http://www.sarahbrown.net/sid99.html

Soaps in Depth, October 5, 1999

DEAR SARAH...

In a personal essay, GH's associate headwriter, Patrick Mulcahey- one of the most respected and honored creative forces in daytime- reveals his thoughts on the surprising controversy that went into the creation of Carly, and the admiration he developed for her portrayer, Sarah Brown.

I remember very well the first time I saw Sarah on-air. We had slowly let drop to the audience that Bobbie had a daughter she'd given up at birth, and at the very tag end of an episode, we saw the girl, up to no good. Suddenly there was Sarah looking ungainly, uncomfortable, a little butch, badly dressed, smiling too much and too insincerely- you could hardly imagine anyone less actressy. I wasn't optimistic. But one thing she had right away: Immediately, she seemed exactly the sort of bad seed that might have sprung from our beloved-but-rough-around-the-edges Bobbie.

A Rocky Start

It's [casting director] Mark Teschner's genius that he can see things in actors that we may not see till much later. I thought her first couple of months on the air were awful. It was partly the function of the character's having a hidden agenda: Every moment she had with anyone was fake. It's one thing to ask a seasoned actor playing a detailed, fleshed-out, established character to do that. It's another to ask a girl of 19 or 20 or whatever Sarah was, who's playing a character that's a complete question mark. I mean, the audience didn't know what Carly "Roberts" was like for real, so how to show she was not what she seemed? All poor Sarah could do most of the time was make faces behind other characters' backs. It's pretty obvious now that bringing on a character and asking her to reveal nothing for weeks on end was not a stroke of genius on our parts.

Who's That Girl?

Worse yet, we the writers didn't really know what Carly was supposed to be. That may sound like a horrifying confession, but in daytime, a successful character is always a collaboration between the writers and the actor. We begin by making a few decisions about who we think the character is, the actor finds certain other decisions have to be made and makes them, sparks fly between the actor and another actor, we see what's happening on-screen and start playing around with it in the writing- that's how a character takes shape.

A Political Minefield

Carly was different. We were afraid of her. I started [on the show] right around the time Sarah did, but it's my understanding that there was quite a hullabaloo about Carly before she was ever cast. I was told a writer (the one I think I replaced) had even quit over it. The issue was this: Carly was coming to Port Charles for the purpose of haunting Bobbie and making her life miserable, out of supposed anger at having been "abandoned" by her. But of course, she wasn't abandoned, she was given up for adoption, and the network and producers were rightly concerned that we might be "sending the message" (that phrase that soap writers dread) either that adopted children were hateful and full of rage, or that their adoptive parents were neglectful or otherwise inadequate enough to instill this smoldering resentment of being adopted in their kids... I need not go on. The pitfalls are obvious, and I imagine Bob [Guza, the headwriter] promised Wendy [Riche, the executive producer] and ABC that we had no intention of falling into them.

Decisions, Decisions

Well, that was easier said than done. For one thing, the antidote to a character's being seen as a "message" is to make her so vivid and specific that she isn't anything but herself- she just is. But that takes time. Carly was brand-new- For another, no two people on the writing team had the same idea of how to keep Bob's promise and circumvent the difficulties. Worse yet, Bob was leaving the show and the new headwriter seemed to have a very different idea of who Carly was or should be. The upshot was that we were all afraid to make any big decisions about Carly when we wrote her. Sarah, naturally, wasn't about to make them either. She was waiting for the writing to make it clear who Carly was supposed to be, and she didn't have the experience or the confidence to say, as a veteran might have, "Okay, they don't know who she is so I'll make her up."

The Turning Point

I remember very sharply the first time I dared to make a big decision about Carly. She was in Bobbie's room alone and was supposed to try on a piece of Bobbie's jewelry. I decided Carly didn't care about the necklace or want to steal it. She didn't covet Bobbie's things. She might've thought she wanted to hurt Bobbie, but in coming to know her, she came to want to be Bobbie- to have her life. This was not only more human and sympathetic but was consistent with her soon-to-be-clear objective to seduce Tony. Well, that's all the logic Sarah needed to go on. It was like letting a genie out of a bottle. She was a completely different actor in that episode than anyone we'd ever seen before, and we all saw it and got excited about it.

Getting Under Carly's Skin

Thank God for [associate headwriter] Elizabeth Korte and Steve Burton (Jason). I think it was Elizabeth's idea that Carly should go slumming, run into Jason and decide he'd make the perfect anonymous sex-partner. Not only did Sarah and Steve turn out to be a great pairing, not only did it add depth and danger to the Robin/Jason romance, but it allowed us finally to explore who Carly really was when she was alone. What she wanted, what she hated, what she didn't expect that turned her from her path. I wrote a lot of those scenes, and watching Sarah play Carly then was like watching Popeye eat spinach- she just grew and grew, revealing not just a good actor but a magnificent one, with phenomenal intelligence and depth and inexhaustible emotional resources. One of the enduring thrills after 20 years in this medium is being able to watch somebody like Sarah discover herself and flex her muscles. It was and is glorious to behold.

Icing On The Cake

I often say that Bobbie and Carly are my favorite couple on the show. I love writing them. Jackie [Zeman] and Sarah are so finely tuned to their characters and each other - Sarah so gets Carly's dodges and passive-aggressive tricks, and Jackie so understands parent/child guilt trips and love/hate relationships, that my big problem writing their mother-daughter scenes is knowing when to stop.

Ain't No Mountain High Enough

There are a few actors who have perfect pitch with regard to the characters they play. Tony Geary comes to mind. He's incapable of misplaying Luke. Asleep he's Luke. There are even fewer actors who can make anything work. A Martinez [for whom Mulcahey wrote during his stint as Cruz Castillo on SANTA BARBARA] comes to mind. It doesn't matter what it is, how ridiculous it looks on paper- give it to A and he will sell it. Even if you have completely misconceived the action, if what's being asked is something the character as established would never do, A will enlarge the character so it seems like it couldn't be any other way. I put Sarah Brown in both categories. Her Carly is both a seamless creation and vast with possibility. Throw A.J. in a laundry cart and dump him in an alley? I cringed at the prospect, but there's no question Sarah pulled it off. Dump her baby the day after giving birth and still pass herself off as a good mother? With Sarah, you believe it completely.

"An EmotionaI Kaleidoscope"

I get so excited when I'm writing Carly. I shouldn't admit this, but privately, I keep raising the bar. I'll write a heavy Carly episode and fret, "Now look what I've done, she'll never be able to pull this off - but of course Sarah always does. My favorite Carly show in recent memory was the one where she started in a catfight with Hannah, proceeded to defend herself to Jason, then tell him off, then wheedle and cajole and apologize, then finally kiss him like there was no tomorrow on the Quartermaine terrace in the middle of the night. Sarah had to take Carly from zero to 60 and back in like five scenes, and she was flawless, fierce, endlessly inventive, an emotional kaleidoscope.

A Tip of The Hat

We started out with an actress who didn't know what we wanted and ended up with an actress who never doesn't know what to do. I feel so lucky as a writer to have her. My only fear is that we may just now have found the perfect story for her but won't be able to keep her long enough to play it. Alas, that's the price you pay for having the best- you can only have them for a little while because everybody's going to want them soon.

Courtesy SoapTownUSA

October 2007

PATRICK MULCAHEY

Patrick Mulcahey won 4 Emmys for his work on “Guiding Light”, “Santa Barbara”, “General Hospital”. Many, certainly I, consider him the best to ever write for a soap opera. His scripts are always memorable: sharp, witty, profound, powerful. For the last couple of years he has been working on “The Bold and the Beautiful”. He kindly accepted to answer a few of my questions.

By: Giada DaRos

Giada: You wrote episode 5000th of B&B. Where did the idea for that episode come from?

