Mona Kane Croft
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Posts posted by Mona Kane Croft
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10 minutes ago, j swift said:
Josie also really suffers in the final recast. Nadine Stenovitch may have shared Amy Carlson's haircut, but she had none of the charisma or sexual chemistry.
It also didn't help when they recast Gary with John Littlefield. I know that they wound up together IRL, but it is a bummer when both characters in a couple get recast.
Does anyone know the story of why they fired and then rehired Mr Littlefield? He left in May 1999, and SOD wrote that he was going to be replaced, then he returned a month later and stayed until the finale.
John Littlefield is leaving Another World this spring Littlefield Joined the show in April 1998 replacing Tim Gibbs(Now Kevin on one life to live}The departure is storyline dicated this was reported from Sod
Speaking of Nadine Stenovitch and John Littlefield, did anyone catch them on a couple of episodes of Escape to the Chateau about three years ago? They are close friends of the family that owns the chateau, so they came for a visit or two.
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9 hours ago, watson71 said:
Had RH made it to the 2000s- how do you think the show would have incorporated the 9/11 attack into the storyline given the NYC locale of the show?
They could not have done it in real time (or anything close to real time), because they would have been taping too far ahead. And playing it out a month later would have probably come across as distasteful. So they might have waited until the first anniversary, and done a tribute then -- as if 9/11 happened and they experienced it, but the audience just didn't see it play out on camera.
Some real life events are awkward and painful for the audience to re-live on a soap. And some, the audience simply would prefer not to re-live. So I think a tribute on the first anniversary would have been RH's mostly likely choice. Just speculation on my part.
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9 hours ago, BoldRestless said:
CZ said she has really big scenes airing on December 26th... the way they have blown through everything I can't even imagine the story going on til the end of this week.
As late as about a week ago, Zenk was saying in interviews that she was still in California taping on the show. That surprised me, even then. But now, I can't see how this plot can go on much longer -- at least Zenk's role in it. Characters like she's playing usually don't last long, after their true identity and intentions have been unveiled. Is she going to keep the whole Newman family tied-up in a basement for a month? That seems unlikely, so otherwise I can't imagine how Zenk was still taping new scenes as late as a week ago. But who knows?
12 hours ago, Faulkner said:This sh’t is laughable. Nick getting overpowered and stabbed by a 70-year-old woman while Victoria and Cole are completely oblivious. Claire already coming to the realization that she’s been deceived by Jordan.
Yes, these scenes were awkward to watch to say the least. The idea that two grown-ass men would just stand there and calmly listen to Jordan's explanation and threats without beating the crap out of her is ridiculous. There should have been at least some reference to Nick and Victor threatening to become violent. For example, Nick grabs Jordan and starts to choke the truth out of her, but she retorts by saying something like, "Go ahead and kill me, but you will NEVER find Nikki, if I'm dead." Then Victor pulls Nick away, Jordan brushes herself off, and the scene goes on. Some how it should be acknowledged that Nick and Victor could beat the truth out of Jordan, even if they choose not to.
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1 hour ago, dragonflies said:
sadly these days fans don't have the patience for a story to go on for months, this is an "insta" world, everything is "Fast"
The audience has the patience, but TPTB don't believe we have the patience. TPTB are just incorrect.
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9 hours ago, Xanthe said:
What about Josie?
The original version of Josie was definitely written as a traditional ingenue. But again, as popular as she may have been with the existing audience, Josie wasn't on the show very long. So she's just one of many tried and failed attempts on the various soaps to introduce that archetype post mid-80s. Thankfully, Josie's exit didn't involve her becoming a villain or going crazy. She was written off with most of the character's dignity in tact, allowing her return years later. But the later version of Josie was older, hardened by experience, and by no means naive. So the later Josie had out grown ingenue status.
