Paul Raven

NBC was at one point touting the teen demo for Passions and that it was laying the foundation for viewers to continue watching into late teens, early twenties etc.

As stated advertisers were interested in the here and now, not possible future outcomes.

Hence, shows using SORASING and introducing new characters to supposedly appeal to a younger demographic.

The fallacy in NBCs hype is that 20 yr olds usually  don't want to be associated with something they did at 14 and unless they were super hooked on Passions they'd probably avoid it like the plague.

47 minutes ago, kalbir said:

Think about it, the middle schoolers and high schoolers that came on board at the beginning of supercouple era Days are now in their 50s. I'm sure a good number of them are still watching.

And that is not the desired demographic. Important sure, but advertisers want women 18-34 to be watching and buying.

When A World Apart and Best of Everything began ABC had to find outside facilities to produce them.

A World Apart- Reeves Telecom  Lincoln Square

Best of Everything - Metromedia WNEW TV East 67 th St.

This information from Variety contradicts what was posted above, so I can only surmise that ABC moved them back to their own studios during their runs. Although BOE was shortlived, so it seems odd that a move would have happened in those months.

@JAS0N47Amazing work! Many thanks.

33 minutes ago, will81 said:

It was also very common for networks here to have package deals with companies that included several shows and were effectively forced on them. So it is impossible to know. Network 10 that aired it may have done a deal with the distributor, not P&G, that included big shows as well as others they were trying to get into international markets. 

I think it was Worldvision that handled the P&G soaps at that time. Definitely a distribution company.

AW had previously aired on the 9 network in Oz in the 70's at 11am at one point for several years.

Feb 70.

NBC's latest programming changes to improve daytime ratings have backfired.

At 12.30 'Who, What, Where' is scoring a 23 share compared to 'Namedroppers' 28 share.

At 1.30 'Life with Linkletter' 15 share compared to 'You're Putting Me On' 18 share.

In turn the soap block's ratings are down compared to a year ago

Days 36 share to 28, Doctors 35 to 29, AW 40 to 32.

Bright Promise had a 16 share against Edge of Night 39.

Feb 1970

CBS makes some adjustments.

Fred Silverman now VP program planning and development NY. Silverman had been head of daytime since 63. This position gives him scope above daytime duties. He will continue to oversee daytime but not on a day to day basis as this new post includes nightime and specials development.

Paul Rauch now national director of daytime programs. Rauch had spent 9 years at P&G as supervisor of daytime programs. He will fill Silvermans post. Mike Filerman director of daytime programs NY now reports to Rauch.

Rauch had been a child actor and was son of Harry Rauch former PR director at Young & Rubicam advertising agency. He had been involved at CBS daytime prior to working at P&G.

Wed @9 was a tough timeslot. CBS tried series there every couple of seasons and they always flopped.

Good counterprogramming to Dynasty and Helltown on NBC. CBS didn't have many slots available for a comedy. Every 8pm slot was taken by comedy throughout the week .

I guess they were hoping for a solid #2 in the slot like how Facts of Life operated in that slot for years. But with no lead in and so so reviews it got moved to a CBS  dead zone Tues @ 8.30.

NBC couldn't find an acceptable show either trying Helltown and Blacke's Magic before moving Gimme A Break to Wed @9.

Charlie & Co was #19 in its first airing up against Helltown #7 and a 3hr doco on ABC #50

The following week up against the premiere of Dynasty it fell to # 68 and so was pretty much DOA.

39 minutes ago, Vee said:

It is, Laughlin is definitely not in that group shot. That's Gillian Spencer and Lynn Benesch next to Agnes.

Lynn Benesch...I didn't even think of her. When did Lynn replace Trish?

Hopefully. Chelsea is one of several characters that needs to be rested.

Mal gave her the boot but Josh brought her back.

Now they have to figure out what to do with Billy. Another go round with Phyllis?

2 hours ago, JoeCool said:

Agnes Nixon is the first person to work for all 3 networks. First, for CBS with Guiding Light and As the World Turns. Then for NBC, Another World from 1965 to 1968 and then for ABC, One Life to Live in July 1968.
 

Irna worked for all 3 TV networks first.

CBS with TGL and ATWT .