Patrick: Well, it kept creeping up on us -- we knew months in advance we wanted to do something special. But of course for writers that self-imposed obligation to do “something special” is the kiss of death. Nothing we think of seems special enough. So the week rolled around when we needed to plot it and write it and we still weren’t sure what we were going to do.

Brad [bell, head-writer] wanted to pay homage to the four original characters still played by the original cast members: Eric, Stephanie, Brooke and Ridge. He was the one who thought of doing it at the Big Bear cabin, which is iconic for our viewers. Our characters keep going off to that purportedly peaceful mountain retreat and getting strangled by each other or buried by avalanches. We wanted something fun and celebratory, not a lazy, all-flashback episode. Brad wanted to connect it at least loosely to our current story –not everybody’s been watching for twenty years. Michael [Minnis, writer] and Betsy [snyder, writer] wanted Brad to have a cameo in the episode – a little wink to our audience; it was Brad’s milestone, after all -- and Brad agreed to do it, albeit with some misgivings, as long as he didn’t have much dialogue. An actor he’s not.

We agreed the setup would be that Eric, Stephanie, Brooke and Ridge come together to decide whether and how the Forrester design firm will continue to exist. We knew we needed a big Eric-Stephanie scene. They started the business together, they remember how difficult it was; do they have the energy to do it all again, or is retirement beckoning? We wanted to see them in private… let’s say in a way we’ve seldom seen. Beyond that, we talked about the tone we wanted to strike and not much else.

I felt honored that Brad asked me to write the episode and left so much of it up to me. I told him I wanted to write it like a little play. I’m not sure he knew what I meant (I’m not sure I did either), but he trusts me. Which is one of the big – maybe the biggest – rewards of writing the show for me. He always gives me pretty free rein, never more than on this episode.

I wonder too, in this instance, if on some level he didn’t want to be surprised. 5000 half-hours of television is an astounding achievement. I suspect he felt it should be honored, but he’s too modest a man to honor himself. Maybe he really felt it was somebody else’s job to celebrate it. He could tell that I understood the personal sacrifice and commitment 5000 episodes represented. At the same time, of course, I had to be mindful of who Brad is – as I say, he’s a very modest man, a guy who loves his work, who gets kicked around by the fans a lot, who’s constantly compared to his father, Bill (who created our show, as well as The Young and the Restless). It’s Brad’s show. The buck stops with him. Anything we air is likely to be taken as coming from his own pen. So the episode couldn’t think too much of itself. It had to have his personality: gentle, self-effacing, humorous, affectionate.

I think it was the best script I’ve written for B&B. Alas, the audience will not see it, precisely because of Brad’s modesty. At the last minute he got cold feet and couldn’t do the on-air cameo role I wrote for him, so that little story I devised had to be yanked out, three minutes’ time or so, and the ending had to be changed. We replaced the lost time with a very few choice flashbacks that our long-time viewers will love seeing. Was I disappointed? Sure. But for me, the episode was about honoring Brad’s achievement, and what viewers will end up seeing is the honor he could accept. It’s not as good as the script was, and Brad will always be the first to admit it, but I think it’s still a very enjoyable half hour.

He apologized to me profusely for weeks. We still tease him about it. When we plot in a day-player, a judge or photographer, somebody will say, “Hey, let’s have Brad play it!” And he gets mortified all over again.

Giada: You’ve written for many soaps through the years. How is B&B different from the others?

Patrick: B&B reminds me, both in how it tells stories and in its writing process, of the way Douglas Marland and I wrote Guiding Light twenty-five years ago. It feels wrong even to write “Douglas and I”: it was only my second writing job, I was very much the junior partner in the collaboration. I was the first outline writer he ever hired, at P&G’s insistence. That was smart of them. He wrote so much of the show himself they feared he’d drop in this tracks (which, God love him, he eventually did, on another P&G show). We got together every day at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning and thrashed out an episode. P&G also wanted him to “train” someone else in his method – which is how people who don’t understand writing think, that you can show someone else how to do it. You can’t train somebody to be a genius, which Douglas was. As a matter of fact (forgive me, Douglas), he was a terrible teacher. But I learned anyway, just by being around him, listening to him, seeing the amazing narrative leaps his mind would make, by abstracting certain unarticulated rules he followed by instinct. Here’s one, for instance: never give the audience what you have led them to want; instead give them something they didn’t expect that they’ll like even better.

GL then was written the way a good writer really works: you think you know where you’re going, but you’re not sure until you get there, and you never know exactly how you’re going to get there. You’re feeling your way along in the dark. Of course, networks and producers HATE that. They think writing is like making a synopsis, in reverse. They expect you should be able to tell them exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and then just make it happen. That’s not how it works. You have to be with the characters, live with them, feel with them, let them surprise you – otherwise what you’re writing is dead, dead, dead.

B&B tells the same kind of traditional character-driven stories we were writing on GL, and we write them in pretty much the same way. Brad protects from the network’s pressures. We don’t deal with them at all. (He has to, though, of course. But our CBS daytime vice-president, Barbara Bloom, is anyway very smart, and an old friend.) We who write scripts aren’t just handed “outlines” of what’s supposed to go into our scripts. That’s what every other show does and I hate it. Yeah, it makes your life easier in a way. If something sucks on the air, you as the scriptwriter can always say, “I know, but it was in the outline.”

Don’t get me wrong, I revere outline writers. It’s very hard work, it’s like mentally cracking rocks, dealing with set restrictions, actors’ guarantees, it’s a nightmare. And you generally only get a day or two to write them. As a scriptwriter, though, when you’re handed somebody else’s outline to write from, all sorts of creative decisions have already been made, you don’t know how or why, which ones are considered indispensable and which are only there because the outline writer didn’t have time to think of something better. You didn’t hear the discussion that informed the decisions and you don’t know what’s going to pay off next week, you’re flying blind. So you do one of two things. You get very cautious and only write what’s in the outline, whether it feels organic and right for the characters or not. Or you do what I’m a little notorious for doing: look over the outline, find something solid in it that really works, build on that dramatically and get to where the story says you need to, changing or just bypassing the stuff that seems inert or wrong to you. The latter, less safe approach will either drive your head writer nuts or make him or her very happy; but you know your script will play and the actors will get you, if no one else does. Still, inevitably you’re going to screw up and skip over something in the outline you didn’t know was important, to future story, and you or your editor will have to scramble to fix it later.

We don’t write from outlines on B&B. Our process is predicated on the assumption that if you have real writers working on scripts, you don’t need outlines. Brad’s the source of our stories, but we who write scripts are always in on the creative decisions about how we tell them. We talk through everything. A lazy writer will invariably detest the way we work, since it adds a full exhausting day of talk to the work week; but me, I dread ever having to go back to writing from outlines. I negotiate everything I write directly with Brad. He has the confidence to say, “Here’s what I think I want, here’s where I want something but I’m not sure what, here are the givens we’re working with, here’s where it could go either way.” Very few times have I had to come away from our discussion feeling I had to make something work that I didn’t buy, because I couldn’t see the story or character the way Brad did. In most writing jobs that’s an almost weekly occurrence. But 98% of the time, the definition of when we’re done discussing my one or two episodes is when I’m happy. Brad knows if I believe in what I’m writing, I’ll make the audience believe it.

The obvious weakness of our method is that it relies so heavily on the willingness – and the ability – of the writer to engage creatively with the material. Many writers used to getting outlines every week can’t do that or don’t want to. It shows up pretty quickly in their work, and then they’re gone. Which, frankly, is another thing I like about Brad. If something isn’t working, in the studio, in the writing, he makes a change, and fast. A lot of executive producers will think, “Well, it’s not working right now, but maybe I can beat, scold or terrorize So-and-So into giving me what we want.” In 28 years, I have yet to see that approach work. (With actors, though, a slightly different approach can be effective: “Maybe we’re asking for the wrong thing, let’s try writing the character another way.”)

