But I think the two of them really had a plan and they stuck to it.
Harry, when Albert finishes up at 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 shoot three different endings,
revealing three different killers.
And I believe it was gonna be Richard Beymer, Leland and Dr. Jacoby.
Jacoby.
I didn't figure he had anything to do with this at all.
I remember taking the three of them into my office
and sitting them down and saying,
"The killer is in the room here with us."
We didn't even tell them who it was gonna be.
But we did tell them that it was one of the three.
It was like an episode of I've Got a Secret.
And they were all kind of stunned that it could be them.
And I think we went so far as to even shoot the scene
where each of them was revealed.
So I went on to shoot that show,
where my character, Leland, kills Maddy.
And also the character of Ben Horne kills Maddy and also Bob kills Maddy.
Because David and Mark didn't want any of the crew even
to know who the real killer was.
So we all three had to kill her that day.
And poor Sheryl Lee, I mean,
she got pummeled for about 14 hours that day.
That was a long day of work.
It was a very long, physical day of work.
Thank God I was working with such great actors
that were so sort of respectful in that kind of a situation.
Because it does emotionally, after being beat up and killed all day,
it kind of gets under your skin a little bit.
We had to edit both endings.
We had to cut the negative with both endings.
And we mixed the show with both endings.
And I believe that the decision was made after we had mixed
and color-corrected both versions,
that one ending was cut on to the show
before it was delivered to the network and that was it.
Finally, I think we sat down with Ray and told him it was him, alone.
I remember it was sort of a sad day
because you realize that it's not that he learned that he killed Laura Palmer,
which was sort 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 was someone who loves actors
and they return that love.
And that was not a conversation that he was eager to have.
David just leaned over and he put his hand on my knee and he said,
"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."
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 bit into that role
with a kind of ferocious dedication.
And the realization that he had killed his daughter hit him pretty hard.
At that time, I had a baby daughter of my own.
We had my daughter in 1987
and the thought of my being
the killer of my own daughter on the show,
was almost incomprehensible to me.
And was certainly something very distasteful to me.
And so I didn't want it to be me in 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 at that time, the series was still quite popular.
So, you know, I didn't wanna wave bye-bye to a great character
and a wonderful gig, a wonderful job.
The kind of, you know, kind of job
that comes along maybe once in a lifetime in a career.
So all those thoughts were going through my head.
And I remember maybe 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 be a beautiful thing.
It's gonna be a beautiful thing."
And then he preceded to tell me a little bit about
the way we would indeed
handle the end of Leland Palmer.
And it did sound very good to me.
I still think his performance in those final few hours
was one of the best things the show ever did.
Honestly, one of the best performances
of any actor I've ever worked with.
It was just... It was a ferociously committed performance.
Laura. I killed her.
Oh, my God. I killed my daughter.
I didn't know. Forgive me.
Forgive me.
So, you know, there it was.
There was the coin of the realm kind of finally revealed.
And I think Ray really lived up to what we'd had in mind.
And I felt that that story line really had the payoff that it kind of demanded.
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?"
Maybe not.
As much as I heard everywhere I went, "Who killed Laura Palmer?"
I don't think anybody was very happy to find out who it was.
They liked to want to know, not necessarily to know.
For me, the best shows were up until that point.
Up until when Laura Palmer's murderer was revealed.
You know, because you have this incredible sense of suspense
and secrets untold and what was gonna be revealed.
But to me after that,
it didn't have the same driving force.
Laura Palmer's
death or murder made everybody a suspect.
So everyone's reaction to it made 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,
it lost the tension, the dramatic tension there that was hard to recapture.
I knew we were gonna kind of fall off a cliff after this had happened.
There had been so much interest and it had been such a consuming part
of why the show had appealed to people.
That it was gonna be almost impossible
to find something of equal interest right away
to get you going again.
We did have
a story arc kind of mapped out of a consummation
of a relationship between Cooper and Audrey Horne.
And that was gonna be, I thought, the next big thing
and then for reasons that I don't wanna go into,
that didn't work out.
My name's Audrey Horne.
Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dale Cooper.
I think that was not gonna happen for interpersonal...
The intramurals of the show.
That wasn't gonna happen.
They made the decision to switch things around,
which I was really disappointed
because I was not interested in Kyle as a man, but Audrey loved him.
You know, I was really into being in those scenes.
And I thought we had fun chemistry so...
I don't know, I guess chalk it up to unrequited love.
I wasn't really kind of crazy with that idea.
I thought if we're gonna sell the idea that she's in high school,
I thought "You know..."
It might not really be the 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 like it was really quite appropriate.
So we had to come up with something else.
So we turned to this old adversary of Cooper's, Windom Earle.
Mark came in and told us, "This is what we're gonna do next."
We have this character, Windom Earle, Bob's friend.
He's gonna come in. And so that's really how that happened.
