The Other Peak : As a lad, Mark Frost sensed the secrets of small-town life; now he and David Lynch are unmasking them on ‘Twin Peaks’

The distance between the real town of Taborton in Upstate New York and the television town of Twin Peaks in the Pacific Northwest can’t be measured in miles. But it can be measured in terms of the imagination of Mark Frost.

Frost, David Lynch’s collaborator on the twisted and moody ABC soap opera, “Twin Peaks,” spent his summers at his family’s vacation home in Taborton when he was growing up. And as a teen-ager, Frost was beguiled by the small town’s secrets, the legends of ghosts of murdered young girls roaming the woods, the hidden affairs and intrigues that undulated just beneath the placid, All-American surface.

“But it was all so hard to pin down because they were always just things that you would hear, and you never, never asked any questions,” Frost remembers.

“That was one of the unwritten laws. Everyone just stayed inside and whispered about everyone else. And I can remember being fascinated by what people really thought about each other and what they were really doing to each other behind people’s backs.”

Flash forward in time and imagination to Twin Peaks, where FBI agent Cooper--who blows into town to investigate the murder of a teen-aged beauty queen--pries the lid off a sordid pit of secret trysts and double-crosses, asking questions that Frost never dared to ask back in Taborton.

“I think that’s definitely where I drew my primary inspiration from,” Frost says.

Most of the attention and much of the credit for this weird and meandering series has been directed at Frost’s famous partner, David Lynch. But Frost, 36, a bespectacled, soft-spoken former playwright, who, like agent Cooper, says he sometimes worries about what really went down between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, deserves at least an equal share.

While Kyle MacLachlan’s Cooper, who Frost describes as a “walking cerebellum,” is the catalyst for the unmasking of all of Twin Peaks’ mysteries, Frost is his real-world counterpart and the brainy work horse behind the series.

“Mark has a real understanding, by virtue of his having been in television before, of all the ins and outs of getting the show done each week,” said MacLachlan, who also starred as the corruptible but Hardy Boy-styled sleuth in Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” “But Mark also has a real dry sense of humor and this off-beat, deadpan delivery that I have combined with some of David’s quirks and expressions to create Cooper.”

Frost and Lynch created the show together in 1988 after pitching a vague idea to ABC about a small town, a complicated unnamed mystery and the notion of a forest primeval pressing in on the town. Two weeks later, they returned with a map that showed where all the characters lived and outlined their relationships to one another. Chad Hoffman, then ABC’s vice president of dramatic series development, told them to make it.

While the series is obviously imbued with Lynch’s bizarre and distinctive sensibility, Frost oversees “Twin Peaks”’ writing and production so that Lynch can work on other film projects. Lynch co-wrote with Frost the first several episodes and directed arguably the two finest shows so far--the two-hour pilot and a dreamy episode with a midget. Lynch is now shooting the two-hour season premiere, which will air Sunday, Sept. 30, and will also direct the subsequent hour-long episode to get the series off to a fast start. Frost, who directed one episode last season, has said Lynch will direct at least one more of the remaining 11 installments ABC has ordered so far. Various feature filmmakers, including Tim Hunter, Caleb Deschanel and Tina Rathborne, are tentatively scheduled to shoot episodes again this season.

Meanwhile, the day-to-day running of “Twin Peaks” and Lynch-Frost Productions, which is also producing an impressionistic and very un-network news-like documentary series called “American Chronicles” this fall for Fox, falls to Frost. (See accompanying story.)

He first came to Hollywood fresh out of college to work on “The Six Million Dollar Man” in 1976 after meeting Steven Bochco, a fellow Carnegie-Mellon University alum. Not wanting to commit to a lifetime of “Bionic” action stories, however, Frost left Los Angeles after a year to work as a PBS documentary producer and as a regional playwright, primarily at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He returned to Los Angeles several years later when Bochco invited him to write for “Hill St. Blues.”

“ ‘Hill St.’ was very good but it was very impersonal work for me,” Frost said. “I wrote about that place as if I was a visitor. It wasn’t what my life was like. It was a great place to learn the craft of how to shape a scene, but I wanted a chance to write about more personal themes and obsessions. My point of view has always been a bit more offbeat.”

