Broderick

I wonder if Jill would've ever realized he was the same kid who lived in the Foster house. Seems like his name was "Charles Victor Howard" when Eve was rooming with Jill. Then when he reappeared as J Eddie Peck about 12 years later he'd magically become "Cole", lol.

"You Don't Bring Me Flowers" sung by a male (Neil Diamond) would've probably worked better 😆 I vaguely remember this show from when I was a little kid. From an urban, corporate standpoint, where very few women held upper-level positions, it was a clever idea, perhaps for a 90-minute movie, but it didn't seem terribly sustainable as a nightly show. Once you'd learned the "gimmick", you'd learned it, and that was that. For the rest of us, out in agrarian America, it seemed like a rather silly concept from the get-go. In a farming family, the husband was usually the farmer (breadwinner), but the wife was his partner in the venture and had equal input. She also ran the house. And invariably, there was an old widow woman down the road who knew more about agriculture and family life than either the husband OR the wife, and she was ultimately the person everyone listened to. ("Marsha, tell Jeff he'd better not plant his corn next week. There's going to be another hard freeze; I saw it in the Farmer's Almanac. And honey, you'd better re-think your kitchen design. You're putting too many steps between the refrigerator and stove, and you're going to wear yourself out walking back and forth. And there's no sense in taking Jeff Junior to the doctor. His leg ain't broken, it's just sprained -- put some ice on it, and it'll be better in the morning.") Everybody just said "yes ma'am" and did what the old lady said, because she was always right. Never was a question who the real "boss" was! That was probably a strange concept in New York, LA, and Chicago, but it was everyday life for most rural folks in the 1970s. All That Glitters was clearly designed for an urban audience, and once they'd seen it for the first week, the point had been made, and there wasn't much sense in continuing to watch.

I think the "downturn" for the Abbotts started the day Brenda Dickson sauntered off the set for the last time (plume, feather boa, veil, and all). Say what you will about Miss Dickson -- and we've all had our say, lol -- but there was some undeniable chemistry between Brenda's Jill and all the other members of the Abbott family -- especially Jack, Ashley, and Traci. (Even if the chemistry was merely created by their well-written characters interacting with an insufferable hip-swiveling, bosom-heaving, eye-rolling villainess.) When circumstances led to Miss Dickson's exit, she was obviously replaced with a more credible actress, but a certain degree of humorous and often frustrating chemistry was gone from the Abbott family & their chief antagonist. Then Traci limped off to grad school in 1987 (though she did return), Miss Eileen left us in 1988 for years, and Terry Lester left us in 1989 for good. The recasts turned Jill, Ashley and Jack into more conventionally drawn soap characters, while Miss Dickson's utterly bizarre Jill, Eileen's assertive Ashley, and Terry's smiling playboy Jack had provided a more unique experience and were doubtless more fun to craft stories for.

Honestly, I think it offered a good lesson about what to do (and what not to do). Find a space that resembles your actual show, practice with the cameras first so that you don't zoom into nose hairs, don't drown out the actors with bad music, be careful with the make-up so you aren't filming corpse-like zombies, don't have everyone ambling about aimlessly like frost-bitten vagabonds, and resist the temptation to make the whole town look frigid & condemned.

I guess they filmed where they could do it cheaply, but I always thought Newark or Hoboken could have given them a more "urban" feel like the Springfield we'd often seen on TV, given them a greater variety of places to shoot, and also provided them with some parks and rural spots if they wanted to show people drifting aimlessly in front of a snowbank or an algae-covered pond.

Yes, she was from Birmingham and left for Ole Miss. Espy was from Dothan and left for Vanderbilt. (I believe he started in mechanical engineering, but graduated in something like philosophy that didn't offer much "job market potential", so he shrugged and said, "Reckon I'll try acting," went to NYC for a short while to do theatre and ended up in Hollywood on Y&R.) His brother Kip was a lawyer in West Texas. When their mama was diagnosed with dementia about 30 years ago, Bill popped back up pretty much full-time as her caregiver.

