0N a Monday in late April, David Lynch was in the studio of his three-building compound in the Hollywood Hills, mixing the soundtrack for the "Mulholland Drive" pilot. Cigarette smoke spiralled above his head as he sat at his Euphonix mixing console, cradling a bottomless cup of coffee. Brown draperies cloaked the walls of the soundproof hall, which doubles as a fourteen-seat screening room. Three sound technicians were perched around him, and everyone stared at a thirty-two-inch monitor as the opening frames of the pilot flickered by.

Lynch had just spent two hours deleting cricket chirps and rolling hubcap clatter from the John Cage-like symphony that plays under the car-crash scene, choosing to emphasize instead steam hiss and the screams of the drag racing kids. As the monitor showed Rita staggering downhill from the crash and turning toward Sunset Boulevard, Lynch said, "Give me a hint of the steam and a taste of the screaming kids. Real low, on infinite reverb." When these sounds were laid in, they made Rita seem not goofy but terrified.

Over the weekend, Lynch had sent his cut of the show, a work print with patchy temporary sound, both to Krantz and to ABC. The cut was two hours and five minutes, and had longueurs, but on the whole it was spooky, funny, and absorbing. Justin Theroux gave Adam a gaunt, raspy wit that made his scenes bounce. Robert Forster was memorable as a deadpan cop. And there was a handful of indelible images: a boy with metal crutches and piercing blue eyes; a bloated corpse lying in a sea of blood; and, particularly, the sepulchral appearance of the pinheaded Mr. Roque.

That morning, sitting in a battered looking director's chair in his woodshop after a meditation session, Lynch had told me, "It works. I really love it, and Tony's over the moon. I'd like ABC to run it at two and a half hours, but apparently Jamie and Stu are freaking out, saying it has to be eighty-eight minutes."

Now Lynch was laying sound for the scene in which the bum gives Dan a heart attack. He tracked in a "stinger" – a pulse of hard-hitting sound – timed to the instant when the bum jumps out, and then watched the result. "That's total horseshit!" he shouted. "Put it in the trash!" But moments later he was murmuring to his sound engineer, "That's a peach, Walter."
"Lose that arbitrary drum hit?"
"No, no! Arbitrary is our friend!"

The intercom buzzed: Tony Krantz was on line one. Lynch picked up and said, "Hey, Tone," then just listened. "Frankly," Krantz told me later, explaining the reason for his call, "I've never heard of a two-and-a-half-hour opener. It's kind of crazy. These people at ABC are used to forty-four minutes" – the length of an hour pilot without commercials – "so they keep looking at their watches, waiting for the fucking thing to end." But Krantz stayed calm while talking to Lynch, trying to finesse the situation.

"The question is, how much do they love it?" Lynch said into the receiver at last. Krantz told him that Steve Tao wasn't sanguine. "What do you mean, 'He's not loving it'?" Lynch asked. "I don't want Steve Tao's subjective judgment to hurt something that I know will thrill people. It's not four hours long, it's not meandering and shapeless, it's feature length. If Michael Eisner" – Disney's chairman – "saw this, I can't believe he wouldn't dig it." Krantz told Lynch it would only alienate ABC if they tried to do an end run and show the tape to Eisner.

The intercom buzzed again: Stu Bloomberg and Jamie Tarses were on line seven. Lynch explained to Krantz and switched over. "Hey," he said, and listened for several minutes. "Right, right," he said, finally. "I thought you would love this so much you'd put it in a two-and-a-half-hour time slot. That would be a beautiful thing. See, I love it. And Tony genuinely loves it. I think it's not slow, it's not boring. It's my pace. 'Twin Peaks' moved slowly, too. And there aren't any sound effects in what you saw, and that slows it down."

The three technicians slipped out of the room. "I know television has a different pace," he said, his voice rising slightly, "and I hear that you're saying it's got to go into the format. But I have a pace, too. And the only way I can think of to get it down to eighty-eight minutes is to start removing scenes in their entirety and end it earlier." Then Lynch asked, "So, Jamie, are you leaning toward this being a series, or are you disappointed and just want to can it?" He tilted his head and said, "Obviously, I got some thinking to do. O.K., swingin'."

Lynch stood up and walked back to sit in the central black-cushioned theatre seat. He drummed his fingers on the cherry-colored armrest, then gave me a slow, sweet smile. "Well, on a scale of ten they were about a three. A three, maybe. I'm one depressed cowboy. They'll call back tomorrow and have more sharpened" – he paused, grimacing – "scissors. But they were slippery. They don't really know what to think until other people see it – the audience testing." He stared forlornly at the blank movie screen. Snippets of the audio mix looped on through the wall speakers: gunshots, the metallic crunch of the car crash, screams in infinite reverb. "Damn," Lynch said. "They hated it."

