JarrodMFiresofLove

55 minutes ago, All My Shadows said:

I've posted on this board with you and PJ for at least 10 years lol I already know what both of you have to say. We watched the same show, so it's safe to say we have a difference in opinion on a lot of what went down.

Here's how Teri/Katie ranked in the episode counts the last few years:

2006: #10 (141 of 251 episodes)
2007: #2 (153 of 251 episodes)
2008: #7 (117 of 253 episodes)
2009: #12 (88 of 252 episodes)
2010: #6 (72 of 183 episodes)

I would hardly the say the show totally revolved around her when there were other performers who were in the top 5 for all of those years (including 2 consecutive years at #1...).

How do we find the complete lists for the episode counts? Are they posted anywhere? I'm curious to see how many episodes the veteran cast (Bob, Kim, Lisa, Nancy, Lucinda) received in the last decade.

10 minutes ago, P.J. said:

 

Hal was from Alva, Kentucky. The story was about him reconciling with his father. His mother had encouraged him to go to college after his brother Billy died in a mining accident. Hal hadn't been back since. I think Half and Barbara got remarried there while she was pregnant with Will. In fact Will is named after his uncle. They did occasionally mention it for a while, especially when Hal's niece Tess came to town. She was played by  Parker Posey. 

 

If memory serves, Fairwinds was still being used at the end. Paul and Emily were living there. Fairwinds started out as the Mediterranean style home Damian and Lily lived in. It then underwent a mysterious remodel into a more traditional mansion with plenty of dark wood. Carly owned it briefly (the only time she had money). It was where Babs lived while burned, then Craig and Ro, and then Paul bought it. Maybe at some point they stopped referring to it as Fairwinds, and by the end the set was chopped down like all the others. 

 

I think the thing about Ruxton Hills was it was Steve's development, and one the fire happened, he went bankrupt. But that's a very long time ago, and details are fuzzy.

Thanks PJ. Yes, Hal and Barbara's remarriage in Alva is what I was thinking of. Did Hal's parents ever feature on the show again? Or was it just Tess? I do remember Parker Posey's stint as Tess.

I'd forgotten that Steve's construction company was involved in developing Ruxton Hills. That was during Steve's last year on the show.

1 hour ago, Soapsuds said:

Gawd...they are having the live ATWT chat on Facebook and those present are Trent Dawson, Fluffy and Austin Peck....talk about horrible....no Martha at all either......who wants to ask those fools questions...

Well there was a big fire explosion there and a murder so I doubt anyone wanted to live there.....LOL.  Actually didn't Derek and Lily move to a house a few years later in Ruxton Hills? The one that Derek's dad blew up too....LOL

I don't know. But it would have been rebuilt. Sometimes Marland created detailed situations that could have been used again later in other storylines but then just dropped these things. At one point there was a community named Alva where something happened to Barbara and Hal. That was dropped. Ten years later Barbara lived at a place called Fair Winds (which I think Hogan Scheffer created) and after Scheffer was let go, the writers in the last years of the show never really mentioned it again. And what about the island where Duncan's castle was? It was pretty much forgotten about after 2000.

On 6/19/2018 at 5:52 PM, Soaplovers said:

I actually didn't find Holmes to be stiff, but more serious than what the previous actors playing Tom were.  Although Holmes was one that got better looking as he aged, imho.

Yes, Scott Holmes is my favorite Tom. He just got better looking as he aged. And he had that wonderful voice. Plus he worked so well with Ellen Dolan. Plus, unlike the other adult Toms he was not interested in running off to Hollywood. So he gave the show a very stable thing by ensuring that Tom never had to be recast again. His scenes with Don Hastings and Eileen Fulton were always so respectfully played. You could believe them as his parents just by the way he interacted with them. Very professional. Also I don't remember Holmes ever flubbing a line. A lot of actors over the years would miss cues or give bad line readings where dialogue was messed up because of a forgotten word or phrase, but Holmes never did that. He was just really smooth when he was on screen.

1 hour ago, Soapsuds said:

Just saw this and picture quality is superb. This is the Ruxton Hills Murder. The episode following this one was included in the DVD release unfortunately this one wasn't. Unless I am wrong...I need to double check...LOL

 

Marland spent so much time building up the stuff with Ruxton HIlls. But as soon as that mystery was solved the place was never mentioned again. It was supposed to be some new ritzy subdivision in Oakdale. You would think one of the later families introduced on the show would have lived there. But it was totally forgotten by Marland and by every other subsequent writer.

