Thursday, July 24, 2008 - Snoqualmie Valley, WA
Twin Peaks Fest hits year 16
Submitted photo
Twin Peaks Festival organizers Amanda Hicks and Jared Lyon sit in the Red Room they created for the event.
The first time Vanessa Glindinning of Wisconsin flew on a plane, it was on a trip to visit Snoqualmie Valley for the Twin Peaks Festival.
The festival — which will celebrate 16 years of Twin Peaks gatherings from July 25-27 — attracts between 100 to 150 fans of the early 1990s television series to the area every year. Each Twin Peaks aficionado gets a choc-full weekend of events about Snoqualmie Valley, one of the principal shooting sites of the late series.
“I grew up watching that kind of stuff,” said Glindinning, who first saw the Twin Peaks TV show at age 11. “It was dark and dramatic.”
The show was so popular that co-creator David Lynch directed “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” in 1992, a film about the last seven days of Laura Palmer. The series starts with her death, and the movie provides a prequel leading up to Lynch’s murder mystery.
“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” premiered in the U.S. at the North Bend Theater. Two fans, Pat and Don Shook, so enjoyed meeting that they and other enthusiasts organized the first festival in August of 1993.
Twin Peak Festival co-organizer Jared Lyon of New York remembered the first time he attended the festival in 2001 with one of his friends.
“As we got closer, we had this nervous laughter like, ‘is this going to be really geeky?’” Lyon said, adding that he and his friend had a great time.
When he returned in 2002, Lyon got to know the regulars.
“It’s like a family reunion every year,” he said.
Kyle Twede, owner of Twede’s Café, said he gives festival participants a 10 percent discount and supplies them with cherry pies for a picnic on their last day.
In 2006, fans got an extra treat. CBS/Paramount filmed a festival documentary for the 2007 Gold Box DVD set of the show.
But most fans come to discuss Twin Peaks’ themes, view the Valley and catch up with one another.
After paying the $150 ticket, attendees will, among other things, attend a David Lynch movie night at the Seattle Art Museum, tour the Valley on a Twin Peaks filming sites bus ride and hobnob with Twin Peaks celebrities over dinner.
“The first time they come for the celebrities, but the returnees come for the family atmosphere,” Lyon said.
Like many festival goers, Lyon discovered Twin Peaks when it aired in 1990-91. He found himself drawn to Lynch’s unorthodox cinematography.
“Someone is screaming and it’s focusing on a telephone pole,” Lyon said.
He called Twin Peaks more “avant garde” than contemporary shows like Roseanne, Cheers, The Cosby Show and Saved by the Bell.
Each show was so detailed that Amanda Hicks, the festival’s other co-organizer, found it difficult to miss an episode and still keep track of the story line. Hicks said her fellow writers on a fan fiction Web site encouraged her to attend the festival in 1999. Since then, Hicks has made an annual trip to Snoqualmie Valley from her home in California.
Some people come from as far away as Croatia, Australia, Germany and Spain to marvel at the Valley’s beauty and connection to Twin Peaks, especially on the bus tour.
“I think some places, the bus had barely parked and I was out the door,” Glindinning said. “I went to the fallsseveral times. I remember seeing them in the beginning of the show. I went up there and was blown away.”
Greg Olson, film curator at the Seattle Art Museum, said the museum has been coordinating the David Lynch movie night since the festival began. Olson said Lynch tends to polarize his audiences into groups who either love or hate his work.
“He’s been in tune with his unconscious and his intuition throughout his artistic career,” said Olson, who is working on a biography due out this fall called “David Lynch Beautiful Dark.”
This year’s show will be held at the art museum at 7:30 p.m. July 25, but the $10 tickets are almost sold out. For people riveted with Lynch’s show, tickets can still be purchased for the Twin Peaks Festival at time of print.
“It’s interesting to explore the effects the show has had after all of these years and how it can still intrigue people,” Hicks said.
© 2008 SnoValley Star