Trivia: Steven Spielberg Almost Directed An Episode Of ‘Twin Peaks’
I’ve ingested a lot ofTwin Peakstrivia over the years, but this is a tasty new morsel: evidentlySteven Spielbergwas such a fan of the show’s first season that he got into some talks to direct the second season opener. What happened? Series co-creatorDavid Lynchwanted to do the episode himself, and did.
As it turned out that was a good call. That episode features some of the show’s best ‘Lynchian’ moments, such as thefirst appearanceof “senior droolcup” (venerable Western character actorHank Worden) andhis giant analog(Carel Struycken). It also pushed the show deeper into pure soap opera territory, but that was balanced by the vision of thehorrifying death of Laura Palmerin the train car, which is still one of the freakiest damn things ever broadcast on television.
After the break, get the quote fromPeaksproducerHarley Peytonabout Spielberg’s brush with the show.
Brad Dstudios (viaBleeding Cool) has a great interview with Peyton in which Spielberg’s almost-involvement is revealed:
This is a long story, but my first wife is and was Kate Capshaw’s best friend so I knew Steven pretty well and he was a huge fan of the show – watched it every week, I mean a huge fan. Because we were friendly we talked about it a lot and he said to me in passing how fun it would be to direct an episode so I went to Mark over the summer and said, “This probably is not a bad way to kick off the second season, right?” So we sat down with him and had this very long meeting about the second season and Steven just said “I want it to be as weird as possible, it’ll be so much fun” so whether or not he would have even done it – we’ll never really know, but when Mark told David he didn’t even hesitate saying, “No, no, I think I’ll direct the first one. Maybe he can direct later in the season” – which he obviously didn’t.
Possibly totally coincidental note: the episode Spielberg nearly directed is called ‘May the Giant Be With You,’ which sounds a lot like a solidStar Warsreference. David Lynch was famously interviewed by Steven Spielberg’s close friend George Lucas about directingReturn of the Jedi, before Lynch decided to makeDune. That’s not quite full-circle trivia, but it’s kinda cool.