Well, he definitely always liked golf. Even when he was on Y&R, he used to show up on golf courses with his fraternity brothers from Vanderbilt, whenever he would come visit his mama. He dragged Jim Houghton down here one time (about 1975) to raise money for a local boy who had cancer. Not very many years ago, Bill did some stage work at the Southeast Alabama Community Theatre. Like I said earlier, I don't think he ever cared much about "stardom"; he seemed like a guy who'd rather tend to his mama and hang out with his friends than audition for movies. (Dothan Eagle, August 24, 1975) Actor Bill Espy, a Dothan native, and Jim Houghton, also an actor, were met at the airport Friday by Charlie Silva. Silva underwent lung and throat surgery 2 1/2 weeks ago and expects to begin cancer treatments this week. Espy and Houghton, who play Snapper and Greg in the daytime TV series "The Young and the Restless" will emcee a six-hour musical extravaganza at the Dothan Civic Center this afternoon. Proceeds will go toward Silva's medical expenses. Featured artist will be Bobby Goldsboro, also from Dothan. [It was a Sunday afternoon concert that started after church and lasted till about dark. They raised a ton of money for Charlie Silva, but he died a few months later. He had a LOT of really extensive surgery and radiation but had no health insurance at all. I believe the Espy boy and his friends organized the whole fundraiser.]

I expect everyone was "taken advantage of" in their original contract negotiations, because nobody had ever heard of them, they were mainly inexperienced kids, and they were probably signed at a bargain price. They likely went from feeling "rich" at first, to resenting their contracts later. Mister Espy is from over in my neck of the woods. His mama and daddy died back around 1995 or 1996, and seemed to "roost" around Dothan in their final years. I wasn't sure what he was doing over there, but I was thinking it was a wildlife preserve. He's always marched to his own non-Hollywood drum. He definitely never gave a flip if he was a "star" or not.

Most of those young original actors who bolted after their contracts expired were probably looking for greener pastures than a long-term soap role. I'd say the two exceptions were likely Miss Bauer and Mister Espy. When Jaime Lyn Bauer bolted in 1982, I believe she was pretty adamant about leaving because she was TIRED. During that chaotic transition period, Bill Bell often used her 4 or 5 times a week, which led to her working five days a week, sometimes six days a week, and she claimed that the workdays were often 12-18 hours. She said she wanted to rest and spend time with her family. She didn't seem to be angling for an immediate movie role. And William Gray Espy was such an unpredictable and unusual boy, there's no telling why he left. He didn't seem overly committed to being a movie star. He probably woke up one morning, discovered he'd saved enough money to buy a horse and said, "I'm leaving. Bye."

Or not used either one of them 😂 I've heard Hasselhoff say something to the effect of, "They kept telling me during my audition that the director was speaking to me from the booth, but I didn't know where the booth was." That may be what you're remembering.

I dunno. They didn't seem to have much in the way of technology. Miss Alden said from about 1975 to 1979, she and Bill would write the show at his dining room table and then send it by "overnight air mail" to Los Angeles. You'd think if they could "view" what was going on in Hollywood (aside from on the TV), they could've found a more expeditious way to ship the scripts!

If you've seen The Feud: Joan & Bette, there's a funny scene where Bette Davis, who's pretty well washed-up at that point, goes on a diatribe about how she won't do this, she won't do that, "because no one would ask Marlon Brando to do it, for God's sake". Joan Crawford pointedly reminds her, "Brando isn't begging for a recurring role on Wagon Train, either!" I believe Hans was pretty much "begging for a recurring role on Wagon Train" by the time the Y&R offer came along. In the past several years, he'd done a few sporadic guest spots here and there, and he'd been in a (terrible) "Herbie the Love Bug" movie. He had a wife and a son by then, and I expect a few weeks of solid work sounded appealing to him. Ditto for Miss Cooper when John Conboy (and that female producer whose name I can never remember) called her for Kay Chancellor. She'd had a small recurring role on Bracken's World in like 1969-1970, and then a few sporadic guest spots, and a few solid weeks of work was probably hard to pass up!

