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8 hours ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

Yeah, I went & looked up who played that GL part & it was so neat!

And I had forgotten, she [Sofia Landon Geier] also played Jennifer Thatcher, David Thatcher's wife who believed that Kevin was her own child and did not realize that he was Sally's (I believe Jennifer's baby was supposed to have died, which kind of seems unnecessarily complicated. I mean it makes sense that David would not want his wife to know that he had fathered Sally's baby, but how fortuitous that when Jennifer's baby died he was able to obtain Sally's baby and substitute it). I wish the videos from fall 1983 were available.

32 minutes ago, j swift said:

Correct me if I am wrong, but the twins weren't on canvas when Reg first re-appeared and Anna Stuart left.  So, it could've been about a child that Nicole lost, and they could've used her history of addiction as part of the plot.  She might have shared a history with John, and there could've been a John/Nicole/Cass triangle. 

Reginald came back from the dead right before Ellen Wheeler left. He was the one who brought Rhonda Lewin to Jake and Marley's wedding. And he was still there when Anne Heche started to play Victoria and he had Peter spending all his time trying to manipulate Vicky into telling Michael that Donna and John were having an affair that they weren't really having. (I remember in his memoir John Considine boasted of how Anne Heche as Marley had slapped him on his first day but he was mistaken, it was Ellen Wheeler.)

With Marley and Victoria well-established I think it would have been better to avoid a Nicole love child plot, but it would have been heaven if they had never had the John and Donna not-rape and instead gone with a story for John and Nicole with either Cass or Michael as the third.  

23 minutes ago, Soaplovers said:

The only actress I think could have played Donna and put her spin on it was the actress that had played Diane Ballard on GL. 

Was that Sofia Landon Geier, who actually filled in for Anna Stuart a few times?

http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/misc5.html

15 hours ago, chrisml said:

Frankie's introduction didn't bother me. What bothered me is that Swajeski had undone the storyline with Cass/Nicole. Anne Howard deserved better than dismantling the relationship and writing off Nicole. Frankie and Cass ended up being a great couple (although I always thought a Ryan/Frankie coupling would have worked too). 

I was reading an interview where Anne [Marie] Howard talked about when she was cast as Nicole, the hair department decided that since the character was supposed to be a high-fashion model she should have short hair, and John Whitesell was furious they had cut her hair, but luckily it got a positive fan response.

It's too bad that the character of Nicole was obliterated but I think Depriest has to take some share of the blame for not doing enough to make the character interesting and necessary even if they wanted to move her out of Cass' orbit. However Lemay/Swajeski could probably have chosen to do something that would have made her more integrated into storylines with Donna, Vicky, Michael, John, Marley, or Jamie. Howard is very diplomatic in the interview but she had a year left on her contract so they obviously decided she wasn't valuable enough to keep.

I've been looking at some of the episodes where Lily, the daughter of one of John's friends from Vietnam, out of nowhere comes to stay with John after Sharlene is presumed dead in 1992. Since nothing ever came of it it's a baffling blip of a storyline and I always wonder what they intended or if they intended anything beyond adding an Asian character and giving widowed John something to do. 

Would she have turned out to be John's daughter? Was she intended as a love interest shockingly too young for him? Would her mother have been introduced as John's age-appropriate love interest? 

Byron Pierce was also around in this period. I was disappointed that Marley did not ultimately choose him over Dennis but I don't really remember how they ended up.

11 minutes ago, NothinButAttitude said:

Speaking of clairvoyants being on the show, Frankie was one of the few that seemed real. It wasn't slapstick. I'd add Nadine (on GL) for that too.

Love Celeste but I felt she was too slapstick. 

I had actually forgotten that Frankie was supposed to be psychic and when I watch old episodes it seems mostly like she has vague feelings that something is wrong. I had less patience with Lisa Grady whose psychic powers seemed to be much more concrete and accurate insights into the minds of Vicky and the Sin Stalker as plot demanded. (Of course although she perceived details of the Sin Stalker's mania she did not pick up his identity.)

Psychics can be useful plotwise because you can use their feelings to justify taking sudden action without any actual evidence.

