The Lowdown on TV’s ‘Twin Peaks’ : Fullerton Man Offers Newsletter for Show’s ‘Junkies’; For Busy Dad, the Deadline Work Can Be Murder

You’ve got your cup of hot java, your cherry pie, your schematic diagrams of all last spring’s episodes of “Twin Peaks.” Now you’re ready for the start of another year. But wait, do you have the newsletter? After all, more than 600 people do.

“Six Hundred,” mutters Steve Ryan, author of the newsletter and a man who expected to attract, at best, maybe 150 subscribers. Ryan is an eclectic kind of guy, a collector of things like political buttons and pocket-size football schedules, a mortgage banker by day and “Twin Peaks” fan by night. Fan, not junkie.

“I really do like the show and make a point to try to watch it, but I don’t think near to the extent of some of these letters” from subscribers, Ryan said.

“People have said they’ve watched the dream sequence over and over again. To me that would take some of the enjoyment out of the show . . . to study it to that degree. It’s still really just entertainment. Why would people want to go that deep into it?”

Hey, Steve! If people didn’t want to “go that deep” into it, do you think they’d be subscribing to your newsletter?

For those who have been woefully out of touch, “Twin Peaks” is a television program. The story line is fairly simple. It’s about FBI agent Dale Cooper trying to solve a murder in a lumber mill town in the Northwest, near the Canadian border. And the dream sequence holds the solution to whodunnit. Or maybe it doesn’t. Who knows?

Well, the show can get sort of complicated. The dream sequence, for instance, featured a singing dwarf, who talked backwards. There’s a lady who talks to a log. There’s a woman who wears an eye patch and is trying to invent a gizmo for silencing window blinds. There are high school students. There’s a brothel. There’s a high school student working in the brothel.

Coffee, usually hallelujahed as “a darn good cup of coffee,” is an important part of Agent Cooper’s life. So is pie, most often cherry pie.

Some call the show a night-time soap opera, but it owes as much to Fellini and Bergman as it does to “Dynasty” or “Dallas.” David Lynch, who directed such movies as “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Wild at Heart,” and who is considered a bit, umm, offbeat, is the co-creator, with Mark Frost, of “Twin Peaks.”

From the start, when Laura Palmer’s body washed ashore and Sheriff Harry Truman went to investigate, the show caused a sensation. Fans traded videotapes. Friends discussed “who killed Laura Palmer?” Viewers became “Peaks Freaks.” And Steve Ryan heard opportunity knocking.

Ryan noticed that at work “a lot of people talk about” the show, which after airing on a trial basis last spring got picked up by ABC and starts a fall season on Sept. 30. “There’s a lot of conversation around the water cooler and in the lunch room.”

Ryan faxed a tiny classified ad to “Rolling Stone” magazine, asking for folks who might be interested in forming an “appreciation society” for the new TV program.

“I really didn’t know what to expect at first,” he said. But when the responses started rolling in, with people saying fans should have some way to communicate with each other, Ryan concluded that “there’s enough other people interested that I might as well find out what I could do with a newsletter.”

The price is $8 a year for four issues--which Ryan concedes isn’t going to make him rich. He hopes he can make enough money to buy himself a home computer, which would make it a lot simpler to get the newsletter out.

Nowadays the “Twin Peaks Gazette” is a shoestring operation, even if Ryan does use an electric typewriter.

Ryan writes the newsletter at night “in a mad rush” and turns it over to his wife, a registered nurse, to proofread it. He cuts it into columns, pastes it onto sheets and drives it to the printer. Meanwhile he hasn’t given up the day job, collecting mortgage documents and getting them shipped off to investors. He also manages to coach his son’s soccer team and keep up with what’s going on in pro football.

The 32-year-old publisher said the newsletter’s main value is giving him a chance to write something other than memos about loan documents. “I always liked to write,” Ryan said, and “in high school I was on the school paper.”

After college graduation in 1982, he started writing newsletters for homeowners’ associations, then drifted into running the associations’ recreation programs, then heeded his brother-in-law’s urgings that he try the savings and loan business--but skipped the added suggestion that Texas was the place to be in savings and loans.

After photocopying loan documents for a while, Ryan switched firms and wound up supervising the loan delivery department for a company in Irvine.

He said few folks at work know about his other job; for one thing, he doesn’t want any co-workers getting the idea he’s using company supplies.

Ryan said about 60% of the subscribers are from Southern California, but that more than two dozen states have at least one person who wants the newsletter. “I have a feeling that a lot of those (in other states) are kids,” Ryan said. “I’ll get a check with, ‘Please send a copy to my daughter who’s away at school,’ some Eastern university.”

The initial issue is eight pages and includes a picture of the Briggs family, three of the show’s characters, as well as a plaintive plea: “Please don’t photocopy this issue for friends.” It also sports a recipe for Snoqualmie Pie--cherry, of course--courtesy of a city council member in Snoqualmie, Wash., where some of the show’s exteriors are filmed.

The two middle pages offer a “rerun guide” for folks trying to figure out who did Laura Palmer in. Some of the offerings: Leo Johnson is a red herring; Agent Cooper probably didn’t do it; Audrey Horne “dresses for attention” but is “innocent, deep down.”

The newsletter also outlines similarities with TV programs and movies from the past:

* Both “Twin Peaks” and the long-running television program “The Fugitive” have one-armed men as characters. Both the one-armed man in “Twin Peaks” and the police lieutenant who tracked Richard Kimble in “The Fugitive” are named Gerard.

* In the 1950 Billy Wilder film “Sunset Boulevard,” Gordon Cole continually calls movie star Norma Desmond. In “Twin Peaks,” Gordon Cole is Agent Cooper’s FBI boss; the boss isn’t seen or heard, though we do hear Cooper speaking to Cole.

* In the 1944 movie “Laura,” Laura is thought to be dead at the start of the film. It turns out the victim was mistaken for Laura, who has a friend, Waldo Lydecker, who is implicated in the murder. In “Twin Peaks,” the apparent victim is named Laura, there’s a veterinarian named Dr. Lydecker and a myna bird named Waldo.

The newsletter also promises in a future issue to provide a complete rundown of “Twin Peaks” merchandise, which so far includes Cooper’s cassette tapes to his secretary, Laura Palmer’s diary and a sound-track album.

Ryan says he and his wife have enjoyed the re-runs this summer, though once again he hasn’t killed himself to watch all of them. He’s “taped a few” of the shows, but if he forgets a rerun is on--the reruns have been on Saturday nights, while the show ran on Thursdays during the spring--it’s no big deal.

He expects to buckle down to faithful viewing once the fall season arrives though, and doesn’t want to make the mistake he made with his only previous non-homeowner-association newsletter on Bruce Springsteen.

Back while Ryan was working full-time by day and going to college at night he was putting out a newsletter on The Boss. Eventually it “just got to be way too much,” so he folded it. A few months later, the album “Born in the USA” hit the stores, followed by the national tour, and Springsteen was hotter than ever, drawing numerous fans who might have been willing to shell out for a newsletter, had it existed.

“It probably would have taken off,” Ryan says ruefully.