“That’s how it came to pass”: the LA coffee shop where David Lynch devised ‘Twin Peaks’
Devised by David Lynch and Mark Frost, when Twin Peaks debuted on ABC in 1990, TV changed for good, seeing the pair blend genres unlike ever before.
It was part soap opera, part surreal comedy, part murder mystery, such that with every episode, audiences were left more confused, more enthralled, and more obsessed with the strange characters who defined the show, and, most importantly, everyone wanted to know, who killed Laura Palmer?
It seemed like an odd choice for Lynch to suddenly pivot to TV, as he had been making some pretty brilliant feature films before, in the forms of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, which were all deeply ambitious and brought an arthouse sensibility further into the mainstream, but it remained to be seen if he could do the same for the ‘idiot box’.
And he did, especially with Frost, who already had experience as a TV writer, and with the duo becoming best friends, they concocted ideas that would push the boundaries of the episodic format. Initially planning to make a movie about Marilyn Monroe together called The Goddess, they struggled to master the right tone, so they instead started work on a comedy called One Saliva Bubble, an idea that came to them while sitting in a Carnation Dairy restaurant.
While they had fun writing something lighter for a change, that didn’t work out either, so they needed a different food spot to spur their imaginations, and soon, a trip to Du-Par’s proved to be the key needed to unlock a brand new idea. Once a restaurant and bakery located in Los Angeles’ Studio City, the place was frequented by Lynch, and it was here that he and Frost were sitting when they had their first idea that would inform Twin Peaks.
Interviewed by Chris Rodley for Lynch on Lynch, the filmmaker revealed, “My agent Tony Krantz had been obsessed since Blue Velvet with trying to get us to do something in television. And we were saying, ‘Well, yeah, maybe’. So one day Mark and I were talking at Du-Par’s, the coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, and, all of a sudden, Mark and I had this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake.”
This indelible image defines the pilot of Twin Peaks, well, it defines the whole show, really, along with the blue face of Laura Palmer, motionless and wrapped in plastic. She is found by Pete Martell while he’s out fishing, and this discovery spurs the arrival of FBI Agent Dale Cooper, one of the greatest TV characters of all time.
“That’s how it came to pass. Originally, it was called ‘Northwest Passage’, a story which took place in a small town in North Dakota. But we didn’t think this idea was so important. It was just like having some freedom, and saying, ‘Hey, let’s see what happens’. But I liked the idea of a story in episodes that would go on for a long time,” Lynch explained.
So, a trip to a Du-Par’s proved to be the backdrop for a monumental moment, an idea forming among these unsuspecting diners that would change television forever.
