Oliver Stone had originally planned to film Bruce Wagner's novel "Force Majeure", but then decided to film Wagner's comic strip "Wild Palms", published in Details magazine, instead: "It was so syncretic. It was such a fractured view of the world. Everything and anything could happen. Maybe your wife isn't your wife, maybe your kids aren't your kids. It really appealed to me." Wagner referred to his creation as "a sort of surreal diary […] a tone poem", set in an "Orwellian Los Angeles". ABC agreed to finance the project on a budget of $11 million, but, remembering the eventual decline of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks", insisted that the series had "a complete story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end".