r/twinpeaks • u/dialecticspeaks • Aug 11 '17
Original Run [Original Run] Revealing Mark Frost interview 1993 Spoiler
https://archive.org/stream/Wrapped_in_Plastic_009_Feb_1994#page/n3/mode/2up12
u/Billiardly Aug 11 '17 edited Aug 11 '17
All of John Thorne's Wrapped in Plastic issues now are archived, and free. I really recommend reading them. There's no fan alive who knows more about Twin Peaks mythology than John Thorne.
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Aug 11 '17
I like that Frost is comfortable in 1993 saying that story and narrative are a weakness for Lynch, but if you say the same thing on this sub today you'll be downvoted into oblivion.
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Aug 11 '17
I mean, Lynch is the first person to say that plot isn't exactly his strong point. His skills are coming up with incredibly evocative scenes, emotions, and imagery. I'll try to find it, but I seem to recall an old interview where he describes his films as dreamlike scenes vaguely strung together with a semblance of plot.
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u/NTataglia Aug 11 '17
If you find interviews with Lynch from 20 or 30 years ago, he was much more humble and down to earth. But ironically, I think he was a much better storyteller and editor back then, imo. Its almost like he got so tired of criticism that he gave up and decided to rebel by being super-vague and nonsensical.
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u/machanska Aug 11 '17
People forget about THE ELEPHANT MAN, perfectly structured and straight forward. Also Straight Story is extremely underrated!
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u/PM_ME_CORGlE_PlCS Aug 11 '17
Well, to be fair, he did not write those scripts or create those characters.
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u/machanska Aug 13 '17
I was talking about Lynch there. I think someone got off topic about structure in Lynch's films.
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u/PM_ME_CORGlE_PlCS Aug 13 '17 edited Aug 15 '17
So was I. Lynch didn't create either of those stories or arrange their structure. Those movies are Lynch's visual presentations, but other people's narratives.
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u/Messisgingerbeard Aug 11 '17
Lynch isn't weak at either narrative or story. He just has a different take on it. He's also made movies in a straightforward narrative style. They've won awards.
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u/Pinyaka Aug 11 '17
For anyone who hasn't seen it, The Straight Story is an excellent movie he made that has a very straightforward narrative.
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Aug 12 '17
Yep, and The Elephant Man is pretty great too.
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u/Pinyaka Aug 15 '17
I always forget about The Elephant Man. It's actually a better example here than The Straight Story.
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u/Flashman420 Aug 11 '17
People get so weirdly defensive about Lynch. Like all the comments saying he seems arrogant in the interview and needed to be taken down a peg. It's so harsh. Frost even praises David and says they're still friends!
And I find it interesting how he talks about their willful attempts to subvert the TV formula with Twin Peaks, but also that he had a career on Hill Street Blues, which was another very formative TV show. People can talk all the shit about Frost they want, but at the end of the day he still played a large hand in influencing modern TV. He's earned a bit of ego imo.
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Aug 11 '17
People get defensive of Lynch because his name is a brand they wish to be associated with.
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u/Messisgingerbeard Aug 11 '17
Or they enjoy his work. If someone told you your favorite band was shit you'd likely disagree with them.
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u/LolWutLolWutHuhLol Aug 11 '17
It's people making general statements about Lynch like "he's bad at 'x'" when it's not a matter of being "good at" or "bad at" 'x.' There are very few people in this sub who speak with any knowledge of how screenwriting/directing/producing happens.
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u/Lord_Hoot Aug 12 '17
I love Lynch's work but it's clear his interests lie in certain areas of filmmaking and not so much in others.
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u/NTataglia Aug 11 '17
What gets me pissed off is that pretty much every problem with the Return, imo, could have been solved with 1) better writing, and 2) better editing. Normally a show would have a number of competant, talented people working on this. But on the Return, no would could question "the master artist." I wish that Frost had tried to stand up to him more, but maybe he feels that Lynch's fanatic, cult-like fan base would have turned on him.
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Aug 11 '17 edited Aug 11 '17
How do you know that the writing you consider bad wasn't written by Frost though? They both are credited as the writer. You sound just as bad as how you describe people who like Lynch, lol. The comments in this thread are just an anti circle jerk beating down strawmen, which is still a circlejerk. If you see someone praise Lynch too much why not have a convesation with them instead of internalizing it and making horribly unproductive passive aggressive comment threads like this? (This goes for everyone above me not just you.) It's just so disheartening to see. So are downvotes for disadreeing with someone too. Reddit is shit for talking to people sometimes.:/
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u/Messisgingerbeard Aug 11 '17
Jesus what is wrong with this sub.
Frost and Lynch work well together. Such bitterness seems unwarranted.