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3 minutes ago, Soaplovers said:
Jenna on AW was a fairly successful ingenue... but she had a backbone and wasn't written to be a Mary Sue and she had a fairly popular coupling with Dean in the early 90s
True, but even she didn't last long enough to become what I would call a successful long-term ingenue.
Sorry, I really didn't mean to side-rail the conversation. My major point was that one of the major reasons Marley became a secondary character to Vicky was that Marley was a traditional ingenue at a time when that type of character was becoming unappealing to the writers, pretty much across the board in the genre.
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15 minutes ago, j swift said:
They may not have lasted as long, but Brett, Lisa, Kelsey, and Sofia were all good girl ingénues young adult leads with contemporary stories created after 1985.
And in terms of long term good girls on modern soaps, DAYS Belle just completed a 16-year gig, and butter wouldn't melt in the mouth of GH's Robin.
Re: Brett, Lisa, Kelsey, and Sofia -- Yes, but as you said, they didn't last long. So not long-term ingenues. The writers were so hip and trendy, they probably considered those four too boring to bother with. As I said (or maybe implied) there have been many attempts at traditional ingenues since the mid-80s on various soaps, but almost none of them have succeeded long-term.
Belle -- Yes, but she had spent long long periods off the show. At least I believe that's the case.
Robin -- I probably would agree she is/was a long term ingenue. She was on GH for many years and never permanently lost a man to a bad-girl (at least not that I recall). And she never turned bad or went crazy. So let's add Robin to the list.
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1 hour ago, Soaplovers said:
The problem was that Marley always played second fiddle to Vicky.. because a character like Marley needed a writer that could make a character like Marley more naunced. Vicky was easy to write so writers like Swajeski, Sloane, etc tended to write for her and use Marley as a talk to for Vicky (except for the 1991/2 period where Marley had a story arc that didn't involve Vicky so much).
We also need to remember that Marley was a traditional soap opera ingenue, at a time when the traditional ingenue had, for the most part, fallen out of fashion -- at least in the eyes of soap opera writers. By 1985-ish, the tables had turned between ingenues and bad-girls. Meaning that by 1985, in most cases, the bad-girl won and the ingenue was either written off or went crazy. In Marley's case, she was written off, and then years later went crazy.
By the mid-1980s, even the queen of writing and/or creating successful ingenues, Agnes Nixon, could not get a new ingenue to succeed on AMC. Nixon had been highly successful writing long romances for Missy Matthews and Alice Matthews on Another World, and on AMC had created popular ingenues, Tara Martin, Nina Courtlandt, and Jenny Gardner. But Jenny was Nixon's final successful ingenue. Even though she tried several times during and after the mid-80s to introduce such characters, the new ingenues each lost the boy to her competition (bad-girl) and were written off.
The era of the "good-girl" was over for good. Writers found the bad-girls more interesting and more exciting, I suppose. A couple of years ago I was involved in an online discussion trying to determine the last two or three successful long-term ingenues on daytime. And the only characters anyone could think of were Lily Walsh and Lily Winters. I tend to agree.
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14 hours ago, j swift said:
It was coo coo for coconuts, and that's what is funny to me. So, it made AW thrilling to watch, and yell at the screen, and joke about with my friends. Which are some of our favorite memories.
At the risk of being potentially offensive (and I apologize for that) -- Your statement reminds me of the people who counter any complaint against whacky writing with the reply, "It's just a soap." Implying that -- well, implying all kinds of things about a genre that many "old fashioned" fans tend to take seriously. I realize you did not use that phrase (...just a soap), but your comments simply reminded me of those who so. I've come to believe those who take soaps seriously will never understand those who enjoy whacky, supernatural, or sci-fi plots on an otherwise believable soap opera. And visa-versa. This is not to say one group is right and the other is wrong, but I do believe the soap audience is split into two different "tribes" who watch for different reasons and have very different expectations.
14 hours ago, j swift said:And, honestly, I don't get why anyone would continue to watch if they felt disrespected.