1 hour ago, MichaelGL said:

So when did Henry Sleasar leave Capitol? 

I believe it was around May 1986. Slesar was there for just a year, having started in the summer of 1985. Lipton wrote the show until it went off the air in late March 1987.

I notice in the section for Episode Writers and Directors (in the Resource Archive) there's no thread for Capitol:

https://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/forum/5-episode-writers-and-directors/

2 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

 

You could have still had this happen and still have Gerald Gordon come back to operate on Eleanor.. and he hears all about Althea's latest dramas.. and the two start to bicker and fight.

 

However, this time.. it had to be Althea because Eleanor has just been released from the hospital.. and she did insist on Althea coming over. and than Althea had the accident.. so it will garner sympathy for Eleanor.  I do like the change in focus with Depriest coming on since now she is showing Eleanor in a sympathetic light.. and Scott/Wendy are being shown in a not so sympathetic light.  Cenedella was trying to show Scott/Wendy as in the right..yet the acting choices of the actors playing them didn't reflect that.

 

With that said, I do give a little bit of slack to Depriest since she came in, and had to write off two long time characters (Alan/Carolee) right away with little to no notice.. and usher in Gerald Gordon for a visit.

 

I actually like Depriest's stint thus far because it's actually interesting and it makes me want to tune in the next day while Cenedella's show had nice character scenes (as well as scenes with recurring hospital patients).. but I never felt anxious to see the next episode.  And since she joined at the end of Feb.. that meant that the majority of the ratings drop of the 1975 to 1976 season was due to him, and not her.

 

But if I were Althea, I would have stayed home since she seems very accident prone.

Excellent post. Thanks for sharing your views.

6 minutes ago, Khan said:

 

Usually, that's a sign that TPTB have run out of ideas for a character.  Sort of like Raymond Chandler's edict about bringing in a man with a gun whenever you have no idea what to write next.

It would have been better if they made Eleanor fall through the window. This would have still put Althea into the story as Eleanor's doctor and keep her involved with Scott through Eleanor. And if Scott had planned to ask Eleanor for a divorce, but now Eleanor had this other setback. This whole thing was rushed, presumably to set the stage for Gerald Gordon's return.

11 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

Just watched the 'Althea  falls through the window' stunt and must say it was very clumsily staged.

 

I know we are talking about something from years ago that was constrained by time and budget, but it was a fail for me.

 

Firstly Althea was at most a couple of feet of the ground.

 

Then Eleanor clumsily spills coffee on her hand (Lois Smith just randomly jerks her arm) and falls back into Althea,causing her to lose her balance and smash through a large window.

 

It was not a clear sheet of glass but rather wooden framed panes,making up the window.

 

No way would a knock into that cause the whole thing to shatter.

 

It would have been more believable for Althea to lose her balance,fall forward and knock her head into a table corner.

 

Rant over...am I being too harsh? What did others think?

The bigger problem I have with these plots is that once again another doctor becomes a patient. We seldom see these medical professionals having scenes with recurring characters who are admitted to Hope Memorial for routine procedures. Instead we get these near-death experiences for the main characters who have to be treated by each other. You'd think this was a private facility devoted to the medical care of the staff instead of a facility open to the public administering healthcare to the surrounding community. Plus at this point Althea's had so many emergencies that have required her to receive medical attention for herself that it's become a joke.

55 minutes ago, danfling said:

Ms. Labine and son certainly did tug at the viewers' heartstrings when she created Eli, the young man with AIDS on One Life to Live.  However, that character later simply disappeared from the story, and that was unfortunate.

 Who are these:  Stuart Blackburn, Kim Revill and Camille Marchetta?

Soap writers who credits can be found on the IMDb.

It's been a lot of fun reading the replies. This is my new favorite thread. Since 2015 I have been working on my own soap, based on a community where I grew up in the midwest. I always felt like the education I received in writing and the experiences I have had require me to write in this format.

I had started by doing a semi-autobiographical story about my father and myself, then realized how complex our relationship is; and how even more complex my relationship is with my mother. I found myself having to explore their backgrounds and the people we knew in my hometown to "explain" my complex relationships with my parents. Plus my father ended up having two other families, one that was a secret to me and my sisters which meant we were living a soap opera in real life. Therefore my story about life in the midwest which originally had a beginning, middle and end turned out to be something I had to adapt into a serial form to explore deeper ongoing issues in my family/families. I suspect that Agnes Nixon and some of the best soap writers did this because all the characters in the ongoing drama we write become pieces of psycho-therapy in our own feeling and healing. Sometimes I look at the storylines I've created for my characters and wonder if these are all personalities of mine or just fragments of my one family-based persona. Does that make sense?