Jeanne Cooper on Maria Arena: "I have to say in Maria’s defense, she was serving two hats, one with MOCA (The Museum of Modern Arts) and one with The Young and the Restless. She had a great sense of Y&R having Bill Bell as a father-in-law and learning and writing under his umbrella. But within the art world, it was going down. And Maria as the chairwoman was very beneficial in turning that around. Now that is a very important position. Now put that on top of writing a number one show and what she was trying to do, which kept her from the show a great deal of time. Maria was thinking she had the right people at her back at every turn, and she had laid out storylines assuming her writing team is taking care of that. She was trying to make it blend and teach this way of working to a show, if the storylines had been correctly done. We talked about how it is to handle two major things without paying attention to one without the other. Maria was trying to blend the two and consequently Y&R suffered for it. [I added the bold & italics, because she's saying exactly what I alluded to above --- Maria Arena wasn't WRITING one damn thing. She was "laying out stories" (probably verbally, in my opinion) to Hogan, and he was writing them. Miss Arena was trying to "teach" this way of writing, which was basically "writing without writing, and writing without being a writer." The woman is just not a writer. She's never written anything. She's a socialite and an art collector. I would LOVE to read the novel she allegedly wrote, according to her biography, but we all know she ain't ever written any novel; nor has she ever written a single episode of Y&R.]

Kay Alden: "Lynn [Marie Latham] has only been with the show maybe six months. She comes to us with a nighttime background. We're now trying to do some more innovative things. More nighttime flavor to the writing. And she's come in to help us with that transition because it's foreign to us, in terms of writing in that venue. And Lynn has an incredible track record." Miss Alden goes on to explain the horrific process SONY and the network subjects the writers to -- thrust documents, detailed outlines, constant script revision, etc. You can tell by her faltering voice -- she knows Latham is about to take the whole mess over.

Kay Alden said at the time that Miss Latham was brought in because she had "primetime sensibilities" and would add more of a "primetime flavor" to the show (at SONY's suggestion). As to why the Bell-era writers were ultimately dismissed -- who knows? Maybe they were seen as hindering Miss Latham's "primetime sensibilities".

The Snapper auditions would've been something Bell definitely observed, as that was a character he intended to use for the long haul.

Wasn't it Jeanne Cooper who said of Maria Arena, "You can't undertake two big projects [writing a soap & trying to oversee a modern art museum] and expect both of those endeavors to flourish. One of the endeavors necessarily suffers." And that's why I believe Hogan wrote all that junk, and Miss Arena simply took credit for it because she didn't even comprehend how horrible it was. There's no question that she sauntered in with some useful ideas about what needed to be fixed on the show, but her methods of fixing them were lackluster at best (and disastrous at worst). I think she just barked at Hogan (or whoever), "Reverse this business with Jill and Kay! Reverse this business with Cane!" and then went to the museum for the rest of the day and then a fashion show at night. I doubt she actually wrote a word. Matter of fact, when they finally fired her ass, she wasn't even in the United States. She was flitting around in Europe on an extended vacation, despite supposedly being Y&R's showrunner. She didn't have time in her social schedule for that boring writing and producing stuff. Her Wikipedia page describes her as a "novelist" (and always has) but I've never seen any evidence of her "novel". I think she's a complete fraud.

Maria Arena was utterly wretched. In her defense though (lol), I honestly doubt she wrote a single word that aired on the show. She probably absent-mindedly tossed some (terrible) ideas to her underlings and barked at them to elaborate on her lousy ideas and type them up, and perhaps she actually scanned a few scripts during her trans-Atlantic flights. But she seemed far too flighty and socialite-minded to ever sit down at a computer and work her way through a problem, or even to read & contemplate what someone else had written. I've never been able to accept that she actually wrote anything herself. But she was more than happy to take credit for the garbage that was churned out during her tenure as "head writer".

I expect so. I believe Brock Broughton was working on those (pretty) sets from Day One. If not, he was there from Day Two, lol.

