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All That We See in This World Is Based on Someone’s Ideas

Key Creative Personnel

There’s a large group of insane men staying on my floor.

David Lynch

David Keith Lynch was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, to Donald, a research scientist who spent his days working in forests for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Edwina, who taught English as a tutor. Though the family moved often, as Donald was assigned to posts in Idaho, Washington, North Carolina, and Virginia, Lynch has reported that his childhood was a happy and stable one. He has two younger siblings, John and Martha. Lynch has often reflected on the influence of his early memories of idyllic small-town life on his work; as he told John O’Mahony in The Guardian: “My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees . . . But on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out—some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath. Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast.”

So, here we have this wholesome, all-American boy—an Eagle Scout, yet—who found himself seduced by the life of the artist. A dreamy, intuitive kid of no academic distinction who loved to draw and paint, Lynch attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in lieu of a traditional college education, but the iconoclastic Lynch lasted only a year, abandoning the institution for an abortive trip to Europe to study with the painter Oskar Kokoschka. Unfortunately, Kokoschka proved unavailable, and Lynch returned to the U.S. with no fixed plan or prospects on the horizon.

His friend Jack Fisk, who would later become an acclaimed set designer and husband of the actress Sissy Spacek (who went on to appear in Lynch’s film The Straight Story in 1999), suggested Lynch join him at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He found the scene more congenial than Boston and stuck with it, though life in the squalid and crime-ridden Philadelphia neighborhood where he lived with his wife Peggy and young daughter Jennifer was less than rosy. Lynch has returned to the atmosphere of that environment many times in his work—the crumbling industrial landscape, unpredictable danger, and abject misery (as Lynch perceived it) of Philadelphia have haunted many Lynch projects.

Lynch began his filmmaking career in 1967 at the Pennsylvania Academy, producing over the next several years shorts including Six Men Getting Sick (which featured illness and fire, recurring Lynch motifs), The Alphabet (an ostensibly sweet childhood vignette ending in sanguinary horror), and The Grandmother (in which a neglected child grows a loving caretaker from a seed). The films were mixtures of stop-motion animation and live action, dreamlike, moody, largely abstract, and disturbing. Sound designer Alan Splet first collaborated with Lynch on The Grandmother, crafting an auditory cognate to Lynch’s dangerous visions, and the two collaborated closely thereafter on many key Lynch projects.

The Grandmother was funded by the nascent American Film Institute, and in 1971 Lynch and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he began studies at the AFI Conservatory. This would be the incubator for his first feature, Eraserhead, a landmark in independent cinema that would establish the young director as an original, audacious talent—but it wouldn’t be easy. Working with friends and family (frequent Lynch cinematographer Frederick Elmes came aboard here) on a shoestring budget, Lynch would labor for five years getting Eraserhead just the way he wanted it. The result was a nightmarish, blackly comic meditation on the horrors of fatherhood, featuring future Twin Peaks stalwart Jack Nance as the hapless, shock-haired Henry, struggling to adapt to his freakish new offspring in a disintegrating industrial hellscape inspired by Lynch’s feelings about Philadelphia.

Eraserhead (1977) was a trip, a beguiling and unique plunge into the unconscious that became a staple on the midnight movie circuit and got Lynch noticed by no less a personage than comedy legend Mel Brooks, who at the time was involved in film production. Brooks was flabbergasted by Eraserhead’s off-kilter genius, and approached Lynch with an eye toward collaboration. Their first try, an abstract ode to electricity (another continuing preoccupation of Lynch’s) titled Ronnie Rocket, never made it past the script stage. Instead, they would make The Elephant Man, a biopic based on the real-life tribulations of Joseph Merrick, a hideously deformed man who gained fame in Victorian England as a curiosity offered for the delectation of the upper class.

The Elephant Man (1980) successfully married Lynch’s painterly sensibility (the director has continued a serious painting career concurrent with his filmmaking work) and feel for the inchoate, atmospheric, and uncanny with a conventional emotionally resonant narrative, and the film was a hit, earning eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, for Lynch.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the success of The Elephant Man led to offers as heady as possibly helming a Star Wars installment; instead, Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis hired Lynch to adapt the sci-fi classic novel Dune for the big screen. Dune the film (1984) was a disaster (though we stubbornly maintain it is misunderstood and underrated): critics and audiences complained it was incomprehensible, boring, awkward, impenetrably dense, and just plain too weird. It flopped spectacularly, but it introduced Lynch to Kyle MacLachlan, who starred in the film as a kind of psychic space messiah. Their next collaboration would go much differently.

