Twin Peaks Publicity – Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman with Doughnuts

I acquired several several color transparencies from ABC / Capitol Cities featuring characters from David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks. I’ve shared a few of them in previous articles, such as Peggy Lipton as Norma Jennings and Sheriff Harry S. Truman and Josie Packard. This time, the small town Sheriff (Michael Ontkean) joins Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department next to stacks of delicious doughnuts.

 SPECIAL AGENT DALE COOPER AND SHERIFF HARRY S. TRUMAN WITH DOUGHNUTS

The transparency of Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) was taken by Mark Seliger. It’s part of a sequence of images from the conference room set at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department constructed at the former City Studios in Van Nuys, California.

I scanned the image in halves with my Epson V600 scanner as it doesn’t contain a large transparency scanning window. I then combined the parts via Adobe Lightroom’s photo merge feature. With the scan complete, I cleaned up the dust and scratches, yet the image felt unnaturally red. This could be a result of the transparency’s age or perhaps this is what the Mark Seliger intended.

The transparency contained a double exposure of Cooper and Truman. I left it in the shot since that’s the way I found the image.

Here is a similar shot from the Seliger photoshoot from the Table of Contents in the May 28, 1990 issue of US. Notice how the camera is higher in frame compared to the transparency.

From 1992 to 2002, Mark Seliger served as Chief Photographer for “Rolling Stone” magazine where he shot 188 iconic covers.  From 2002 to 2012, he was under contract with Condé Nast Publications where he shot photos for GQ and Vanity Fair and numerous other magazines. Mark has published several books including “When They Came to Take My Father: Voices of the Holocaust, Physiognomy” and “On Christopher Street: Transgender Stories.”

You can follow his work today on Instagram at @MarkSeliger.

The Mauve Zone had a shot that was closer to the angle found in the transparency, yet it’s not an exact match.

I scanned the transparency at a very high resolution which uncovers all sort of details I’ve never noticed. For example, Cooper is wearing a tie made by Dior while Sheriff Truman’s badge number is 289 (could that be the month and year they started filming Twin Peaks, February 1989?).

We first see Cooper’s Dior tie during episode 1.004. You can barely see the logo when he prepares to speak with his supervisor Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole via an intercom at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. This may the time when Seliger took the photo of Cooper and Truman together.

I thought they might have captured it during episode 2.001 when Agent Cooper lays it all out. There are stacks of doughnuts on the conference room table, but they don’t match what is seen in the transparency. The biggest things missing from the episode compared to the publicity photo are bear claws, which flank the doughnut piles.

The transparency shows up in newspaper articles from the times, such as this image from the September 5, 1990 issue of the Waco Tribune Herald. The image accompanied a syndicated story from Denise Webb about the “TV myths about eating.”

You can see this transparency and other Twin Peaks publicity photos on my Flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aloha75/albums/72177720325607231/