Twin Peaks

Origins

A producer at Warner Brothers wanted Lynch to direct a film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on the book The Goddess. Lynch recalls in the Lynch on Lynch book that he was "sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story."[4] Mark Frost was hired to write the screenplay. Even though this project was dropped by Warner Brothers, Lynch and Frost became good friends, and wrote a screenplay entitled One Saliva Bubble, with Steve Martin attached to star in it. However, this film was not made, either.

Lynch's agent, Tony Krantz, had been trying to get the filmmaker to work on TV since Blue Velvet, but he was never really that interested in the idea. "So one day Mark and I were talking at Du Pars, the coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, and, all of a sudden, Mark and I had this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake," Lynch remembered in an interview.[5]

Lynch and Frost pitched the idea to ABC in a ten-minute meeting with the network's drama head, Chad Hoffman, with nothing more than this image and a concept, according to the director: "The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was the foreground, but this would recede slightly as you got to know the other people in the town and the problems they were having...The project was to mix a police investigation with a soap opera. We had drawn a map of the city. We knew where everything was located and that helped us determine the prevailing atmosphere and what might happen there."[5]

ABC liked the idea, and asked Lynch and Frost to write a screenplay for the pilot episode. Originally, the show was entitled Northwest Passage and set in North Dakota, but the fact that a town called Twin Peaks really existed (much like Lumberton in Blue Velvet) prompted a revision in the script. They filmed the pilot with an agreement with ABC that they would shoot an additional "ending" to it so that it could be sold directly to video in Europe as a feature if the TV show was not picked up. However, even though ABC's Bob Iger liked the pilot, he had a tough time persuading the rest of the network brass. Iger suggested showing it to a more diverse, younger group, who liked it, and the executive subsequently convinced ABC to buy seven episodes at $1 million apiece. Some executives figured that the show would never get on the air. However, Iger planned to schedule it for the spring. The final showdown occurred during a bi-coastal conference call between Iger and a room full of New York executives — Iger won, and Twin Peaks was on the air.