On the flip side, when a writer gets the show, gets Brad and his way of working, he’s very loyal. He calls Rex [M. Best, writer], Tracey [Ann Kelly, writer] and me “the lifers.” (LOL, as they say online. I’m not always sure what I think of that term.)

Giada: What are its strengths? And weaknesses?

Patrick: The strength of B&B is that we have the same characters (some played by the same actors) and relationships front-and-center on the show that we presented twenty years ago in episode one. That’s enormously rewarding for our long-time viewers. They really know our people.

That’s also our weakness. A new viewer is probably baffled by the complexity of the relationships we’re presenting, since they have such long histories. And if our long-time viewers get tired of the faces they’ve seen day in and day out for twenty years, we’re in trouble. We always try to have something fresh going on, but it’s a little show with a little cast and I don’t think we always succeed.

Soap operas only really tell two kinds of stories: romances and family stories. On a really good show, solidly structured, the two are blended: the romances are family stories. I think that’s another strength of B&B.

Some shows, not ours, are able to tell a third kind of story: the social story. But that I don’t mean the “social issue” storyline, be it breast cancer, AIDS, homosexuality, what have you. Look at those stories closely and you’ll see, if they work, it’s because at bottom they’re romances or family stories. No, by “social story” I mean the story told, as it were, from within a community, affecting all levels of society in it. That ‘s feasible in fictional milieux, Springfield on GL, or Pine Valley on AMC. Douglas told beautiful stories about community on GL, so did Nancy Curlee. B&B is set in Los Angeles, which is vast, multi-ethnic, teeming with such a variety of social and economic life that we make no pretense of representing it. Our study is the Forrester family and their intimates.)

Giada: What character on B&B is the hardest to write for?

Patrick: Brooke. She’s a very subtle and original creation. She’s simple, but in a specific, even complicated way. I observe that it takes a new writer a long time to get her; it did me. She’s kind of dim and kind of not. She’s kind of sleazy and kind of upright. She can be manipulative and open-hearted in the very same moment. Kelly Lang is wonderful to write for, and brings who she is to the role – by which I don’t at all mean that she “is” Brooke. I don’t know the woman. But the way she understands the character and what we write for her gets refracted through the prism of her in a beautiful way that I can’t describe but have learned to anticipate. She’s incredibly generous, humble and trusting, as an actor. If you write Brooke wrong, she’ll do just what you asked of her, and when you see it on the air you’ll wince, because you’ll realize you missed by a mile. Luckily, she so has the character that we can never go very far wrong. I honestly don’t know if anyone else could play her. Giulietta Masina, maybe. (As pretentious as that sounds, she’s the only actor I can think of with a comparable quality.)

Stephanie’s another character who’s difficult to write, for some of the same and some different reasons. She’s been in the forefront of practically every story we’ve ever told. The actor who plays her [susan Flannery] is really splendid, a rare talent, and very particular and protective of her character.

Giada: And the easiest? Why?

Patrick: I wouldn’t say they’re “easy,” but I will admit, there are three characters I love to write: Eric, Felicia and Bridget. Lesli Kay [Felicia] and Ashley Jones [bridget] are just wonderful, no-nonsense actors. They know their characters very well and are always willing to go out on a limb with me when I write them. And John McCook, in addition to being a terrific actor too, has been playing Eric for 20 years. I love Eric and his history. He’s part patriarch, part artist, part horn-dog. I think he tends to get short shrift with us sometimes, he’s been around so long and is surrounded by such strong female characters. But he’s a gem, and John jumps, with both feet, at every opportunity we give him. Nothing gets lost with him.

Giada: Do you have a special memory associated with he show and that you are fond of?

Patrick: Brad throws a big anniversary party for the show and everyone working on it every year in March. At last year’s he made a fuss over me by presenting me with a big birthday cake. (I was born on March 17th.) This at the House of Blues on Sunset, of all places. I don’t think most of the people involved with the show pay much attention to writers who aren’t on-site. For them, “the writers” are Brad. So mostly they were like, “Who’s that guy again, with the birthday? What does he do?”

Giada: What about past shows? Are there any episodes you’ve written that have a special significance to you or that you are most proud of?

Patrick:

SANTA BARBARA is really where I cut my teeth as a writer and made any name for myself I may have. It was both a wonderful and a trying show to work on, for behind-the-scenes reasons. Bridget and Jerry Dobson [sB creators] were wild, funny, passionate, creative people and bosses. I’d get outlines with ten, twelve pages X’ed out, and a note in the margin: “Patrick, do something else” -- they gave me that much credit and leeway. We had a great cast, great directors, and a solid idiosyncratic collection of characters, the Capwell family and its satellites. All of us talked to each other – which is rare enough -- and trusted each other, it was a dream collaboration. And when the Powers That Be brought in head writers (after the Dobsons were legally ousted) who didn’t know the show or were just plain bad, we’d ignore them and “do something else.” The more of them they hired, the more we ignored them. It was rude and disrespectful, I don’t know how they tolerated it (the huge pay-check may have had something to do with it), but nobody stopped us because we knew what we were doing. SB was where I found my power as a writer, my inner power. I decided whatever I was given to do, I was going to write the hell out of it. I put my heart and soul, everything I knew and didn’t know, into a lot of SB episodes nobody else would remember. I never cared if I got fired for breaking the rules; writing as honestly and well as I could was all that mattered to me; and miraculously, I never did get fired. By the time [network executive] Jackie Smith, God rest her soul – who, in my opinion, was already pretty demented – brought in John Conboy as executive producer, I had a bit of a reputation. I think he’d been advised that I was somebody he should make nice with. I was called into his office for a chat. When he told me that the show was going to center around polo and a polo club, that he wanted Cruz, our Latino cop hero (played by the magnificent A Martinez) to become a polo player, I said, “Okay, thank you, that’s it for me.” The two of them, Smith and Conboy, were the most clueless and inadvertently comical characters I ever ran across in daytime. I quit.

I already mentioned the great experience I had working with Doug Marland on GL. I loved that show, and fell in love with it again when I worked on it with Nancy Curlee and Stephen Demorest. Maybe the most careful, most moving, most complete and most lovingly told story I was ever part of was the story of Buzz Cooper’s return to Springfield. He’d gone MIA in Vietnam and never returned to his wife, his son and daughter, for reasons we eventually understood without ever fully explaining. It was a story about love, community, forgiveness, the joy and heartbreak of what it means to be family. And it was so beautifully played. Justin Deas [buzz] is a very, very rare actor. And the actors playing Nadine, Jenna, Harley, Frank, Eleni, Alan-Michael, Blake, Bridget, Vanessa, Holly, Roger, Ed, Michelle, Ross, David, Kat – what an extraordinary ensemble that was. That couple of years was a magic time in the life of the show and in my own creative life. Nancy Curlee’s a magnificent, meticulous writer. One of the things that’s wrong with daytime TV now is that she’s not in it. If I were pressed to choose one daytime episode to represent the best of my soap-writing life, it would probably be Frank and Eleni’s wedding on Fifth Street.

I loved GENERAL HOSPITAL for different reasons.The show still bore (and will always bear) the Gloria Monty stamp, which gave it a certain cachet; but [late executive producer] Monty had also decimated the show’s structure to the point where we had a lot of “vestigial” characters to knit together. By “vestigial” I mean characters who used to belong to some important family or relationship or story but weren’t really connected to anything anymore; they were kind of isolated off in a corner by themselves. Some of them could drive story, not by virtue of how they were related to the rest of the canvas, but by being big or forceful or evil or outrageous enough to get everyone’s attention. To some extent that dictated the kinds of stories we could tell. You’re not going to fire an actor the audience likes and who’s doing a good job, even if it’s hard to use the character in a way that any other character on the canvas will give two hoots about. They’ll have to shoot you or blackmail you or kidnap your wife or get HIV or shave their head to induce you to look up from the morning paper when they walk by.