And he was fun to write because he was such a bizarre character.
Sometimes I think probably too bizarre.
But it was always a pleasure to write for him
because you were writing these kind of insane speeches
that were very kind of florid and rhetorical.
And as a writer, that's always fun to do.
And easy to do too much of, I suppose.
I cannot tolerate people who do not play by the rules.
People who shirk the standards.
Many people
are going to regret this.
I thought the show sort of changed its tone to some extent.
It sort of veered off into another direction
that I didn't find nearly as interesting.
You know, I suppose it was inevitable
once you found out who killed Laura Palmer.
You needed to develop other episodes.
But I just thought there was such a wealth of,
you know, of sort of underpinnings
to a lot of the characters who'd been developed
that could have been, you know, expanded and changed.
I mean, we were talking earlier about the idea,
well, maybe Audrey becomes pregnant
or maybe she would become... Maybe she were killed.
Or one of the other characters ran away and something...
I mean, I thought, rather than expand it into new characters
who were being abducted by aliens and developed super-human strength,
I thought you could take a lot of the original characters
and follow their stories
and develop something much more interesting
than I thought where the show was going towards the end.
I think people were frustrated as we got into the second season
and as the second season progressed, I think.
And I remember watching the shows when 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 such a phenomenal core cast of people.
Why don't we just stay in town?" If you know what I mean.
I thought the whole second season pretty much sucked.
I stopped watching.
Because I didn't know who anyone was.
Who was that lady that James was with and who was the...?
What was that little animal, the pine-weasel?
The little pine-weasel
is about to become a household word.
Oh, God.
Oh, God. That seemed like it sort of came from the wrong show.
But, you know, that's what happens.
The story line started to spiral in all kinds of different ways
and I don't know what caused that.
I know that Mark's attention was somewhat taken
by his project, Storyville.
I know David was... His attention, you know,
was taken by Wild at Heart and other endeavors as well.
And I think people started losing interest.
I think the public started losing interest.
And I think some of us started losing interest.
What struck me immediately was
how everybody seems to be in a trance.
And first I thought, "Oh, that's David Lynch doing his thing."
And afterwards, I realized it was just because
everybody was so overworked,
working day and night on this project.
I'm dog-tired.
A man can only go so long without submitting to a period of rest.
For as we know from experiments conducted on American Gls
during the Korean War,
sleep deprivation is a one-way ticket to 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 that have a real obsession with television.
I think David was much more interested
in getting back into doing the features that he really was great at doing.
And, you know, he probably had tired of these characters.
I mean, who knows? I mean, you'd have to ask David
but reality is, is that it's, you know, it's a real killer schedule for people.
And unless you're really obsessed with doing that television, you know,
and working 24 hours a day for nine months out of the year
to get these shows out and supervise them
and make sure that they sort of represent your vision of it,
it's pretty hard to do. And I think David probably tired of it.
And it was easy to turn it over to some other producers
who maybe didn't have the same vision
that he would have had if he had been supervising it.
They really weren't there
the way they had been at the very beginning of 2 and Season 1.
They were all going on to their next creative challenge.
And it became a very hard show, I think, to keep together.
You know, to be perfectly honest, it became more like a TV show.
It became more like...
David wasn't that involved with it anymore
and he pours so much.
I mean, the first seven episodes are basically little films.
I mean, he's pouring his heart and soul into this thing
and so you could tell the quality just went...
And then as the episodes kind of kept going,
it got a little more jokey and hokey and a little...
It might have been a little less believable.
I think sometimes people came on to the show
and would just do weird things for the sake of being weird.
And I don't think... I feel that that part of David's work is soul-based
and it's a part of his truth on some very personal level.
And it's not, "Let's just shock value and be weird for being weird."
The show wouldn't have been a 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 suddenly not to have quite that sense
and feeling of creativity in time.
Anything was possible.
And so I think everybody was 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 been uncomfortable with the show.
It had never really fit into their mold of what a TV show should be.
You know, they'd been bought by Cap Cities at that point
and I think the executives at that company,
which were very conservative and very traditional,
were very uncomfortable with the show.
So we faced a lot of pressure and a lot of uphill battles.
ABC was never, ever ready for Twin Peaks.
And I don't think they really knew what they had
and I certainly don't think they knew quite how to handle it.
One of the few things
that I think of in bitterness
about my film career was the way ABC treated Twin Peaks
by shuffling it around the schedule
and basically bringing about its demise.
They moved it from Thursday night to that kind of water-cooler effect
where people could get together at the office on Friday and talk about it,
to Saturday night. And it didn't go over so well
because then we didn't have that 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." You know?
"Oh, okay. We'll watch before we go to church."
That coincided with this weird thing
that we ran into with the start of the Gulf War
which preempted us for,
if I'm not mistaken, something like six out eight weeks.