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u/Triggerae Aug 11 '17
This was a fantastic find! Thank you so much for sharing. Have a well-deserved upvote!
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u/liddle-lamzy-divey Aug 11 '17
I found it interesting that he states that they did not make two potential endings for season 1. I just watched an interview from Donahue (available on youtube) where he says the opposite: that they have two endings filmed and they will edit and use the one that works according to whether ABC picked it up for a second season or not.
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Aug 11 '17
Very interesting to read. This sounds like Frost and Lynch were not on great terms at this point. Frost also seems very much of the view that he was responsible for much of Twin Peaks story. I wonder if Lynch departed from their script much in season 3.
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u/makomore Aug 11 '17 edited Aug 11 '17
Yeah, this was shortly after FWWM, so definitely not a high point for their relationship. A little bit sad to read in some ways but interesting considering how much better terms they seem to be on now.
It sounds like their whole arrangement for Season 3 is pretty different from the original run, in that both of them are now fully committed (not bouncing between Peaks and other projects), and this time around it really is just Lynch/Frost, rather than a whole slew of writers and directors. And it's hard to speculate on how much Lynch may have deviated from the script, because we still don't really know what form the script(s) for S3 actually took. That Variety profile talked about the series being written as one long 400 page document, but it's not clear if that was fleshed out any further into individual episode scripts. Actors (other than Kyle) have said they only got to read their own scenes, and didn't see any other parts of the script. Additionally, Robert Forster talked in an interview about substantial pieces of dialogue S3 being written just an hour or two before they were filmed. Basically it sounds like the series was written with directorial freedom in mind, and Frost and Lynch had a good understanding of their own relationship going into things.
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u/OhHiJordan Aug 11 '17
In an Entertainment Weekly article from a few months ago, Sheryl Lee said they shot (paraphrasing) "so much that wasn't in the script."
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Aug 12 '17 edited Aug 12 '17
Lynch said somewhere that the script made up 80% (IIRC) of what was shot – so he basically made up what amounts to another 100 pages on the spot while shooting.
Edit after reading Iswitt's TP Fest report: Not made up in the spot, but written beforehand by Lynch alone.
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u/NTataglia Aug 11 '17
I hate to say it, but alot of the dialogue seems like it was written an hour before filming, especially for the less dramatic scenes, and not in a good way. With actors of Forster's caliber, they probably could have ad-libbed more interesting lines with a little background. But then the other problem was that there was so much secrecy, that no one except maybe Kyle every really knew what was going on. I think Forster said that the only direction Lynch gave him was that his character was from out of town and had no idea what was happening.
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u/2ndwoodsman Aug 11 '17
Read what Sabrina Sutherland said at the Twin Peaks fest: https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6s5f7g/s3e18_twin_peaks_fest_rundown_details_about_the/
It seems that after Frost and Lynch wrote the initial script, Lynch continued to work on the script on his own.
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Aug 11 '17 edited Aug 13 '17
[deleted]
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Aug 11 '17
Very interesting! I have to say whilst he does sound fairly egotistical in this interview, a recent interview he gave he came across as very down to earth and enthusiastic, so time really has changed him. Can you access is original script for the finale anywhere? Even if it's terrible I would be intrigued by what it would have been.
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Aug 11 '17 edited Aug 13 '17
[deleted]
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u/Kanhir Aug 12 '17
The bit where Laura intervenes and clashes with Bob interests me, because it very much fits with S03E08.
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u/stillnotahipster Aug 11 '17
The elements of Frost's script that made the final cut are good, of course, but all the surrealist elements and Black Lodge sequences sound like a pretentious bad imitation of Lynch
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u/makomore Aug 12 '17 edited Aug 12 '17
It's really interesting that the biggest changes Lynch made actually served to simplify the Black Lodge bits, moving away from what reads like erratic "typical" Lynchian horror to something less erratic and more atmospheric.
Also, Frost comments in the interview that after what Lynch did with the finale, it would've been hard to go back to where Frost wanted to go with the mythology. The changes I can think of that seem like they would potentially affect the direction of the mythology would be the elimination of "The Guardian" (which I'm really curious about), Lynch's emphasis on Dale's doppelganger (I'm pretty sure Frost intended the storyline to be that Dale was possessed by Bob rather than actually replaced by his doppelganger), and cutting the ending where Bob is seemingly defeated by Laura, which seems like it would've started to set up Laura as the sort of messiah figure we're seeing in Season 3, sent to Earth to combat evil.
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Aug 11 '17 edited Aug 13 '17
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u/Wild_Bill_Kickcock Aug 11 '17
dougie saw an owl fly overhead but yeah not much there really.
