ellabelle

Falling five feet through a trapdoor? She herself stands at barely five feet. Ouch!! What a tough cookie!!

She's apparently a very good sport and generally very professional, aside from the yogurt-throwing incident, which is recalled differently depending on who you ask and where you read about it.

I seem to remember reading in an old soap book that Susan was at the studio looking up at a huge display of hats when she stepped backwards through a trapdoor and fell quite a few feet? I don't remember all the details. Can anyone fill me in?

I can't remember if it was in Susan's autobiography or if it was covered in the unauthorized bio of her that was written in the mid to late 80s, but the story as I recall is that Susan went to wardrobe for something, and she was in a hurry and was looking at all of the stuff around her and didn't realize that a trap door in the floor was open, and she fell through it, about five feet down. I don't think she was seriously injured, just bruised and shaken up. She wrote in her book that she once tripped over some cords on the studio floor while running in heels to her next set and banged up her knee badly enough that her husband and mother insisted on sending her to the hospital when she got home that night.

Susan gave such classy, PR-esque responses even at this time.

I have some 70s soap magazine articles in which she was a lot less guarded than she generally is. I don't know how much of that was writers/editors asking leading questions or manipulating what she said and how much was just her speaking off the cuff and being kind of blunt, but it's interesting.

Thanks for sharing those, DRW! It's kind of funny to read Susan Lucci saying that she doesn't think the hours will be that bad once they get going and get used to the one hour format. My understanding is that the days on AMC really were 12 hours or longer for most of the cast.

Imdb.com doesn't list her on AMC at all. I wonder if she had a recurring role? I Googled and didn't find much.

I thought Arya's story in Braavos was fairly interesting, but to be honest, I'd rather see what happens with Sansa. I've read all the books, and I know what Littlefinger explains to her is his plan for her, but I don't see what Littlefinger gets out of that, which means there has to be more to it. I'm definitely more interested in what happens in Westeros as opposed to what's going on in the free cities.

Colleen Zenk(Barbara-ATWT) on tonight's Blue Bloods.

Colleen is also appearing in an online Western genre "soap" called Thurston with AMC alum Walt Willey:

I think Walt looks pretty convincing as a guy from the old west, but Collen just looks like someone in costume to me. Maybe it's the eye makeup, but IDK, she just looks "off" somehow. I've actually not seen the show because I'm not really into westerns, so I can't really speak to how either of them actually are while acting in it, but the pics of her in costume bug me for some reason.

^ I kind of doubt it. I don't think either party would use Meredith's talk show to announce a settlement. Most likely, Meredith had Susan booked to come on and someone at her show thought it would be fun to surprise SL with a former AMC colleague.

I wonder what Karen Gorney thinks of Susan Lucci now!!!

I Googled. http://lifeafter50.com/news/2014/sep/14/karen-lynn-gorney-stayin-alive-and-active-after-50/?page=2

That's from this fall, and in it she's quite positive about Susan: "Amongst her fondest memories of her work on the daytime drama was having the opportunity to work with Lucci, who played the ingénue-turned-super-bitch, Erica Kane. “When we started doing ‘All My Children,’ Susan and I were just kids,” says Gorney. “We got to do fabulous scenes together because our characters detested one another. Erica was always stealing one of Tara’s boyfriends or husbands. But it was totally different off-screen. We got along great. Susan is hysterically funny and was always making me laugh.”"

So I don't know if time has mellowed her opinion or if she was misquoted in the book or what.

Interesting. Thank you Paul and Dan for sharing all of that! In looking back at recaps of the show from the late 70s through the early 80s, it definitely feels like a shift in direction was made, and I assume this perhaps correlated with the move to an hour-long show?

Amy, Tara was recast several times, but yes, Tara and Erica had a lot of scenes together in the early years. Interestingly, Karen Lynn Gorney, the original Tara, was quoted in an unauthorized bio of Susan Lucci, written in the mid to late 80s, as saying that she didn't think Susan was much of an actress, that what Susan and Ruth Warrick did was "pure camp" but it wasn't serious acting. So I'm guessing they didn't particularly get along behind the scenes either.

I do think he could be allive. Wasn' he on a mission or something when he died? If so, witness protection or "on the run" ALA Jessie.

Also, if the show came back, that would be a good way to restart the Erica/Tara/Phil triangle. Hell, while there at it, they could add in Dimitri or David.

I don't know - that's why I asked. I think if AMC were to return, Erica/Phil/Tara is long over and gone.