I believe many long-term fans continue to watch poorly written soap operas because most of them watch for the characters, and not the plots. Over the last 50 years, I have tolerated many many terrible, unbelievable, even insulting plots, because I simply loved the characters too much to give up. For example, I believe Another World was the worst soap opera on the air for its final 20-years. But I kept watching -- always hoping it would improve and return to its former glory. Which it never did. But I loved the characters, so I continued to watch and to hope. I'm confident I'm not alone.
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42 minutes ago, DRW50 said:
I did wonder if they had more plans for Jansen.
Dr Eric Jansen seemed like a Harding Lemay character to me. And his situation with Marley (including her fertility issues) also seemed like a Harding Lemay interaction, heading toward a romance (it was dry, talky, and percolating slowly). So I've always believed the Marley/Jansen thing was something Swakeski pulled from Lemay's storyline projection. And then when she realized it wasn't flashy and exciting (the superficial stuff Swakeski seemed to prefer), she decided to dump the whole thing, along with the Eric Jansen character.
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34 minutes ago, SFK said:
Revisiting the Iris/Mac/Sylvie backstory, I am reminded of a couple of plots from B&B. Li and Jack raised their adopted son, Finn, who unbeknownst to Li was Jack's biological son all along. Even more disturbing, Ridge had a romantic dalliance with Bridget, who he raised as a daughter and later accepted as a sister. Let us thank Kay Chancellor's dear God in heaven that Lemay never took Iris' Electra complex to the forbidden once it was revealed that MacDaddy was not biologically related.
Actually, I personally believe there is on screen evidence that Lemay was likely toying with the idea of Iris and Mac "consummating" their strangely inappropriate relationship. Not that it would have ever been an ongoing thing -- but I believe one night of (later regretted) passion was possibly on the horizon. Of course, P&G would never have allowed that to happen, but there were scenes between the two that are uncomfortable to watch (to put it lightly) both before and after the adoption revelation. I believe Lemay was testing the waters to see if it would fly. It's unlikely he informed anyone at NBC or P&G that he was doing this. Frankly, he probably didn't even tell Paul Rauch. It is my opinion that Lemay rather wanted to go there.
23 minutes ago, SFK said:While I did not see any of Gerald Davis, I did see some of Eric Kane as a child (and more recently on YouTube). I feel like there were significant missed opportunities with these father/daughter relationships on each show in their later years. I did not care for AMC killing Eric offscreen and the revelations thereafter.
You probably know this but, although Rachel and Erica were very similar characters -- especially in the early years of both; and Ada and Mona did have a few similarities, Gerald Davis and Eric Kane were really not similar in any way, other than the fact they had both abandoned their daughters when they were young children. Otherwise, Gerald and Eric really had nothing in common. I do understand, however, why people might try to compare them or even assume they may have been similar to one another. I believe of the six characters mentioned in this post, the only one NOT created by Agnes Nixon was Gerald Davis, who I believe was created by Robert Cenedela.
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11 minutes ago, kalbir said:
Nikki's substance abuse was from self-medicating after a fall from a horse that resulted in a miscarriage and a back injury. She hardly left the ranch during the time she was self-medicating.
Okay, thanks for that information. I was not watching Y&R during Nikki's initial alcoholism storyline.
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1 hour ago, Donna L. Bridges said:
I don't believe it was Pete who caused George R to be fired; it was Paul. Jacquie, of course, is completely on his head. He, and he alone questioned her acting ability. My solution would have been to pair her with a good acting coach & find a way for her to deliver the style he was looking for! I was never satisfied with any other Alice. Virginia Dwyer also but I found his reasons to be compelling in her case.
You are right about that, Donna. Rauch was the person who cut George loose. But my point is that Lemay was writing great stuff for many of the actors and characters he disliked (or found boring). Lemay was given too much power over hiring and firing. He was the head-writer, not the executive producer.