De Laurentiis owed Lynch another film, and this time the director had carte blanche to do whatever he liked, however he pleased. He responded with Blue Velvet, a bracing shock to cinema and pop culture in general that confirmed Lynch’s genius and stands as one of the most significant films of the eighties. Blue Velvet (1986) is Lynch’s subversion of the small-town ideal he cherished from childhood; in it, MacLachlan returns to sleepy Lumberton in the wake of family crisis and becomes embroiled in a mystery that brings him face-to-face with the unspeakable depravity and evil that lie just below the surface of this Norman Rockwell paradise.

Blue Velvet divided critics (Roger Ebert famously trashed it, while Pauline Kael hailed it as a masterpiece), dominated think pieces, and established Lynch as the industry’s premier enigmatic artist—Lynch’s personal eccentricities and skewed charisma were media catnip, and he became the rare director as famous as his movies; it is in the Blue Velvet era that “Lynchian” became a common descriptor for entertainments that were luridly strange, abstract, or disquietingly peculiar. Blue Velvet earned Lynch a second Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

Shortly after this triumph, Lynch met television writer Mark Frost, and the two collaborated on some projects that failed to get off the ground (including a biopic about Marilyn Monroe and a comedy called One Saliva Bubble) before creating Twin Peaks (1990), another sensation that redefined a medium: after making the suburban cineplex safe for surrealism, Lynch, aided by Frost, did the same for television. This book explores the production, themes, aesthetics, and cultural impact of that landmark work in some detail.

Lynch returned to film with the hyper-violent black road comedy Wild at Heart (1990), which again drew mixed reactions from critics and fans (it did net the Palme d’Or at Cannes, as well as angry protests), following it with a film prequel to Twin Peaks called Fire Walk with Me (1992), about which we have much to say in the following pages. In a nutshell: it was wildly divisive, critically panned, and an absolutely fascinating example of a unique filmmaking sensibility given its full head.

On Location: David Lynch, in Snoqualmie Valley, Washington.

Lost Highway arrived in 1997, another sinister and otherworldly crime story distinguished by Lynch’s extraordinary visuals and narrative puzzles. He followed it with a complete left turn: The Straight Story (1999), an economical and affecting tale of an elderly man who goes to extraordinary lengths to visit an ailing brother. It featured nary a doppelgänger or grinning maniac, and the critical reception was warm. Lynch returned to his former full glory (as far as critics were concerned) with his masterful, melancholy Hollywood fantasia Mullholland Dr. (2001), a complete return to form that boasted all of the emotional power, unsettling strangeness, and lush, perverse romanticism of Blue Velvet. The film wowed critics and audiences, but the victory had a bitter edge: ironically, the project was initially planned as a television series, but ABC—the network that brought Twin Peaks to the air—turned it down. He was again nominated by the Academy for Best Director, and won Best Director awards at the Cannes film festival and the New York Film Critics Association.

Lynch has continued to follow his muse, painting, sculpting, composing music, and making films, such as the mystifying, formally rigorous Inland Empire (2006). He has married and divorced several times, fathered children, dated international supermodel Isabella Rossellini, written and drawn the comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, and proselytized for Transcendental Meditation. In 2014 Lynch announced plans to revive Twin Peaks on the Showtime cable network.

Mark Frost

“The Other Peak,” the Los Angeles Times called him in July 1990, acknowledging the obvious: in the media frenzy surrounding Twin Peaks, Mark Frost had been consumed by the imperial shadow of David Lynch. We get it: Lynch was one of America’s most charismatic filmmakers, with a repertoire ranging from avant-garde to mainstream studio film to mega-budget sci-fi to psycho thriller. Critics loved him or loved to hate him, but were never indifferent. Frost was . . . you know . . . the TV guy.

So unjust.

