Twin Peaks Prop – Windom Earle’s Playing Cards

IDENTIFYING WINDOM EARLE’S PLAYING CARDS

In Episode 2018, Windom places The Joker card over a Miss Twin Peaks flyer. On it, the deck’s brand is visible: The United States Playing Card Company. From a quick Google search, I found a match to the No.92 Club Special “Bee” playing cards with the red diamond back.

I went straight to eBay and was lucky to find a nice condition vintage deck for a reasonable price.

AUDREY HORNE AND DALE COOPER’S PHOTOS

While I waited for the cards to arrive, I did some research on the cut out faces of Audrey Horne, Dale Cooper, Donna Hayward, and Shelly Johnson. I felt like Audrey’s and Cooper’s looked familiar, so I searched for promotional photos. Luckily, I found matches to both in the ABC Television Network archives.

DONNA HAYWARD’S PHOTO

After an extensive search, I wasn’t able to find a match for Donna. Instead, I found a photo that was fairly close and did a bit of photo manipulation and came up with an approximation that I was happy with.

After writing the above portion of this article, fellow Bookhouse Boy Steven Miller found the shoot that Donna’s photo is from on The Mauve Zone. It’s part of a series of images taken by Paula K. Shimatsu-U, though we haven’t found the exact match yet.

He also sent along the photo of Donna, Shelly, and Audrey from the scene in Episode 2015 where Leo Johnson is transcribing the poem that all three characters receive. How did I miss that?

From that photo, I distorted Donna’s photo back into shape. Soon I will rework her card to get it right in my recreation.

SHELLY JOHNSON’S PHOTO

Shelly’s card had a nice close up in Episode 2020 when Leo is looking longingly at her card, so I was able to do a clean usable screen shot.

CREATING THE REPLICAS OF WINDOM EARLE’S PLAYING CARD

Now that I had all of the faces, I went back to a screen shot of all of the cards and created an outline of each face as it appeared on the cards. With a little resizing, contrast/brightness adjustment and other tricks, I created each face as they appeared on the cards. I’ll be reworking Donna’s card based on the alternate image.

Here’s a fun bit of trivia – Audrey is seen wearing a Queen of Diamonds card at One Eyed Jacks in episode 1.007. I’m glad they kept her card consistent between the seasons.

Once I finally had the real deck in hand, I scanned the cards and resized the faces to fit as they should on each one.

I printed them on a medium weight photo paper and cut them out with scissors. I then carefully studied the cards as they appeared on screen and glued the faces in place with rubber cement.

With some red thumb tacks holding them in place, they go nicely in my display case with some of my other pieces of memorabilia.

I sincerely hope reading about this project inspires others to recreate their own props replicas. I hope to write about more of my replica projects soon, so keep an eye out for more in the future.