Courtney didn't need an acting coach. The audience loved her. She was voted most popular female soap opera actress two years in a row -- including the year she was fired. Virginia Dwyer was the matriarch of the entire show, and she was also beloved by the audience. Mary Matthews was the Nancy Hughes of NBC. Dwyer's acting was fine. Again, the head-writer should not be in control of judging the acting ability of the cast. As always -- my opinions only.
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1 hour ago, Khan said:
It's funny how Lemay personally abhorred plot-heavy writing; yet, in the times when he was forced to do it - Iris' real mother, Sven, the Greg Barnard murder - people actually really liked it, lol.
Yes, you are correct. Interestingly, Lemay was very good at writing plots he said he didn't enjoy writing. He was also very good at writing for characters he didn't particularly enjoy. For example, he said he didn't enjoy writing for Jacquie Courtney's Alice, but he wrote amazing stuff for Alice -- Emmy worthy material, actually. Also Lemay implied in his book that he didn't know how to write for middle-class characters, but he wrote great material for nearly every member of the extended Matthews family, while they were on the show.
That's one of the reasons I believe Lemay should have been forced, coerced, or strongly encouraged by Paul Rauch to keep Virginia Dwyer, Jacquie Courtney, Ariana Muenker, Michael Ryan, and George Reinholt on the canvas.
To some degree, Lemay was not a good estimator of his own talent.
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2 hours ago, j swift said:
@Mona Kane Croft I recall the circumstances of Iris finding out she was adopted, but do you recall how she found out that the adoption had been retconed?
Also, around the time that Sandy came to Bay City, Mac promised Jamey that he would be in the will, did that pan out later?
In one of her early scenes in 1989, Iris told Mac that Sylvie had told her that Sylvie and Mac had an affair years earlier, and that Mac was Iris's bio-father. Completely unnecessary to retcon the original story. Everything Iris did in 1989 could have gone forward with Mac as her adopted father.
If I'm not mistaken, this conversation occured during one of Swajeski's first episodes credited as head-writer. So it's possible Swajeski chose to do the retcon herself, or it is equally possible Lemay had planned the retcon and it was in his storyline projection, which Swajeski used for months. She followed some of Lemay's plans, and ditched others in favor of her own ideas
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With all the vodka and alcoholism references, is it possible Claire and Aunt Jordon have something to do with Nikki's past as an alcoholic? Did Nikki ever kill anyone while driving drunk? Or hurt anyone in some other way, during her heavy alcohol use? Perhaps Claire and Aunt Jordan are connected to Nikki through her addiction. Who knows??
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27 minutes ago, Paul Raven said:
How did the idea of Iris being adopted come through at the time?
It seemed a bit out of the blue-one of those major plot points that had never been mentioned before eg I forgot to mention that i had been married before until my ex turns up.
I watched the "Amanda is born, and Iris is adopted" episode live, and it did certainly come "out of the blue," with no foreshadowing whatsoever. At the time, it did seem a bit too plot-driven for Another World, and Lemay's style of nearly plotless writing. But I think the fans accepted it because we were starving for any kind of real storyline. Just as we had accepted the Sven storyline a few months earlier. "Please give us a real plot, Mr Lemay -- please . . pretty please." so he finally gave it to us, and we accepted it.
Within a few weeks , viewers saw how well crafted this new plot was coming along, and suddenly we we were completely engaged. Who was Iris's real mother? And would Iris ever find her??
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20 minutes ago, j swift said:
It has been over a decade since I read Eight Years in Another World (I checked my Amazon purchase and I bought it in 2011), so I didn't remember that detail - thanks @Mona Kane Croft & @Khan
Harding Lemay writing a Jewish mother for Iris in 1978-1979 was a bold move! That's pretty inspired. Initially, I thought the idea of exploring Iris's conception (and the later retcon) was unnecessary, but if the plan was based on giving Iris a mother who would destroy her sense of identity, I think it is genius. I cannot imagine a writer taking that kind of risk today.
