This is from the October 1971 TV Dawn to Dusk (Ideal Publishing). My scanner is a little iffy right now but I will type up the article. It's an interview with the producer at this time of Secret Storm and Where the Heart Is.
Please Don't Refer to Chuck Weiss, Executive Producer, As Scrooge
Many's the time you've seen those credits whirl by, and probably wondered to yourself, Executive Producer, hmmmmm, what does he do?
Chuck Weiss, whose name appears under that impressive title both for Secret Storm and Where the Heart Is, promptly points out, "I do not do as much in the studio as the producer does. My work is mostly with the writers."
Rangy, buoyant, quick-witted, at 32 Chuck easily could pass for a young leading man on one of his shows, but he has absolutely no inclination to be an actor. "I like," he says, "being a producer very much. To me, the producer's function is to get the right people together, the right combination of creative people, to give them the kind of stimuli they need to keep their brains working, and to get the best out of them. I get great joy out of watching it happen."
Although he does not personally supervise rehearsals or the actual televising of his two serials, he does ultimately make all the major decisions. These include casting, negotiating contracts, overseeing and approving all new sets, and above all, meeting endlessly with the writers to iron out script and story problems and to plan ahead for future developments in the plot.
What with Chuck's attending actors' auditions, each show's daily dress rehearsal, story conferences, business conferences, production meetings, and his reading and analyzing weekly story outlines, daily script breakdowns, plus ten scripts every week, he can justifiably say, "It's an impossible job. I haven't had a vacation in three years. I'm sailing to Europe in a few weeks, and I don't care if this building falls into the river."
The building, of course, is the enormous CBS production center on West 57th Street in New York City, from which both shows are televised, and where Chuck has a warmly panelled office.
One of the constant concerns of a man in his position - and of any TV program executive - must be with how large an audience his shows attract, as measured by the rating services. When the rating falls, he says, "I spent a lot of time figuring out why. If it rises, I'm very happy.
"If the rating drop is chronic, and there doesn't seem to be any way out, you get new writers. I don't like to do that if it can be avoided, because I think it's better to work with people who are familiar with the show. But if the writer doesn't know what to do with the story, or it isn't going well, you have a hard decision to make.
"Changing a writer means a period of adjustment, for the show, the actors, everywhere. The heart of the show is really the writer. No matter how you cut it, the writer is the person who keeps it going.
"I frankly think that if a writer and a producer have decided on a story and they think it's good, they should have some faith in it, and let it go for a while, not jump the minute it drops two rating points, and say, 'Oh God, we've got to change it.' Usually the stuff that you change hasn't yet been aired. So how do you know it's not going to work?
"If we find the audience in previous weeks was, say, more interested in Sean and Amy, then we realize they're less interested in another area of the story. So for the immediate future, we would try to concentrate more on the Sean-Amy story, while we fix the other stuff. Hopefully, we then can have two good things running at the same time."
Mr. Weiss' story planning also encompasses things like focusing more heavily on younger people during the summer to attract kids who are home from school, and avoiding peaks in the action during holiday times when audiences generally shrink.
For him personally, peaks of excitement come when there's a spectacular episode, as for example when Mary Hathaway got pushed down the stairs by Vicky on Where the Heart Is. "It was," he glows, "really super. We got a stunt girl in, did the actual fall, and shot it with cameras up on cranes, so we could follow her down the whole flight. It was beautifully done. I was very proud. Everybody worked hard to get it.
"We also turned it into a dream sequence that Vicki remembered afterward, using a slow motion disc and some strange color stuff. I think it was as good as anything that would be on at night, if not better. And the ratings went up."
He then went on to describe how the terrifying car crash was accomplished on Secret Storm. "You put Amy and Mickey in a car. You project chromakey filmed landscape onto a screen behind them. This is the same technique they use on the news, the images you see behind the newscaster. Anyway, we put that behind our actors, with lots of snow coming down, windshield wipers going, traffic noises, sounds of the car speeding, 'Oh my God!,' and screech of brakes. The camera moves in on the persons, their fear and horror, and you go to black.
"What we did with this particular crash, was toward the end we ran it into slow motion. Then we stopped on Amy's face, screaming behind the windshield, and went to black.
As much as he enjoys unusual scenes like these, Chuck also has reservations about them. He feels, "A good strong emotional scene where something is happening with the actors is really far better than a gimmick to end a show, wrap up a story, or create a high point. Besides, you can't do it too often, or the bloom would be off the rose."
Chuck's chief headache as a producer is illness among the actors. He shuddered, remembering when Diana Van der Vlis (Kate Hathaway) came down with chicken pox, shortly after Stephanie Braxton (Laurie Stevens) had contract the disease. He was terrified it might spread all through the studio.
Substitute performers have to be brought in to keep the show going, and the viewers complain bitterly about these substitutions. He recalls, "When Terry Kiser (Sean McGonigle) got sick, and we had to replace him for a few days, the phones started ringing from all over the country. Letters came in raging. 'How dare you do that to us!'"
Perhaps the most painful feature of Mr. Weiss' job is the necessity occasionally to fire people. "I hate it," he laments. "I just pray people do their work well. The actors, however, understand these things. They feel bad, and I feel bad, but sometimes you have to call one in and say, well listen, it looks like Hugh Claiborne and his wife, Jill, are going to go down in a plane crash, just around Christmas Eve. It was not expected, but we find out we've got to do it for story.
"I was at a wedding in Pennsylvania just after the segment featuring the crash occurred. Some women found out that I produced Storm, and I was practically attacked bodily for killing those two people. How could I be so mean? And just before Christmas! They called me 'Scrooge.'"
Chuck has also been on the wrong end of some wildly outraged phone calls. When he was with Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, Iris, he relates, "was going to be married. She'd run away from her first wedding, and coming up was her second or third time. A woman viewer called up and said that she was having all of her friends over for a wedding party for Iris and if Iris didn't show up at the altar, she would be so embarrassed, so furious with all of us, she would never watch the show again.
"And all I could say way, 'Madame, you'll have to watch the show.'
"Iris did not show up, and the phone rang off the hook from all these people. Then this woman from the Bronx called in, and she was furious. She said, 'I had all these people over for her wedding, and I have never been so embarrassed in my life!'"
Chuck began the climb to his present position as a production assistant with CBS News and public affairs about ten years ago. In addition to working on such CBS series as Accent And Chronicle, and such dramatic specials as The Life of Charles Dickens, has he co-produced a feature film directed by Mai Zetterling, an off-Broadway revival of Truman Capote's House of Flowers and has been associate producer on the now-defunct ABC soap A Time For Us.
He returned to CBS as associate producers of Love Is a Many Splendored Thing three years ago, subsequently was advanced to producer of both that show and Secret Storm. "Then," he relates, "they asked me to take over Where the Heart Is because it's in trouble."
To relax, Chuck retreats almost every weekend to a house near Woodstock, New York, about two hours from the city. "I'm a bachelor," he admits. "Doing these shows, I know what marriage is like. I mean, it's fraught with problems. Being a bachelor is much simpler."
Chuck's home is on a 56-acre property, with a blue stone quarry in the woods for swimming, and a living room with a wall of glass looking out on the Catskill Mountains. He's recently added a glass and stone hexagonal adjunct containing two bedrooms and a kind of wild bathroom - the tub surrounded by blue stone and Italian tile floors.
For the future, Chuck thinks television is going toward cassettes. "There are," he believes, "people who want better programming. And I think they're willing to pay for it. I know I would be. I don't know what the networks are going to do, but I don't think this kind of programming is going to last forever. It can't."
By Albert J. Zuckerman