When “Hill St.” ended its six-year run, Frost wrote the John Schlesinger film “The Believers.” He met Lynch in 1986 and penned two features with him, “Goddess” and “One Saliva Bubble,” that have never made it into production. Then they hit on “Twin Peaks,” and Frost found himself the anonymous partner in the eye of this media hurricane.

The first wave of the “Twin Peaks” storm ended on May 23 with agent Cooper opening a door and being shot three times in the chest. And, to the dismay of many of the show’s die-hard devotees, it ended without answering the series’ central question, “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

Now, about half way between the last episode and the fall premiere, ABC is trying to rekindle excitement for the series’ return Sept. 30 by repeating the two-hour pilot next Sunday and then, beginning the following Saturday, all seven hourlong episodes in the 10 p.m. Saturday nighttime slot the network has reserved for the series in the fall.

Along with “The Simpsons” on Fox, “Twin Peaks” has generated more media attention and water cooler gossip than any show in recent memory. While both these series are clearly unique and innovative, Bart Simpson, a cartoon hero, is obviously much more marketable than Laura Palmer.

Hers is a show that presented the crucial clues to the solving of the murder-mystery in a dream replete with a midget and the dead beauty queen talking and walking backward. It’s a show where the hero will drop everything for a few minutes with a good cup of coffee and a piece of pie. It’s a show that used a peculiarly American form of Zen divination--throwing rocks at a milk bottle placed exactly 60 feet 6 inches away--to assess the guilt or innocence of every suspect in town. And by pairing a single cherry stem with the pouty mouth of Sherilyn Fenn, who plays the sultry and bratty rich kid Audrey Horne, this is the show that provided one of last season’s most provocative TV moments.

But the Nielsen jury is still out on whether this demented portrayal of small-town life will play in Peoria or Taborton or any other small town. With much hype and a cushy Sunday night time period for the premiere last April, “Twin Peaks” started fast, nabbing a whopping 33% share of all those watching TV that evening. But up against top-rated “Cheers” this spring, subsequent episodes lost viewers each week before leveling off at around a 18-20% share of the Thursday night audience.

Though Robert Iger, president of ABC Entertainment, said the survival of the show was never in jeopardy once it stood up respectably in the brutal Thursday nighttime period, Frost admitted that he left the murder unresolved in a deliberate effort to force ABC to renew the series.

But the show obviously played somewhere. And loudly.

“Peaks” freaks gathered weekly for cherry pie and coffee klatches to watch and discuss each episode. Some communicate via computer, analyzing and dissecting the tiniest of details. There is a “Twin Peaks” newsletter with synopses of the latest plot twists, and radio stations, including KROQ-FM (106.7), provided updates the morning after each episode. Even the tabloids caught the “Twin Peaks” bug, featuring many of the actors, including Catherine Coulson, a.k.a the Log Lady, in space generally reserved for the likes of Kim Basinger and Michael J. Fox.

Newsweek published a flow chart that illustrated the convoluted relationships between all the characters as well as frequent updates on the status of the investigation. And the fictional Laura Palmer, played by Sheryl Lee, graces this month’s cover of Esquire as the magazine’s “woman of the year.”

All this over a soap opera that--before it premiered--no one was willing to bet a cup of coffee that it would survive the network rating wars. While gilding it with rhapsodic praise, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales expressed grave doubts. Back then, not even Lynch, who has yet to direct a box office movie hit, Frost nor ABC would have dared to predict such fevered devotion.

Iger, the 39-year-old executive who ultimately decided to stick “Twin Peaks” on the schedule last spring, said many at his own network thought that the series would fail and fail quickly. Nonetheless, Iger scheduled and then renewed the show because he believed that network television must explore new territory in order to combat growing dissatisfaction among viewers, who are now faced with myriad television alternatives.

“ ‘Twin Peaks’ is a huge leap forward in this exploration, and that (quest) remains one of the most important things we must do to maintain our vitality as a programming service,” he said. “Once we stop experimenting, once we stop trying to create new viewing experiences, then it’s over. Then we’re dead.”