I believe a good soap writer keeps track of all the characters despite occasional overlaps and similarities because each one is created to tell the story of one thing we have felt in life. There is one male character in my show that went through several foster homes and adoptive families and carries the pain of that with him in everything he does as an adult; he represents the part of me (Jarrod the adult writer) that carries a huge chip about things, things I can't let go and use to justify my anger in certain situations. So when I write him he's a fictional construct but he's very real; and I feel like I am clinging to the hurt little boy in me when I create scenarios and dialogue for him. I bet that's what Agnes did when she wrote Erica Kane. What makes it interesting is that as the character ages along the timeline the hurt boy part of him never goes away and remains with him as an older middle aged man. Interesting, isn't it? And I do think the best soap writers keep characters consistent like this, because again they represent the one thing we have felt and continue to feel.

I am posting my comment here as a free thinking exercise. I am guessing some of you who contribute on this thread had or still have aspirations to write for a soap. In my case it's really grown into a huge project. I have a guy who helps read through all my material, questioning me on all my story decisions. He uses a large document we call The Guide which is my expanding list of characters with biographical notes on each one I create. Then we have what are the bibles. Unlike Nixon, Bell or Marland who only wrote one ongoing bible, I wrote four separate ones for the characters. This is because while adhering to the timelines in my own family, I wanted to create a show that was set in the past when the characters were younger, a show set in today with modern issues with the characters as they are right now; and a show set in the future where I think the characters would logically all progress to; and then there's a separate bible for my mother's family; because it occurred to me that all of what happens to me in my father's family has a mirror relationship to what happens in my mother's family since she was from a different place than my father and her people and social class was extremely different from his.

Basically I have what's becoming a literary saga on my hands. And I think the bibles can be published later as books in a series...and they can also function as blueprints for the scripts in a long-running soap that occurs in separate time periods.

Is anyone else attempting to do something like this? The guy who checks my stuff helps me get a bit more self reflexive. He'll say why does Character X do this? Why are you having Character Y do this? And I have to explain it because this is what my father did or what my mother did or what I did. Sometimes I've really screwed up a plot and his comments help me fix it. When you have a fresh pair of objective eyes going over your material it helps you eliminate the plot holes, the character inconsistencies and it helps you with pacing.

I love doing mystery storylines, not all are murder mysteries, I do mysteries about paternity, mysteries about dual identities, one story was a mystery about an out of body experience a character has, told as comic relief. I love it when he is reading my notes and he has no idea where I'm going with a character and how the mystery will play out. If he's hooked then I know my audience will be hooked too. I always see the big outcomes first. Like I knew I was going to have a grandmother character ruin her granddaughter's life by accidentally running over and killing the girl's best friend. So it was a matter of how we were going to build and get to the car crash and back fill all the early scenes so the grandmother and granddaughter had this very strong relationship that suddenly gets thrown into turmoil. And in my mystery stories I always know where it's headed, who the culprit is, what secret they're really hiding and it makes the payoff so much fun to write.

During this process I see what writers in the genre have influenced me most. My greatest influences seem to be Stuart Blackburn, Kim Revill (love her), Bill Bell, Robert Shaw, Jean Rouverol, Claire Labine, Camille Marchetta, James Lipton, Henry Slesar, Barbara Esenstein & James Harmon Brown; Bridget Dobson; James Reilly; Pam Long; Doug Marland; Eileen & Robert Mason Pollock; and of course Agnes Nixon.

Another reason I am doing this four soaps in one project is because I think the golden age of serial storytelling doesn't have to end. Soaps do not have to be a thing of the past. Telling our stories now can help people tell their stories in the future. When I read about past writers on this thread or read comments about things occurred on cancelled soaps I find information that I can use as a guide post in how I construct my own ongoing dramas. - Jarrod

Okay, everyone, I found the SUCCESSFUL SCRIPTWRITING book (my public library had it online). It won't let me copy and paste the text, so I have retyped the important parts of the interview Robert J. Shaw did. It follows below:

*****

Page 131-132: "I did a show for a long time called "Search for Tomorrow," and there was a very fine actress on it named Mary Stuart. Mary is one of the best in the business, and she has played the lead in "Search" for all 25 years (meaning he wrote for her around 1976). When we go to New York, one of the obligatory things is to take Mary to lunch so she can find out what's coming up for her. One time we finished dessert and she said 'Well, are there any exciting plans?' and I said 'As a matter of fact, Mary, I don't want to get you in a stir but in the next few months you're going to have a mastectomy. Don't worry, it'll come out fine.' She said 'Oh that's very interesting...it'll be my third.'

