“The beautiful thing about treasure is that it exists. It exists to be found. How beautiful it is to find treasure. Where is the treasure, that when found, leaves one eternally happy?” —The Log Lady
This was one of two Log Lady quotes I incorporated into my speech while officiating my brother-in-law and fellow “Twin Peaks” fan Joe’s wedding last year in Washington state. It was “Twin Peaks” that brought my wife—Cinema Femme founder Rebecca Martin Fagerholm—and I together, and has helped preserve our sanity whenever the news cycle is overloaded with garmonbozia (the show’s term for pain and sorrow). When we learned that a film was to be made about the woman who brought her to life, there was no doubt in our minds that we had to cover it.
Catherine Coulson may be best known for playing Margaret Lanterman, a.k.a. The Log Lady, on Mark Frost and David Lynch’s groundbreaking series, “Twin Peaks,” but that’s only one small slice of her extraordinary life. She worked at the American Film Institute, meeting Lynch through an acting workshop that she taught, before serving as an assistant director on his landmark debut feature, 1977’s “Eraserhead.” She was one of the few female camera operators working at that time, lensing the work of other trailblazers like John Cassavetes, while building an extensive acting career on both stage and screen. And with only days left to live, she was determined to film her scenes as the Log Lady in Lynch’s magnum opus, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” which would premiere two years after her death in 2015.
The new documentary “I Know Catherine, the Log Lady,” directed by Richard Green, immortalized as The Magician of Club Silencio in Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece, “Mulholland Dr.”, packs as much of her engrossing story into its two-hour running time as possible, leaving us hungry for an expanded miniseries. We learn of Coulson’s trio of unhappy marriages—starting with “Eraserhead” star Jack Nance—the trauma from which she channeled into her cathartic work in theatre, as well as some stunningly serendipitous nuggets, such as how she and actor Charlotte Stewart crossed paths long before they collaborated on “Eraserhead” when the latter worked at Disneyland. Once the film arrives at its final act, detailing Coulson’s shoot for “The Return,” it emerges as a work of enormous power.
Prior to the film’s Chicago premiere on Monday, April 14th, as part of Daniel Knox’s latest David Lynch retrospective at the Music Box Theatre, Rebecca got to interview Green while I spoke separately with Coulson’s grand-niece, Claire Coulson-Ollivier.
PART I: RICHARD GREEN (interviewed by Rebecca Martin Fagerholm)
What was your own personal connection with Catherine prior to directing this film?
First of all, thank you for taking the time to do this. Matt has a great reputation amongst the world of “Twin Peaks.” Whenever I see a post that has his name on it, I am looking at that because he’s a smart guy who cares and has got a great attitude. Another writer in Chicago, Marya E. Gates, is a friend of ours and served as an associate producer on our film. To answer your question, I must backtrack to when I was hitchhiking up the west coast at 17 years old. It was really easy to do back then, and you’d end up forging new bonds and relationships with the people who picked you up as well as those who were picked up along with you. I ended up in San Francisco where I performed a character who talked in rhyme at a Dickensian version of the Renaissance Fair.
Around that time, I co-founded a theatre company with John Achorn, Donna Du Bain and Cab Covay called Theatre of Marvels. Both Donna and Cab had previously been involved in the San Francisco theatre company Circus, and eventually, our theatre became filled with people from all over the country who had been in Circus. It became a theatrical family that is still my family to this day. Jack Nance performed with us, but Catherine Coulson never came up. She was down in LA basically running the AFI throughout this period, and she became a right hand to everybody there, so much so that she brought Donna in to be her assistant. At 20, I worked at the Mayfair Music Hall, which was built by Milt Larsen and designed by John Shrum, who was Johnny Carson’s art director for thirty years. They made it into an English-style music hall, complete with red velvet curtains and a chairman up in the booth right next to the stage, just like the Blue-Haired Lady in “Mulholland Dr.” The venue looks exactly like Club Silencio. I had a drinks budget, and I don’t drink—but David did and Jack Nance really did.
For the six or twelve weeks I was there, David and Jack would come down two or three times a week and get drunk while watching me do improvised verse. The rest of the time, I was hanging out and smoking pot with Catherine and David and Jack up at their house in Beachwood Canyon. David talked like Jimmy Stewart, Jack was hysterically funny and Catherine took care of us. Later on, I was in the middle of my first year at CalArts when I got a call from Donna saying, “David is going to screen ‘Eraserhead’ for the first time tonight up here at the Doheny Mansion.” When I arrived, I found myself in an underground screening room with stones all on the walls. Then I saw “Eraserhead,” which I must tell you, scared the fuck out of me. It freaked me out because it contained textural, visual elements that were straight out of my nightmares. David stood next to the narrow exit door as people were leaving. I just looked at him, mumbled some gibberish, and he went, “Uh-huh.” [laughs] I didn’t talk to him again for three or four years.