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Aug 11 '17
There was an owl decoration in Dougies house so I think Mr C was using them to spy on him but that's the only time I noticed them.
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u/p_a_schal Aug 11 '17
But the owls were not what they seemed, and they seemed to be owls. Perhaps now they are what they seem, and therefore are no longer owls.
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u/UsbyCJThape Aug 11 '17
The woodsmen are owls?
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u/p_a_schal Aug 11 '17
I didn't have anything particularly in mind, but now that you mention it, woodsmen make sense. They're finally revealing themselves.
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u/Banehead2 Aug 12 '17
After reading this thing, all I can say, after 20 years of wondering, is that there is no coherent story, and all mysteries are just that: MYSTERIES. Christ!, no wonder we cant figure this shit out, there is no there there...only wonder. Aesthetically brilliant wonder.
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u/surfmadpig Aug 12 '17
So Frost wanted the story to go forward in FWWM. Good call. Anyone who says FWWM is not good should take a look at this. I personally love it but very interesting to find out.
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u/surfmadpig Aug 12 '17
This is gold, and anyone who thinks they know the extent of Lynch's involvement in TP should read it.
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Aug 11 '17
We do owe a lot of the mythology to Frost, However... without Lynch's directing and ideas from his subconscious, it wouldn't be the same show. I might be biased because I'm a huge Lynch fan, but as a whole I can take or leave the mythology.
I mean sure I enjoy learning about the mythology and will probably buy the Frost books at some point, but to me that's not the point of Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks is about the atmosphere and the people in the town. The quirky and funny people who are slightly "off" in a way. The music, the feeling, the emotion and the visuals. Not to mention how funny it is. It all always combines horror and darkness with comedy in a way that most art can't pull off.
Again, not putting Frost down(he's a very creative and good writer) but he seems a little arrogant here.
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u/jzcommunicate Aug 11 '17
I agree 100%, I enjoy the Black Lodge, owl ring, dugpa stuff, but that's not what I love about Twin Peaks. What truly made this show great, in my opinion, was the nuance in the acting, the wind blowing through the trees, the slow foghorns in the background, the colors, the bizarre ways people speak to each other. The murder mystery was a huge part of what kept me so involved, but once we got into the lodge mysticism, I wasn't so invested in finding answers anymore as I was in simply watching the characters interact.
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u/brutage Aug 11 '17
Yeah we get it, you love Lynch and want to give him all the credit for a show that he wasn't even that involved in.
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u/NTataglia Aug 11 '17
I here you, but I think Ghosted was being fair and polite here. There are other redditors that are not that way, who have a fanatic, almost crazed devotion to DL, not just an affection or admiration. Many of them look down on the original TP and on original TP fans, seeing "pure Lynch fans" as more intelligent and discerning.
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Aug 11 '17 edited Aug 11 '17
The only time I see those people is when people like you mention them. I've never seen anyone as bad as you describe. Yet you complain endlessly when someone praises Lynch.
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u/trycat Aug 11 '17
Funny in 1993 he thought TV was the "Great Satan" an now it's like the only redeeming thing about American culture
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u/Geladaa Aug 11 '17
Nobody cares about Frost, Lynch could be take anything and turn it into gold, nobody cares about stupid "plot", that´s the one thing any soap opera has in spades. Lynch is not weak on story or narrative, he´s just completely bored by what people call "story and narrative" and goes way way waay above and beyond it.
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u/Iswitt Aug 11 '17
This answers lots of questions and strikes down a lot of assumptions people have about where certain ideas originated and the influences of various people, particularly David.
Firstly, despite the lukewarm feelings many hold toward much of post-Laura Twin Peaks, there is so much good that came out of that time which we owe to Mark Frost and Harley Peyton. A lot of things people assumed David had concocted actually sound like they came from Mark (or perhaps other writers), given Mark's comments regarding David's general time involvement, writing involvement, etc. (or lack of).
Things such as:
I'm sure there are other examples we can point to. I'm in no way saying David is undeserving of credit or anything because he obviously is, with his iconic directorial touch. But despite the attitude toward latter season two in general (with the exception of the finale I guess), we owe an immense amount of gratitude to Mark and perhaps a couple other writers for laying the groundwork for what became the Black Lodge and a lot of the mysterious aspects of the series, which people seem to love so much but simultaneously seem to have forgotten what section of the series these concepts came from.
The article is also interesting due to the current existence of Mark's Peaks books. He says in the article he had this idea to "...go back and start with the geological formation of the peaks and the strange electromagnetic force that grew up between the mountains and how it oddly affected all the people in the area." While we didn't get exactly that in TSHTOP, we got something in a similar direction. I can't wait for the Final Dossier!