In A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks (Running Press), entertainment and culture writer Scott Meslow, the author of From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy, peeks behind the red curtains to explore the making of Twin Peaks, and its impact on the television landscape. He spoke to PW about what he learned, including some amusing stories of how certain key characters were cast, and how the show might have looked had ABC not pressured creators David Lynch and Mark Frost to resolve its central mystery—who killed Laura Palmer?—a plot choice that contributed to the show's declining audience.
How did a show as out there as Twin Peaks make it onto television?
One of the premises of the book is that Twin Peaks came around at just the right time to sort of smuggle true art onto television twice. The first time, as I talk about in the book, ABC being in fourth place, and just kind of being willing to take a flyer on this show, and David Lynch being at just the right point in his career to do a TV pilot combined at just the right time. And for a TV series to happen, he needed Mark Frost, who could help with the basic visual language, and the grammar and the structure of television. And they were introduced at just the right time.
I think it's pretty clear why it became so influential. I kind of paraphrase that famous line about the Velvet Underground in the book, it's not necessarily that everyone was watching Twin Peaks, but everyone who did went on to make a TV show. I mean, take your pick—The Sopranos, Lost, True Detective, Severance—all of those people have more or less at one point explicitly cited Twin Peaks as an influence.
How about Twin Peaks: The Return?
It was the exact same thing. We were in this era that they called peak TV, which has since passed. But there was this window where everyone was agreeing that tv was the great defining art medium of our time, and everything that had had any kind of popular or cult fandom was getting rebooted. Mark Frost was canny enough to re-approach David Lynch—who had talked for many years about not wanting to continue Twin Peaks—with the idea that ultimately became Twin Peaks: The Return. Part of their approach was basically, we're going to do a reboot of this popular show that people are really hot for right now, but we're going to do it in a way that is so totally unexpected. You can kind of imagine what the easy reboot of Twin Peaks would have been, and The Return is definitely not that. It is something very strange, and artful, and interesting, and I think it really only could have happened in that particular window, where Showtime was eventually convinced to just give them a blank canvas and see what they make. And Lynch and Frost delivered; Episode Eight [known unofficially as "Gotta Light?," and which connected the events of both series to the dawn of the Atomic Age] is, cited by many critics as one of the great film-anythings of the 21st century.
Was Twin Peaks Lynch and Frost's first collaborative effort?
They were connected through a mutual agent who basically just bugged both of them a bunch of times and said, "I think you guys would do something cool together." And they had several abortive projects before they came to Twin Peaks, which was almost a little bit of a Hail Mary at this point. They talked about The Lemurians—they didn't get very far with it, but that would have been a very crazy-sounding show that was sort of like a proto-X-Files—government agents investigating a weird conspiracy. One Saliva Bubble is probably the weirdest and most interesting thing they played around with, a movie that was intended to star Steve Martin and Martin Short that Lynch called an out-and-out dumb comedy, two guys accidentally set off a slapstick chain of events. So those didn't happen before Twin Peaks, which did happen because ABC came to them, basically saying they wanted something like Peyton Place. Lynch and Frost took that idea and really ran with it.
You write that Lynch and Frost, especially Lynch, maybe both of them equally, did not want to identify Laura's killer. How could they would have sustained that longer than they did? And did the decline in popularity after the murderer was revealed provide lessons to the makers of other series?
I didn't make Twin Peaks, so what do I know? But the Mark Frost argument on this makes more sense to me than the David Lynch argument. Mark's belief was, we will have to resolve it sometime, but we will take our time getting there, and we can open up smaller mysteries that can feed into the larger mystery, and we can keep the show running longer than one and a half seasons before revealing the killer. David Lynch's belief that they never had to reveal the killer seems to me to be very out of step with what any TV audience would expect. David Lynch was a genius, and far be it for me to tell him what is a good or bad idea, but I have a hard time imagining that, especially on TV in the 90s. I think the enigmatic, sort of unknowable stuff in The Return, TV was ready for it by then. It makes more sense to me that some of that show's central stuff remains more unresolved, or at least, harder to parse.
In terms of when they resolved it, I'm of two minds about it, because I think they absolutely could have strung it along longer, and audiences would absolutely have hung on for that, the people who cared, but I also, I think the resolution is terrific. I think it's a great solution to the mystery. It introduces darker and stranger ideas. If I'm gonna put on my fanfiction hat and say what I think Twin Peaks could have done at the time, there is a middle ground between, we know who the killer is, and the town knows who the killer is. And I think you could have played out the the thread where we know the killer, doing more bad things in the town before Cooper and everyone figure it out. Reimagining the show, you could have done the rest of the second season with more bodies turning up, Cooper increasingly frustrated, more detours and red herrings, and I think that would have been just as riveting, and helped. The thing that they ran into, that everyone spoke very candidly about, was that although the solution to the murder was great, they didn't really have a great thing to replace it, and they spent a lot of the second season casting about with different ideas that might fill that hole.
At what point did Lynch and Frost devise their solution?
My understanding is that basically none of the breadcrumbs in the first season were intentional. Mark told me was that he and David Lynch had agreed pretty early on a very plausible suspect. They didn't want to lock in on someone, because they didn't want to, yget in such a narrow lane creatively if a better idea might occur to them eventually. But the person they'd identified as the killer seemed like he was always the most plausible suspect when they felt they had to pin it down, in their minds.
What did you learn during your research that most surprised you?
I couldn't believe it when Joanna Ray, the casting director on both shows, told me how her son ended up cast as Leo Johnson, which is kind of funny. He was not an actor, and certainly didn't have any intention of being one, and he just kind of filled in reading lines opposite other actors who were reading. And, David Lynch kind of got his voice in his head, liked his look, and decided that was Leo. And so I just kind of offhandedly asked, if that hadn't happened who did you have in mind for Leo? And she said one person was Brad Pitt.
