Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  The year 1986 was a good one for Lynch. Blue Velvet ushered him into the pantheon of cinema’s great auteurs, but equally important was a fortuitous meeting he had early in the spring of that year when he crossed paths with writer Mark Frost. Born in New York in 1953, Frost spent his teenage years in Minneapolis, where he worked at the Guthrie Theater, then studied acting, directing, and playwriting at Carnegie Mellon. After graduating in 1975, he went to L.A. and landed a series of jobs writing for television. In 1981 he became a staff writer for Steven Bochco’s acclaimed series Hill Street Blues and remained with the show until 1985. The following year he met Lynch.

  “An agent at CAA brought us together to work on a feature called Goddess, for United Artists,” Frost recalled of a project chronicling the final months in the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on Anthony Summers’s book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. “David struck me as a straightforward guy with a great sense of humor and we clicked on that level right away—we made each other chuckle. He had a friendliness I responded to and we just got along well. Sometime in 1986 David set up shop at Dino’s place on Wilshire Boulevard, and that’s where we worked on Goddess. We both wanted to expand the story beyond strict realism and inject lyrical, almost fantastic elements to it, and we started seeing a synchronistic way of working together.”1

  Also titled Venus Descending, the script they completed in November of 1986 implicated Bobby Kennedy in the death of the actress, and the project was quickly abandoned. “Goddess was a great subject and we wrote a good script,” said Frost. “Unfortunately, United Artists and the producer who hired us [Bernie Schwartz] hadn’t sussed out that there were revelations in the book about the Kennedys that we now take for granted but were new at the time. We dealt with those things in the script and that was the end of that.”

  Directing opportunities were coming Lynch’s way during this period, but he had no interest in making a big studio film. “David and I used to joke that he wants a big salary and a little budget,” said Rick Nicita of Lynch, who learned a lesson with Dune that he didn’t forget. Lynch tried to set up Ronnie Rocket with De Laurentiis but said, “Dino couldn’t relate to it.” De Laurentiis believed in Lynch, though, and they continued to look for a film they could do together. One possibility was Up at the Lake, a project Lynch had spoken to Raffaella De Laurentiis about while they were shooting Dune. She encouraged him to take the idea to her father, who committed some development money, but the project never went anywhere.

  One inarguably significant occurrence during that period was Lynch’s acquisition of what’s referred to as the Pink House. A mid-century modern residence ornamented with Aztec-inspired chevrons, the Hollywood Hills house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, and built in 1963. Restored for Lynch by Lloyd Wright’s son, Eric, the house has interior walls of violet stucco, and Lynch has always kept the place sparsely furnished. The Pink House allowed Lynch to live for the first time in an environment that was precisely what he wanted it to be, and the house is important to him. He’s never left it and subsequently purchased two contiguous properties to create the complex where he continues to live and work.

  There were other lifestyle changes then, too, because Lynch needed a staff for the first time in his life. His staff has expanded over the years and now includes an engineer who runs his sound studio, an in-house editor, a full-time handyman, an archivist who manages his art and exhibitions, an in-house producer, and a personal assistant. Initially, it was a streamlined operation of just two or three people, though. One reason Lynch is able to accomplish so much is that the people who work for him are invariably highly capable and devoted to him. Debby Trutnik was installed as office manager in 1987, and John Wentworth assumed the post of jack-of-all-trades.

  Goddess was a misfire, but Frost and Lynch still wanted to work together. Frost said, “One day we were sitting at the Carnation Dairy coffee shop and David said, ‘I’ve got this idea about a secure research facility in the fictional city of Newtonville, Kansas, and two cretinous guys who work there. One of them laughs and a bubble floats out of his mouth and goes down a hallway, around a corner, and into a room where it lodges in the housing of a sensitive piece of equipment and shorts it out. Then you cut to outer space and see a satellite deploy a kind of ray-gun weapon that fires, and then a countdown starts.’ That was all David had when he first came in, and we started spinning it into this comic phantasmagoria called One Saliva Bubble. We were six weeks away from shooting it with Steve Martin and Martin Short when Dino reveals he’s out of money and the company is going away along with all the projects.”