By every inside account, Frost was as integral to the identity and success of Twin Peaks as anyone, and not just logistically. Yes, as the experienced television producer he was point man with ABC executives, which involved, among other things, hurdling network-imposed obstacles. But Frost is a creative guy, and that’s where his imprint is most pronounced. He wrote five of the first season’s eight episodes—the first three (including the pilot) with Lynch, a process that he compared, in an April 8, 1990, New York Times article, to the Vulcan mind meld: “You throw your minds up toward the ceiling and they meet somewhere near the light fixtures. The script becomes written by a third party. The author is someone called Lynch-Frost” (even Frost gives Lynch top billing!). Frost directed the season-one finale, and has teleplay credit—singly or jointly—on six of the second season’s twenty-two installments. But Twin Peaks writers interviewed over the years have without exception stressed Frost’s complete immersion in the scripting process: mapping out stories, bouncing around ideas, tapping writers, providing outlines (especially detailed in the first season, when the creative team had the luxury of time), conversing with Lynch, and finally reviewing and editing scripts, not just scene by scene, but line by line. Among actors Frost wins kudos for his snappy, sophisticated dialog, and his voice is especially channeled through so-called verbal characters—in other words, those who like to talk, like Benjamin Horne and Albert Rosenfield (or, on Hill Street Blues, where he worked previously, redneck Officer Andrew Renko and silver-tongued Sergeant Phil “Let’s Be Careful Out There” Esterhaus). Kyle MacLachlan touts Frost’s dry, offbeat sense of humor and deadpan delivery, saying he tapped into both (along with numerous Lynchian quirks and mannerisms, of course) in bringing Dale Cooper to life.

Cocreator Mark Frost, playing a television news reporter in the first season of Twin Peaks.

Everyone praises Lynch for concocting the Red Room, Killer Bob, and the dancing dwarf (and rightly so—all strokes of genius), but Frost’s abiding interests in theosophy (the Black and White lodges), Sherlock Holmes (Windom Earle), and Arthurian legend (Glastonbury Grove) figure just as prominently in the mythology of the series. Plus, Frost recruited so many behind-the-scenes contributors, including Harley Peyton and Robert Engels, writer-producers who went on to play hugely influential roles in the evolution of Twin Peaks’ narrative and characters (Engels even cowrote Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me with Lynch).

“Other Peak?” We prefer “Twin Peak.”

Frost had been writing for television on and off for fifteen years by the time Twin Peaks premiered in 1990. Initially raised in New York (where his father, Warren—Doc Hayward on Twin Peaks—was stage-managing and acting on live early-television anthology dramas), Frost moved to Los Angeles at a young age, then spent his high school years in Minneapolis, while his father taught acting at the University of Minnesota. Mark Frost moved on to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, studying acting, directing, and playwriting, but left school early to join fellow Carnegie Mellon alumnus Steven Bochco at Universal Pictures in Los Angeles, landing a writing gig at ABC’s The Six Million Dollar Man, the action/adventure/sci-fi series starring Lee Majors as a bionic former NASA astronaut (Frost wrote two episodes, both airing in 1975, and earned college credit doing it, so that he was able to graduate). He also wrote for NBC’s Sunshine, a short-lived half-hour series about a musician widower and his young stepdaughter, and Lucas Tanner, starring David Hartman as a former pro baseball player turned English teacher in Webster Groves, Missouri (a St. Louis suburb that was the subject of a very famous, and very controversial, 1966 CBS documentary called 16 in Webster Groves). Finding the work unsatisfying—go figure—Frost returned to Minneapolis, working as a literary associate and playwright at the Guthrie Theater and writing, producing, and directing documentaries for the local PBS outlet, including The Road Back, about a rehabilitation program for juvenile felons.