But we had the Quartermaines, who were a real family, and wonderful to write for, either played by old pros like Stuart [Damon, Alan] and Leslie [Charleson, Monica] and John [ingle, Edward] or by terrific young actors like Steve Burton [Jason] and Amber Tamblyn [ex-Emily]. Alan’s drug addiction was one of my favorite stories. So was the Robin-Jason romance, and the triangulation we did with Carly, played then by the amazing Sarah Brown; we had a lot of good people in the cast. And the writers I worked with directly – Bob Guza, Michele ValJean, and Elizabeth Korte – are not just big talents but people I truly love. Bob is a prince, a good writer as well as a good manager of writers. He and Nancy Grahn [Alexis] are my longest, closest personal-professional friendships.

Here’s a story that exemplifies Bob as a writer, friend and boss. I was writing the infamous “Clink-Boom” episode: Brenda marrying Jax, intercut with Sonny’s wife Lily being blown up by a car bomb, at the moment Brenda’s and Jax’s champagne glasses touch on his yacht. I’d known Bob since Santa Barbara days, but was fairly new on GH. I didn’t realize how long he’d been working up to this episode, or what a measure of trust he was placing in me by giving it to me to write. For months he’d had the clink-boom sequence in his head, and the outline reflected it exactly the way he’d conceived it. Now, I wasn’t so dim-witted I didn’t realize it was an important turning-point in the story. But when I got the outline and read it over, I didn’t like it. It didn’t make sense to me. That happens sometime when you outline something, even something very good. It’s like seeing the lyrics of a song without hearing the melody: it feels flat. So I called Bob and said, “This clink-boom sequence isn’t working for me. It feels mechanical and amped-up and hokey.” And without hesitation, he said, “Then write it the way you want. I trust you.” Well, given that liberty, I went back to it, and thought it through and felt it through – and you know what? It turned out almost exactly the way Bob had it. I think I might’ve inserted or deleted one cut. “Writing it the way I wanted” meant finding the power in it that Bob had already found and fallen in love with. But he was willing to put it on the chopping block for me.

Giada: What do you think is your strength in writing?

Patrick: I work hard. I dig hard. I try to make it fresh. I never phone it in.

Giada: And your weak point?

Patrick: I work hard. I dig hard. I try to make it fresh. I’m always behind deadline.

Giada: Who do you admire within the soap world?

Patrick: A part from the people I’ve already named…

don’t know if any of your readers will remember Charita Bauer, who for many years played Bert on GL. A really generous, kind woman, and a wonderful actor, who never got tired of doing the work of acting. No matter how tangential Bert might be to what we had going on, Charita nailed it. She never got lazy. She was The Bomb.

I really liked and admired Wendy Riche, EP of GH when I was there. She could be annoying as hell; she drove Bob crazy, they were oil and water. But the things that drove you crazy were really positive traits in her. She was consistent, insistent, persistent and very hard-working. I found her thoughtful, attentive, fair, and completely aboveboard, no hidden agendas. To a fault, she would tell you what she really thought, when she agreed, when she didn’t – in fact you’d end up thinking, “All right, enough, shut up already.” But so many producers treat you like children, lie to you, undermine you behind your back, screw with your work while you’re not looking, etc. I never felt that way with Wendy. And she never failed to do the one thing you really want a producer to do: produce the damn show. Sounds like the minimum you could expect, right? But many producers can’t be bothered. They don’t actually know how, so they pretend they have more important things to do, like making you re-write last week.

Jackie Zeman [bobbie, GH] is a lovely person to work with, very down-to-earth and generous, thoughtful, gracious. Constance Towers [Helena, GH] is about the kindest, most charming woman you could ever meet, really a person of substance. She reeks integrity and goodness. John Ingle [Edward, GH] and Stuart Damon [Alan, GH] are delightful guys, funny, honest, humble.

I really miss Michael Zaslow [Roger, GL; David, OLTL]. I admired and appreciated him very much. or one thing, he was a fine and underappreciated actor. For another, he was a gentleman. He’s the only actor who ever thanked me by name when receiving his Emmy. And he had a real appreciation for writing, and the taste and experience to know when he had a good script in his hands. He would quote back to me lines I had written months ago for Roger that I didn’t remember myself. Once he got so furious when Standards and Practices decreed he couldn’t say a line I wrote him that he fought them and called the network and finally had to lock himself in his dressing room to cool off, he told me. There was no profanity in the line, nothing like that. It was (if I say so myself) deft and simple but shocking. And, like so many lines and scenes I have written, nobody heard it or ever will.

Giada: And among writers (from soaps and not)? And in general?

Patrick: I love a lot of writers for a lot of reasons. For me, Proust is the greatest of them. Then, in no particular order, Hardy, Dickens, George Elliot, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Trollope, Melville. Chaucer, Homer, Dante, Pope are in there somewhere. Jose Saramago. Primo Levi. Eudora Welty, a very graceful writer.Garcia Marquez. Jane Bowles. Alice Munro. Graham Greene. Pedro Almovodar has become a favourite writer for film. Robert Riskin was another great screenwriter. David Chase, who wrote The Sopranos, is clearly some kind of genius. David Milch, of Deadwood and NYPD Blue, is not only a fine and honest writer but was one of my writing teachers at Yale, long before he wrote for TV. Alan Ball did glorious, glorious work on Six Feet Under. He deserved more recognition.

Do you mean people in general, non-writers I admire? I tend to appreciate rather than admire, except for people I know and admire close-up, in my life, whom your readers would not know.

Giada: Are there stories/dialogues you’ve regretted you’ve written or that you’d have written differently?

Patrick: I’ve been implicated in dozens of truly wretched stories, but they weren’t mine. The kidnapping of Eden’s baby on SB – shudder. And certainly there’ve been many scenes I was solely responsible for that I watched on the air and thought, “Whoops – I muffed that.” But they won’t have stuck in anyone else’s memory, because I muffed them.

Giada: How did you start writing?

Patrick: I don’t remember. I got my first rejection slip when I was five. I started reading before I was in school. Nobody’s explained that to me. My parents say I just picked up a book and started reading it when I was three or four. Obviously that can’t be the whole story. I do actually have a dim memory of doing something like that. My mother read a lot, and I remember picking up a book and suddenly having all those letters from the alphabet make words, make sense to me, and being surprised by it.

Did you have a mentor?

Patrick: Many

Giada: When did you first realize you were truly a writer, not just someone who writes? Why do you write? What’s its meaning for you? What’s your poetics/aesthetics?

Patrick: I don’t know the answers to these questions. I don’t write to express myself; I write to understand myself. I think writing is harder for me, not easier, than for other people.

Giada: Do you think your writing has changed through the years?

Patrick: Yes. It’s become much simpler and more confident. On the downside, it may also have become more narrow. Plus side: more focused.

Giada: What do you wish you had written yourself, but you hadn’t?

Patrick: I wish I had written ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. But doesn’t every writer.

Giada: What skills do you think a soap writer, or any writer for that matter, should have/develop?

Patrick: You know, this is a great question, and there are many such skills to hone. But they don’t have names, because nobody needs them but writers, and we use them like we use our fingers and toes, which we don’t think of naming either.

A skill is a very different thing from a rule. I think we all develop our own private rules about writing and refer to them mentally when we try to diagnose what’s wrong with what we’re working on. For instance: every character must be both faithful to himself and able to surprise you. That’s what people are like. If your character can’t do those two things at the same time, he’s not a character, he’s a construct, and something’s gravely wrong with how you conceived him. I would say though that creating that sort of character is not a matter of skill but of heart.

Giada: What advice would you give to writers?

Patrick: “Write. You’ll figure it out. Don’t believe anybody who tells you you can’t. If you can’t, you’ll stop.”

Giada: How do you learn to write well?

