Exclusive: Peek at 'An Oral History of Twin Peaks'

I'm glad people are still talking about Twin Peaks more than two decades after it aired; the strange and beautiful David Lynch drama deserves examination, particularly as it continues to influence today's crop of acclaimed shows.

This month is particularly rewarding for Peaks fans as a deluxe Blu-ray set and an in-depth oral history arrive. Brad Dukes' Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks includes commentary from dozens of cast and crew members, including co-creator Mark Frost and actors Kyle MacLachlan, Russ Tamblyn, Sherilyn Fenn and Ray Wise.

Today I'm excited to feature an exclusive excerpt from the book that features all of the folks listed above and more. I'm also giving away two signed copies to readers who answer this question:

Who's your favorite Twin Peaks character and why?

Entries should be sent to popcandy@usatoday.com by July 24 at 5 p.m. with the subject line "TWIN PEAKS." Now let's move on to the excerpt, which offers just a sample of the surprises Brad was able to uncover. The book is on sale now through Amazon.

Excerpt: "A Whole Damn Town"

David Lynch and Mark Frost established complete ownership of the Northwest Passage property by selling worldwide distribution rights to WorldVision, a subsidiary of Spelling Entertainment. Lynch and Frost then partnered with Propaganda Films to produce the pilot episode for ABC as they began to scout acting talent with casting director Johanna Ray.

Special Agent Dale Cooper was the first role to be cast, with Lynch's oft leading man Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet) appointed as the protagonist. The supporting cast of Twin Peaks was populated with a variety of familiar faces from cinema and television of prior decades, including Peggy Lipton (Mod Squad), Piper Laurie (The Hustler, Carrie), and Richard Beymer (West Side Story).

Kyle MacLachlan: Johanna Ray was the casting director and she put together such a diverse mix of people. Not only just physically, but with their natural rhythms, their speech patterns, even down to their interests — incredibly diverse. At the same time, those initial scripts (particularly the pilot) were so concise and specific that the voices of the characters (meaning what they represented on the page) were so specific that it was very clear to all of the actors what their job was and who they were and what purpose they served in the material.

Piper Laurie (Catherine Martell): A very dear friend of mine had worked with David Lynch on Dune and they had become friends. Sometime later she had a dinner party for David and invited me. I'd seen and admired all of his films up to that point and looked forward to meeting him. He was very easy to be with and I just liked him; I liked him a lot.

I ran into him again over the years and my agent told me he and his partner were interested in meeting with me about their television show. I read the pilot script before the meeting. I didn't think there was much in the pilot for me, just a few moments here and there but I thought it would be interesting to work with Lynch. It was not planned to be a TV series at that point, only a TV movie, and our meeting was fast and pleasant.

Richard Beymer (Benjamin Horne): Johanna Ray and I had known each other for some time and she was always waiting for the right time to introduce me to David, but she never had. This came up and she said, "I think you ought to meet David, there are some roles here." I knew of David because I had seen his films, particularly Eraserhead which I had thoroughly enjoyed and I knew people working on it back when he was making it while I was working on my own film at the time. They would say they're making this strange baby and all other sorts of things. [laughs]

Mark Frost: David and I sat in together on all the various meetings and we didn't have anyone read, we just met with people. Once we met Richard Beymer (who was a friend of Johanna Ray's) we really thought he would be great for Benjamin Horne and then she brought in Russ Tamblyn and we just couldn't resist the notion of reuniting them (from West Side Story).

I think Russ may have been wearing his Dr. Jacoby glasses when he came in. There wasn't much to the character as it was written in the pilot, maybe one brief scene, but once we knew we had an actor as great as Russ Tamblyn, our ideas about Dr. Jacoby expanded. That was kind of a favorite moment.

Russ Tamblyn (Dr. Lawrence Jacoby): To tell you the truth, it was just exciting to work. I hadn't done anything in a while and it was great to be back to work. I was able to bring quite a bit of my own creativity to the character; I actually made up the glasses and suggested a lot of the crazy clothes too.

Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey Horne): What was interesting about Twin Peaks is that they (ABC) didn't tell David what to do. He did not read a cast. He said, "Here's my cast!" He didn't say, "Here's my first, second, third choice, you all can read them and make them jump through hoops." He thinks an actor having to audition is the most horrible, brutal thing ever.

Ray Wise (Leland Palmer): I had an appointment with David at the Propaganda Films office. We talked for about fifteen or twenty minutes, not about Twin Peaks or the script or any of that, but mostly about our first cars that we owned. Mine was a 1960 Alfa Romeo, a convertible. Not a bad first car!

It was a nice interview and then a couple of days later I got a call saying that they think David would be interested in me playing Leland Palmer. I had to stop and think a moment, "Wait a minute? Leland Palmer? I'd originally gone in for the role of Sheriff Truman!" Yeah, isn't that wild? So I had to read Northwest Passage again and look at Leland Palmer.

I looked at the first scenes where he discovers on the phone his daughter has been killed and he breaks down and cries. He goes to the morgue to identify his daughter's body and he breaks down and cries … he's up in the bedroom when the sheriff's deputy goes through his daughter's things and he's weepy there too. I thought all this guy does is cry! [laughs]

Mark Frost: I just loved Peggy (Lipton). I mean, she is such a sweet and authentic and warm and wonderful person. She hadn't been working a lot for a while and I had loved her (when I was younger) on Mod Squad and it was a dream to cast her. I have nothing but wonderful memories of her and how creative she was. She has a singular warm presence about her that people really gravitate to, and I certainly count myself as one of those people.