I thought that I had read that the original casting concept of Frankie was that she could be Italian-American called Francesca, but when they cast Alice Barrett they made her Mary Frances Frame and decided to have her as a slightly new-age flake because Alice Barrett was also that way inclined. Casting being what it is it is possible that they always intended to have the character as a Frame. I can also see both sides of the Molly Ordway question -- Molly had the baggage of having been married to Michael Randolph and there had been no Randolphs around for quite a while. Sharlene was already covering having been married to a Matthews and with secret child Josie. So in many respects Frankie with a clean slate is a useful option and then you can still bring in Molly later and mine that past as well as having her connected to Frankie and other Frames.  

23 minutes ago, soapfan770 said:

The origin of this came from the now defunct Jumptheshark.com site. Someone had voted this at the moment AW had jumped the shark and wrote this as the comment why:
 

• While I'm not really a fan of soap operas to start with, I watch them with my mother sometimes.  I stopped watching this show when Victoria Windom was such a rude, arrogant bitch to my mother in the ice cream shop in Rhode Island in 1994!

 

AW was on its last legs at the time and that comment was shocking and puzzling for just about all of AW fandom. Was VW guilty of a little rudeness on her part and the poster exaggerated? Perhaps that’s the case. The comment of course sparked a lot of speculation of what VW was really like in real life at the time and for several years afterwards. I don’t think anyone ever asked VW about.

Thank you for the details. I can understand holding a grudge but it seems like a bit of lost perspective (or at least not grasping what jumping the shark is supposed to mean) to insert one's personal grudge against an actress into a discussion that should really be about the creativity of the show itself. 

56 minutes ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

Where can I read about it? I know nothing. As they say tell it to me like a 6 yr old. 

I have not seen a lot of detail, just second-hand references to posts on another board a long time ago, for example:

I remember someone at WoST telling a story about VW.  The poster worked at an ice cream parlor in RI (?) and VW was a nightmare customer.

Sometimes it is mentioned that the owner of the ice cream parlour was the poster's mother and had been a fan of Another World who was so offended that she stopped watching the show. 

Dragging this offhand reference by @soapfan770 over from the Guiding Light thread:

Quote

 

the anecdote about Victoria Wyndham’s 1994 ice cream shop incident

 

I have seen this alluded to before and occasionally it is mentioned that the ice cream shop may have been in Rhode Island. I always wonder about that because I am pretty confident that I remember hearing about an event with at least Grayson McCouch appearing at an ice cream shop in RI around this time. I don't remember whether any other cast members were involved but it does make me wonder whether the Victoria Wyndham incident was supposed to be VW buying ice cream as a civilian or if it was actually related to a professional personal appearance that she did or didn't make.

50 minutes ago, j swift said:

Gordon Thompson's 1991 SOD profile when he was hired as Mason on SB recycled the old Raymond Burr foreign ex-wife story....

He was just too busy for love.

It's not unusual for even heterosexual non-USians to be married to fellow citizens in their home countries. Gordon Thomson was in fact married to Maureen Fitzgerald even if he was fooling her or himself or just the public in the 1960s/70s in Ontario. 

 from the Toronto Star, March 6, 1976.

2 hours ago, DRW50 said:

An alternate version of the Bull pilot. Bull featured Alicia Coppola, among many others like Elisabeth Rohm and Stanley Tucci.

 

Thank you. I don't remember this series and spent far too long wondering when it was going to get to the part about jury selection. Love Stanley Tucci and George Newbern.

I was just listening to Alicia on Linda Dano's podcast yesterday and she mentioned both Christine and Stanley Tucci. I don't recall her mentioning this series but they talked about a guest-starring rôle she had on Monk. Linda had found watching Monk a comfort after her husband died and Alicia had been pleased that Tony Shalhoub recognized her comedic ability. 

On 9/16/2023 at 10:15 AM, Neil Johnson said:

Do you feel this was solidly confirmed?  Are you aware one of the existing scenes from that day's episode actually includes Pat, Dennis, and Louise (along with Alice and Steve)?  So to me, that seems to confirm the episode was not a two character episode.  Unless I'm misunderstanding something.  

 TL;DR: it depends. I'm not the final arbiter but if I intended to make a case I'd evaluate the evidence we have and try to figure out what additional research might make a difference.

Based on the discussion here I was not aware we had any direct evidence of what was in the episode on October 8th, 1973. The link to video that I saw provided in this thread was to a compilation of scenes from different days and on its own could not prove the point definitively.