Page 132: "...the pace was painfully slow in the old days. I had a show, "Love of Life" where I literally had a woman in labor for seven weeks. Thirty-five shows and she was still in O.B. waiting to deliver the child."

Page 133: "I think our audience has gotten younger...the important audience to me is the 18 to 25 group. I know that's what Procter & Gamble wants. They feel, with justification, that your grandmother has been using a certain kind of soap all their lives and nothing is going to make her change. But younger people are very receptive to advertising and have an open mind about which products they're going to buy."

Page 134: "Procter & Gamble buys a new soap maybe every ten years. "Texas" is a perfect example. They let it go two years before they took it off the air, and it never got a rating above 2.4. But they are very patient, so it doesn't allow a lot of room for new programming. "General Hospital" for example is 24 years old (meaning this interview was done in 1987).

Page 135: "The head writer, while he or she is highly paid and has many responsibilities, is usually the first one whose head is chopped off. They never think to examine the whole committee, it's the head writer's fault when things go badly."

"In the old days of early television I use to write all five scripts. Those were half-hour scripts and I could write five in two days, easily, and take three days off. But no longer. Now they've become productions. Soap operas got that name not only because they sold soap but because the average scene was played out in the kitchen. Now "General Hospital" has a whole city underground; they're going to freeze Port Charles and now we've got a new character we're bringing in, a police commissioner, and he has a secret room with so many gadgets you wouldn't believe it: teleprinters; computers and so forth. This all takes time to write." (I assumed he was talking about Sean Donely, but Sean was introduced in October 1984 by Anne Howard Bailey. So maybe he's talking about someone else?)

On page 136 he says they are about six weeks ahead writing scripts before they are filmed and air. He says GH has paid research people. An actual doctor or nurse they can call to ask medical questions.

Page 137: "I can do "Search for Tomorrow" for five years and think, 'If I have to write one more line for that woman, I will go out of my mind.' So you leave one show and go on to another one. The characters will be different, and that can be stimulating, although of course the stories won't be all that different. There are only a few basic plots. The triangle always works, the Lady and the Tiger always works. I think every writer to some extent follows the dictum 'when in doubt, steal!'

"A good head writer on a soap makes between $6000 and $7500 a week, 52 weeks a year (mid 80s wages)."

2 hours ago, robbwolff said:

And his obit said that Jo didn't have one but two mastectomies. 

 

Paul Raven's post with Shaw's timeline of writing stints makes me pretty certain that the soap book I saw featured his storyline plans for Love of Live, with Meg returning in the late 60s. I'll have to get over to Alexander Library at Rutgers and see if I can find it. Mind you, it was decades ago when I came across the book. 

Perhaps the book you are thinking of is "From Mary Nobel to Mary Hartman" written by Madeleine Edmonson and David Rounds. Rounds had appeared on Love of Love in the 60s and later had a featured role on Mary Hartman. The book was published in 1976 and can be found on Amazon. I mention this because I read it once years ago and I think it had story information for LOL.

Yes, maybe Shaw stated things incorrectly during the interview. Or maybe he had been an uncredited consultant on LOL in the 70s. Considering the way these headwriters were moving around all the time, it would not surprise me if some of them were brought in to fix other writers' material.

In the event I have gotten some of this wrong, I am going to re-purchase the Successful Scriptwriting book. Since I no longer have my original copy of the book. I will re-read the interview with Shaw and quote it verbatim here what he said, so we have a better less confusing record of these things.

Is there a way to add in images/photos? I'd like to show everyone the cover page for Shaw's unproduced bible.

10 hours ago, j swift said:

I understand killing Nadine from a story perspective.  She had an almost perfect arc as a character.  She was introduced as very unlikable, then she did a really bad thing and then, she got a redemption through her reconnecting with Buzz which set her up as a martyr when she was killed.  Considering that she was always a supporting character it is remarkable that she got a full redemption, that is rare for female characters in general and seems like a herculean writer's task for a character who conspired to keep a baby from his mother and was giving gold-digger advice to her daughter.