Frost returned to the City of Angels in 1982, accepting an invitation from Bochco to write for the groundbreaking police procedural Hill Street Blues, where he worked until 1985, earning an Emmy nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award (during this time he also scripted a single episode of NBC’s Gavilan, another instantly forgettable TV drama, this one starring Robert Urich as a former spy turned oceanographer—how do they come up with these ideas?). Frost ankled Hill Street with the intention of crafting more personal work, and though he wrote two episodes of the well-regarded CBS crime drama The Equalizer that aired in 1986 (“Wash Up” and “No Conscience”), it was around this time that he teamed with Lynch to adapt Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe into a thinly veiled biopic titled Venus Descending. While that project, and two others with Lynch, never saw the light of day, the pairing, of course, led to Twin Peaks, as well American Chronicles, a short-form-documentary series airing briefly on Fox in 1990, and On the Air, a criminally underappreciated 1992 sitcom about a hilariously incompetent television network in the 1950s, whose stars included Twin Peaks alum Ian Buchanan (Dick Tremayne), Miguel Ferrer (Albert Rosenfield), and David L. Lander (Tim Pinkle)—seven episodes were made, but, sadly, only three aired. Although credited as an executive producer on the Lynch-directed 1992 theatrical film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Frost was not involved in the making of the film, which he has attributed to a disagreement with Lynch over its timeline: Frost wanted to pick up where the TV series had left off, while Lynch was intent on making a prequel.

While Frost took a break from TV in the aftermath of Twin Peaks and On the Air, he later returned, exec-producing Buddy Faro, a 1998 CBS crime drama (which he also created), and All Souls, a 2001 horror show for UPN, both short-lived.

Frost launched his feature-film career with the screenplay for the 1987 occult film The Believers, directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy). Storyville, a New Orleans-set political thriller starring James Spader and Jason Robards—written and directed by Frost—was released in 1992, though Frost had worked on it extensively during the second season of Twin Peaks, leaving some members of the cast dismayed that he wasn’t around as often as in season one (they felt the same way about Lynch). Ironically, the film was championed by Lynch’s old nemesis Roger Ebert, who awarded it 3.5 out of 4 stars, and even here couldn’t resist taking a shot at Lynch: “With Lynch’s recent work, it’s as if he wants you to know he’s superior to the material. Frost doesn’t mind being implicated—he likes this kind of stuff, and plunges into the dark waters of his plot with real joy.” That same year Frost executive-produced a documentary about Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, titled Once Upon a Time. Later film work includes the 2005 adaptation of his own nonfiction book about golf, The Greatest Game Ever Played, plus the screenplays for two Fantastic Four movies (Fantastic Four, 2005, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, 2007).

Frost also boasts a flourishing authorial career, with nonfiction books about golf and baseball, but also several novels, including two occult-themed yarns of particular interest to Twin Peaks deconstructionists, since they present themes and characters evocative of Peaks mythology: The List of Seven (1993) and its sequel, The Six Messiahs (1995). The protagonists in both books are Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and a fictional character named Jack Sparks, clearly modeled after Holmes.

It’s a hit: Twin Peaks merchandise for the fans.

Photo by Pieter Dom

What They Really Wanted to Do Was Direct

Unsurprisingly, David Lynch directed more episodes of Twin Peaks than anyone else: a total of six, including the feature-length pilot, which set the template for all other directors to follow (Lynch, of course, also helmed the 1992 theatrical prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me). When all cylinders were running, the process went like this: directors were handed their script, which they read, followed by a meeting with Lynch and Frost, and then off they went to shoot the episode. Lynch would view their work during the sound mix, which would leave enough time to repair anything that needed fixing. As Frost told Brad Dukes in Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks: “I think everyone understood that was the assignment: work with the house style and the mood that David had so brilliantly created and then bring whatever you can of yourself to add to that.”

More surprising is who comes in second: Lesli Linka Glatter, with four episodes (five, ten, thirteen, twenty-three). Though today a veteran TV director with over sixty credits, including many of the small screen’s most distinguished dramas (Homeland, Mad Men, The Walking Dead, and The West Wing among them), Glatter was relatively unknown when tapped for her Twin Peaks debut, having helmed just three installments of the NBC anthology show Amazing Stories (created by Steven Spielberg, plus the St. Elsewhere/Northern Exposure team of Joshua Brand and John Falsey) and a long-forgotten TV movie titled Into the Homeland (with a cast including Twin Peaks’ Leo Johnson, Eric Da Re, as “Male Surfer #1”). Like Lynch, Glatter is a graduate of the American Film Institute, and it was her 1985 Oscar-nominated short film Tales of Meeting and Parting that brought her to Spielberg’s attention and launched her TV career.