I expect Bill either flew out to Los Angeles (or they sent the tapes to Lake Shore Drive) when they were auditioning a character who was slated to last for years (such as Jaime Lyn Bauer, who was cast after 9 months or so as Lorie Brooks). But Victor Newman and Kay Chancellor were initially slated for pretty short-term roles, and I doubt Bell was jumping up & down wanting to see all the applicants. (Ditto for the boy who played Scott Adams.) Just my guess. Some of those early names from the production crew are forever stuck in my head (such as John Conboy, of course), the main director (Bill Dunlap), the set decorator (Brock Broughton), that weird trio of writers ("Eric L. Roberts", lol), the hair stylist (India Sparhawk), but when it comes to Patricia Wenig -- I never get that one right.

Yes, thank you!! It hit me after I posted. Jeanne Cooper described her as "the girl who looked as though she worked in a pastry shop in Carmel, California."

In her verbal interview with Archive of American Television, Jeanne Cooper indicates that Bill Bell was nowhere in sight when she auditioned for the role of Kay Chancellor. She said John Conboy called her, she eventually came in, and she read for John Conboy and that female producer whose name I can't ever remember. Possibly, John Conboy overnighted Bill Bell a tape of the audition to his apartment in Chicago, but it wasn't mentioned if he did. My feeling is Bill Bell was involved (heavily) in the initial casting of the Brooks and Foster families, but after that, casting was handled by John Conboy and that girl. I believe John Conboy, as the executive producer, had the ultimate authority to hire & fire people. Ditto for Wes Kenney. Once those two executive producers were gone, Bill Bell made sure he ALWAYS had an executive producer credit, making him the ultimate decision-maker on matters like that. [Edit --- Patricia Wenig was the female producer's name.]

In my opinion, Kay Alden held her own once she was in charge, even breathed some fresh life into the show. This would've been 1998-2000 (approximately). But then she stalled completely; she hit a series of storyline duds. She introduced a character named "Sean Bridges" into Jill Foster's orbit, cloaked him in mystery, recast him spontaneously, had him spout out a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about sleeping on futons, and then dropped him without exploring any of it fully. She squandered the final months of Shemar Moore's contract with a ridiculous story involving a "retro prom" for an unlikable character named Alex Perez. She wasted months spinning her wheels on Mackenzie Browning's dull mother, Amanda Browning. And then there was her downright bizarre obsession with sperm and sputum (Victor's sperm, Cassie's sputum). I kept waiting for her to introduce smegma into the mix. Just what we all we wanted to hear about during lunch! The ratings dropped substantially -- from the high 7's to the low 5's. Jack Smith was brought in to "help" her. Whether he'd simply lost his mind (or whether he was acting under a mandate from SONY), he introduced the most childlike, juvenile stories in Y&R's history: Look! -- upper-middle class Brittany is suddenly a STRIPPER!!! Bad Boy JT is crooning syrupy love ballads to Colleen and porking Mrs. Hodges!!! Kay Chancellor forgot she had another child and -- surprise!! -- it's JILL!! It was just one disaster after another. And the ratings reflected it. It was as though a twelve-year-old boy was the head writer. By the time Lyn Marie Latham pranced onto the scene with her reliquaries, there was nowhere to go but up! Miss Latham, however, figured out a way to go down even farther. And so have all her successors.

His stories were long & involved and generally moved toward a powerful, emotional climax. As titan1978 alludes to above, the day-to-day writing (for Y&R) was stylized and detached. If you watch Douglas Marland's (best) material or Anges Nixon's (best) material, it's what I would call "kitchen sink" stuff, where everything looks completely "normal" and people talk in a normal manner, with lots of interruptions and chit-chat. Bill Bell didn't bother with that much. He wrote in the manner in which we might "remember" events --- simply choosing what's vitally important and focusing on that. It's often "cerebral" or "chilly", but it got the job done without any excess.

The actor who played Nick Andropolous was born in 1929, and the actor who played his brother was born in 1953. So there was a 24-year age gap between them. I don't remember the characters mentioning their ages during any of the episodes I saw, but I got the impression Nick was supposed to be "about 45" and Steve was probably supposed to be "about 25".