 

On the other hand, Peter(was that the baby's name?) was a great candidate for SORASing.

Yes, his name was Peter. I think he ended up living with Bridget and Dylan in Minnesota.

9 hours ago, amybrickwallace said:

Why did GL drop Bridget Reardon and not bring her back until the show's final weeks? One would think she'd be a viable part of the core of GL for years to come.

I agree. She and her son were lost in the shuffle with all the changes in producers and headwriters. Peter should have shown up in Vanessa's life again. Didn't Vanessa adopt him for awhile or look after him? This plot involved all three of them, Bridget/Nadine/Vanessa. Plus Peter was Roger's grandson (he was Hart's son). So Peter would have been the half-brother of R.J., Cassie's boy. R.J. was another kid who was not aged and seldom appeared on camera after he was born. Cassie's focus was on her other children, Tammy and Will.

1 hour ago, robbwolff said:

 

Thanks for sharing. That bible sounds quite interesting.

 

Gibson's character Lynn departed Love of Life in November 1978 according to synopses I read online. Prior to that, she didn't seem to have much of a storyline. Perhaps Shaw was head writer back in 1976 when Lynn grappled with alcoholism. 

 

I can't recall the title of the book but I remember coming across a fascinating book about soaps in my college library back around 1984. It was written in the 60s or 70s and included storyline projections for Love of Life. It discussed Bruce Sterling cheating on Van and involved the return of Van's sister Meg when their mother got ill. Not sure why that storyline never came to pass. This was well before Labine and Mayer brought Meg back to the show.

So Shaw must have written LOL before SFT. He suggested the character of Lynn was basically forced on him by the producers who were eager to court a young(er) audience. So it would have been around the time she was introduced on the show.

Re: the bible for "The Fires of Love" there's a Columbia Pictures/TV logo on the cover, which means that studio would have produced it if CBS had bought it. A few years after Shaw's death, around 2003, I found my copy in a box of things when I was moving and re-read it. I was curious as to who might now own the rights to it. Shaw was gay and had no heirs. It turned out he bequeathed his estate to a school he attended in his youth in Wisconsin. I contacted a secretary at the school who put me in touch with the school's attorney. He had no idea the unproduced bible even existed. I did not send him a copy. They were more interested in any money that could have come from it, but since it was never produced, no money had ever been made from it. I was going to donate it to the UCLA Film & Televsion Archive for research purposes but never got around to it. My former professor, whom Shaw had mentored, passed away last year. So I may be the only one who has a copy of it.

3 minutes ago, MichaelGL said:

Does anyone remember the confrontation between Nadine and Vanessa after the truth came out about Nadine taking Bridget's baby? 

It was one of my earliest memories of GL, and I wish I could find it online. Such gripping scenes between MK and JC. Seeing how Nadine and Vanessa butted heads, I can't help but to think that Nadine was a substitute for Nola. I can't, however, say that I'm that mad about it, Jean Carol was phenomenal as was Nadine. 

Yeah, I think it was a mistake killing Nadine off. I never understood that decision. Just like I didn't understand the need to kill off Maureen either. At least Vanessa was on until the very end. To answer your question, I haven't seen any clips of that confrontation about Bridget's baby. Though I do remember watching it live. What month and year was that?

24 minutes ago, Soaplovers said:

I think both Marland and Long could write certain male and female characters well, and at the same time, could be off the mark with other male/female characters.

 

Marland struggled to write certain female characters on GL that weren't his creation, and some of his male characters were written better when Long took over.  I often think if Pam Long had ever been head-writer on ATWT, I think of the ways she would infused that soap with a little bit of fun and emotion.. since Marland eventually turned ATWT into such a downer in the late 80s/early 90s (great intricate stories, but such a cold apathetic tone.. sometimes Long would never be accused of doing).

 

Laiman... I do recall her era of Days had a lot of strongly written female characters (Jennifer, Kimberly, Kayla, Adrienne, Melissa, Eve etc)...and it seemed like the men were written less well rounded.  And I do recall her brief stint on AW had lots of great material for Paulina and Lila.  

 

Lorraine Broderick always had a quirky sense of humor infused in her writing  (i.e. Janet/Erica/Skye hiding Kinders body is my favorite example... and all the women in Oak Haven right before AMC ended).