So if there is an intact version of October 8th, 1973 available to view, given that we have been told that the original script did include scenes with other characters, my first question would be how do we know that it is the broadcast version and not either a version based on the original script or a compilation of multiple broadcasts? 

If it is clear that it is the intact broadcast version then I would see how that can be reconciled with the reference in the EON article and @vetsoapfan's recollections. Were Pat, Dennis, and Louise only supporting players in the Steve/Alice drama and limited to short appearances? If so I would probably say that it still belongs in the list of "special episodes" on the AWHP but I would not describe it as a *pure* "two-hander".

If I had any further doubts or questions (video only rumoured but not available, or provenance not certain) I would try to research (to the extent possible) publications from the mid-1970s after October 1973. Normally I would say that the closer to the original event the information is published the more reliable it should be, but I would also want to take into account that a synopsis might have been provided to the publication before broadcast and might not match up with what was actually broadcast. So part of the question would need to be whether the source was definitely based on the actual broadcast.

At the end of this the evidence may still not be 100% definitive but I'd probably still be willing to say that the episode was trying to do something special even if the EON comparison might have overstated the case. 

19 minutes ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

Okay, I stand corrected. It is shown elsewhere different but I will always go with AWHP if there is an issue. 

It's not so much a question of trusting the source per se but understanding what the supporting evidence is. The AWHP synopses are created from various different sources. I expect less accuracy from the Tune in Tomorrow weekly summaries than from the synopses Eddie and Mike summarized from the scripts.

In the recent discussion about the two-hander episode, it was something the AWHP had no information on. As they say, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". So the evidence we had was initially from a contemporaneous article about the EON episode. And @vetsoapfan was able to confirm that the episode had happened and to explain why the scripts would not have been clear about it. But even without that confirmation, I would say that the EON article showed that it was worth further research.

Eddie and Mike have done tremendous work but there is still more research that can be done.

7 minutes ago, Neil Johnson said:

It's not a very important issue, I suppose.  But the Another World Home Page lists John Randolph's death as March 6.  I've also always heard he died on the second 90-minute episode, which would be March 6.  The first 90-minute episode was March 5. Aside from the AWHP, I don't know any other way to verify this.  

The AWHP details in the daily synopses for 1979 seem to support the March 6 date with the caveat that apparently the script for March 6 was missing from the Bowling Green collection. But John seems to be alive at the end of March 5 and to have had scenes on March 6th.

http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/aw1979d.html

1 hour ago, Sapounopera said:

What I understand from all this is that Rauch and Lemay sabotaged their own show by overestimating Wyndham's (or Mac and Rachel's?) star power and getting rid of major parts of AW's fabric. I can't know why they did this, but they messed things up. 

I would say rather they underestimated Jacqueline Courtney's star power. They did keep Alice on the canvas with recasts and it was later regimes in the 1980s that dispensed with the character and started killing off the younger Matthewses (Sally and Julia).

Likewise, Mac and Rachel and Iris (don't forget about Beverlee McKinsey's star power!) do seem to have been effective in their heyday and it was the Texas spinoff that diluted AW. 

10 hours ago, DRW50 said:

I guess Rauch's and Lemay's hostility toward Courtney and Reinholt overshadowed any memory or discussion of this moment.

I wonder how much promotion or coverage it got at the time and how long they spent on the planning. It's fascinating that the concept was not decided with the original script but rather edited from a conventional script.

On 9/9/2023 at 9:22 AM, Donna L. Bridges said:

This one was Anna Stuart. She is so fun & fine & such a good storyteller.

I have only just started listening to this episode of Linda Dano's podcast and when they mentioned they had done Mame together I swooned. This review makes it sound adorable. 

https://www.thereporteronline.com/2005/06/15/linda-dano-and-anna-stuart-make-stage-debut/

I need to recover before I can listen to the rest of it. 

ETA: Still working my way through, I got very excited when Anna mentioned having worked in industrial musicals but then she didn't go into any details. I highly recommend the documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway though -- Chita Rivera, Florence Henderson, and Martin Short all perfomed  in industrials.

41 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

I was looking in an old soap magazine which praised the Nancy and Mike two-hander on Edge of Night. They said the first time this had happened on a soap was Steve and Alice on AW. Which episode was this? I am trying to remember if we'd talked about it before. 