Talk to me about Phil Brent. I know his story from the start of AMC up through the end of his marriage to Erica, when he left her to reconcile with Tara. I'm fuzzy on the details after that. Wasn't he hit by a bus or something and killed a few years later? What was his storyline from the time his marriage to Erica ended through his death? I know Tara married someone else at had Kelsey/Kate with him, but I've often wondered why Phil was killed off.

I know the role was recast at least once (as was Tara), so I'm guessing the reason for killing him off extended beyond "the actor wanted out." It did occur to me that by the late 70s/early 80s, Phil's birth mother Amy was gone, his birth father Nick Davis had left town, his adoptive father Ted Brent was dead, and his adoptive mother was remarried to Joe Martin. Still, Ruth was on the canvas, and Phil had little Phillip/Charlie with Tara, he was friends with Chuck (which gave him a connection to the Tylers), and he'd been married to Erica (who then got involved with his birth father before marrying Tom Cudahy), so even though a lot of his family had been killed off, it seems like there were still reasons to keep him around or to at least leave the door open for him to come back later.

Does anyone know if AMC did another Fan Fantasy episode? Or was the episode in 2002 the only one they did?

Yeah I mentioned that upthread. Finola Hughes was in that movie too. Susan also starred in a TV movie, Lady Monster, with future AMC actors Michael Nader and Roscoe Born. John O'Hurley, who played Kit Steeling on AMC played her husband in another TV movie, Blood on Her Hands.

^ Not really. They were both complicated and interesting characters, but I don't see David Hayward as a second coming of Nick Davis. David grew up in wealth and comfort, went to medical school and was by all accounts a brilliant doctor. Nick grew up poor, educated in the school of hard knocks. To the best of my knowledge, Nick was never portrayed as a villain in the way that David was in later years. They were both denied children who'd been born to them when they were much younger, but while Nick wanted to get to know Phil, I don't think he attempted to intervene in Phil's life the way David did with Babe. At least, not that I know of. I don't think Nick was quite the plotter and schemer that David was. I think Nick had an easier time letting go of people and past betrayals and heartache than David did.

If anything, you could argue that David was the second coming of Adam Chandler: wealthy, Machiavellian, a plotter and a schemer who would go to any lengths to protect his family or the people he loved like family, prone to obsession, a villain with just enough of a likable quality that kept him from being turned into a Michael Cambias or a Will Cortlandt.

My understanding of Nick is that he was definitely a complicated anti-hero. He was the guy from the wrong side of the tracks who knocked up a girl and left town never knowing he had a son (Phil Brent). He made some money elsewhere and hoped to come back to Pine Valley and establish a business and reinvent himself as a member of decent society in PV. I believe that Mona had been his good friend in high school. He immediately rubbed a teenage Erica the wrong way by basically telling her what to do and to treat her mother better. He fell for Phoebe's daughter Ann Tyler, and Phoebe was of course, aghast that this social climber wanted to be with HER daughter.

I loved that TPTB brought Nick back over and over again, but I wish he'd been willing to stay longer. I loved his friendship with Mona. I thought he and Susan Lucci were fabulous to watch together, no matter what they were doing. There's a scene after Erica dumps Nick's grandson Charlie on what should have been their wedding day, when Nick comes to visit Erica, and they talk about her relationships. At one point, they full on kiss each other, and it's disturbing because she's just been engaged to his grandson and because that kiss is far hotter than anything Erica/Charlie did.

I could see Mona pushing Erica back toward Jeff in the late 70s. She would have thought he was a better option than Nick Davis.

John James didn't have the same joking rapport with Tad that, say, Ricky Paull Goldin's Jake did later on, but I thought he interacted well with Ray McDonnell and it was believable to me that they could be father/son. I really disliked though that Jeff basically encouraged Josh's creepy stalker behavior with Babe. Granted, Jeff did so because he wanted a relationship with his son, and he could hardly chastise Josh for chasing after a married woman when he was basically doing the same thing with Erica.

