Throughout his career, visionary filmmaker David Lynch, whose death was announced Thursday at the age of 78, made 10 features and dozens of short films. He only ever did two TV series (plus a 3-part anthology), but through one of them, Twin Peaks, his impact on the medium was profound.
“Even though, he’s probably better known as a filmmaker, when he entered TV, he revolutionized it,” says Gary Levine, Senior Creative Advisor at Showtime Networks who was a development executive on both the original Twin Peaks series at ABC and its continuation at Showtime.
In summer 1988, Levine, then a senior drama executive at ABC, had just seen Lynch’s Blue Velvet a few weeks earlier when they got word that the director was coming to pitch his first television show.
Watch on Deadline
“I was scared to get in the room with him to tell you the truth,” Levine recalls of the meeting, which took place August 25, 1988. “And of course, he’s the exact opposite of that in the room, the sweetest kind of Midwestern and aw-shucks, soft-spoken guy he could possibly be.”
RELATED: Hollywood Pays Tribute To David Lynch: Ron Howard, Sting, Judd Apatow & Others Remember
Lynch, joined by Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, pitched the show to then-ABC head of drama Chad Hoffman and Levine.
“They had a hand-drawn poster board that showed all the characters and all the connections between the characters,” Levine says.
Even at the pitch stage, Twin Peaks — then titled Northwest Passage — was unique and different. Hoffman and Levine liked it, and they also didn’t have much to lose.
“This is a good golden age of ABC, we’re in third place and love taking big swings,” Levine says.
They developed the script with Lynch and Frost, which was picked up as a two-hour pilot. Levine went to Washington state for a portion of the pilot shoot, which went smoothly.
“David, for all his eccentricities, is an excellent producer. He’s a great director but he’s also an incredibly responsible producer,” Levine says. “He is on schedule, he is on budget, and he will not let any actors… there are no prima donnas in David’s ensemble, and everyone wants to work with him, he gets enormous loyalty from from actors.
“And what impressed me was, when I was watching him direct in Snoqualmie when we were doing the pilot, every director has an idea of what they’re hoping to get in the camera that ultimately can end up on the screen. But I never saw someone whose vision was as precise right from the beginning as David. It was like a giant mosaic in which he knew where every little tile fit before he ever rolled a foot of film. He also had this incredible combination of warmth and cordiality, but he also had a steel will. It was a very effective combination.”
In his first upfronts as ABC Entertainment president, Bob Iger picked up the Twin Peaks pilot to series.
“There was a little wariness about putting it on the fall schedule because it was so different, so it was decided it would be held for midseason,” Levine recalls. “I think that was actually one of the keys to its enormous success. It gave 9-10-11 months for journalists to see it, for the drums to start beating, and by the time it got on the air in April of ’90, there was a tidal wave of interest and amazement.”
As a development executive, Levine was only involved with the mystery series in its early stages, which involved Twin Peaks‘ pilot and first season, to this day considered one of the greatest and most influential seasons of television ever made.
“Aside from all the wonderful films he did, David really did revolutionize television,” Levine says. “He really gave TV writers, directors and producers a license to imagine more, to be more creatively ambitious. And he, I believe, was the first one to open a show with this visceral, grizzly murder — and, of course, there’s been dozens since. It seems like almost every show about anything to do with criminal justice, every limited series starts with a murder, but he did it, and he did it in such a memorable way when [Laura Palmer’s] body was found.”
Levine would get a chance at another Twin Peaks collaboration with Lynch and Frost. When the duo started thinking about a new installment in the fall of 2014, their rapport with Levine on the original series took them to Showtime where Levine was president of programming at the time.
Between Levine’s existing relationship with Lynch and the filmmaker really liking a painting in Showtime CEO David Nevins’ office of a bookshelf about to fall on a baby, the project landed at the network.
That would prove another memorable experience for Levine, with Lynch at one point blasting to his 2 million social media followers that he would not direct the season because of an impasse with Showtime over budget. The standoff stemmed from Lynch’s decision to veer from the original agreement for nine episodes.
“I think it was in January of 2015, David Lynch personally arrives at our offices carrying three huge binders with three copies of about 400 pages of Twin Peaks, but this time, there are no dividers in the binder. And he starts to tell us that, it’s not nine episodes anymore” and that he wouldn’t know how many it would be until after he shoots the entire season. “it was a difficult level of flexibility for a big network to absorb.”
After months of impasse, Lynch went public with the social media salvo on Easter morning, announcing his exit as a director.
“And so that night, Easter night, David Nevins and I were in David Lynch’s dining room and hashing it out to get him back,” Levine recalls. “In fact, it was not only Easter, it was also Passover. David Lynch has an incredible sweet tooth, so I remember bringing homemade macaroons from our Passover Seder that my wife would make, which he loves; he talked about it almost to the day. So over chocolate macaroons, we hashed it out, and ultimately, what we did was we folded. And what had begun as nine scripts, as a concept, became 18 hours of Twin Peaks: the Return, all directed by David Lynch.”
RELATED: David Lynch Appreciation: A Visionary For All Time
Lynch, a heavy smoker, “always was stationed at his directing stand with that cigarette,” Levine recalls, remembering the filmmaker not only for his “velvet glove, iron fist” approach but also his perfectionism.
“He was a bit of a perfectionist, so even when we were going to watch the rough cuts of the return of Twin Peaks at Showtime, he insisted upon sending his technicians to tune up our TVs before we could watch the rough cuts. He would then deliver the rough cuts with a box of donuts and then be on the phone the minute the rough cut ended,” Levine says. “It was all out of just incredible passion and care for his work. And you got to love that, somebody who is such an original, such a visionary, and so damn interesting as a person. It really was one of the highlights of my career.”