The executives were in a receptive mood: “Just the title alone had us really excited,” Tao told me. One day last August, David Lynch drove his 1971 Mercedes to Century City to pitch “Mulholland Drive” to Jamie Tarses, the president-until her resignation last week-of ABC Entertainment, and one of her senior deputies, Steve Tao. It’ll be interesting to see, nine years after ‘Twin Peaks,’ whether people will stick with something so painterly and . . .” Failing to find a euphemism, he shrugged: “ . . . “It’s great,” he said carefully, “but it’s way out there for ABC-they’ll probably think, What the fuck is this? TV is now about speed and snappy dialogue, for people hitting the remote. Michael Polaire, Lynch’s line producer, stood ten feet behind the gleeful crew. “This is now my favorite shot in the movie, sir!” Mark Cotone, the assistant director, agreed. “That was a humdinger!” Lynch said, grinning. ABC just has to trust me that people will respond.” “The jump mechanism has got rusty and sleepy, particularly if you watch only television, but it’s there in everybody. “People are capable of taking jumps into another way of thinking,” Lynch says. On the set, Anderson’s tiny head above the big suit looked eerily like the squalling baby’s head that pops out from the neck of its father’s suit in “Eraserhead,” which was Lynch’s first and strangest film: both images trigger a primal anxiety. We’re hoping to feed that hunger with ‘Mulholland Drive.’ ” Steve Tao, ABC’s vice-president of drama programming, told me, “ ‘Twin Peaks’ was like a young rocker who dies in an airplane crash-the early departure creates an even greater hunger. Their passion for the show’s swaying stoplights and barking teen-agers, for its one-armed demon and innuendos about cherry pie, made way for the creation of such offbeat television shows as “Northern Exposure” and “The X-Files.” Yet nothing on the air since “Twin Peaks” has approached its originality. “David’s work isn’t consciously coherent,” he says, “but its coherence on an unconscious level is inescapable-almost against your will.”Īmerican viewers relished the bewilderment. But Anderson maintains that even he could never get Lynch to explain what that dwarf character meant. Nine years ago, Anderson played the inscrutable dancing dwarf who appeared in dreams to Agent Dale Cooper on Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” the hit show on ABC that shot up like a rocket in the ratings-and down just as fast. “ ‘Never you mind where my ideas come from,’ ” Anderson continued, mimicking Lynch, for this was a well-worn joke between them. Then, looking up at Lynch, he asked, “Where do your ideas come from?” The director laughed companionably, but wouldn’t answer. “I feel like I’m preparing for a space shot,” the immobilized Anderson murmured as a production assistant hand-fed him bites of chicken satay. The set’s spareness is a Lynch trademark, and the draperies are a familiar exhibit in his gallery of obsessional motifs, which also includes random blue objects, antlers, yellow highway markings, guttering candles, closeups of women’s lipsticked lips, long screams into telephone receivers, and the sounds of buzzers and steam. A light shaped like a stove hood brooded above him, a cobalt-blue lamp glowed on a desk, and brown draperies shrouded the walls. M., on a small office set, Anderson stood up in the wheelchair, his head popping out above the lapels of a nailhead business suit twice his size. “He’ll look perfect, natural-but paralyzed. “Beautiful!” Lynch said, inspecting the apparatus under the thousand-watt “baby” lights of the cavernous soundstage. “You have to surrender to the obscurity of David’s vision,” Collins told me two nights later, as he returned to the lot at Paramount Studios carrying prosthetic limbs whose joints had been shaved down and made more angular. “It’s a man’s head!” Lynch advised Collins, who stared back blankly. Normal, but with a worrisomely tiny head. Roque, and Lynch had him stand on the seat of a wooden wheelchair while he was being buttressed by foam legs and silicone arm extensions, so that he’d resemble a normal man. Anderson, who is a dwarf, was playing a mysterious studio magnate named Mr. Lynch, the writer and director, ran a hand through his shock of gray hair and made fluttery gestures to his special-effects man, Jason Collins. It was a mild March night in Hollywood, near the end of the shoot for “Mulholland Drive,” a two-hour pilot that David Lynch was filming for ABC.
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