And it became very, very difficult to sustain the same kind of momentum
when people couldn't pick up the threads of the story again.
So, you know, we had some problems on our end
in ramping up a new story right away.
And that combined with being preempted a lot during that period,
there was a fall off in the numbers
and that was kind of the beginning of the end with ABC.
The audience, it's so difficult, you know, once you lose them, you know...
It's hard to get them back.
If I'd had a chance to do it over again,
I think I would have gone back and 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 partly where we
kind of let our audience down a little bit.
That we didn't just come in with guns blazing on this second story.
We tried to introduce it kind 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...
The kind of riveting spine that the show needed
until the Windom Earle story really kicked up.
And then I think, we really hit another kind of stride with the show
late in that season.
Now, I had gone off to direct a movie, David had been gone to direct a movie.
And, you know, we hadn't been there to shape it for a few episodes.
So it got... It went a little bit off-track.
And we really felt the need to pull it back
toward the end.
And I felt like we'd done that,
that the last couple of hours in the second season are pretty powerful.
And what we had set up was a great dilemma for Season 3
with Cooper becoming, in effect, you know, the hero and the villain
which is where were we gonna go with it.
Coop?
Coop.
The very last episode was the wildest
piece of movie-making or TV-making that I have ever witnessed.
And 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 somewhere in the morning or so.
And there were all these strange things happening on the set.
David devised this idea of us, you know, speaking backwards
once we got to the other side of the curtain,
you know, in this sort of hellish place, you know.
And Mike Anderson was the expert on that.
Apparently he had made a study of it in junior high school.
And he taught all his friends how to speak backwards.
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 different sounds in a vowel, to reverse that,
you really have to think about it.
Otherwise, it comes back and it doesn't sound like anything.
They're reciting the lines phonetically backwards, they're moving backwards.
And David just knew what this was gonna look like somehow.
That was one where we just sort of
put our trust in David, really. And said, "Okay," and, you know...
It's somehow... Your mind sort of doesn't flow that way, obviously.
So I was like, "I gotta end up here, but then I gotta be here in the middle,
then I gotta be back here at the end. And I gotta make sure that everything
is backwards and how do you...?" So it became kind of a mental puzzle.
If you give me your soul,
I'll let Annie live.
I will.
I think there was a sense that, based on ratings or whatever,
that it was... That this may be the last one.
But David certainly went out there and just blew the doors off
and did the episode.
Because the script that we had put together...
I don't know if he threw it out or just put it on a table.
But I mean, what he did was much different and again, brilliant.
So I think maybe David, on some level, may have known
this is how I'm gonna go out.
We just sort of, you know,
threw in the kitchen sink again in that last episode.
And said, "If we're gonna out, we're gonna go out with a bang."
And again, try to create a sort of cliffhanger
that, you know, people are gonna wanna come back
and see what happens and that's what we did. We did our part.
And, you know, then it died a slow and inglorious death.
I never thought, there would be a Season 1, let alone a Season 2.
I'm not sure... I don't think anybody ever imagined a Season 3.
I don't think we thought there was gonna be a third season.
I think, you know, you make plans for it,
we had some interesting thoughts,
everybody had interesting thoughts about what to do for a third season.
But I think, I think...
I think we were done.
David and I had both been kind of distracted
during parts of the second season,
that we would have come back to season three
with a kind of renewed dedication to it.
And I had started to map out some territory
that I thought would have been interesting
for where the show would go.
That would have brought us back
to what people had liked about the show originally.
It's really an examination of the nature of good and evil
in people's hearts.
And how you don't have to go to a big city
or famous characters to find that kind of divide.
That the human heart is capable of incredible goodness
and remarkable darkness.
And that's a theme that David and I
have both explored in other work that we've done
and, you know, really examined it here together.
And Season 3, I think, would have gone further
into that heart of darkness
in looking at what happened with Agent Cooper.
With a guy who had been the personification
of kind of the light side of things,
having to confront that within himself.
You know, I was always disappointed we 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 gotten a kick out of it.
The thing that I think is extraordinary is that the show,
even though it sort of lost its way and got a little fragmented and fractured,
began to come back together again towards the end,
but by that time it was too late.
But the power of those first few shows
and some of the other ones in the second season were such that
people remember that, you know, and it still
has huge resonance.
It was breakaway television.
It was... It had a style all unto its own.
It was very distinctive.
The characters were all
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 characters
and the style that I think carried it.
Just the whole combination was...
Was so radically different than anything else
that was on television at the time.
And that's what I think is good for television.
It helps it to be breakaway, it helps it to be different,
it helps it to be 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...
...feel that it influenced television so 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 pride
for working on the show. I mean, it's been 15 years
and I still... People still...
I tell them what I've been working on,
and when I say Twin Peaks, their faces light up.
And my face lights up still.
I've always sort of felt that Twin Peaks
was meant to burn very brightly for 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.