Caleb Deschanel, Duwayne Dunham, and Tim Hunter all directed three episodes of Twin Peaks. Deschanel (episodes six, fifteen, and nineteen) also was an inexperienced television director when tapped for his first episode of the series, but had two feature films to his credit (The Escape Artist, Crusoe). He too attended the American Film Institute, concurrently with Lynch. Today he is one of Hollywood’s most accomplished cinematographers, with Oscar nominations for The Right Stuff, The Natural, Fly Away Home, The Patriot, and The Passion of Christ. Deschanel’s daughters, Emily and Zooey, are both established television stars (Bones and New Girl, respectively), and his wife, Mary Jo, portrayed Eileen Hayward on Twin Peaks.

Dunham (episodes one, eighteen, and twenty-five) was a neophyte director, but landed the choice assignment of helming episode one (“Traces to Nowhere”)—the first director not named David Lynch to take on a Twin Peaks assignment. Dunham had edited the pilot, and later the season-two opener, both Lynch-directed episodes. He possessed some shiny film-editing medals as well, including two little films called The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. As an editor he had worked with Lynch on Blue Velvet and was editing Wild at Heart as the first season of Twin Peaks was airing.

Hunter (episodes four, sixteen, and twenty-eight) had attended AFI with Lynch and Deschanel; he was one of the bigger-name directors to lend his skills to Twin Peaks, having made a splash with the 1986 theatrical film River’s Edge, which helped launch the careers of Crispin Glover and Keanu Reeves and earned Hunter an Independent Spirit Award nomination. Like Twin Peaks, River’s Edge pivots on the murder of a high school girl, found, well, at the river’s edge. Having also helmed episode twenty-eight (“Miss Twin Peaks”), Hunter is the last person not named David Lynch to have directed an installment of the series.

Tina Rathborne and Todd Holland each directed two episodes of Twin Peaks. Rathborne (episodes three and seventeen) had directed Lynch in his first significant acting role, in Zelly and Me (1988), which starred his then-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini, who was originally tapped for the role of Andrew Packard’s wife (a character that eventually mutated into Josie Packard, portrayed by Joan Chen), but had to bow out due to scheduling conflicts.

Holland helmed two season-two episodes (eleven and twenty); the former (“Laura’s Secret Diary”) features one of the series’ most inventive opening scenes, in which the camera burrows inside the acoustic tiles of the walls in the interrogation room at the sheriff’s station as Leland Palmer confesses to the murder of Jacques Renault. Holland dreamed that one up himself; the only direction in the script was that Leland was being questioned. Holland had previously helmed episodes of Amazing Stories and Max Headroom, and today is a major TV director, with Emmys for his work on Malcolm in the Middle and The Larry Sanders Show.

Each of the following directed a single episode of Twin Peaks: Mark Frost, Graeme Clifford, Uli Edel, James Foley, Stephen Gyllenhaal, Diane Keaton, and Jonathan Sanger.

Aussie Clifford had three theatrical films on his résumé by the time he joined Twin Peaks for episode twelve (“The Orchid’s Curse”), including the critically acclaimed 1982 biopic Frances, earning Jessica Lange an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of troubled actress Frances Farmer.

Edel, helmer of episode twenty-one (“Double Play”), had directed a number of television programs in his home country, Germany, before tackling the 1989 film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s controversial novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, about emotionally wounded Brooklynites teetering on the edge of society. Edel’s connection to Lynch was that he had directed the German trailer for Dune.

Foley was an accomplished Hollywood film director by the time he joined Twin Peaks for episode twenty-four (“Wounds and Scars”), having worked—separately—on both sides of the Madonna-Sean Penn equation, with At Close Range, Who’s That Girl, and Madonna: The Immaculate Collection, plus the 1990 neo-noir adaptation of Jim Thompson’s After Dark, My Sweet.

Gyllenhaal was an established TV director when arriving at the tail end of the series to direct episode twenty-seven (“The Path to the Black Lodge”), whose credits included the 1990 telepic A Killing in a Small Town, based on a real-life Texas murder, earning actress Barbara Hershey a Golden Globe. He is the father of actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Keaton was an Oscar-winning actress best known for Annie Hall and other collaborations with Woody Allen, plus her appearances in Reds and the Godfather movies, by the time she joined Twin Peaks for episode twenty-two (“Slaves and Masters”), which blissfully concludes the much derided James Hurley-Evelyn Marsh arc. Keaton had little directing experience up to that point, though she had helmed an episode of ABC’s China Beach, plus the documentary Heaven and a CBS Schoolbreak Special.

