From: jgp@zodmate.Rational.COM (Jim Pellmann)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks,rec.arts.tv,rec.arts.movies
Subject: TP: On the set of FWWM
Date: 12 Aug 92 22:11:31 GMT
Followup-To: alt.tv.twin-peaks

From the November/December '91 issue of Film Comment:

                             See You in the Trees
                             
                                 by Greg Olson

A September evening in Western Washington; a dilapidated trailer park, its
raggedly parallel, pale rows set off against the sunset-stained upthrust of
blackish-purple mountains.  In a window at the near end of one trailer a little
girl is doing dishes.  Some motion outside catches her eye and she calls,
"Daddy, are they out there again?"  Sandwiched between her trailer's row and
the next are microphones, movie cameras, and thirty people.

Chris Isaak and Harry Dean Stanton, talking softly, start to walk slowly toward
the camera.  Suddenly, a familiar all-American twang cuts the dusky air:  "I
can see that ninety.  We gotta lose that ninety."  David Lynch has noticed a
1990 license plate at the edge of his scene.  A grip hops over and covers the
date with a postage stamp of tape, and the director is ready to roll.  This is
not the early Nineties in the Pacific Northwest--this is dreamtime in Twin
Peaks.

David Lynch has returned to the scene of the crime.

The nation-grabbing pilot episode of "Twin Peaks"--set in motion by the
discovery of the plastic-wrapped corpse of high-school homecoming queen Laura
Palmer on a chill lakeshore--featured the series' most extensive filming in the
rural environs of Seattle.  It was a dreamlike, floating entrance into a
strange world so nearly like our own.  Uncharacteristically of television, the
two-hour show gave us stretches of time to get lost in the fear, grief, desire
of the human face, and the contemplation of secrets behind it.  Manmade objects
seemed animated by infernal forces--an ever-turning stairwell fan in the
murdered girl's house, fluorescent morgue lights zapping on and off like a neon
sign, a nighttime traffic light burning redder than blood.  "Twin Peaks"
assured us that, even on cozy domestic evenings, a wind whispered in the firs.

The various writers and directors who worked on "Twin Peaks" the series (Lynch
himself directed six of 30 episodes) did a creditable job of sustaining the
master's tone and style, his sense of generic dreamworld intermixing clothing,
cars, hairstyles, interiors, value systems, and ways of speaking from the last
four American decades.  However, after we learned that Laura's demon-possessed
father Leland was the one who killed her, new characters started popping up
like mushrooms, and storylines bent time and space like a cherry stem at the
mercy of Audrey Horne's tongue.  With the obtuseness that is the stock-in-trade
of overpaid network programmers, ABC schedulers disrupted the show's subtle
rhythmic cycle a number of times, and many impatient viewers stopped watching.
Loyal fans prepared to start pining: cancellation couldn't be long in coming.

Three months after the final episode (in which FBI stalwart Agent Dale Cooper
was last seen playing host to the spirit of ultimate Evil, the demon Bob), the
September 4th news-at-11 tells me that not only will there be a "Twin Peaks"
feature movie, "Fire Walk With Me"--it started shooting today in a funky
Snoqualmie trailer court.  The plot will cover the seven days of the town's,
and Agent Cooper's, life before the two meet up.  Laura Palmer's still alive.

I'm on the case at 1:30 the next afternoon.  September 5 is one of those rare
85-degree Indian summer Seattle days.  As I whiz through the evergreens toward
the Cascade mountains, passing the salmon-hatchery town where I graduated from
high school, and the whistle stop where my Swedish-immigrant father was a
pre-chainsaw lumberjack, I mull over the TV news report of a closed set; the
video man had to catch a glimpse of the production through a knothole in the
fence.  But the sign for the Snoqualmie turnoff has a red-letter FIRE WALK
paper banner taped to it.  This is going to be easy.

Well, maybe not.  The Snoqualmie Police Station yields no receptionist Lucy, no
Sheriff Truman, no one at all.  Finally a young officer leans into the waiting
room and casually points me toward Park and Meadowbrook.  I head over, skirting
a ROAD CLOSED sign and coming up against parked squad cars and numerous boys in
blue, who have cordoned off a block of old brick buildings and rundown
storefronts: Snoqualmie's economic hard times are a production designer's good
fortune.  Beyond the officers, I can see the production vans and
walkie-talkie-bearing crew-members and a couple of people not technologically
engaged.

I can pass for one of those, I tell myself.  I stride past the nearest cop,
breathe a sigh of relief, increase my pace, round a corner, and almost smack
right into Dale Cooper--an arresting sensation, suddenly sharing three feet of
pavement with a fictional character, his double-breasted overcoat, monumental
ivory chin, and gleaming black slicked-back hair as perfect as they are on my 
Mitsubishi.  In a second, the illusion passes and he's looser-than-Cooper Kyle
MacLachlan, leaning to confer with the transportation van driver.