Patrick:By writing, by developing your taste and judgment by reading great writing -- understanding what makes it great – and by becoming honest.

Giada: What’s your writing routine?

Patrick: I fret, and then I write and stop fretting. Then I finish and start fretting again.

Giada: Were you a soap watcher before starting to write for them?

Patrick: No. I didn’t have a television. I was writing plays.

Giada: There’s a lot of discussion on what characterize a TV genre with respect to other genres. How would you define a “soap opera”? How are soaps different from other TV genres, from your point of view?

Patrick: A soap is a specific kind of serial that doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Soaps die for lack of interest, not because the story ended.

Put another way (Douglas’s way): the end of the story is always another story. They’re like life in that way.

Giada: Do you think the soap genre changed through the years? If so, how? How do the politics of running a network reflect on the writers? The soap genre is said to be dying for lack of viewership: do you agree with that forecast? If you do, what measures, if any, should be taken to avoid it, in your opinion?

Patrick: I do agree with the forecast. Furthermore, I think that mostly soaps deserve to die. What we do now isn’t nearly as vital or fresh or interesting as what we were doing eighteen, even twenty-five years ago. Soaps then were powerful, raw, shocking – we did anything and everything. What we do now is so timid and constrained. I understand it. The networks are afraid of losing even more viewers, so they try not to upset anyone, and in the process bore the pants off them.

I have bills to pay, so I’m hoping I can ride this genre out for a while longer. But whether I do or not, serials will be back. Maybe on a more limited-run basis, like telenovelas. I don’t know that we’ll see anything like Guiding Light again.

Do you read soap press criticism?

Patrick: No

Giada: Do you find it useful?

Patrick: I might if I had the time to read it

Giada: Why should anyone watch a soap, in your opinion? What makes them worth watching?

Patrick: The long-haul rewards for the audience (and for the writer) are pretty unique. The long-term viewer’s memory is pretty literally telling the story with us. We don’t have to bring them up to speed about situations and relationships that resonate with the character’s history. If you walked into The Cherry Orchard during Varya’s big scene with Lopakhin, you would have no idea that he wanted to marry her or that she was waiting for him to ask. The heartbreak of the scene depends on the audience understanding what’s come before. Just so with every scene of a soap. The way we construct them makes the audience feel engaged with us creatively, and they are; we count on them to pay attention, to remember, to bring the past to bear on the present moment. I think it demands a level of commitment and intelligence that can be very satisfying for a viewer. People who don’t watch soaps tend to marvel (or be aghast) at how involved our audience gets. But really, there’s no other way to watch.

The soaps can be good or bad, coherent or not. Each has its own personality, quirks, attracts its own audience, has its moments of glory and its bumpy rides. And the page-turning quality – What will happen next? – of the stories we tell cannot be underestimated. I felt a little bereft, for instance, when I finished Trollope’s Palliser novels. They weren’t all wonderful, there were certainly longueurs, but the highs were higher than any two-hour movie or any single novel in the series could have afforded.

Fundamentally, though, the appeal of soaps is this: our theme is intimacy. Two people alone in a room. A family within the walls of its home. That’s how most of us experience life, and the way we acknowledge our really formative experiences as having happened. For people, women especially, who are attuned to the power and necessity of intimacy in their lives, we will always have a special attraction and a special reward.

Giada: A bizarre question recurs often among soap fans, and nobody seems to be able to answer it, so I pose it to you: do head writers get paid extra if they create brand new characters?

Patrick: No. I never did, anyway.

Giada: When you had your first paid writing job, who did you tell first, and what did you do with your first paycheck?

Patrick: (1) I told my mother. She always believed in me as a writer, or at least pretended to. (2) I paid my rent.

Giada: Where do you keep your Emmys?

Patrick: Near my desk. I don’t look at them much and think it would be bad form to oblige other people to.

Giada: At night, do you ever dream soap characters and stories or dialogues?

Patrick: I hear dialogue all the time, especially when I’m falling asleep. Or it will just come out of my mouth – anytime, even in public. People who know me well have to get used to me talking to myself or to no one a lot.

I don’t know if I “dream” characters. But I often – daily, maybe hourly -- imagine what it might be like to be somebody else.

I want to thank Patrick for his answers which I find very insightful, and quite emblematic of his personality in many instances. I admire him as a writer and as a man. He has a unique way of looking at people and he’s able to see them as no-one else can. This is part of his ability to write so forcefully. I thank him for this also, and for the inspiration he constantly is.

http://tvguide.sympatico.msn.ca/Soaps/Features/Articles/090806_santa_barbara_NB

Happy 25th Anniversary, ‘Santa Barbara’!

By Nelson Branco

2009-08-06

Fasten your soap belts: Emmy winner Patrick Mulcahey remembers penning one of the most beloved soap operas of our time! Plus: His thoughts on the soap world today

He’s been called the William Shakespeare of soap opera.

No pressure or anything.

Mr. Patrick Mulcahey, who is currently penning scripts for the very lucky The Bold and the Beautiful, became a boldface name after “scribbling” the trials and tribulations of some of the most dysfunctional characters in daytime history on shows such as Texas, Loving, Guiding Light, and General Hospital.

But it’s the four-time Emmy and three-time Writers’ Guild Award winner’s work during Santa Barbara’s unrivaled heyday that prompted fans to stand up and take notice of the poetic, lyrical writer.

Thanks to Mulcahey’s incomparable prose, passion for subtext and irony, sinful — and deeply sick — sense of humour, keen ability of understanding the human condition despite our immense flaws, Mulcahey has transcended the medium and been able to connect with his audience like no one has before. Consequently, he’s been able to elevate the level of serial writing to new artistic heights that will probably never be achieved again.

But what is Mulcahey’s greatest contribution to the soap opera art form? That’s easy — it’s the artist’s refusal to pander to the lowest common denominator, and his unwavering and irreverent love of and loyalty to the human soul. These unbelievable accomplishments in an industry built to destroy those ideals have inarguably qualified him for the most revered status as the greatest writer in soap opera history. Saints or Sinners, his ass! Anyone who has been lucky to witness his beautiful monologues and/or dialogues knows that the aforementioned is not hyperbole. If CBS really cared about soaps, they would employ Mulcahey to teach head writers how to, um, write for starters.

So who the hell is this talented bastard? Born in Oswego, N.Y. — “right across the lake from Toronto in the second largest port in that area; we thought Canada was the Promised Land” — the Pisces left for Yale University to pursue the life of a tortured writer. From there, the former National Spelling Bee contestant accidentally found his way to the wacky world of soap opera. Alas, it’s a fate that has haunted him every since! And so here we are.

TV Guide Canada opted to connect with our greatest writing idol, Mulcahey, who earned the first annual TV Guide Canada’s Irna Phillips Soap Opera Spirit Award for outstanding contribution to the soap opera art form, to help celebrate Santa Barbara’s bittersweet 25th anniversary (the NBC soap debuted on July 30, 1984 before signing off the sudsy airwaves on Jan. 15, 1993) and honour its iconic legacy. The beloved soap opera, which aired in over 40 countries and won 24 Daytime Emmy Awards and 18 Soap Opera Digest Awards, celebrated its 25th anniversary this past week. We also dished about how he became an accidental soap writer, why he is not necessarily mourning the cancellation of GL, his thoughts on the industry’s impending death, and why working with Marcy Walker (ex-Eden, SB) may just be one of the most intensely rewarding connections he has ever experienced in the soap hemisphere.

TVGuide.ca: It’s been 25 years since those kooky Capwells and Lockridges entertained us on a daily basis. Does it feel like forever since Santa Barbara last aired?