A plot I liked on AMC in the mid-80s was the one where Erica's sister Silver was introduced. Didn't she die and get wrapped in an oriental rug and thrown into Palmer Courtlandt's pond? The mother Goldie Kane turned out to be the killer I think. Maybe I'm misremembering this. Who wrote the Goldie and Silver arc? Was that Broderick?

Re: Laiman...yes, all the women were over idealized. Even young Eve was written so we could sympathize with her, despite the fact she was turning tricks and had caused Kimberly to miscarry.

One criticism people had about Marland's work in the early 90s was he was doing too many business stories. All that stuff about Lucinda trying to prevent Connor and Evan from taking over her company; Barbara's fashion business; Lisa's multiple businesses; Cal had some sort of business; Roseanna Cabot was an heiress of some car manufacturing company; Angel's father Henry owned a chain of furniture stores I think...Kirk and Emily were involved in business plots, so was James...it was too much...Marland was getting away from the hospital stories and domestic stuff that had been the show's trademark.

8 hours ago, Khan said:

It's just incredible to me how Robert J. Shaw could write for so many landmark shows -- DALLAS, PEYTON PLACE, GH, etc. -- and yet be so incredibly mediocre.

I like the comment earlier where someone said he was a journeyman writer. He obviously did something right to keep getting hired all the time, to work on so many hit shows in this genre (in both daytime and primetime).

Incidentally, for those who are interested-- the book I keep mentioning where Shaw was interviewed is called SUCCESSFUL SCRIPTWRITING. The book has chapters on all facets of writing for film and television. There is a whole chapter on daytime soaps which features the interview with Shaw. Jurgen Wolff and Kerry Cox are the editors. I bought the original hardcover in 1988. It was published in paperback in 1991 and the paperback is dirt cheap on Amazon. Obviously the material and  interviews might seem dated now, but it's still a good book with insights on the writing process and I recommend it.

21 minutes ago, robbwolff said:

His New York Times obit says he was hired to write Search for Tomorrow in the 1977-1978 season. That matches what other sources say. His obit says he wanted to give Jo a breast cancer storyline and a mastectomy but Mary Stuart had said that Jo had already had two mastectomies. Not sure how accurate that claim is.

 

In what ways was his soap bible brilliant? What was it about? I recall an article in late 1981 that CBS chose Capitol over another soap titled Beverly Hills.

 

Interesting about the proposed storyline for Mary Stuart. Amy Gibson, the teen actress on LOL, has a very incomplete credit on the IMDb, which says she was on that show from the late 70s to the early 80s. So maybe Shaw went to LOL after he left SFT. That would have been before he wrote for Dallas.

Shaw's proposed series was called "The Fires of Love" which is what I am referring to with my screen name. It kind of sounds like the name of a Harlequin romance, doesn't it? But it's a very sharply drawn portrait of a troubled east coast family. The backdrop is the cosmetics industry, but there are other elements. The first half is an overview of all the main characters; there are about 20, suggesting this was for a half-hour daytime serial. And the second half is where he outlines the storylines for the first two years.

It covers topics like an unwanted pregnancy, drug use, and a brother and sister who fall in love with each other (one turns out to have been adopted, but the viewers aren't supposed to know in the first six months they aren't technically related by blood when they start having romantic feelings for each other...which might have been why it was not given the green light, though that could have easily been revised so the viewers did know upfront it wasn't actually incest). There are a few other storylines he outlines in it. I think the best one is an Erica Kane type schemer who marries into the main family but then is set up for murder by her new mother-in-law and ends up going to prison and giving birth to a baby behind bars. It was brilliant the way he wove it all together, and I think it would have been a hit. He also had a few minority characters, a black model who worked in the cosmetics industry as well as two young guys who lived together with the black model, where it was implied the guys were gay.

I would love to have known if Shaw was creating any of those characters for specific actors to play. I never met Shaw. But one of my professors at USC had taken over his course load when Shaw officially retired. She gave me a copy of the unproduced bible which Shaw had shared with her. She also was a writer in the soap industry but had started as an actress. She obviously looked up to Shaw, and I think he might have been a mentor to her.

10 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

I don't believe that Robert Shaw wrote Search for 5 years. 

 

The thing with a lot of these headwriters is that they wrote maybe a maximum of 2-3 years (often less) on a particular show, which in itself is obviously no easy task, but doesn't really test their abilities to plot and plan longterm.

 

That is why Bill Bell, Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon rank as first tier because they wrote for many years and kept their shows on track for that time.