I find the fence the news crew peeked through--and an unexpected gap.  I slip
into the film's Fat Trout Trailer Park.  So, right behind me, does David Lynch.
He wears baggy khakis, a white shirt with its collar button closed, a black
suit jacket with small holes at the elbows, and a charcoal-billed cap.  A
toothpick, like a little splinter of divining rod, juts from his lips.  The
furrow between his eyebrows gives him an earnest, concerned look that opens
easily into amusement and amazement--not unlike Agent Cooper's when confronted
with a slice of cherry pie.  For eight years (in "Dune" and "Blue Velvet"
before "Twin Peaks") Kyle MacLachlan has tracked clues and read dreams as
Lynch's truth-questing alter ego, and the two--who both spent their early years
in Washington state--begin the afternoon with a firm handshake.

Lynch and cinematographer Ron Garcia (who shot the TP pilot) set up a scene
involving that national treasure Harry Dean Stanton, who plays the Fat Trout's
scruffy, plaid-shirted manager.  Stanton points MacLachlan toward a certain
trailer and then sees him, almost in a trace, going off in another direction.
For a number of rehearsals and takes we get to savor Stanton bellowing, "Why
the HELL are you going up that way?" Lynch speaks quiet words of direction and,
on one take, says, "Okay, Harry Dean, let's get that anger up there" before
calling "Action!" through his megaphone.  He calls Stanton "Harry Dean" and
MacLachlan "Cooper."

The scene in the can, Lynch thanks his actors for their "doggone good job."  A
teenage girl crosses the shooting area and joins two friends near me.  One asks
her, "Could you see a lot from over there?"  The girl looks wistfully at
MacLachlan and sighs, "All I know is, there HE is."  But in a blink, he isn't
there anymore.  Nor are Lynch and Stanton.

I follow a dirt road that circles left to the far side of the park, which
borders on the lazy Snoqualmie River.  From here the green waters flow past the
double smokestacks of the Weyerhauser sawmill (the Packard Mill in the series'
opening credits), on to the Salish Lodge (the Great Northern Hotel), and over
the Snoqualmie Falls (Whitetail Falls) that local Native Americans still
worship.  As I watch kids skip stones, I remember how these grassy banks became
Mark Twain and Washington Irving country in my childhood imagination.  Hearing
a murmur of voices, I look over my shoulder and see the director having a
little powwow with his two actors and gazing at the river.  They're perched on
the set-dressed trailer porch of the film's park manager.  Message-bearing
scraps stuck to the door, a weathered strip of outdoor carpeting, and two
scraggly potted pines--one decorated with a neon-red fishing lure--complete a
true low-tech David Lynch tableau.

Lynch's fascination with the interface between industrial and organic textures
surfaces as he has a technician apply a layer of dust to an old car's hood.
Then he grabs a hose and carefully mists and spatters droplets over it,
perfecting the look even though the eventual shot won't focus on the car.

Lynch has spoken of the kinship he feels with those who are physically and
socially outside the consumer-culture-imaged mainstream.  That evening, after
his crew "loses the ninety," Chris Isaak and Harry Dean walk and talk, and are
interrupted by an old woman with a sunken chin, her hands permanently curled at
the end of stiff arms.  "Where's my goddam hot water?  Where's my goddam hot
water?  Where IS my goddam hot water?" she importunes Stanton.  The woman, a
local, speaks on the wrong cue.  This is the last natural-light shot of the day
and there are precious few minutes left to get it.  Lynch stops the take and
patiently tells her how he wants her to enter the action.  They take the shot
three times, and she demands a lot of hot water in perfect form.  When the
camera stops after the last take, Lynch goes straight to the woman and puts his
arm around her: "That was very, very good, Margaret."

As Pat from North Bend's Mar T Cafe (the Double R Diner) arrives with Harry
Dean's favorite chili and the crew prepares for hours of night shooting, Lynch
calls this "a beautiful day."  He's been getting the best from cast and crew,
and the filmmakers and townsfolk have interacted as felicitously as flapjacks
and syrup.  Babies and dogs have been quiet during takes, movie stars with
relaxed faces have signed autographs, dreamed-up movie life has melded with the
everyday doings of the trailer-court residents, and the whole thing's been
witnessed by smalltown-dwellers-in-spirit variously from New York, England, and
Sugarland, Texas.  Around 4:30 PM Lynch says, "We've got a bad siren," and
stops a take; when the noise ends, a Snoqualmie man grins and says, "That's the
Packard Mill changing shifts."  Just another moment in "Twin Peaks," as
rendered by Norman Rockwell.  We'll have to wait for the movie to hear the
woods breathe and feel the night come creeping into bodies and souls.

In my newspaper the next morning I see that, in the middle of yesterday's
late-summer picnic of an afternoon, a couple reaching for a piece of dirftwood
downriver from the falls spotted something oddly spherical--a human skull.

            (Greg Olson is Film Curator of the Seattle Art Museum.)
            
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--
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"I lived in my head mostly."                | Jim Pellmann (jgp@rational.com)
"That's not a bad neighborhood."            | RATIONAL
"There were some pretty strange neighbors." | Santa Clara, California