Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

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Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by Jerry Horne »

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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Will definitely be picking this up! Always great to see Mark getting his due, and I always enjoy hearing him talk about his process and influences.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by bowisneski »

So excited about this, hopefully it'll be his equivalent of Lynch on Lynch!
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by Jerry Horne »

I've read it and it's a must have as far as I'm concerned.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by bowisneski »

Got my copy in the mail and what I've read so far is great and I totally agree with Jerry, Bushman goes so in depth with questions and Mark is very verbose in most of his answers. Just flipping through the book, it looks like Bushman's questions get longer and Frost's answers shorter in the The Return and after section. Even though I'm just hitting the Twin Peaks section, I highly recommend it.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

My copy should arrive tomorrow. I read the preview that’s available on Amazon (the first few pages, mostly about Warren’s early life), and I’m loving it so far.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by bosguy1981 »

I read it last night. Really terrific book with wonderful stories and insights from Frost. Obviously it focuses strongly on Twin Peaks and I was delighted to see Bushman ask so many detailed questions. And he did a good job on follow-up questions where Frost was perhaps initially being slightly vague with an answer, and Bushman followed up to get more detail.

Frost is less forthcoming about The Return but he reveals a few surprising things (no spoilers from me!). He doesn't sugar-coat things about his working relationship with Lynch over the years, he touches on some of their differences and friction, and I felt happy for Frost that he was able to go on the record with his side of things without trying to flatter Lynch where it isn't warranted. I'd say this one's a very important read for all TP fans.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by baxter »

I just got this for my kindle (instant delivery and a much cheaper price finally won out over getting an expensive paper copy shipped to Oz).

Am very excited about reading and discussing it.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by vicksvapor77 »

A few fascinating tidbits off the bat:

I read somewhere where somebody said the creature that Milford is shown by Nixon at the UFO facility bears a resemblance to the Experiment. Is that the way you see it as well?
You mean the thing in the box?

I do.
It's not unintentional.

Do you not call it the Experiment?
No, I've never heard that term before.

Really? What do you call the thing in the box?
I can't say, because, we had a secret code for it.


So "The Experiment" name in the credits was a strictly David Lynch addition it seems!

Another one:

In The Final Dossier, you sort of address this - obliquely of course - but was Laura Palmer killed by Bob/Leland or not? I mean, do you think Laura is dead or not, after Cooper goes back?
You mean by the end of season three?

Right.
It's sort of laborious to lay it out, but - I think we've talked about this - the idea was that by going back in time and having the hubris to think he could undo something, Cooper was following in the footsteps of Phillip Jeffries. He crossed a forbidden barrier, risked his existential existence to do it, and ending up hurling both he and Laura into a sideways, alternate reality.


This is quite revealing at face value. Mark calls Carrie Page by Laura's name here. In his mind, it seems Carrie is Laura. Not a tulpa or whatever other theories are out there. And he's calling whatever we see of Twin Peaks in part 18 as a sideways, alternate reality. No mention of the word timeline. Not sure what to make of this but it's pretty incredible!
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by TheArm »

The book is just wonderful. Where David is often quite elusive and cryptic, Mark comes off as really intelligent, articulate and urbane. (Nothing against Lynch, of course, but he's not exactly the world's best interviewee.) Mark is more candid here than I've ever seen/heard him; and while he's still quite political and doesn't speak ill of Lynch, one definitely gets the sense that Mark feels like he did shoulder the lion's share of the day-to-day work on the original series while Lynch was only around very sporadically (Frost also admits to feeling guilty for stepping away when he did to begin Storyville). It sounds as if Lynch wasn't really around for much of S1 at all until the very end, when Ep 2 was shot, which surprised me (I had always thought that both of them were very involved in the production of S1). And that for S3, Lynch re-did/re-wrote quite a bit of what he and Frost had originally written once the cameras started rolling and that Frost had very little control once production began, and no role at all during post. It certainly doesn't sound to me like the two of them are particularly close and that it's mostly a professional relationship; Frost speaks respectfully of Lynch, but not warmly or affectionately.

Certainly it's the best book since Brad Dukes's "Reflections" to really give a sense of what the day-to-day on TP was like and what the real creative process was behind much of the show. It's a fascinating read and highly recommended for any TP fan.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by bowisneski »

vicksvapor77 wrote:This is quite revealing at face value. Mark calls Carrie Page by Laura's name here. In his mind, it seems Carrie is Laura. Not a tulpa or whatever other theories are out there. And he's calling whatever we see of Twin Peaks in part 18 as a sideways, alternate reality. No mention of the word timeline. Not sure what to make of this but it's pretty incredible!
I would love to listen to Mark and David’s discussions where Mark lays out something matter of factly, as he does a lot in the book, and then he and David talk about the nitty gritty of lore. Because it sounds like something at least along those lines happened while they were writing.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by vicksvapor77 »

TheArm wrote:It certainly doesn't sound to me like the two of them are particularly close and that it's mostly a professional relationship; Frost speaks respectfully of Lynch, but not warmly or affectionately.
Absolutely the case from what I've read so far, as well. We all have coworkers we aren't friends with but work well with at work. It's just wild to think of Lynch and Frost as another example of this but I think they are. I think they basically had next to no contact for many years from the end of Twin Peaks until around 2007 or so when they worked on the Gold Set and then not again until 2012 or so for season 3. It's wild to me.
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Just finished the Hill Street Blues chapter, and am enjoying it tremendously. It’s so fun to relive the evolution of the TV writers’ room through his eyes. His take on working with David Milch is wonderful to read.

It’s amazing how many famous personalities Frost interacted with during his formative years. As a Bond fan, I loved the Terence Young anecdote.

Can’t wait to get to the L/F stuff. (I couldn’t help peeking ahead and skimming it. So much wonderful material.)
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by baxter »

I'm over half way through now (I've read up to the section on his various obscure TV pilots in the late 90s/early 2000s). It is so good that I spent half an hour at work this morning reading it, because I couldn't put it down after my train journey!

It is making me really want to seek out this obscure material of his (e.g. Buddy Faro).
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Re: Conversations With Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Just finished the chapter on pre-TP L/F projects. Terrific read. One thing that’s always bothered me about One Saliva Bubble: the casting seems to completely miss the point of body-swap movies. The joy of the genre is watching an actor with a certain physicality act as if (s)he is inhabited by someone completely different. Having the same actor play both roles seems to defeat the purpose. I’m really curious how Lynch/Martin/Short would have played this out.
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