I don't see anything listed on the AWHP page under Special Episodes. Do you have a date for the EON episode? Maybe there might be something mentioned in the synopses.

@Donna L. Bridges FYI two-hander means only two characters appear in the entire show.

11 hours ago, j swift said:

Agreed, what's missing (in part) is the turn that precipitated Reg's motives.  In hindsight, I can't even recall why he chose to come back to Bay City while everything was going well in Paraguay. 

You would think a dastardly international criminal like The Vulture would be able to manage his affairs through henchmen and not risk being exposed by returning home, even if he is big mad because the father of his daughter's children has come back into her life and bought the stables on his family estate.  There was also some plot where Reginald hired Mitch and Blade to do some kind of digging in a subterranean tunnel between the Cory stables and the Love stables in order to obtain a valuable treasure named The Trump. (I believe Cecile also tried to steal The Trump and possibly it was small enough she could hide it under a jacket?) But it doesn't actually make sense that he needed to be on the spot to handle this. Also why was Scott in Bay City independently? Surely there was a more prestigious law school they could have sent him to, or if not at least one that wouldn't entangle him with the Love and McKinnon families. 

1 hour ago, j swift said:

Also, connecting the Loves and the McKinnons together is an interesting move, given that their origins are based on the relationship of Marly and Jake. 

Ben McKinnon was Marley's first boyfriend and triggered some strong emotions in Donna as she thought of her past with Michael. The decision to replace Ben with his cousin Jake was a good one in that it allowed them to link Jake to Victoria (what are the odds! as far as I know this was never portrayed as anything other than an enormous coincidence given that Mary should not have been working for the Loves yet when Marley and Victoria were born) and give a deep root to the love triangle. If they had stuck with Ben it would have had to be structured completely differently.

Big Bad Reginald was not subtly deployed and the writing didn't give much nuance for anyone to work with. Mary didn't really have much of a relationship with the Loves after the initial bombshell setup although before she and Vince left town she did have some nice interactions with pale pastel Marley played by Anne Heche. Relationships under Lemay and then Swajeski were just so much richer.   

2 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

Also...I like Mary...but I often feel she would have been better served playing  Liz's daughter Susan Matthew's instead.  Susan was a therapist with ties to Jamie, Liz, etc...and could have filled the same function with a tie to the Matthews.

If they had not killed off Julia that would have been another tie as well.

12 hours ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

They both talked about how acting for a soap is so different. And, that not all actors can do it. They said many times actors would be hired & be there for one day & not be able to make time because they were having to have so many lines read to them & they simply would not ever be back. They laughed & said maybe you had to have a weird brain to do it well.

I wonder if they were thinking of the original Reginald (supposedly Jonathan Pryce) who bailed/was fired and was replaced by John Considine. 

3 hours ago, ScottyBman said:

Donna and Felicia bonding over lost daughters.

 

That's the one. Thank you! For a man taking the moral high ground, Michael was awfully cavalier about bringing up Iris when he had made his own decision not to tell Donna that he and Iris had had a relationship and Donna had been upset when she found out.

4 hours ago, DRW50 said:

They sort of hinted as Reuben/Josie too.

There was a point where it seemed like they were going to have Olivia as the spoiler in Matt and Josie's relationship while Josie was in NYC with Reuben, but then they had Olivia focus on Sam while Evan was pursuing Amanda. I don't know how much Sandra Ferguson's issues with RKK changed the way that played out -- maybe they always intended Olivia to pivot to Sam -- but then I was surprised to learn that Alison Hossack, whose Olivia seemed very young to me, is in fact a couple of years older than Sandra Ferguson.

On 9/3/2023 at 12:38 AM, DRW50 said:

The most successful character since Reuben (they could have done a lot more with Reuben)

I found Clayton Prince charismatic as Reuben and he was a good friend to Josie, worked with Zack and Cass and Frankie, and had a little romance with Kasi Lemmons as Tess. So they did try, but maybe the real problem was they didn't do enough to connect him and Ronnie and Tess to the rest of the canvas. Ronnie was dating Zack but although she worked at the hospital and singing in the club she didn't seem close to anyone else. Tess was really only connected to Reuben I think (even though she was supposed to be rich so could have intersected with the Cory or Love families).