Vee

Victor Miller (AMC) famously wrote the original Friday the 13th, and his ongoing litigation against series producer/sometimes director Sean S. Cunningham (who refuses to credit Miller with royalties for the creation of Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked killer) continues to this day, freezing all production of anything related to the franchise. Incumbent co-HW Chris Van Etten (GH) has a background in YA literature. I've always liked those two guys at GH and I feel they could do better work out from under Frank, but who knows. Russell T. Davies (Doctor Who, It's a Sin) also got his start submitting scripts to Crossroads. I've often wondered what became of some of Eastenders' most famous or visible writers, but I haven't looked into it.

I'm not dogging on Phil Carey, I loved watching him. But he was a handful and a character, and also a dear friend to Michael Storm and others IIRC. It was Clint Ritchie who was a known alcoholic. I'm simply pointing out that Montgomery has told this story before.

She talked a fair bit about the same issues with PC in the oral history (and IIRC, him taking a lot of Percodan or Percocet). They did not get along.

She is especially active in the arthouse horror scene these days, not just direct to video schlock.

Bob Guza worked on a couple of classic slashers in the early '80s - both Prom Night with Jamie Lee Curtis and Curtains with Samantha Eggar, which is a favorite of mine. I know he supposedly was working on a Broadway musical following GH (with Nick Offerman!) but who knows what became of that beyond a few stagings or readings.

Axios, a.k.a. Politico with fillers, screws up letting the mask slip:

Arnold nails it once again:

The NYT has finally managed to top the Tom Cotton fiasco. A thread: The kicker is later, and 100% the truth IMO:

If Barbara Crampton turned up again I'd have to tune in. She is everywhere back in the horror genre these days and she is still incredible.

How much of a slow burn does it qualify as when the main focus and story drive seems to continue to be the white teens? Esme executes a scheme against Joss and Cam to drive plot, even though her stated objective is supposedly about Nikolas and Spencer. These two kids have been on almost a year and haven't kissed, while Cam and Joss (who do not have a serious fanbase together as far as I can tell) get a tender love scene. And I happen to think William Lipton is the best actor of the four, but go where the attention is and weave him in with Spencer and Trina, while doing something different with Joss's character as she potentially begins to morph into the rich bitch when Esme is done. Instead the focus is still on Frank's priority, IMO - Joss and her man. The Spencer/Trina stuff increasingly functions as a B-plot to me even though it's supposed to be a central story, which is exactly how Frank treated the 'ethnic' teens on OLTL: Sidekicks to the whites. Even when the story is supposed to be about them, the focus is not on them.

Yeah, I've been pretty cynical about TI West's post-House of the Devil output but it is easily his best film IMO. Brittany also does a decent cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" in it.

All the teen scenes on the ABC soaps in the last however many years have been squeaky clean and tame as hell. Starr Manning got knocked up at like 17 on OLTL but she instantly had a man, a baby, a fully furnished home and no problems whatsoever while singing her treacly songs and carrying her baby around on her hip being a perfect heroine. These GH kids, also boring as hell. You looked at Degrassi or the PP soaps and it was another story. To me it's just another indicator of the networks and the shows being too nervous to rile the ever-shrinking, conservative-skewed audience in the 21st century as the polarization has heated up nationwide. That's what governs the use of non-white characters or LGBT characters, and it's what governs the treatment of the teens and twentysomethings like they're vanilla little angels. IMO, at GH at least, it starts with Frank who carried that sensibility over from OLTL and what he considered a winning youth formula. Yeah, Nate on OLTL did porn and Cam and Joss have a sex tape, but ultimately the story is either not about them or about how someone else did it to them and is the real problem. The actual teens are mostly relatively sinless. Even the GH teens of the 2000s got dirtier, usually led by Maxie hoeing it up!

Since this has been put in this thread for awhile, I thought it should go here - some excerpts from the new Evan Ross Katz BTVS oral history floating around, particularly re: the BTS drama. It does deal with the Whedon of it all as well. Most of the actors seem to sympathize with Sarah Michelle Gellar being used as a target by Whedon and/or the higher-ups to stir up aggression. (Alyson Hannigan and David Boreanaz declined to be interviewed.) I'm not using direct quotes because these are all from press coverage. @DRW50 @Khan Emma Caulfield (Anya): Julie Benz (Darla): Amber Benson (Tara): SMG: Danny Strong (Jonathan):

Speaking of horror: Brittany Snow (Susan/Daisy, GL) stars in Ti West's new (and excellent) horror picture X, where she shows more than you'd ever expect to see of her. But she's great in it.

