In Part 1 of this look back at my video series, I focused on the build-up to its creation as well as the fast-paced, relatively brief process of putting together the first part. This entry examines the much longer period spent on the subsequent three parts, concluding with the presentation of the complete Journey Through Twin Peaks
at this time three years ago on February 4. Part 3 will eventually chronicle the creation of new Journey
chapters focused on The Return
, which have yet to be produced but will hopefully be available this summer. (That process took much longer, and I eventually added a Part 4 of this essay as well.)
On the morning of October 3, 2014 less than twenty-four hours after I'd put the finishing touches on the first part of
Journey Through Twin Peaks, the entire context of
Twin Peaks - and with it, my little video project - was forever altered. David Lynch's and Mark Frost's simultaneous Twitter teases would be revealed within days as what many suspected:
Twin Peaks' return to television as a limited series on Showtime in 2016. This was a cosmic coincidence for my purposes; not only had I just launched what would become my most ambitious online work just as it became newly relevant, but this same week I'd announced that I'd be devoting the following six weeks exclusively to
Twin Peaks, including perhaps the longest interviews ever conducted with John Thorne, publisher of the legendary fanzine
Wrapped in Plastic. We'd spoken during the summer, and at one point we mused about the future of this world we were both falling back in to. (John, whose involvement with the work had obviously been far more extensive than my own, hadn't written or engaged with
Peaks much at all in the previous decade; the magazine's last issue had been 2005 and its co-founder, Craig Miller, had passed away a few years later.) As exciting as
The Missing Pieces was for
Peaks fans that had been starved for new content since the early nineties, John noted that this was all a bit of tempest in a teacup - or, perhaps, a coffee cup.
John's friend had attended the red-carpet premiere for
The Missing Pieces in Los Angeles and observed (in John's paraphrase) "it was the same types of people who are at every Lynch event, it was a fairly small venue. From the outside, it has this glamour to it like it was a big event, and
Twin Peaks was in the air. But in fact it was a small event magnified by social media and the internet." John himself added, "I’m glad it’s still there and I’m glad it’s getting press coverage but there’s a small core devoted." We both reflected that the old Lynch - the one who savvily played the "Czar of Bizarre" for mainstream media in the early nineties - would have capitalized on this momentum rather than calmly letting it pass. I remembered the odd buzz of the spring, when (twenty-fourth!) anniversary pieces were popping up left and right,
Twin Peaks would randomly trend on Twitter, and the first announcement of the deleted scenes was made; I noted that if Lynch and Frost wanted to seize the moment with some sort of revival, this would have been the opportunity. But a couple months had passed since the blu-ray, Brad Dukes had already made the rounds to promote his oral history (the first of a tsunami of
Peaks literature though at the time it seemed an unprecedented one-off), and if there was any chance of
Twin Peaks re-emerging in the broader public consciousness, it was rapidly fading. And then, of course, the news.
By the time that particular interview went up, I'd already conducted another with John to wrestle with this unexpected windfall. Those
Wrapped in Plastic interviews were published three weeks in a row after the first part of
Journey Through Twin Peaks; also in October I interviewed Martha Nochimson, author of
The Passion of David Lynch and
David Lynch Swerves, and continued a deep dive into the archives of the
Twin Peaks Usenet forms (alt.tv.twin-peaks) where early internet adopters discussed the series in the early nineties. After all, the
Journey videos were only supposed to be one part of my now expanded "
Twelve Weeks of
Twin Peaks," a central feature perhaps but not the only show in town. And while the blog content was exclusively
Peaksian, I still found room for non-
Peaks endeavors elsewhere - for example, tweeting my "alternate Oscar" picks, a new year every day, throughout the fall. By early December, however, the video series had taken over the weekly
Peaks posts altogether; by the end of the month, when a much-delayed Part 3 finally premiered, I had dropped the "Twelve Weeks" limitation entirely and was dedicated to publishing about
Twin Peaks as long as it took to finish this project, and as the new year dawned my
Twin Peaks immersion became exclusive and all-encompassing, not just yielding by far my most popular work but changing me in the process.
This is the story of how I created parts 2 - 4 of
Journey Through Twin Peaks, and what that experience meant to me.