Patrick Mulcahey: [sighs] To me, sometimes it feels long, and other times, it feels like it was just yesterday. It’s a funny story of how I was first introduced to Santa Barbara. I had such a bad experience when I left GL the first time to write Loving with Douglas Marland — along with this awful, awful show we did for Showtime called A Day in Eden — that I swore off soaps forever. I was planning to move to San Francisco, which I finally did and where I currently reside, but I was still in Connecticut where I found myself one night at a reading of a play I wrote. Clearly, I hadn’t gotten the memo that you can’t earn a living as a playwright at the time! That night, I met a pretty blond woman who acted as our audience. Afterwards, I walked her home because we were headed in the same direction.

TVG: [laughs] Sounds like a likely story …

PM: [Acknowledging the irony] Exactly! She told me she was moving to California to take a part on a new show called Santa Barbara, which I didn’t know anything about. Even though I was connected to soaps, my head was focused on moving to California to write plays and screenplays, make a few million dollars and receive world adulation. As we were walking down the street, these cars began slowing down near us. Finally, one driver rolls down her window and screams, “Die Liza, you bitch!” [Laughs hysterically] So that was my introduction to the famous Marcy Walker, whom I didn’t know was famous at that point. Clearly, she was very hated as Liza on All My Children. She finally moved to L.A. to take the SB job just as I moved to San Francisco to take a relationship, which almost immediately went down the toilet. I was going to wait tables because that’s the only other thing I knew how to do other than write. Unfortunately, as I get to San Fran, I learned there was a restaurant strike. I refused to cross the picket line, so luckily, I got a call from someone named Bridget Dobson asking me to write for a new show called Santa Barbara. I was desperate because I was self-employed and I couldn’t rent an apartment. I finally found a seedy place on 16 and Mission in the worst neighbourhood imaginable. I had to give five years of tax returns to be able to rent this crappy apartment where people were being shot on a daily basis! So I told Bridget, I would take the job. After figuring out how much I would be paid, I started immediately.

TVG: And the rest is history. Let me get this straight: we have your bad accounting and a restaurant strike to thank for your unforgettable contributions to Santa Barbara!

PM: Yes, I’m afraid.

TVG: Do you think Santa Barbara was ahead of its time? How do you think the show would be received today?

PM: It’s so hard to imagine Santa Barbara still being on the air today. They would never let us do now what we got away with then. We had a 16-share back then in the Nielsens — a number executives would kill to have today — but throughout our run we were always in the ratings basement. Soaps were still a cash cow back then so NBC kept us on the air. We tried anything to get our numbers up, and because Bridget and Jerome Dobson were nuts, we did do everything! They were adventurous writers and amazing to work with. Don’t dare them to try anything because they really will!

You see, Douglas Marland and Bill Bell wrote a show for viewers who watched every day. Their narratives were very dense in texture. One of the hallmarks of their style was that a line of dialogue had to include three or four names in it! Somehow, the audience would follow all of that. The audience wasn’t poetic, so they were drawn in [in the literal sense]. Viewers got their payoff because they could understand what lies were being told that day, and what the movements were of the characters off camera because the writing was so detailed. [Conversely], if you watched Santa Barbara every day, it was incomprehensible! But I’ll tell you, twice a week we soared …

TVG: Why do you think Santa Barbara didn’t attract a more loyal following? One of the soap’s first reviews opined, “it’s the worst show on television … maybe ever.”

PM: Remember when Augusta cooked her daughter Laken’s homing pigeon for her daughter’s dinner? [Laughs] That was Bridget and Jerry for you. When people saw that, they immediately made up their minds that the show would never last. From the beginning, we didn’t inspire a loyal following. Also, our original cast was pretty terrible. We had to weed them all out. We had all these terrible identical blonds on our show, which our producer at the time, wanted to keep. So one of the first things we did was write in a serial killer who killed blond women! [Laughs] Needless to say, after that our cast vastly improved.

TVG: I bet the Santa Barbara writing room was a fun place to work.

PM: We had a blast but I wrote scripts from home. Back then I had to FedEx scripts to the Dobsons. But regardless, immediately Bridget, Jerry and I fell in love. Man, when you had their trust — that really counted for something, you know? I would get assigned outlines scotched by the network, whole pages crossed out, with comments like, “Patrick, write something else,” in the margins. God, I’ll never get that kind of liberty ever again. As a writer to have the luxury of writing one hour of television where you could write whatever you damn well wanted, well … After a bit, they asked me if I wanted to write outlines with Chuck Pratt Jr. Once a week, I would fly down to the Dobsons’ beautiful home in Bel Air, California, to thrash out a week’s worth of shows with Jerry and Chuck. We were a good team. Chuck was the idea machine and I was the “yes-or-no man.” Later, I started editing scripts before New World locked out Bridget and Jerry from their own show. Let me tell you, editing the show made a lot of writers pissed off at me!

TVG: I bet. When you left Santa Barbara in 1990, Guiding Light hired you as a co-head writer, right?

PM: Yes. It remains the most creatively consistent, fulfilling soap opera writing experience of my entire career. Alas, when my partners-in-crime Stephen Demorest and Nancy Curlee were canned as my co-head writers, then it became an awful experience. I don’t even want to talk about that time ...

TVG: Why does it seem like a soap opera can only sustain a creative high for only two years?

PM: You’re right. The answer is: daytime is just hard. It takes a lot of energy and hours. We work very hard. And sometimes you’ll work very hard and still produce a really bad show. Chemistry is a fleeting thing. You can see it between actors. You can take [a super-couple like] Stephen Nichols and Mary Beth Evans and pair them on another show in different roles — and it doesn’t work. The same thing happens with writers. Nancy, Stephen and I had chemistry. We wrote all the outlines together for GL. And Nancy was a wonderful, wonderful poetic and natural storyteller. She was a terrific person to work with. I think she just burned out, which unfortunately happens a lot in this little business of ours. It’s a good observation, really: the confluence of energies that makes for a really good show is impermanent and will only last for around two years without a serious drop in quality.

TVG: GL never recovered after you, Nancy, Jim Reilly, and Stephen left. Ever.

PM: The time with Nancy, Stephen and myself was the most artistically satisfying time in my career — and the most rewarding for the viewer every day. Santa Barbara was just getting going when Bridget and Jerry were locked out — that was our heyday. Afterwards, we were given a succession of head writers who didn’t understand the show. Consequently, huge power struggles ensued. At that time, I was editing the show. We, as the old writing team, Bridget’s and Jerry’s, basically decided that never mind the clueless head writer, we’d write the show the way we saw fit, because we were there before them — and we’d be there long after they were fired! [Laughs] I can’t believe we had the audacity to usurp the head writers’ power, but we did it so well that they let us! The head writers tore their hair out, but we happily did it anyway! At that time, Santa Barbara was still experiencing epic highs. I remember one show where I wrote the entire episode in iambic pentameter. Is that crazy or what? I wrote some rhymed couplets because I knew some actors would get it. I didn’t want it to sound like Shakespeare; I wanted it to sound like speech and that’s what happened. That was the episode called “The Capwell Zone” when Greg conks out and has a dream where everyone is an alien.

TVG: Remember that! Brilliance! Santa Barbara was Shakespeare on crack!

PM: And remember Mason and Julia’s wedding? Those heights were easy to achieve because we had such a great cast and directors. Our stories were better forgotten, but our individual episodes were standouts.

TVG: What was your favourite storyline on Santa Barbara?

PM: Eden and Cruz’s first romance when Eden believed it was she who had pulled the plug on her father’s life support — but it was actually Gina! And Eden marrying Kirk, the preppy villain, because he pretended he knew her “secret.” Marcy and A Martinez [Cruz] always knocked our socks off. The first leg of their romance was very magical, even though they stayed together for most of the show’s run. Eden and Cruz’s epic romance was the best thing about the show. Oh, and Carrington Garland as Kelly was fun to write for as well.

TVG: Santa Barbara was hugely popular in Canada — and the entire world. Why do you think the soap resonated with everyone except America?

