David Lynch is asked to describe his idea of a good time.
"I like factories," he says. "Just to look at people working in machine rooms would be pretty much a thrill." Pause. "Hospital basements I like. You find things in them, machines, that were real necessary about ten years ago and then just started getting dusty."Factories and hospital basements. Well, who doesn't get a kick out of them? "It's just a mood, mainly," Lynch explains. "I like places that make you dream and give you new feelings."
Twin Peaks is certainly a place to make you dream and give you new feelings. "Twin Peaks," the TV series, Lynch's first venture into television after directing such far-afield films as "Blue Velvet," "Dune" and "Eraserhead," just premiered as a two-hour movie and begins a run of seven one-hour episodes on ABC Thursday, April 12.
Lynch seems to have no idea how revolutionary his slow-paced, eccentric, artsy soap opera is, because he's watched very little TV. He says he's never seen "thirtysomething," and has seen only portions of "Dynasty," one of the shows whose old-fashioned mentality (if it had a mentality) "Twin Peaks" renders obsolete.
"I of course have watched television," Lynch states grandly. "I mean, I know how to turn one on. And I've got a remote control. But I don't ever watch it now. I just don't have time." TV would seem awfully hard to avoid. "Oh, it's possible," says Lynch. "They're not very large, those television sets."
Tall, sort of pear-shaped, with a big puff of brown hair that sits on his head like a tumbleweed, Lynch was twice married and divorced, once each in the '60s and '80s. "I was never married in the '70s," he says. He was born in Missoula, Mont., and also lived in Boise, Idaho, and Spokane, Wash. But pressed for the influences that made him turn out the way he did, Lynch says he thinks those occurred when his family moved East. He was 15.
"Philadelphia influenced more than almost anything," he says. "Philadelphia, for sure - the impact of a big city, the fear of a big city, the fear I felt inside a big city, was a real influence."
Sometimes critics of Lynch's work describe it as not just weird and peculiar but perverse. Even Lynch's partner in "Twin Peaks," Mark Frost, considers the show "subversive." The movie "Blue Velvet" was said to plumb the depths of American darkness. All these people might be surprised to learn that David Lynch was an Eagle Scout. And as an Eagle Scout, he attended the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961 - Lynch's 15th birthday.
"Because I was an Eagle Scout, I was invited to the inauguration. I was at a White House gate, seating VIPs in these bleachers for this parade thing. I would run to the gate and look at limos coming out, and one time I saw two limos coming right toward the gate I was at," Lynch recalls.
"The Secret Service man said `You!' I said, `Me?' He said, `Yes, you. Come over here. Stand right next to me.' So I was standing between these two Secret Service guys and the gates opened and the cars passed and I saw Eisenhower and Kennedy in the first limo and Nixon and Johnson in the second one. I saw four consecutive Presidents, although I didn't know it then, of course."
Lynch fans may also be surprised to hear that he in turn is a big fan of Ronald Reagan. "Oh, yeah," he says, his eyes lighting up. "I like him 'cause he was so sort of happy. A Hollywood actor, happy, clears brush, rides a horse, sharp dresser, nice neat haircut. " Did he vote for Reagan? "Oh yeah. People got very upset with me."
Having met Reagan twice before, Lynch recently got to spend a few minutes with him at Reagan's post-presidential office in Los Angeles. "Just a short five-minute talk. And then my agent, who set it up, said something about, `Well, if you ever want to get back in pictures. David's the guy to work with!' And Reagan laughed."
Ronald Reagan in a movie directed by David Lynch? Stranger things have happened. But not many.
Lynch may not know much about TV, but he does know hits from flops, and he would like "Twin Peaks" to be a hit. Will the show's slow, hushed pace scare viewers off? "Slow is not boring, necessarily, and fast is not interesting, necessarily," Lynch says. "Mystery and a mood require a certain pace and feel or it just doesn't happen."
He steadfastly refuses to give away any of the "Twin Peaks" plot twists or even to say whether the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, which begins the series, will ever be solved. It was solved however, in a version of the premiere prepared for home video distribution abroad. It's 19 minutes longer than the one ABC showed and the identity of the killer is revealed.
"In the middle of shooting the pilot, I had to concoct this thing for the foreign version," Lynch says. "Mark came and told me we had to do an alternate ending. But the very last part of the alternate ending is a small piece of film that thrills me to my soul. It's really, to me, a beautiful thing."
Will he tell us what it is? "No," says David Lynch, and his eyes light up again.