  That was the end of One Saliva Bubble, but things were moving forward on other fronts. In June of that year Lynch’s career as a fine artist advanced when he met art dealer James Corcoran, owner of the James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles. “David was living in a small apartment in Westwood at the time, and I went to his place and met him,” remembered Corcoran, who gave Lynch a solo show the following year. “David has a lot of spirit and I liked him immediately—he’s a very legitimate guy. He was doing large pastel drawings then, and one of the things that intrigued me about them was that they were very dark compared with work by the artists I was showing at the time, like Ken Price and Ed Ruscha.”2

  Lynch’s exhibition did well in terms of sales and critical reception. Artforum described the work as “deeply affecting and deliciously quirky,” while the Los Angeles Times called it “authentic and fresh.” Isabella Rossellini subsequently showed Lynch’s work to Milan gallerist Beatrice Monti della Corte, who encouraged legendary art dealer Leo Castelli to look at it. Castelli mounted Lynch’s first exhibition in New York in February of 1989, and Corcoran gave him a second show in L.A.

  It was immediately apparent in the work in those exhibitions that anything dark that was lurking in Lynch’s soul was channeled directly into his art. Titles like Shadow of a Twisted Hand Across My House, On a Windy Night a Lonely Figure Walks to Jumbo’s Klown Room, and Oww God, Mom, the Dog He Bited Me, all from 1988, give an idea of the mood of the work. Large, murky fields of gray, brown, and black paint applied with a loose hand, the pictures are perfumed with a sense of menace and dread. Carefully deployed passages rendered in flesh tone introduce a human presence in the work, but forms are never more than crudely sketched stick figures; the touches of flesh tone feel more like wounds. They’re scary pictures.

  Lynch was leading a bicoastal life during his years with Rossellini, spending half his time with her in New York and the other half in L.A. His divorce from Fisk was quietly finalized in 1987. “I didn’t want to go through courts and dredge up stuff and make a mess of things,” Fisk said. “We married without lawyers and could separate without them, and we wanted it as simple and quick as possible. It was hard, though. I saw an article on David with Isabella in Vanity Fair the day our divorce was finalized.”

  In 1987 Lynch began what would prove to be an important friendship when he met producer Monty Montgomery, who had co-directed the 1981 indie cult film The Loveless with Kathryn Bigelow. “I met a guy named Allan Mindel who had a modeling agency in L.A. named Flick, and they were trying to break into everything—I crossed paths with him because of music videos,” said Montgomery. “Allan represented Isabella and he told her that she and David should meet me, so I went up to David’s place. He was sitting in his empty house with one piece of furniture and he was friendly; we spoke the same language as far as movies and ideas, and he seemed very honest—we just hit it off. When we were first getting to know each other we went to Musso & Frank’s for lunch a lot, and we’d pass these characters on Hollywood Boulevard and David would look at them and say, ‘I wonder what his story is?’ He’s curious about everything.

  “When David and I met, he’d just finished shooting a commercial and needed some post-production work done,” Montgomery continued. “[Production company] Propaganda Films was up to speed with video, so I hooked him up with a gu
y and he had a good experience, and that’s how we started working together.”3

  Montgomery wasn’t a partner at Propaganda but he was instrumental in all the projects Lynch did there. The seeds of Propaganda were planted in 1978 when Icelandic producer Joni Sighvatsson was a student at the AFI and met Steve Golin, who was a fellow in the producing program there. They began developing projects together, then teamed up with three additional producers and founded Propaganda Films in 1983. Golin and Sighvatsson met Montgomery in the mid-eighties when they found themselves in pursuit of the same project. “Steve and I liked this book by Richard Hallas that was published in 1938 called You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, but it was under option by some guy in Texas, so we called the guy and that was Monty,” said Sighvatsson. “We developed the project together, and that was the first thing the three of us approached David with. He liked it but didn’t want to do a period film, and he was trying to get Ronnie Rocket going at that point. We got involved in that, and a couple of times the financing seemed to be coming together but it always fell apart. Then David started writing Twin Peaks with Mark.”4