PM: [pauses for a long time] There was this kind of oscillation between twin poles of, God, isn’t that crazy, the “C” in the Capwell Hotel sign falling down and killing Mary, or Brian Frons playing God in heaven, or the gangster in drag, and the anchoring of honest, grounded acting. At the time, there were no better actors than A and Marcy. As an actress, Marcy had this relentless, honest machinery that was unrivaled. She would cut her heart out for you every freakin’ day. She was the greatest army general that ever lived, going out into battle every day, battle-scarred as she was, but still fighting the good fight. I was in awe of her, really. That kind of sacrifice we got from our cast was so rare. They never said, “Oh, it’s only a soap.” They gave it everything they had. And so did we.

TVG: It sounds like a perfect marriage. I remember being shocked that a soap opera’s main romantic lead was from Native American, Spanish and Mexican descent.

PM: Right! Physically, A and Marcy were beautiful together — with her lightness and his darkness. I guess oscillation isn’t the best word to describe Santa Barbara; dialectic is more fitting. The space in between the reality and the insanity, where the characters and actors lived, was what Santa Barbara was about. Remember when Mason, the urbane lawyer, was hit on the head and then turned into Sonny, a country-western singer? Robin Mattson was absolutely wonderful as Gina. Wow. And Louise Sorel as Augusta — she had the chops for anything. Nicolas Coster as Lionel was superb as well.

TVG: [Joking] We now know whom to blame for giving Brian Frons a God complex! [Laughs] Thanks a lot, Patrick!

PM: [Laughs] Yep, we wrote him as God! Blame us! When I wrote GL with Douglas, Brian was our CBS boss, too. He was a toddler at that point.

TVG: In many circles, critics and fans believe Santa Barbara is the greatest soap opera that has ever aired. Would you agree with that assertion?

PM: [pauses] It pains me to say this … Let me start off by saying that Santa Barbara was the most important job I have ever had as a writer, and where I found myself as a writer. However, I don’t think it was the greatest soap that has ever aired. When I wrote GL, first with Douglas and then later with Stephen and Nancy, both times that show was, in my opinion, the greatest soap opera ever.

TVG: Were you upset when CBS cancelled GL?

PM: No. I hadn’t watched the show in forever so I didn’t mourn as a viewer. Many of the actors, who I so admired, were either off the show or sidelined like Jerry ver Dorn [ex-Ross], Justin Deas [buzz], Maureen Garrett [Holly], and Michael Zaslow [ex-Roger]. It wasn’t the same show. I’m sad that my friends lost their jobs but, for me, GL had died a long time ago.

TVG: I agree.

PM: In many ways, GL used to be about community. The daytime canvas isn’t anymore. That’s sad because that’s what keeps us all connected as creators and viewers. Back then, every economic class was represented. We had those big events like Founder’s Day, and Memorial Day, the July 4th weekend. Heck, we married Eleni and Frank on Fifth Street! You got a sense that the show — and life — was about knowing your neighbour, which people desperately need to see.

TVG: Soap fans are somewhat disenfranchised from society which is why I think we watch for community — not necessarily for the romance portion. GL hasn’t connected to any kind of truth in a bitch’s age. Personally, I’d rather GL leave the airwaves than witness this once beautiful show made a mockery of.

PM: I agree. That kind of happened to me with Santa Barbara, too. I was there for six years. I left in 1990. After the Dobson mess, Jill Farren Phelps became an executive producer. And Jill was a wonderful producer. We’d all hang out, we all talked on the phone — the music guy, set director, writer, and directors. We all liked each other and shared the same vision. Except for the head writer at the moment, of course! But everyone else worked as a team as best we could. Bringing in Jackie Smith as our chief was a fatal blow for us. She hated Santa Barbara. She never understood the show nor cared to. She brought in John Conboy as the executive producer, which was a disaster. Jim Reilly told me hilarious stories about Conboy, by the way. Conboy was told to make nice with me. He was a very tall bastard. Everything about him was fake. And I mean everything! He told me his plan to have Cruz start playing polo, and that was the fat lady singing for me. So I quit. Having worked with Jackie, I have to assume that the magic at GH was all Gloria Monty’s doing, not Jackie’s. Sadly, she ended up dying from a brain tumour not too long after that. You had to be [dense] not to know there was something wrong with her mind. She was crazy. It was no fun, and as much as I loved the show, I had to leave.

TVG: In your Wikipedia page it states that you said Gloria Monty “decimated” GH. Is that true?

PM: No, that was is an interpretation of something I said about GH, which I believe to be true — and that was that GH is very difficult to write because the generational structure of the show, with the exception of the Quartermaines, was decimated. By the time I got to GH, the Baldwins and all the rest of the families were gone. At least our families are still intact on The Bold and the Beautiful. But you know, Nelson, soaps are not about romance — they are about families. If two people fall in love, murder each other, or rob a bank, no one cares if no one is connected to those characters [and creates a fuss]. To me, that was something Monty didn’t care about, but at the same time, I wouldn’t say she destroyed the show in any sense. Obviously she gave it new life.

TVG: Monty was a visionary in many ways, à la the weather machine, which has more weight now thanks to global warming, though I blame her for influencing networks to make their shows more plot-driven.

PM: Back then, we also had more money to film those fantastical, outlandish storylines. The action-adventure style Gloria was known for is just not affordable anymore. But back to character: who really was Anna Devane? Where did she come from? All these people like Holly drifted in from everywhere, leaving a little bit of DNA in their wake, so it was hard to assemble a show from all those [fragments]. That’s why we relied a lot on the Quartermaines because they were the only family left intact. They were our pit bulls!

TVG: Do you think the pursuit of the younger demographic killed soaps? Or was it the executives insistence that soaps become dumb and dumber?

PM: Back then, writers had clout. When a head writer was fired, everyone on the writing team was fired. When networks began hiring us as individual cogs in some writing machine, that’s when soaps started its descent. So it became impossible to tell coherent storylines because not everyone shared the same vision. Also, remember when soaps were edgy? Soaps used to be like, “Oh, my God — they’re doing an abortion, breast cancer, and rape storyline.” Stories you’d never have seen before on TV. Now we’re quaint. Today, we have Maury Povich opposite us doing transvestite sons of alcoholic women who are in jail with their lesbian lovers. It’s clear that our audience doesn’t share our assumed “values”. And that’s a huge problem. Maybe that was a part of the success of Santa Barbara. We essentially believed that while we knew our audience didn’t believe in all this hogwash, at the same time, we had fun with the material but we still gave them hope through our romances, humour and love of life.

TVG: Without getting yourself in trouble, do you think network interference played a part in the destruction of soap?

PM: I’m beyond trouble. No one cares what I think.

TVG: The fans do.

PM: Well, thank you. No one wants to be a head writer anymore. Unless you’re Brad [bell] and you own the show and there’s a limit to how much you get bossed around. You can’t afford to spend all this time rewriting weeks you’ve already written because the network disagrees with everything and will demand rewrites from page 1 to the last page. So you just write what the executives want because you’ll end up with a team of dead writers — or have to hospitalize them. Even back on GH, when I worked with Bob Guza as co-head writer, the network changed stuff but at least they left the story intact, which is probably why the show remained successful as long as it did.

TVG: Are you happy with this influx of gay characters on soaps? I’d love to see you pen a gay romance.

PM: I’d love to! I used to sneak in a gay character here or there back in the day. I ended up frustrated with doing that because they were always a recurring role with no ties to the canvas, so you couldn’t explore the character. You have to make a core character gay. All My Children did it brilliantly with Bianca. Soaps aren’t about romances. Harding [Lemay] calls them generational stories — but I call them family stories. I don’t see a gay triangle coming up anytime soon. I would like to see that happen on B&B, but we have such a small cast, so I don’t see that happening.

TVG: Did you watch soaps as a kid?