“Mark, David and I have had a good laugh about the reaction,” said Hoffman, the man who initially bought and shepherded the program through the network development process. “We knew it was good, but none of us expected anything could catch the public like this.

“They put a mirror up to America, kind of showed us a different, reverse vision if you will. And yet it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It does poke fun at many of our American icons--apple pie, the G-man, a cup of coffee or that behind-every-curtain-there’s-a-mystery. Plus the timing was right. The audience was just sitting there waiting for something fresh and different. Mix all that with a lot of luck and you have a phenomenon.”

Not in the wildest reaches of his obviously wild imagination did he ever envision such hoopla and acclaim, Frost says. But it isn’t the fame, the regular phone calls from Newsweek, the chance to be seated at the best tables in Los Angeles’ hottest restaurants that he likes best. It’s the chance to dredge his fertile pool of childhood memories and bring to life his own small-town world.

“What I love about the show is that the characters seem real to me and they talk about stuff that seems like the stuff real people would be concerned about as opposed to characters sort of stiffly moving through a plot,” Frost says. “We try to build into each show some sort of breathing space so that the characters can live and behave and do things off the main highway. To give the sense of people having a life that extends off the edges of the screen, which I think is rare in both film and television.”

Thus the various characters’ obsessions with coffee, doughnuts, pie, silent drape runners or Icelandic beauties; thus the moody music, the hypnotic pacing, shots of trees rippling in the wind, traffic lights changing colors at empty intersections, the many loose ends. “Twin Peaks,” Frost says, is more a journey than a destination. It’s like reading a big, fat, juicy, Dickensian novel rather than zeroing in on the punch line of a joke.

The problem is marrying Frost’s and Lynch’s obsession with letting their characters live, breathe and indulge their peculiarities to the viewers’ obsession with who killed the damn girl, already?

Frost said the initial eight episodes were designed to reveal the complicated relationships and the show needed time to unravel them all. Since the last episode was billed by ABC as the “thrilling finale,” Frost said viewers were given the mistaken impression that the crime would be solved. But he realizes that he can try his viewers’ patience only so far, and he assures them that the first two hours of this season will “go a long way to tying up many of the loose ends.” But he would make no promises that the murder of Laura Palmer would be definitively solved or that the killer would be caught.

Iger promised that “the viewer will see the killer” in the season premiere, but he also suggested that the mystery would not fade away quickly--at least in the minds of the show’s characters.

“They never would tell me who did it,” said Hoffman, who left ABC last year to develop programs independently. “The intent was always to drive the audience into the new season. But there is a fine line between doing that and getting the audience ticked off. They are trying to walk that fine line. They broke a lot of rules, that’s one of the reasons people have responded. And they will find a way to keep doing that without alienating their audience.”

Frost said the series will start and finish many of the new plot lines this season in two, three or four episodes. But he insisted that the spirit and mood of the show won’t be sacrificed to audience or network pressure to move the story along. Frost believes that the show evoked such unbridled enthusiasm not because the murder-mystery was that spellbinding, but because the town, the characters and the tone of the series swept viewers along on an irresistible ride.

To help hype a new season of wild rides, ABC has scheduled a “Twin Peaks” special on Sept. 29, the night before the season premiere. The special, which Frost describes as a collector’s item that will not be integral to the main plot, will include some kind of summation of the story to date as well as a visit to some “strange corners of the town.”

As for any hints of who killed Esquire’s woman of the year, Frost is tight-lipped. His only advice: study Cooper’s dream of the midget and the longhaired man. Then again, if they solve the murder, FBI guy Cooper, the series’ “cerebellum” if not its heart, has no real reason to hang around town.

Rest assured, however, that coffee and pie will be back on the menus of the Great Northern and the Double R Diner, although Frost won’t take credit for inspiring this ongoing dig at the American diet. Lynch is the sugar and coffee nut. Frost says he never touches the stuff.

In the realm of “Twin Peaks,” to each his own obsession.