THE following evening, Tony Krantz drove his silver Porsche to Lynch's house and walked up the steps carrying two bottles of Château Lynch-Bages. It was an old joke between them that if Krantz arrived without wine it meant bad news. Krantz and Lynch and Sweeney settled down in the living room, with its polished gray stucco walls and Danish modern furniture, and they drank the Wine and looked out over the Hollywood Hills to the lights of Santa Monica. At last, Lynch said he had decided to lose the surplus thirty-seven minutes by simply cutting from the end. What he edited out would be saved for the first episode of the series.

Krantz, who carried a memo from Steve Tao with thirty-odd instructions on what the network wanted cut or " paced up," expressed strong disagreement. "ABC and Disney had put seven million dollars into the show," Krantz told me later, "and simply cutting the. last thirty-seven minutes contradicted the spirit of ABC's notes entirely and would have been a slap in their faces. If you're a professional, you don't flagrantly tell the buyer to fuck off "

Krantz began to read Tao's memo aloud. Lynch objected to each note, and after ninety minutes of heated discussion they had covered only the first three points. Lynch believed that the "creative control" clause in his contract was equivalent to his having "final cut" authority in a film; in fact, that contract was with Imagine, not with the network That night, Krantz told Lynch, "Ultimately, ABC has creative control. And their ultimate creative control is to say, 'We pass.' "

"The way we were going at it was ridiculous," Krantz says. "So I said, 'David, who cares, ultimately, whether we speed up Rita's pace in getting to Hollywood? Let's not have this terrible tsuris about whether your artistic vision is being compromised a little – we're still going to do something fantastic.' "

Lynch began to laugh: "So, nothing matters, and it's all shit at the end of the day? You're really convincing me, Tone." Lynch finally promised to think over what he called "Tony's stern talking-to." But Krantz had self-doubts of his own. "Around David, I sometimes get frustrated by my own linearity," he says. "I think, Have I become too conservative? Have I become Eke Aaron Spelling" – the producer of such shows as "The Love Boat" and "Melrose Place" – where my instinct has become the TV instinct, prizing what works instead of what I believe?"

So Krantz was surprised when Lynch called him the next day and said that he and Sweeney had stayed up all night and trimmed the whole story down to eighty-eight minutes. "I don't agree with the cuts," he said, "but I've made them."

"You're kidding!" Krantz told him. "That brings tears to my eyes."

Lynch had refused to read the rest of ABC's instructions – "I have a problem with notes," he told me – but afterward Sweeney looked the memo over and said they had addressed almost all of Tao's concerns: gone was the Denny's scene, and almost every scene featuring a character who appears only once, including the boy with the metal crutches, ABC had wanted the pilot to end on a shot of Rita's blue key, but Lynch kept his final image of the red-eyed bum, even though, without the Denny's scene, it was now utterly enigmatic. "I whacked away to make this fat man fit in a real little phone booth, trying to answer their concerns about pace," Lynch said the day after he'd done the editing, his chin stubbled and his eyes weary. "They want things to move fast, but it's like water-skiing: when you go fast, you stay on top – you never get below the surface."

Rolling a cigarette butt to shreds between his fingers, Lynch offered another analogy. "See, a pilot 8plants seeds, and you get excited by the little seeds that are starting to sprout. A lot of our seeds got crushed and butchered out, and what you end up with is a sick little garden. But obviously I'd rather lose seeds than lose the whole series." He sighed. "It's a heartache, but we're playing ball over here."

Krantz preferred the short version, believing that it was more accessible. "I hope ABC will pick it up now," he told me. "They'd be fools not to recognize the commercial potential." The cuts did make the pilot faster and more focussed. But in truth the version edited to be more Eke television had become, paradoxically, less necessary as television. What had distinguished it was gone: scenes that weren't immediately fathomable, pauses and puzzles and lingerings, a pervading sense of a powerful and idiosyncratic mind at work. Without the virtues of its apparent faults, "Mulholland Drive" was no longer what ABC had gambled on nine months earlier.

DURING the third week in May, all the networks make expensive, theatrical presentations of their primetime schedules to the advertising community in New York City. ABCs presentation was held on May 18th, before a packed house at the New Amsterdam Theatre, in Times Square – the home of Disney's long-running musical "The Lion King." It began with a peppy dance tribute to ABC's lineup, which featured DURING the third week in May, all the networks make expensive, theatrical presentations of their primetime schedules to the advertising community in New York City. ABCs presentation was held on May 18th, before a packed house at the New Amsterdam Theatre, in Times Square – the home of Disney's long-running musical "The Lion King." It began with a peppy dance tribute to ABC's lineup, which featured a giant Rockettes-style kick line. Before long, Jamie Tarses walked out in a pin-striped suit and read confidently from a teleprompter, promising the advertisers that ABC's lineup was already surpassingly strong and stable, and therefore the network would premi6re only six new programs. She started to announce the new schedule, and each night's lineup was concluded with a fifteen-second perp walk across the stage by the stars and future stars and soon-to-be-cancelled would-be stars of that night's shows. Then the downtown magician David Blaine rose from beneath the stage in a coffin and did some of his glum card tricks.