PM: Oh, God no. I was in Yale writing plays. I was going to be a literary writer. I had things published. One of my professors thought I was going to be the next William Faulkner, even though I frankly didn’t like Faulkner very much! I quit Yale because I hated it. I moved to New Orleans and ended up living there for six years. I ran a little art gallery there. These kids from Louisiana State came in one night and asked to do a play in my gallery. Because I was a writer, they asked me to write the play so they didn’t have to pay royalties. And that’s how I started working with this group of actors. And we did great. Later, when we did Hamlet, I had to act, which let me know right away that I was a terrible actor! [Laughs] I love actors. Actors taught me more about writing than any writer ever did. Actors are really smart because they ask “Why do I …?” questions. And, as a writer, you have to have an answer for them, whether you’re Shakespeare or Neil Simon. [Laughs] It’s not their job to make sense of a script.

Anyway, I got a call out of the blue from a woman who had seen my plays and asked me if I wanted to write scripts for a show called Search For Tomorrow. Of course, I didn’t have a television so I didn’t know what it was. Very earnestly, she told me I had to learn the voices of the characters so I had to watch the show for a month. Luckily, I found a TV set in the school where I was teaching at. After watching the show, I thought, “what’s the big deal? These characters all sound exactly like they look.” Ultimately, I wrote a script and they liked it enough to hire me. My first gig? A few fun months on Search for Tomorrow — Mary Stuart was such a trip — then the spinoff Texas, from Another World, starring Beverlee McKinsey, which was great, and produced by Paul Rauch, which was not so great. That didn’t last too long, because at that time, you worked for the head writer and if they were fired, so was the whole team. But P&G liked me and picked me up and offered me a job with GL, where I worked with Douglas Marland. My real education began with Douglas. We gathered in his Connecticut kitchen every morning at 8 a.m. and over coffee we’d hammer out an episode together.

TVG: Did Mr. Marland regale you with stories of Irna Phillips?

PM: He did, but I’ve forgotten all of them! He told me stories about everybody. Douglas was immensely entertaining. I don’t know how much of a personal connection Doug had with Irna. Agnes Nixon, Pete Lemay, and William Bell were more Irna’s whipping boys and/or scapegoats. I have to confess: I don't have any idea what Irna Phillips would think of me today. I suspect she would kick my butt around the block. I am not very good at following directions, and she was a very directive writer by reputation. But I do revere the medium she created and the impulse in her that gave it life, such a long durable life.

TVG: I’ve noticed that the best soap writers always seemed to have started off as actors or worked as one at one point like Douglas and Harding.

PM: I never wanted to be an actor. Having said that, it’s very important to understand what an actor needs. One of the roles I played on Santa Barbara, and later on Guiding Light, was the go-to guy for the actors. If they had a problem, Jill would send them to me. As a writer you have to be there for the actors. I remember a long conversation I had with Justin Deas because he was having a problem understanding Buzz Cooper. I was very proud of the Jenna/Buzz/Nadine storyline, but Jill Farren Phelps asked me to have dinner with him because Justin had issues. And during that dinner, Justin didn’t look at me once the whole time! He looked down at his plate and revealed that he felt there was a gap in the character’s past and he needed Buzz’s past filled. He didn’t care if Buzz’s actions would be forgiven but he needed to know the character’s back story. So I did a whole episode on it. And of course he was wonderful in that show.

TVG: That’s interesting because I know Claire Labine would meet with her actors for their input. Recently, one actor walked out in the middle of his contract because of a reported objection to the morality of the tale and another actress was fired because her personal beliefs interfered with the story.

PM: That’s new. Santa Barbara was the right time and place for me — along with GL — because actors just got the job done. When I joined GH, the lunatics were running the asylum. The actors decided what they would act or not. That was an attitude I never encountered before. On SB, we had an incredible cast. Looking back now, that cast never squawked; they just did it. Well, Nancy Lee Grahn [ex-Julia] would complain, but then again, we called her Nancy Groan. But she’d talk to me and we’d figure it all out because we are dear friends. Let me tell you that Nancy was really funny back then. The phone would ring and it would be Nancy saying, “Well, you may as well hire that hit man now because I just ruined five beautiful scenes of yours today.” Sure enough, I’d check out the scenes on the air, and that's exactly what she'd done! [Laughs] God bless her!

TVG: [Laughs] That’s hilarious! Wow. I feel sorry that she’s on such a stupid show now like GH. But back on topic: I think writers should take an actor’s concerns on a case-by-case basis.

PM: For sure. I could handle Nancy because she’s a dear friend of mine and was, for me, at least easy to work with. But you’d have to gauge what was important to explain and work out. As a writer you can’t just say, “just do it,” because that doesn’t solve anything. The rule of thumb is if the actor thinks there’s a problem, there’s a problem. Duh.

TVG: You are one of the few out gay soap writers in the business. Was your sexuality ever a problem for the idiots-in-charge?

PM: No, it wasn’t. If there were things said behind my back, I never heard about them. There was one producer working with Lifetime who wanted me in on some development deal she had, but when she found out I was gay she told me very bluntly, “I don't hire gay writers. They don't understand romance and they can’t write action.” Of course, if you can’t write sex and violence, what’s left in TV to do, The Apprentice? I didn’t like the project anyway. Lifetime is too sappy. But I will admit, back in the ‘80s, the shows were scared of gay writers, because they thought we were all going to die.

TVG: Why haven’t soaps mentored new writing talent?

PM: Soaps have a strange hate/hate relationship with their writers. They recognize the show can't get off the ground without us, and resent it, too. We don't cost very much (except for head writers; consequently you have to beat back the hacks fighting tooth and nail for those jobs), so strangely enough, it begins to seem that what we do isn't very hard and we're not working very hard at it. Or wouldn’t we come with a bigger price tag? We get blamed for everything that goes wrong, even for actors who can’t act (“You should write to her strengths!”) —

TVG: Amen, sister!

PM: — and since nobody can demonstrate a direct, immediate cause-and-effect relationship between what's on the air and the ratings, it can always be argued, no matter how good the show seems, that we’re doing it all wrong.

We aren’t considered trustworthy at all — or rather, the kind of talent a writer has isn’t. If we write something good, that the actors and audience like, it may well have been an accident: protections against us still need to be taken, the show’s guard can never be relaxed. Every idea must be scrutinized with extreme care. Walls must be erected to ensure our ideas do not stray out of the realm of the acceptable into, oh, the world of vampire love stories. It’s not enough that everything we write must have some executive’s approval. First we must write a little document that explains what we are planning to write but haven’t written yet, to keep our imaginations from running off on some tangent. And really, it’s best if before that, we can also produce a document explaining what we are planning to plan to write, in general terms. What they want is the TV Guide synopsis now, before the thing synopsized exists. And then of course, even if your story does get a green light, the executives may change their minds and make you drop it, or may keep you rewriting last week for so long that the next week of the story can't get written or is so slapdash it embarrasses even you.

So, a long answer to your question: Do I think daytime should've mined new writing talent instead of recycling, oh, people like me?

Sure, and some stabs were made in that direction, by P&G, by the networks. At the same time they were making the writing of soaps so unpleasant, unrewarding, sometimes even impossible, that no writer in his or her right mind would want to do it. So think about it, who writes soaps? Just the hacks and the old-timers — those of us who remember what a thrill writing for daytime used to be. And we still have a jones for that thrill, even if it only comes three or four times a year.

Now you also know why I prefer to work for another writer.

TVG: Would you accept a co-head-writing gig if a soap offered you one?

PM: Well that would depend on who I was working with. Bob Guza, Michele Val Jean, Elizabeth Korte and I were a good team at GH. [unfortunately that writing team] wasn’t sustainable because Bob and [former executive producer] Wendy [Riche] were oil and water. I don’t know of any other situation like that waiting for me.

TVG: That’s the real soap opera cliffhanger.

Tune in to Part Two of this interview in the Aug. 14 edition of Suds Report.