The later retcon (in 1989) was unnecessary, and frankly insulting to the long-term viewers. We will probably never know if the retcon was written by Lemay (who had left-behind his long-term story projections), or by Donna Swajeski (who was credited as head-writer during the retcon explanation episodes).
Yes, Lemay's idea was genius. And yes, no writer today would take that kind of risk, because soap operas no longer take themselves seriously. When was the last time you cried during a soap opera scene? That's a serious question . . .
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33 minutes ago, j swift said:
Speaking of mothers, by modern standards, do you think the character of Sylvie Kosloff was coded as Jewish?
Clearly, as a member of the tribe, I am not speaking derisively. However, she was from New York, and she worked in the discount garment business which are two commonly coded devices for characters who were probably Jewish, but they never mentioned it on screen. It would have been an interesting issue if Iris, who identified as an upper crust WASP, had a Jewish mother. I recall much of the story was plot driven, rather than an opportunity for self-reflection on behalf of Iris. But, when I read the synopsis, Sylvie's cultural origins were among my first reactions.
Of course, Sylvie was Jewish. Harding Lemay says in his book that he created Sylvie as a Jewish character, and he wanted to write Iris as anti-Semetic (ashamed of her Jewish biological mother). But NBC or P&G balked at the idea, so he simply never mentioned the word Jew or Jewish in any of the scripts, but continued to write Sylvie exactly as he had planned. Sylvie was Jewish, most certainly.
The problem for TPTB wasn't Sylvie being Jewish. The big problem was allowing Iris to be anti-Semetic. So all references to Judaism were dropped from the scripts, but Sylvie was written and played as Jewish, and Iris's disgust was obvious but unexplained -- especially during the early months after Sylvie's introduction.
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14 minutes ago, Soaplovers said:
That's why I bought Rachel's relationship with Carl because 1993 was a year of incredible change/loss for Rachel. She lost Ada, almost lost Cory Publishing, and then was basically pushed out by Amanda.. so she went to NYC to recharge and had Loretta as a surrogate mom. Loretta didn't have the history with Rachel that Ada did so even if Loretta had reminded her that Carl was bad news.. Rachel wouldn't have listened.
Also, the only reason I could think of that Rachel was cool with Ada's close relationships with Nancy/Clarice, plus was accepting of her mom's marriages was because Rachel wasn't abandoned by Ada. She was abandoned by her father so her outlook was different. In a weird way, Rachel and Iris were more alike then either would admit... both had daddy issues, both had abandonment issues, and both didn't always parent their children effectively.
Damn. Are you Harding Lemay returned from the dead? You have a great understanding of psychological drama! Please write me a soap . . .
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5 hours ago, Donna L. Bridges said:
Here's 2 pictures of Rachel's other half-sister, Pammy.
Interesting. I wonder if Pamela Toll was still acting throughout the duration of Another World. She could have resumed in the role.
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34 minutes ago, j swift said:
The mind reels over whether the 1984-1985 plans for Pam Davis were grafted on to another character (like Donna), or just scraped.
Because imagine if Pam was re-introduced as the ex-wife of Carl Hutchins? (mind blown).
Fantasy casting: Sharon Gabet as Pamela Davis, rather than as Brittany Peterson (or whoever she was). Pam comes to Bay City, a difficult woman who considers herself a failure -- resentful of her wealthy older sister who never offered help. To make matters worse, Rachel doesn't even recognize Pam at their first meeting. Relationship off to a great start!!
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32 minutes ago, j swift said:
It does make you wonder if any of TPTB ever thought of bringing Gerald or Pammy Davis back to Bay City. It would have been a good plot twist to have Gerald be Justine’s father and have him plotting with Justine against Rachel. At least it would have explained the resemblance between Rachel and Justine.
There was a report in the soap press back around 1984-85, that AW was planning to bring Pam Davis to the canvas. Supposedly casting process had already begun. But the plans were obviously changed, and it never happened.
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How long had Cole been gone? What year did he leave the show?