Warren Frost (Mark Frost's father; Dr. Will Hayward): I was living in Brooklyn Heights (New York) at the time and I was working on a soap opera. My wife was teaching at a school and we'd only been there for a year and we were going to go down to Florida where we had a house and retire. Mark called one day and said he had this part. I always kidded David and Mark by saying I'm the only straight man in the whole damn thing! [laughs] But that's okay.

I met David when I was in New York and he was there for some reason. I went over to a recording studio and that's where we first met. He was supposedly looking at me to find out whether or not to accept me because he didn't know me; I've mainly done stage work for most of my life. One thing led to another and they picked me up in a limo and I went to Washington where we shot the pilot.

Mary Jo Deschanel (Eileen Hayward): I got the part of Eileen Hayward (mother to Donna and wife to Dr. Hayward); she is crippled, in a wheelchair. So I concentrated on working to understand what it would be like not to be able to walk, learning to operate a wheelchair and the relationships and story at hand as written in the script.

One day some people were over at the house seeing someone else and I was in the chair and met them and then a few minutes later I just got up from the wheelchair and started walking around the room and then I saw the strangest looks on their faces! [laughs] It took me a minute to realize that they thought I was really crippled and couldn't walk.

Charlotte Stewart (Betty Briggs): I didn't even interview for it. I went in to talk to David and Mark Frost because I had a couple of ideas about Garland and Betty and Bobby which they did incorporate into our characters a little bit. Betty was Catholic, Garland was in the military, and Bobby was screwed! They put a big palm frond cross on our wall in the dining room and things like that.

The Northwest Passage script offered a delicate balance of characters ranging in age from wise elders to brooding teenagers. To complement an established group of screen veterans, Johanna Ray recruited a promising ensemble of young talent to capture a sense of high school angst met with tragedy.

Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs): Johanna Ray knew me from this other show she cast called Amazing Stories. I auditioned for that show and my picture was in a stack of pictures David was looking at for Twin Peaks. I guess he saw a picture of me and wanted to meet me.

Before I went into the meeting I remember sitting out there with Eric DaRe (Johanna's son) who was running the casting session. He and I had known each other from other auditions. We were laughing about the script with the woman with the patch on her eye and the silent drape runners; we just thought that was so funny. So I took that energy into the room when I met them and it was just amazing.

Mädchen Amick (Shelly Johnson): I had already known David's work from Dune. I had gone to see Dune with my mom and I thought it was the strangest, weirdest movie I had ever seen so when I knew he was doing this TV show I thought this was either going to be a horrible flop or its going to be brilliant. Once I read the script I thought, "Wow, this is really good," and it reminded me a lot of my home town of Reno, Nevada, in a really dark and twisted way.

I had done a guest part on Star Trek: The Next Generation and I had done the pilot for Baywatch, neither one had actually aired before I was cast in Twin Peaks. Since I had been auditioning for anything and everything I had gotten to know Johanna Ray and had gone in for her a lot. She brought me in basically to meet David and I had gone in to read for Lara Flynn Boyle's part and read with Eric; he was just reading the off-camera lines.

Mark Frost: The other person that impressed us so much that we altered our plans was when Mädchen came in. She was brand new in town and hadn't really done anything at that point, but we were so taken with her that we actually conceived the role for her. The Shelly character was nothing like what it became at that point, but we saw a lot more potential in her.

James Marshall (James Hurley): I had a very youthful look, this boyish look and at the time my photos were terrible, they looked literally like Teen magazine. There were a few headshots that looked normal, but he (Lynch) had one of the bad headshots and just refused to see me when he was casting it. So Johanna told me that he broke down and said, "Fine, have the guy in," which made me like, "Oh my God. I'm the only one he's avoiding seeing the whole time." [laughs]

I remember David had his hat on and he was just really cool. I don't know what prejudices I had going in, but he was this tall, all-American, kind of cool guy [laughs] and he was just so straight. He was so clear and not what I was expecting. At the end of the meeting he said, "I think we're going to do this and I want you for the part. I wasn't even going to see you and now there's no one I'd rather have. This would be great if you're willing."

Caleb Deschanel (director, episodes 6, 15, 19): They did a great job of finding these really wonderful young actors and I think it went a long way towards making the show that much more interesting. And at the same time, finding these established actors like Kyle and Joan Chen, Richard Beymer. They had a great interest in the history of movies and television in the casting - drawing people from West Side Story and other things they remembered as kids. It was kind of fascinating to have the older guard be representative of another time period and then find all these really young actors and match them together in a really interesting way.

Mark Frost: The whole time we had trouble finding a Leo and Eric DaRe had been working with his mom all through the process. I think he was the next to last role we cast. We just looked up one day and said, "What about Eric for this? He's the son of Aldo Ray for Chrissake!" and you know, that turned out pretty well.

Sheriff Truman was the last major character we cast. We looked at a lot of people and I remember one day hearing from ABC that they had a deal with Michael Ontkean and I knew his work primarily from Slap Shot. I think David and I met him separately, because one of us had to be up in Washington — which was the only time that happened. But we had exactly the same reaction, that Michael was our guy.

Michael Ontkean: Years earlier I had gone to a screening of Blue Velvet with Paul Newman and we were both knocked out by the originality of all the elements. For unknown reasons David had not done another feature since then. It was winter when we first met. I had on a coat that Mitsuhiro Matsuda made for me to resemble and replace the worn-out biker jacket I'd been wearing since 1961 as a teenage member of The Black Diamond Riders motorcycle gang in Canada. David's birthday is only two days before mine so there was some sort of immediate affinity, but he offered me the part of Sheriff Harry S. Truman just to be able to see more of that motorcycle jacket.

Excerpted from Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks (short/Tall Press) with permission of Brad Dukes.