The big issue I had with the whole Jeff/Erica story was that by the time Jeff and Erica's marriage ended on AMC in the 70s, they were DONE with each other. There were no lingering feelings. I mean, Erica then was not all that unlike SMG's Kendall circa 1993/1994: Erica was going to ditch Jeff to be with her modeling agent/lover Jason Maxwell until Jason dumped her and ended up murdered. Erica wasn't exactly truthful about the status of her marriage when talking to the police, and Jeff ended up on trial for Jason's murder as a result. By that point Jeff and Mary had fallen in love and just wanted to be together. Joe paid off Erica to testify on Jeff's behalf and sign divorce papers, but the bribery came out during the trial. It eventually came out that Mona had accidentally shot Jason, and Jeff was set free. This was well after the abortion that MMT later un-aborted. When Jeff first appeared on the show, he basically told Erica he was shocked they had a son, that she called the shots before but that he was going to get to know his son, and oh yeah, she looked fabulous. I could maybe see that discovering you share a child with your ex might make you feel more attracted to that person, but based on what I know of their history, them having an affair struck me as rather unlikely.

I will say though that Jeff and Erica did have some interesting scenes. There was a scene in the fall of 2006 when Erica was moving into the Valley Inn - she ran into Jeff in the lobby and they had drinks (hers non-alcoholic), and they had a really mature conversation in which she admitted that she no longer drank because she'd dealt with addiction (he was shocked), and she basically said that she'd been divorced so many times that she'd gotten used to being on her own and that living in a house with a husband and a bunch of teenagers was really stifling, and she felt like she wasn't really herself anymore and that she needed some space to clear her head. While running away from your husband and your marriage isn't exactly great, I did think it was one of the more honest conversations I'd seen her have with anyone in a long time. Jeff was sympathetic and I think fairly impressed that Erica had grown up quite a bit in the years since he'd left town.

That scene was followed a few weeks later, right before Thanksgiving, by a scene with Jack and Brooke in which Jack was saying how much he loved having Sean, Lily and Reggie all living with him, that he loved all the noise and the chaos of having a bunch of teenagers underfoot, and he loved having a big family around him. The juxtaposition of those two scenes... it was painfully obvious that Jack and Erica wanted really different things out of life, and if you look back at those scenes from late 2006, the implosion of their relationship in 2011 makes sense - they want different things and different lives. Ultimately I think the Jeff/Erica fling just served as a way to break up Jack and Erica yet again. I really did enjoy their "New Divorce" reality show the following year because it was kind of funny, but it would have been nice to see more open and honest conversations between them, at least acknowledging that they have very different wants and needs and trying to find a way to reconcile those.

I thought it was terrible that Josh didn't have a proper funeral with Jeff there to mourn his son.

Judging from Charles Frank's appearance on Oprah in 2011, he'd aged quite a bit - as one would certainly expect over 40 years! I assume that he was judged as 'too old' to play Jeff Martin circa 2006. John James is 58, and Charles Frank is 67. I didn't dislike John James as Jeff - I just thought he had minimal chemistry with Susan Lucci, and their 'romance' was not all that believable.

I think Mafia Princess might be the only MOW SL did that I haven't seen. "Secret Passions" was shot around that same time too, and it also stars Susan's future AMC co-stars, John James and Finola Hughes. It's a cheesy movie, but it really should have been proof to TPTB that SL and JJ did not have a whole lot of chemistry together.

Prince of Sunspear, I owe you my most sincere apologies. I read some of your posts earlier in this thread that expressed frustration because GRRM has not finished writing these books, and my instinctive reaction was along the lines of "Geez, back off. He's written a gazillion pages already. You can't rush the creative process! He'll finish it eventually."

Then I read the books.

I just finished A Dance With Dragons. I have watched all 4 seasons of the show. I have this enormous void now that can only be filled with new episodes and new books, and I absolutely understand your frustration now. So, I am very sorry for being less than sympathetic before. I know that odds are he's going to just kill everyone and be done with it, but even so, I really, really want to read it all. Now. And barring that, I'd really like to watch the next season already.

AMC's 30th anniversary episode, also the end of the 1999/2000 Crystal Ball. I love the mix of old clips in with the current stories.

I know, for example, that Nick Surovy wouldn't stay on as Mike Roy for more than 6 months or so at a time, which was why he was recast in the 80s and why Erica chose Jack in 1998. I wasn't sure if Mark LaMura had some sort of similar objection to coming back to AMC long-term or if AMC just couldn't be bothered. I agree with you - I would have loved to see a closer relationship between Bianca and her Uncle Mark.

I'm not too familiar with LaMura's off-screen life. Why did he leave AMC? Do you know if AMC ever asked him back for a longer duration and he was unwilling or if AMC just felt the character was done, save for brief visits to Erica and Bianca?

1970's SOD covers

Do you have the AMC issue pictured above??