So that is how I met Catherine, and the relationship between us stayed the same over the years. I felt like she was my cousin in a big theatrical family. I didn’t know her very well, but whenever I saw her, there were always smiles. When I wanted to do the documentary, “I Don’t Know Jack,” following Jack Nance’s passing, it was Catherine who arranged for David to do the movie. When I ran into David at the memorial, he wanted me to remind him of how I knew all of these people, and I told him about our time together at the Mayfair Music Hall. I also shared with him the story of a character I once played who was an evil magician. That’s what ultimately led to my role in “Mulholland Dr.” David was a lover of ideas and a master at synthesizing them.
How did you go about constructing the film, which leads us to the filming of her scenes in “Twin Peaks: The Return”?
I love the question. Nobody has asked me about this, and it is so relevant to what this process was. In September of 2015, I got a call from Donna, who told me that Catherine had passed. I figured that since a new season of “Twin Peaks” was being filmed, people would want to see a documentary about Catherine and that a platform like Netflix would give me a million bucks. I couldn’t get a fucking deal, and it’s not because it wasn’t a good idea. I’m outside of Hollywood. My credibility with Hollywood exists on two levels, with a very successful voice-over career and acting roles, most importantly in “Mulholland Dr.” For that film, David had given me a seven-page script in English on Saturday that he planned to shoot on Monday. He said, “Richard, I’ve been looking for a role for you for a long time, and I think I got the one.” It wasn’t until the end of our conversation that he added, “I also wanted to do it in French and Spanish.”
He gave me the contact information for a translator who wouldn’t answer my calls, so I got two friends of mine—one French, the other Spanish—to translate it. Then I was faced with a 21-page script to learn by Monday morning in three languages. To be honest with you, I don’t remember my thought process in deciding when the dialogue would be in which language. When I arrived onset, I told David I had put together my own draft of the scene that was ten pages, and he said, “Well, let’s see it.” Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring were already in the balcony, everything was set up and I showed it to them. When I was finished, David crossed the stage with a smile on his face, looked me in the eye and said, “Aces.” I had never, ever felt so seen in my life for my work.
When I interviewed David in 2017 for the documentary on Catherine, it gave me my vision for the film. Interviewing David was like performing for him. He got from me what he gave me and that’s why that interview is so emotional. After filming with him, I knew where the movie had to go, which would ultimately be the day she shot her scenes for “The Return.” I felt I was the right person to make the film because I wasn’t too close to the material. Catherine and I weren’t close, and neither David nor I wanted the film to be about “Twin Peaks.” It had to be about Catherine. I avoided watching the third season of “Twin Peaks” until after filming and didn’t ask about the show unless I was interviewing someone who had been involved in it. I spent two years conducting interviews and another year in which I built the timeline of her life. Our initial cut, consisting solely of talking heads, was six and a half hours long.
For a year and a half, I molded the footage into a linear three-part miniseries that I could cut down into a feature if needed. I sent David the miniseries version, and about five days later, I got a call from him. For twenty minutes, he went through the movie and told me why he loved it. David is one of the most specific people in the world about everything, and it was like I had written him a script. I was in tears. There was one thing that he wanted to change, and that was the way that the Log Lady got into “Twin Peaks.” Mark Frost had said, “We need a character who is the town weirdo, and David told me, ‘I know just the right person.’” David said, “Bullshit! I didn’t tell Mark or anybody else that I was going to bring her up. I brought her up myself and she was there in the background doing her thing.” So I put together my alternate cut of that moment, David zoomed in to the studio for a half hour, and that was the last time I spoke to him.
Once the market fell out of the documentary world completely, I realized that I’d have to restructure the film in order to hook viewers who weren’t “Twin Peaks” fans. It had to be a feature rather than a miniseries for that reason, and it seems like that was a good choice. Making this film changed my life in really fundamental ways, such as how I look at my own mortality as well as that of my close friends. Catherine made the most out of her life. She was so there for people and was so kind to them. She was instrumental in so many aspects of my life.
PART II: CLAIRE COULSON-OLLIVIER (interviewed by Matt Fagerholm)
My first date with my wife was sparked by me asking her, “Want to talk more about ’Twin Peaks’?” When I officiated her brother’s wedding last year, I recited two quotes from the Log Lady, one of them being, “The heart—it is a physical organ, we all know. But how much more an emotional organ—this we also know. Love, like blood, flows from the heart. Are blood and love related? Does a heart pump blood as it pumps love? Is love the blood of the universe?”