Jonathan Sanger also had only a handful of episodic television credits when tapped to direct episode twenty-six (“Variations on Relations”), though he was a producer on the 1980 theatrical film The Elephant Man, which earned David Lynch an Oscar nomination for Best Director.

The Write Staff

Harley Peyton was the most prolific credited writer on Twin Peaks, solely or collaboratively contributing thirteen of the thirty scripts. Mark Frost is next, with eleven teleplay credits, though of course Frost oversaw all of the writing and would go over scripts with writers scene by scene. Robert Engels is credited solely or partially with ten teleplays, in addition to coscripting Fire Walk with Me with Lynch.

Peyton, born and raised in Twin Peaks country (Spokane, Washington), was a writer on the first season of the series, scripting two episodes, one nominated for an Emmy. For the second season he was bumped up to producer. He got his first big break in Hollywood penning the screenplay for the 1987 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, starring Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy, plus Jami Gertz and Robert Downey Jr. Peyton attended the Directors Guild of America preview screening of the Twin Peaks pilot at the invitation of his friend Mark Frost (the two belonged to the same fantasy baseball league). Peyton’s post-TP work includes the feature film Friends with Benefits, starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, for which he shares story credit. He created and executive-produced the short-lived Moonlighting wannabe Moon over Miami, and also was co-executive producer on the 2013–2014 series Dracula, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the 1993 reboot of Route 66. He wrote and executive-produced the 2001 theatrical film Bandits, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett.

Engels was a made member of the Minnesota mafia Mark Frost rounded up for Twin Peaks, which also included Richard Hoover (production designer), Chris Mulkey (Hank Jennings), Kenneth Welsh (Windom Earle), and of course Mark’s dad Warren (Doc Hayward) and brother Scott (writer). Engels was credited strictly as a writer on the first season of the series, but was promoted first to executive story editor and then to coproducer on the second. He and Frost went back almost twenty years; Warren Frost was Engels’s college adviser at the University of Minnesota, and Engels had trained as an actor at the Guthrie Theater, where Mark Frost had also worked. Engels eventually headed to New York, where he acted in commercials and daytime soaps before shifting to documentary writing for HBO and Showtime. When first writing for Twin Peaks, he was concurrently story editing/writing for the CBS crime show Wiseguy, which curiously included a “Lynchboro Arc” about a serial killer in the Northwest in the winter of 1990—after the first season of Twin Peaks had been shot, but before it aired. Hmmm. After Twin Peaks, Engels moved over to the short-lived Lynch-Frost sitcom On the Air. Of course, he also coscripted Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me with Lynch, which they followed up with two never-produced screenplays: The Dream of the Bovine, about three erstwhile cows who are transformed into men (we kid you not), and In Heaven, about a man forced to marry an unattractive woman who suddenly becomes beautiful. Engels’s subsequent TV work includes Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda (2002–2005). His wife Jill portrayed Trudy, the waitress at the Great Northern.

Other writers who contributed teleplays to Twin Peaks were Barry Pullman (four); Lynch (three); Scott Frost and Tricia Brock (two apiece); and Jerry Stahl (one, though not really, according to all accounts).

Pullman had written for Shannon’s Law and Against the Law before contributing to TP, and went on to work as a writer and/or producer on numerous network shows, including Roswell and Mark Frost’s Buddy Faro.

In addition to contributing two teleplays to Twin Peaks, Scott Frost wrote the 1991 companion book The Autobiography of F.B.I. Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. He went on to write for Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, along with Robert Engels.

Brock (Harley Peyton’s first wife) made her network-TV writing debut on Twin Peaks, and has gone on to become an established television director, with credits including The Walking Dead and Girls (odd combo, that).

Stahl struggled on his one assignment for Twin Peaks (episode eleven, “Laura’s Secret Diary”), being in the throes of heroin addiction at the time (as recounted in his 1995 book Permanent Midnight: A Memoir, later adapted into a feature film starring Ben Stiller), and the aberrational teleplay credit reads “Jerry Stahl and Mark Frost & Harley Peyton & Robert Engels.” Stahl had written previously for thirtysomething, Moonlighting, and—believe it or not—ALF.