Vee

This is fascinating to hear about, thank you. I'll go look it up. Eddie Drueding never lets people down. I didn't know Lemay invoked Pat's trial much, and I read his book. I'd love to hear more.

LMAO at MBE: "If you've been on this show, you've been in a coma." And Dee dryly saying 'hard to believe, I know' as to Marlena not(?) being buried alive.

A very transparent attempt to add white str8 hunks (Jessica Leccia, their mother, was Latino but was added later and all the Ford studs were just white dudes) to the show to get it back on the Fronsian track after they purged a ton of minorities and LGBT people. And yeah, Bordisso went by "DV". Don't ask us why. Don't forget Donna Mills as Madeline, Obrecht's sister and Nina's mom who swapped all the babies.

A.J. was a welcomed return by the fans and Sean Kanan had always been popular in the role. It was the show that let him down by getting hung up on rebuilding roles for the OLTL 3 when the chemistry between Kanan and Laura Wright was smoking hot and welcomed by fans. The bigger issue still was FV/RC clearly souring on Kanan behind the scenes and openly letting it influence the scripts including having Tracy regularly mock his weight.

Wasn't it the creepy dude who played psychic spy DV on Port Charles? That psychic spy storyline with him, Scott and Kevin's dad (where DV turned out to be Scott's bio-dad) still doesn't make any sense to me.

No. They were despised. Lindsay only survived based on Cat Hickland's performances.

She's the only one who comes through with dignity, though Zaslow mostly manages it by just having fun with the ludicrously OTT dialogue. It's the maid with the baby abruptly walking in on the chaos and everyone going 'noooo!' that really makes me lose it though. I'm a hypocrite, because I love those scenes with Janet monologuing! I think the difference is the portion I can remember at least (it's been a long time, so maybe other scenes are more histrionic) did not have everyone howling back at Janet like the monkey house.

I just can't see anyone coming off well in that setpiece, no matter which actors were in play. (Though I'll admit I can't see Beverlee McKinsey standing down there screaming up at him ineffectually.) They all howl and shriek at Roger from below a small set of stairs they could easily walk up and it turns into a complete rager. It's some of Marj's worst work but everyone acts a fool. Right down to Roger yelling about preferring 'a toothless street whore!' to Alex. It's just hysterical.

It's hilarious to me. In large part due to the blocking in which virtually everyone impotently howls up at Roger from the ground floor beneath the stairs, just heckling him. It's like an episode of Jerry Springer when the audience yells back and forth with the latest guest. And then anyone who tries to occasionally get up there gets beat, and then a baby shows up....

Annie Wersching (Amelia Joffe on GH, but best known for her roles in Timeless, 24, Star Trek: Picard and as the original VA and physical modeler of Tess in the video game version of The Last of Us, among many other roles) has died of cancer at 45. Such a talent.

Oh damn. Annie Wersching was so talented - she reinvigorated 24 in its later years opposite Kiefer Sutherland and then did a solid turn as the Borg Queen on the recent season of Picard. Way too talented, way too young.

Meanwhile: It's time for the return of this immortal sequence. @DRW50 It can't be embedded so I had to link. @Darnhas probably never seen this and must, it is hilarious and ridiculous. Marj Dusay and many others at their less than best. It is up there with the scene on DAYS where John and Brady fight the entire town while Brady is dressed as Gay Zorro. The capper is still when the maid comes in with the baby and everyone is like "no, no!" As I said when I first saw it all that was left to add was their bringing in some sort of circus animal act.

Doing a bit of a Dobsons deep dive this lazy, hazy weekend, as their incredibly intricate and labyrinthine plotting - especially on GL with the Spaulding/Marler quad and saga - and the overall haunting mood of their era and Marland's (heavily inflected by the Ritournelle/light through trees opening setting the tone IMO) has always stayed with me since the days of WOST. I see the Spauldings came on en masse in late '77 and am enjoying looking in on that. I've said this before but I always found Elizabeth Spaulding in particular to be a spooky, ethereal character they should've brought back when Phillip went dark in the 2000s (along with Cindy Pickett as Jackie, who I've always liked whenever I saw her in an old episode). What I am curious about is this: Jackie and Justin allegedly both came on in spring-summer '76. What were they doing for most of the year and a half before the Spauldings, the central axis of their future story, finally arrived?

Peggy Lipton! What the hell?

This is just a partial episode, so maybe there was more dialogue before or Holly monologued to him while he was unconscious, but another neat bit is that it seems as though the first words they say to each other after however many years are very simple: Holly: Why? Roger: Our daughter. And that's it! No long expository dialogue. Holly leaves the room. That's enough. They don't need to give the audience a speech about who they are to each other when they would already know all that about themselves and wouldn't talk that way together, the info can be filled in via other scenes or other characters.

To add on to that, in terms of reveals sometimes less can be more. I am sure they did more in dialogue and exposition to explain away who Roger and Holly are at the time to new viewers, and I think the initial reveal scene of Roger to the townsfolk at Phillip and Blake's wedding is great, but this is very artful (timestamped below): Yes, the jump cuts on the faces are slightly dated but they do it all with great music, Garrett and Zaslow's faces, and flashbacks with absolutely no dialogue over the music. It all tells the story by itself.

Thanks!

I've worked in post-production. You can absolutely plan it when cutting together a montage or sequence like that (and I'm betting they deliberately chose it to match the music - having her turn just as the slice of the screen scrolls by and 'turns' as well is too perfect) I but having that footage to work with at all was a happy accident based on something Beth Ehlers did in a scene.

I always liked Harley dancing in the opening and the crescendo at the end but I think I'm considerably more partial to the '80s GL theme (does it have a name? idk if it was Jack Urbont but it came after the disco mess) vs. Hold On To Love today. This is the one I mean (timestamped). They kept it til '90, I guess (the later one is faster and more synth, and I liked it too). I also always really liked the haunting light through the trees/Ritournelle. It was mysterious and kept the tone for me with the Dobsons/Marland's stuff. I knew AMC (still overbudget, having moved to California) was in real trouble when they dumped the masterful scrapbook opening and basically xeroxed GL's horrible PowerPoint slide, BTW:

I'll never understand why they dumped the '80s ATWT theme. I always hated the cornfield opening. The overly dramatic music did not match the stories at all.

Y&R has been toying with the 'film in public spaces in the studio and pretend it's on location' since at least JFP. A lot of drab institutional-looking stairwells, like when Phyllis took her tumble down some stairs when Stafford left the show for GH. In fairness, I'm sure soaps have always played with filming in the facilities and making it pretend to be location over the decades. But the lighting and production value in the earlier years was much more adept at disguising it vs. the ugly GL/ATWT and even recent GH and Y&R method of 'just film anywhere backstage and pretend it's a set'. You can tell the difference between some grimy back staircase on Studio X and a stairwell in Newman Enterprises or whatever.

He definitely was not on during Live Week, lol.

Yeah, the Academy trying to turn this into Watergate to cover themselves is a bit much. It's a few older actresses getting overzealous on Twitter, it's not exactly the ruthless Weinstein/Miramax campaign strategy. It's an unfortunate flap but I imagine Riseborough will be fine in the end. She has long been plugging away successfully in the arthouse scene and on prestige TV and would likely continue to do so regardless of the nom.

Let alone that Sonny and Ava are friendly too via Nina. I saw the three of them sharing chummy scenes together and thought I was in Bizarro World. Avery or no Avery, I can't see it. And I've never forgotten the scenes with Stafford's Nina tormenting Ava in labor. It looked like a very personal, physical violation. I was a bit nauseous watching it.