If what you're doing fulfills you, more power to you. But I'm sorry, writing your own show or getting a job at one of these shows vs. writing fanfic on this forum are two really different things. For myself, I work in another part of the industry where I'm happy doing what I'm doing, and I have different goals and bigger creative fish to fry than soaps. I don't have any interest in working in daytime today because of the state of the genre and that particular piece of the industry. Trying to pursue creating a daytime soap today is like trying to pursue creating your own horse and buggy company. I have no interest in Jamey Giddens' career path, but even if I did, I wouldn't be doing it by writing original prose on this forum. I hope what you do makes you happy, but it has nothing to do with me and it's not going to change my critical review of these shows.

I would happily bring Lorenzo back, at least for an arc. I never bought his death. Tomas was a dud though. I'm still annoyed about how they squandered him on OLTL, because his entire introduction mystery (long story) was part of a long game for getting back Roger Howarth. It was actually very well done as a seeded series of clues involving a mysterious painting many months in advance and paid off spectacularly when Howarth's Todd finally came face to face with his loved ones with the art in his hands - Ron can still be good when he writes for moments - but ultimately it meant Ted King's character had no actual purpose or weight to him because they did not give him much decent to work with in the interim.

I don't think Eden McCoy is terrible, but she's average at best. She did a decent job with those scenes with Benard's kid and William Lipton the other day. She is the temp that stayed because she filled Frank's shallow physical and ethnic requirements for a teen star, and she should not be leading this part of the canvas. Lipton is very good, while Sydney Mikayla and Nicholas Chavez both have their green moments but have a ton of charisma and likability. But Joss is the center because Joss is in the Starr Manning/Kristen Alderson mold. They need to de-emphasize Joss and then work on a recast for the long term, or at least start playing Joss as the selfish rich girl - I think McCoy could play some of that. And I would play an actual triangle or quad with Cam and Spencer and evil Esme for a little while, since the actual pairing of Spencer and Trina is moving at a snail's pace as is, but that's me. It all depends on how the new girl works out. Jordan #3 makes them all look like Richard Burton, though. And Willow - I don't understand.

Tomas was kind of a bust of a character. People were very excited when he was brought onto OLTL, especially me, but Ron mangled it very quickly. He clearly didn't have any interest in Ted King except as a foil for Roger Howarth and Kassie DePaiva, and invested nothing in the relationships and then wrote some stuff which made it impossible for the audience to invest in him as a serious romantic option (making him the man who had abducted Todd for the evil agency in 2003, etc - he had done a lot of awful things as a spy). He devolved into a scold for the characters people liked and had little to do by the end. I love Ted King, but if GH was going to bring anyone on, then or now, it should've just been about bringing back Lorenzo.

Zach Tinker is part of a very stacked cast in Supermassive's latest interactive horror game. I loved their work on Until Dawn, starring daytime's own Hayden Panettiere among many others (like Rami Malek). For horror fans, the game also features (among others) David Arquette, Lance Henriksen, Ted Raimi, Lin Shaye and Grace Zabriskie.

What, really? I thought they were brothers. And no, I seriously doubt it. Luis was active, high profile and in charge of his organization for years when Tomas was known to be operating in intelligence, and before that he was with the Delgado family as a young man. I think it's likely Tomas posed as Luis and/or Lorenzo as part of some sort of covert operations at one point, but I don't think there was a feasible way to claim Tomas and either one of them were actually one and the same all along.

I don't think Ron knew WTF that whole thing was about. He improvises sometimes and then figures it out later. It was just another way to keep the endless subplot/tease with Todd and Blair going. I don't think there is a feasible way to claim that Lorenzo Alcazar had been living a double life as Tomas Delgado for years, because Téa knew of her estranged brother going back to the years the Alcazars were in power in the underworld and well before. The Alcazars were too visible. I do think, as I've said in the past, that it would've turned out that the Delgados and Alcazars are related genetically, and that Tomas (who spent years as an intelligence agent) may have been doubling as one or both of the Alcazar brothers at times as part of some shady operations. Which is fine. Stop copying my paper. 😘

Seeing as Ron used to love that Talk Soup/The Soup was roasting his GH and IIRC began actively writing the show into scripts and courting its attention, that's on brand. I will never get over the Soup skit making fun of Luke's flashback episode where Tony Geary played Luke's abusive dad, with Tony Hale howling 'you're old, Luke!' and ranting about their inability to do a second take of any scene no matter what. I wish it was still available. ETA: You're welcome. 12:08 into the video. Be sure to have AdBlock.

Richard Burgi gave one of the great genre performances of all time in, of all things, Hostel II. Both hilarious and scary. He channeled white yuppie impotence and rage perfectly. Both GH and Y&R utterly wasted him because I don't think they knew how deep he can run. And poor Robert Newman clearly is only here to run out the clock.