I actually heard that quote for the first time just yesterday, which happened to be the 35th anniversary of the show. Someone posted that quote in the comments on our Instagram page, and I didn’t know what that person was talking about. I love that it’s a quote of hers. I don’t remember how I first discovered “Twin Peaks,” because it has always been around me. I’ve only watched the first five episodes of the first season, and I am finally making my way through it now as an adult. For whatever reason, I never felt the need to watch it as a younger person, but it is so beautiful to see the fans and the community come together. It’s a little like the Dead Heads. They built this community that is a family where you can feel seen and accepted for who you are. This show that you love so much is more than just a show. It’s something that will be able to be discussed forever. The show came out 35 years ago, and it’s still keeping people together and always will. That’s so cool how you and your wife met. I love that.
It seems that Catherine and David were very much in tune with one another regarding the art that they wanted to create.
One hundred percent. The movie talks about it a little bit, and I am biased, but the reason that “Twin Peaks” came to fruition was because of the character that he had created for Catherine. She worked a lot on “Eraserhead,” and was originally supposed to have a part in it. It’s nice that she and David had this relationship where they lifted each other up artistically and in terms of their careers. He was so grateful to her. Before “Twin Peaks,” Catherine and David came up with a character named the Log Girl who would be featured in short episodes where she gave educational talks to people about the forest. It’s cool that now, 35 years later and ten years after she passed, her daughter Zoey is carrying on her environmental activism. She’s letting the log leave its safe place for the first time ever to be on display at the World Forestry Center in Portland. It will be part of a popup exhibit called “What the Log Saw” that goes from May 1st through June 8th. The Log Lady’s glasses, which I have here, will also be on display in order to raise funds to save the forest.
What was your relationship with Catherine like?
She and I weren’t extremely close, but she was very close with my mom. Even though she was one of four children, Catherine has a very big extended family. Whenever you were around her, you instantly felt closer to her. You didn’t feel like an acquaintance. The film’s title, “I Know Catherine,” is fitting since you will feel like you know her once you’ve seen it. Years would go by without us seeing her, but whenever we did, she would be so attentive and was such a good, active listener. She made every person around her feel like they were worthy of being listened to and appreciated. I think that kind of ties back into the “Twin Peaks” community because you feel that as a fan, and maybe in spaces where you wouldn’t otherwise.
One of the film’s memorable interview subjects, Timothy Near, was a regular cast member on “Sesame Street.” Catherine was delighted when the show did a “Twin Peaks” parody that included a character modeled after the Log Lady.
That is so cool! Timmy is very interesting. Her sister Holly Near is, according to Richard, one of the great feminist singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s. And their sister Laurel Near played the Lady in the Radiator in “Eraserhead”! That film was so DIY that at one point, Catherine was looking for props and ended up rummaging through the trash bins in the back of a hospital. She found some random, actual organs and they apparently used them in the movie. My mom Connie’s cousin was a little kid at the time, and he was in the movie as well, so it felt very much like all hands on deck.
The second assistant cameraman on Cassavetes’ “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” Rob Hahn, once told me how he kept asking, “What can I do to help?”, until Catherine finally told him, “Stop asking about what you can do. Just look and see what needs to be done and do it.” What she said inspired him to be better at his job. To me, this is emblematic of how Catherine always seemed driven to make things happen one way or the other.
And she still is! Richard, from time to time, will thank me for whatever minimal things that I’m doing, and I say, not in a modest way, it’s really not me doing it. For example, the finding of the glasses was all Catherine. My mom found them in her closet. All of these things that we were able to do for the film—the magazine articles, the bookings, certain screenings—it’s not me doing it. I really like that story you shared about her kind of pulling things together. In the film, Kyle MacLachlan refers to Catherine as a shaman, which is so true. It came from her childhood. She always had this nurturing instinct and homemaking energy that translated into the characters she played in a really nice way.
Did you get to see Catherine perform onstage?
Yeah, we got to see her in a play in San Francisco a long time ago. What’s great about including that part of her career in the movie is that it reminds people how she wasn’t just this “Twin Peaks” character. There were a lot of people who only knew her through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I know she would’ve said that the work she did with them was equally as impactful for her as doing “Twin Peaks.” That community in Ashland, Oregon, is really beautiful too. The film will screen at the Ashland Independent Film Festival at the end of this month, and the flyer for the festival shows Catherine hiding behind a curtain, with a galaxy above her. People from the festival reached out to me and said that having the film at their festival felt like a homecoming for many members of the Ashland community.
