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.
