David Lynch is responsible for the immediately recognizable
visual language of Twin Peaks, but as
far as its story goes, Mark Frost had the most control over its direction on an
episode-to-episode basis. Yet Frost is serially left out of the conversation because
he does not have Lynch’s flair for self-promotion and because he did not have
as audacious a resume as Lynch did before the show began.
David Bushman’s new book Conversations
with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer
sets the record straight in a few ways. Between February 2018 and October 2019,
Bushman conducted a series of 22, one-hour phone interviews with Mark Frost
after clearly doing a lot of homework. Bushman asks the right questions to fill
in each significant phase of Frost’s family, personal, and creative history.
And that history is startling and peppered with odd anecdotes. His grandfather
was one of the first doctors to work with Margaret Sanger on Planned
Parenthood. His dad Warren (Twin Peaks’
Doc Hayward) once had dinner with FDR. Mark investigated UFOs with a guy from
MUFON in the late seventies. He worked alongside Michael Keaton in the lighting
department of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
and dubbed either Bennie or Bjorn’s voice (he can’t remember which) in a
documentary about ABBA.
And let’s not forget that Frost’s writing career doesn’t
start and end with Twin Peaks. He is
also a prolific novelist, sports writer, and screenwriter of others works such
as Hill Street Blues and the Fantastic
Four movie. Of course, most readers will pick up Conversations with Mark Frost to learn about his most famous and
enduring creation, and there is plenty for Twin
Peaks fanatics to sink our teeth into. David Bushman is also the author of Twin Peaks FAQ (an installment in the
same series as my own The Who FAQ),
so he naturally made Peaks a dominant
focus of his conversations without neglecting the rest of Frost’s life and
work. When discussing the first two seasons, Frost surprisingly does a lot of
explaining, not just regarding the process, which really emphasizes how little
Lynch was involved in Twin Peaks
after the pilot, but also regarding the meaning behind some of that world’s
mythology.
Frost is much more tightlipped when it comes to 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. While he
displays a writer’s affection for detail and language in his responses in the
other chapters, he uses words sparingly when discussing The
Return. Frost makes it clear that this is partly because he does not want to
give away too much regarding this cryptic work that is so open to multiple
interpretations—and because Lynch might get pissed if he says too much. I
also got the sense that Lynch changed quite a bit of the scripted material when
he filmed it, and Frost may not have always understood or even appreciated
Lynch’s changes. I may be reading too much into his terse responses. You know
how we Twin Peaks fans are.
While that chapter on Twin
Peaks: The Return is a tad frustrating, the rest of Conversations with Mark Frost is tremendously satisfying. This is
also one of the most necessary Twin Peaks-related
books ever written because it is the only one I’ve ever read that really puts
Mark Frost’s contributions in their proper context. It’s also consistently
compelling reading simply because the guy has led an interesting life and is
very insightful when discussing philosophy, politics, critical thinking, civic
responsibility, and creativity.