Some of my fondest memories of Catherine are from when her brother, Bill Coulson, and all of his kids would perform in the Coulson Family Jazz Band at the Sacramento Jazz Festival every year. Our entire extended family would go to see them perform, and the last time I saw “Cookie,” which is what many people close to Catherine called her, was at the festival in 2015. She was really weak at that time, but it was so inspiring to see her, despite her illnesses, be so involved in wanting to talk to everybody and make memories. That sticks with me obviously to this day. When I wake up with a headache or am not feeling super-good, I remind myself, “Okay, if Cookie, four days before she died, was working on ‘Twin Peaks’ while terminally ill with cancer, I can get out of bed today.”
The film shows how Catherine was almost single-handedly keeping “Twin Peaks” going during the 25 years in between seasons.
Trends in art or music tend to circulate, and “Twin Peaks” has gone really big recently because of David’s passing and “The Return.” It almost feels like all of the work Catherine did—all the tiny festivals that she would fly to in the U.K., and all the business cards she’d hand out to people—has come back tenfold after she passed. But she knows that it’s happening, and I know she feels really amazing about that.
I was struck by how Lynch left it up to Catherine regarding whether or not she would wear a wig during her scenes in “The Return,” and she decided to let herself be seen as she was. What was it like for you when you first saw that footage?
It was super-emotional. I think there is a lot of beauty as well as strength in vulnerability, and in that moment specifically. She said, “I’m going to lay it all out, and people should know that this is life.” I haven’t seen the full third season yet, but the second half of the documentary is really moving for me. My mom had driven up from LA to Ashland to stay with Catherine, and it’s just so beautiful to see how, throughout her life and her career, she gave out so much love and welcomed people in. I know she wasn’t expecting anything in return, but she got it, and all these people rallied together to make sure that she was able to fulfill her last role. That’s all she wanted to do. I do believe that when you are on your deathbed in hospice, there are certain things that you want to do before your body will allow you to cross over, and that was the biggest one for her.
Is art an interest of yours as well?
Art and film are definitely high interests. I moved out of Southern California and wanted to get as far away as possible without having to leave the state, so I went to school in Arcata, which is in Humboldt County and very similar to “Twin Peaks” geographically. I studied environmental studies, which also made me feel close to Cookie, and that’s where I got my Log Lady tattoo by her close friend, Mindy Alper. After I finished my MBA, I reached out to Richard and joined the team to help with social media outreach for the film. My job dips into a lot of different things because it is a low-budget indie film, but my main goal is to make sure that as many eyes can see the movie as possible. It’s not just the story of why the show must go on, it’s the story of how life and death don’t have to be seen as a scary thing. It can be beautiful and we can interpret it in the way that we want to interpret it for ourselves. The last hour of the film is emotional in a good way. It can be nice and releasing to cry.
Would you say that Catherine served as an inspiration for you?
I think it was unconscious. It’s interesting to me how hobbies are unconsciously passed down generationally. Catherine’s aunt was a swimsuit designer and seamstress in LA who created some beautiful designs. My own healthy outlet is sewing. I picked up quilting over the past few months, and it has been such a nice experience for me. It’s just nice to know that it’s a common thing that we all share. Catherine’s mother was a vaudeville dancer with her sister, and we have beautiful pictures of them in my house. I feel closer to Catherine when I do things that we would’ve probably similarly enjoyed.
It’s nice to see members of the “Twin Peaks” community getting involved in environmental causes.
Yeah, definitely, even in Catherine’s character of Margaret. Her ability to be able to give this inanimate object emotion and its own character is so nice because we should be communicating with nature. We should be taking care of the earth in the way that indigenous people were, especially now. Nature can’t speak for itself, so who is going to? It’s just strange that today, we’ve evolved to think that nature is something that we can profit off of. It’s so weird.
What are your own hopes for the film?
I want it to make people think about how they should be themselves in times of grief or struggle or pain. I want people to think, ‘Wow, I need to take a step back and reassess and try to see the good in things, even the pain.’ I think there is joy to be had in pain and suffering.
“I Know Catherine, the Log Lady” will screen at 6:50pm on Monday, April 14th, with Richard Green in attendance as part of Daniel Knox’s retrospective, “David Lynch: Moving Through Time,” at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre. Green will also be in attendance for 3:30pm screening of “I Don’t Know Jack” on Tuesday, April 15th, while “Mulholland Dr.” screens twice, once at 3:40pm on April 14th with author John Thorne and again at 5:45pm on Friday, April 18th, with editor Mary Sweeney. For the full lineup of the retrospective, which runs through Sunday, April 20th, click here. For more information on “I Know Catherine, the Log Lady,” visit the film’s official site.