At last, Tarses got to the schedule for Thursday, which was where Krantz thought "Mulholland Drive" should go, as counter-programming to the NBC juggernaut of "Friends" and "E.R." Tarses began by making some of the same points that Krantz had made to the network. "NBC is down eighteen per cent on Thursday night," she said, adding that "we're going to go bold, and we're going to go up." ABCs plan was to please advertisers by lowering the median age of the networks viewers, which currently stands at forty-one – well above the coveted demographic of eighteen to thirty-four. (Fox's median age is thirty-three; the WB'S is twenty-six.)

ABC went with Krantz's argument, but not with his show. Instead, its strategy for "going young" on Thursdays was to air a new drama called "Wasteland" at 9 P.M. "Wasteland" was created by Kevin Williamson, the writer responsible for the "Scream". movies and the WBs popular show "Dawson's Creek" At the New Amsterdam Theatre, Tarses rolled a few minutes of tape that showed six twenty-somethings living in New York City, wearing black knit shirts, gliding around to the Smash Mouth song "All Star," and contriving to have sex with one another. In a weak year for new shows, "Wasteland" is distinguished chiefly by its similarity to such other new "Friends" clones as Fox's "Time of Your Life" (five twenty-somethings in New York), the WB's "D.C." (five twenty-somethings in Washington), the WB'S "Jack & Jill" (six twenty-somethings in New York), and NBCs "Cold Feet" (three twenty-something couples somewhere or other).

Stu Bloomberg ended the primetime presentation by rising from David Blaine's coffin – not, perhaps, the best metaphor for this crowd – to make a final, halfhearted "Star Wars" pun: "May the sales force be with you!" Afterward, the buyers and analysts walked through a steady rain to a cocktail reception held under a large white tent in Bryant Park. The more exuberant among them got in line to have their pictures taken with Drew Carey or Michael J. Fox.

I found Steve Tao and asked him what had happened to "Mulholland Drive." He looked sheepish. "Well," he said, "it needs a little work." So it might be a midseason replacement? "Sure, yep, possibly." He turned away.

Five days earlier, Tony Krantz had received a phone call from Tao. Krantz had heard rumors that ABC would not pick up the pilot, but he still hoped that the network would select the show for midseason, the way it had done with "Twin Peaks." "It's going to be a pass," Tao told him. "I'm sorry."

Krantz immediately phoned Lynch. "They don't want it," Krantz said "They don't want it for fall, and they don't want it for spring." "I see," Lynch said.

Later, Krantz told me, "I think David was surprised. He's an artist. And when someone tells you, "The thing you love, we don't love; we don't value your inner life' – that's very personal."

When the show's cast and crew learned of its demise, they were outraged. Justin Theroux had turned down a chance to be in "Wasteland" in order to work with Lynch on "Mulholland Drive." Yet he believes that he chose well, because he learned a salutary contempt for how television shows are chosen. "I want to say that the people at ABC are terrible, awful, heinous people who kiss up to you when they think you might be a star and then drop you like a hot turd when they decide you won't be," he said. "But really they're just terribly frightened people who want to keep their jobs by giving audiences what they want. The audience testing that the networks do is in Middle America, and I picture these men and women who spend their time in McDonald's and bent over slot machines being brought into a room in a mall to watch David Lynch and turn up their knobs if they like it. Those knobs are going to be arrow-headed to the ground. On that basis, ABC assumes that America wants 'Wasteland' and not 'Mulholland Drive,' which means that they assume America is stupid. The sad thing is they're probably right."

A few weeks later, I visited Lynch at home, in his woodshop. I asked him how he felt about ABC's rejection. He pushed his index fingers against his lower lip and remained in a brown study for a full two minutes. He rose and hit the intercom to request a cup of coffee, sat and thought for thirty seconds more, and finally said, "At a certain point, you realize you're in with the wrong people. Their thinking process is very foreign to me. They like a fast pace and a linear story, but you want your creations to come out of you, and be distinctive. I feel it's possibly true that there are aliens on earth, and they work in television."

ABC plans to air "Mulholland Drive" later this season as a two-hour TV movie that sets its plot lines in action and then abruptly stops. Lynch dreads the broadcast. "Having that butchered version go out ... it's like an accident," he said. "Some people love to see a sad, bad traffic accident, and that's what they'll see on ABC. I hope no one watches."

I asked him if he thought that the "Twin Peaks" pilot would get picked up today. "I kind of doubt it," he replied.

What if Tony Krantz came back in a few years, carrying a case of Lynch-Bages, and suggested that they take another crack at a TV show?

Lynch smiled faintly: "He'd have to be wearing some protective gear." He took a drag on his cigarette. "We don't talk about television anymore."

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