  Lynch’s activities were expanding in multiple directions at that point, and his involvement with music was deepening. Roy Orbison initially had reservations about the use of his song “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet but eventually came around, and in April of 1987 he went into the studio and recorded a new version of it produced by Lynch and T Bone Burnett. Then, in 1988, Lynch was invited by Le Figaro magazine and Erato Films to do a short film for the French television series The French as Seen By…, and he wrote and directed The Cowboy and the Frenchman. A twenty-four-minute catalog of clichés about Americans and the French, the film stars producer Frederic Golchan as a dazed Frenchman wearing a beret and toting exotic cheeses and a baguette; he arrives out of nowhere at a dude ranch, where he encounters clueless ranch hands, a country-western vocal trio, and a native American in a loincloth and feathered headdress.

  Co-starring as the cowboy was Harry Dean Stanton, in the first of seven Lynch projects he appeared in. “I’d always been impressed with David’s films and we had a natural bond,” Stanton recalled. “We understood each other. We talked about Taoism, Buddhism, and meditation and have a rapport based on our shared interest in Eastern thought.”5

  Golchan said, “Johanna Ray called and said, ‘I have a director who’s looking for a French actor; would you be interested in meeting him?’ I told her I wasn’t an actor but would love to meet him, so she arranged for me to go to David’s house, which I remember as an empty space. I think there were two speakers and two chairs sitting very far apart from each other. It was stark but he was warm and friendly, and whatever I was saying made him laugh. He said, ‘I think you’re perfect,’ and three days later we were shooting. I was initially intimidated by the prospect of playing this part, but David takes you along, and it was such a fun ride that I stopped worrying.”6

  Also on set with Lynch for the first time was script supervisor Cori Glazer, who went on to become a mainstay on his crews. She was offered fifty dollars a day to work as a PA, and her career course was set. “I remember thinking, If I only ever work for one director, this is the person I want to work for,” she said of Lynch. “I fell in love with his creativity, and he’s got the hugest heart of anyone I know. I remember that Isabella came to visit him on the set and he sent a green M&M over to her. He’s always cheerful, at the end of the day he thanks people, and he knows everyone’s name on the crew, down to the lowliest PA. If one of them brings him a cup of coffee he’ll look them in the eye and say, ‘Thank you, Johnny, thank you so much.’ ”7

  That same year Lynch made his debut as an actor in a significant role, in Tina Rathborne’s Zelly and Me, a coming-of-age story about a little girl torn between an abusive grandmother and a loving governess portrayed by Rossellini; Lynch played the governess’s mysterious boyfriend, Willie. “Tina [who went on to direct episodes three and seventeen of Twin Peaks] did a film about a married woman with an illness that I found quite beautiful, so when we met to talk about Zelly and Me, I was interested,” said Rossellini. “I play a babysitter who has a boyfriend, but none of the actors we tested for the role were right. The story is evocative of another century when people didn’t consummate their love as quickly, and the actors we tested were too modern and sexy. David is gentle and polite, and when he tested for the part Tina was convinced.”

  The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23rd, 1988, and opened on April 15th to middling reviews. Lynch had mixed feelings about appearing in the film and has rarely spoken of it, but he seemed comfortable with his new position in the cultural landscape. He was becoming famous.

  “I remember the first time someone asked him for an autograph when he was with me,” said Martha Levacy. “It was around 1988 and we were at a Denny’s or someplace like that, and two people walked up with a napkin and asked him to sign it. He took it in stride and said, ‘Yeah, some people are starting to recognize me.’ He didn’t seem to feel one way or another about it. It was just a statement of fact, and he was real gracious about it, always. Our folks taught us to behave that way.”