In the interview  Shaw did (in the book I mentioned) he claimed he was headwrtier on SFT for five years. He didn't say which years it was. Even if he was exaggerating, his time on the show is still not reflected on the IMDb. He makes a joke that as much as he loved writing for Mary Stuart, he reached a point where if he had to write another thing for her character Jo he would go out of his mind. That's where he talks about burnout and how sometimes it's good for headwriters to go to another show and start over with a new set of characters and actor personalities. It seemed like he felt restricted by having to write  material for Stuart all the time since she was clearly the star of SFT. Even when Jo was not in a major storyline of her own she was always appearing in the stories of the other characters.

He also had a funny comment about advertisers...and how certain things couldn't be done right before commercial on one of the shows he wrote or the advertisers would complain. Basically the sponsors wanted the audience to be properly led into the commercials and had specific ideas of how that should be done. I remember another comment where he talks about a female teen character he was forced to write for in the 70s. It was Lynn Henderson on Love of Life (played by Amy Gibson). He said the producers just decided overnight to put a young teen front and center, so he had to juggle other stories to accommodate this. I see he does not have a credit for Love of Life on the IMDb so maybe he was only in charge of that show briefly. I got the impression he did not like working on Love of Life.

In the interview he talked briefly about a sensational plot he did on GH in the mid-80s. Where the city was frozen? Is that what happened? I didn't watch GH during those years, but he laughed about freezing all of Port Charles. He said the push was for action and more over the top storylines which is what he did. He took the gig on GH when his bible for a proposed half hour soap on CBS was not given the green light. Though he does not say in the interview, I think Claire Labine had also submitted a proposal to CBS for a new series. But as I said, CBS went with Capitol. It's a shame because the bible Shaw wrote for the unproduced series is brilliant in so many ways.

16 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

What makes a good head-writer?  Is it someone with a clear vision of long term story with wiggle room in case an actor left and/or got pregnant?  Or is there something else needed to be a good head writer?

 

I ask because I finally got to see some of Robert Cenedella's work on The Doctor's.. and his stint wasn't all bad or all good either.  On episodes where he was the script writer, it was a very strong episode full of great scenes and character development.. but he didn't seem to have a good grasp of long term story and/or pacing.  And this is just my impression of seeing his 6 month stint on The Doctors.  

A litmus test I use is how they can write for both men and women. When a male writer only writes for the male leads, or a female writer only writes for the female leads, it always goes off balance (in my opinion). This is where I think Doug Marland excelled, because he wrote evenly for both men and women. Pam Long, whom I love, wrote more for the women, but she also had an interesting way of idealizing and demonizing the men. So there's a great tension between the sexes in her material for GL, SFT, SB and OLTL.

In my view Leah Laiman is an example of someone who could not write adequately for both sexes. I think her stint at Days and her later stint at ATWT show she clearly favored the women and as a result the male characters become nothing more than cardboard props. Also Craig Carlson, when he was writing OLTL, over emphasized the Buchanan men, and the women were just there to blend in with the scenery.

In some cases where there is a husband-wife writing team like Bridget & Jerry Dobson or Richard & Carolyn Culliton, we get more balance...but not surprisingly the husband-wife teams write stronger material for married couples and don't always get the single characters right.

Grant Aleksander had only recently left his more popular role on GL to go west to get in primetime and the movies. I think he only signed a 13-week contract, probably to pay the rent in L.A. while he was waiting for primetime opportunities to open up. He was written as such a sleaze bag from the start I doubt he was ever meant to be long-term. As we know Aleksander didn't make it in primetime or the movies and went back to New York where he rejoined GL (causing his replacement John Bolger to be unceremoniously dropped from the role of Phillip Spaulding).

One thing we're seeing in the May 1986 episodes is the transition from Henry Slesar to James Lipton as headwriter. After Baxter and Clarissa remarry, it is all Lipton's material until the end (March 1987). Lipton wrote out Tyler and abruptly killed off Jenny, in order to facilitate a Julie-Zed relationship which I think was a mistake.

Lipton also took Sloane entirely out of Trey's orbit by hooking her up with Prince Ali. And he decided Trey didn't belong with Kelly either, so Kelly ends up falling more in love with Thomas...and Trey gets a new wife in the form of Teri Hatcher. Some of Lipton's stuff was quite good...but the transition from Slesar's material to his was a bit jarring and not as smooth as it could have been.