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  Lynch was about to become really famous. Tony Krantz, a young agent who started in the mailroom at CAA in 1981 and moved up the corporate ladder, felt that Lynch’s approach to storytelling could translate well to the episodic structure of television. “When I heard that David was collaborating with a senior writer on Hill Street Blues, I thought, There’s a weird possibility there! I wanted to make a hit series and I saw an opportunity, so I got a meeting with them and convinced them to give it a shot. They came up with a thing called The Lemurians about the continent of Lemuria, a place where evil prevailed. The continent disappeared into the ocean leaving a few survivors, and the show was about FBI agents with Geiger counters who search out and kill the remaining Lemurians. We took it to Brandon Tartikoff, who was head of NBC, and he ordered it as a movie, but David didn’t want to do it as a movie because he thought it was a series. So even though we sold it, it just died.

  “David and I had lunch frequently,” Krantz continued, “and one day we were at Nibblers and I looked around and said, ‘David, this is your world, these people, the flotsam and jetsam of L.A. This is what you should do a series about.’ I rented Peyton Place and screened it for David and Mark and said, ‘Peyton Place meets your world, David.’ ”8

  Although Lynch hated Peyton Place, Frost recalled that at that point he and Lynch “knocked some stuff around. Then we went into ABC for a how-do-you-do meeting with some executives, including ABC’s head of dramatic programming, Chad Hoffman. We talked about this idea, which was originally called Northwest Passage, and they lunged at it.”

  Lynch and Frost had this successful pitch meeting in March of 1988, just as a Writers Guild strike that was to stretch into August began. “Because of the strike, everything got put on hold for almost a year, so there was a hiatus after that first meeting at ABC,” said Frost. “When the strike ended they called and said, ‘We want to proceed with that project you pitched,’ but by that point neither of us could remember much of what we’d said! So we talked about it some more, then met with them and were told to go write. We knew it was going to be some kind of serial about the murder of a homecoming queen, and the first image we had was of a dead body washing up on the shore of a lake.”

  A study of small-town intrigue set in the same indeterminate time zone as Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks had a clear narrative arc, but the story was elastic enough to accommodate new ideas along the way. While Frost and Lynch were writing early episodes for the show, for instance, Lynch had the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama, who spoke to him about the plight of Tibet. This led to a scene with Agent Dale Cooper giving a lecture on the subject to the staff of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department.

  This highly unconventional material made its way onto network TV partly
because Frost knew how to navigate that world. A seasoned television writer who understood the rhythms and limitations of the medium, Frost was a good foil for Lynch, and each brought different things to the table. “Initially, part of my contribution was that I knew the ground rules of television more than David did,” Frost said. Lynch has recalled that Frost had an office with a chaise longue like a psychiatrist’s couch and that he’d lie on the couch and talk as Frost typed.

  “We’d toss things in the air and bat them back and forth like a game of ping-pong,” said Frost. “Scenes would suggest themselves and we’d hammer them into shape, and there were certain characters that one or the other of us had the voice for more authoritatively. Structure might be a little more my strong suit, but David’s got tremendously enhanced ideas about mood and character and small details and behaviors that are indelible and unique. David’s tastes run darker than mine, and that was a point of departure on occasion, but we somehow always resolved it. Neither of us ever said, ‘That won’t work,’ and walked away.”

  “We weren’t wildly excited, like, This is it!” Frost said of the completion of the two-hour pilot script. “It was more a case of, Here’s another thing we’re taking a crack at. We wrote the pilot fairly quickly—I don’t think it took more than a month—and that first draft was the final draft. I remember David sitting in my office while I printed out two copies, and David went home and read it, then called me that night and said, ‘I think we have something.’ ”

  Lynch had drawn a map of the town of Twin Peaks (the map now hangs in Krantz’s office), and they took it with them when they turned the script in to ABC and referred to it as they described the world they were evoking in the script. Brandon Stoddard, the president of ABC Entertainment, was charmed and ordered the pilot for a possible fall series in 1989.