On 5/16/2018 at 2:22 PM, MichaelGL said:

Thanks to everyone for the input about Shaw. I guess it now makes sense as to why people rarely mention him lol

They SHOULD mention him. He was an interview subject in an important book about scriptwriting in the late 80s. He was a professor at the University of Southern California during that time, after he had finished head writing GH. In the book he talks about his first job as head writer of Search for Tomorrow; he says he had that job for five years. He talks about how head writers can get burned out, and also about things head writers shouldn't do. He also described what it was like writing scripts for Peyton Place, and about his time as head writer for a show in the 70s where he joked they had one character pregnant for a whole year!

His credits on the IMDb are certainly not complete, since his work on SFT is not listed. And in addition to Somerset, I think he also wrote on Love of Life for awhile in the 70s.

I have the unproduced bible he wrote for a new daytime soap in the early 80s. CBS considered airing it (the network instead went with Capitol). Reading Shaw's ideas for what would have been his show, you can see what themes mattered most to him.

The problem with Loving is they tried to combine Agnes' style of storytelling with Doug Marland's out of the gate. And they were just too different. Both subsequently left. Loving ran too long, I don't think it ever had any strong years in terms of awards or ratings.

Slesar was a little too campy for my tastes and I think he was getting incredibly lazy at the end of his run on Edge. Too much death, too many new characters introduced for one storyline who would inevitably get killed off. It became predictable and too formulaic. I do think he did an excellent job when he wrote Capitol from 1985 to 1986. He seemed inspired by the traditional families on that show and he gave them suspenseful melodrama, not campy murder mysteries.

Bill Bell was obviously inspired by classic movies. He lifted a lot of plots from gangster pictures, medical dramas and film noir and grafted them on to his shows. But he was very skilled at doing this and knew how to write to the strengths of his actors. His son Bradley also does a lot of creative plagiarism but it works. One thing Bill Bell really contributed to the genre was his inclusion of legal characters, since he had been a lawyer before turning to writing for television. So his trial scenes were always much more realistic than what we'd see on other programs. When he retired that was one of the first noticeable declines in quality on Y&R-- the succeeding writers seem unable to craft logical legal dramas the way Bill Bell did. The courtroom scenes are mostly laughable now on Y&R.

But I still think Agnes Nixon was the genre's best writer. And I would also rate Pam Long quite highly. She brought all of her southern background on to Texas and Guiding Light. She created some of GL's most memorable and long lasting characters (way more than just Reva, though Reva was her crowning achievement); and as a feminist she believed in showing women as strong and capable in business. She stayed away from psycho chick stories which almost every male scribe has done, including Bill Bell; and made the women achievers. Her stories had heart and they made us laugh too.

Almost all of them were a mixed bag. Even Bill Bell had stories that didn't work. So did Doug Marland. It's just that when they got it right, they REALLY got it right and gave the genre some of its most defining moments.

The headwriter that I think was the most consistent was probably Agnes Nixon, and that's because Viki Lord and Erika Kane were extensions of her own troubled relationship with her father. So every story she did for those women and the other characters which mirrored the struggles of those women came from an ongoing source of conflict she still had with her father years after his death. You have to suffer like Agnes Nixon to be that consistently good in this genre. Plus being Catholic with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt like Agnes had, doesn't hurt. She used the genre to exorcise her demons. The other writers did not get that personal with the format, like she did.

On 5/23/2018 at 4:09 PM, Soaplovers said:

 

The problem is that it seemed to have been nicely resolved in September 1975 with Toni declaring she was choosing herself.  Mike then left for Brazil.. while Alan/Toni dealt with lingering feelings at first.  She then focused on balancing motherhood and her career.. while he gradually moved on with MJ.  I even liked the scene where MJ told Toni that she and Alan were starting to date.. and Toni gently telling her that she doesn't own Alan and even wishing them luck.

 

I did think it would have been interesting to see how Mike would have reacted to the changes that had gone for the last three months he was gone.. but oddly, it seems like we are back at square 1.. instead of continuing the organic progression that had been nicely set up the last three months where both Alan/Toni had moved on.. and seeing how Mike would have adjusted to the fact that he hadn't moved on.  Instead we aren't seeing that.  The current head-writer supposedly is set to leave in the next month or so.. but I'm starting to see why he was replaced.

The triangle lacks any real suspense because it is always guaranteed that Toni will choose Mike. This is because Mike came back from the dead and he's the son of the show's lead male character. If Mike had stayed dead, then maybe Toni and MJ would have fought over Alan. But Alan is clearly the runner up when Mike is around.