NBC with AW in 64

ABC as consultant working on the development of Peyton Place and ABC daytime:

Feb 65...Flame In The Wind, which premiered in late December, is a good example of the care ABC puts into developing new daytime entertainment. It's written by Don Ettlinger, produced by Joseph Hardy and has as story consultant Irna Phillips, all of whom have been responsible for some of television's most popular serials.

April 64 ...Irna Phillips named ABC -TV consultant on all nighttime dramatic programs. She is credited with originating serial form on radio and TV. Miss .Phillips will be associated with all three .networks since she created and writes CBS -TV's daytime serial, As the World Turns, and, Another World, which will start on NBC -TV next month.

4 hours ago, soapfan770 said:

Chance considers a career change.

Goes to work with Sharon.

I'm going to have to disagree. I believe that is Trish Van Devere in the photo with Agnes.

She does resemble Sharon Loughlin. Maybe too closely and that was one of the reasons she was dropped.

I doubt very much an actress who was dropped from the show before the debut would be posing happily with her replacement.

No I think this is an early promo shot of the leading ladies of the show.

5 hours ago, BoldRestless said:

Maybe I'm naive but I'm honestly shocked that the soaps do so much better than an almighty sacred sports event! I always thought those events were so popular that they had to preempt our silly soaps so they could get the ratings for sports. Maybe March Madness and Thanksgiving football do better. Or maybe it is just that the network signs a contract for broadcast rights to sports so they preempt the soaps. And as far as I know, most sports have less commercials than scripted series so it seems like they lose money between paying for the rights, less commercials, and lower ratings? 

I think you are right about Thanksgiving football rating better and maybe Wimbledon?

But with sports I think a number of factors come into play.

One is the 'prestige' the networks associate with having exclusive rights to a sporting event. Obviously they want the ratings and on weekends and evenings they hope to get them but daytime is a different proposition. There would be a hue and cry if they got the rights to an event and didn't show weekday games for the soaps. Bad Optics.

Also the type of viewers they would get (men)would be different and I'm sure the products advertised would reflect this. 

It's a similar situation with news pre-emptions. The networks want to be seen as news leaders and even though they lose money interrupting the soaps it is seen as important to the image of the network.

It's also a reflection of the attitude of the networks that news and sport are more worthwhile and daytime is treated as an afterthought. Obviously major news events should take precedence but often the interruptions were unnecessary. But the news division had the power to preempt.

35 minutes ago, kalbir said:

Maybe international money was coming in? I know Another World had a sizeable following in Canada from the 1970s until the end. It was also exported to Australia and Italy but I don't know how popular it was in those countries and how long the runs were.

I doubt that any money made from international broadcasts would make a difference.

I would imagine the Australian networks got the show at bargain prices. They wouldn't want to pay much for programming at 10 am in the morning. I think that the distributor would get a piece from the sale and the rest back to P&G. 

Did the actors receive anything for overseas sales? Probably a check for $1.29.

2 hours ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

California was one of the fictional locations, not physical locations. 

No.

When The Guiding Light returned to radio in 1947 after a break the new show was set in California and produced in Hollywood.

It then returned to New York for the rest of its radio and tv broadcasts.

Another Irna Phillips soap Masquerade was also broadcast from Hollywood at that time.

3 hours ago, ~bl~ said:

Supposedly GL for a time while on radio was produced in California I read that many years ago so can’t source it. Does anyone else have a recollection of this or was it some wild theory to explain the show moving location within the story?

Tv Guide Nov 1969.

Carla had a guest spot in The Survivors around this time.

When Carla Borelli was six months old, her mother, a San Francisco grocer’s wife, took one look at that beautiful ltalian baby face and decided, Carla, my girl, you’ve got to be a model. So Carla was a model before she could talk. The tap and ballet lessons began when. she was 7.

By the time she was 15, alas, she had no worlds left to conquer. She was “the top model” in San Francisco, making a sinfully large sum of money. “I needed more to do,” Carla remembers. “New conquests. SoI signed a contract with 20th Century-Fox. Trouble was, they didn’t know what to do with me and they told me to go home.”

Carla went home “a very rebellious young lady.’ She kept auditioning for things when she should have been doing her school work.

“l rebelled,” she says,“because I didn’t get what I wanted.” Two years later she tried again in Hollywood. “I lived with a wonderful little old Italian lady who made wine. Right off the bat I was making commercials, and I knew there was something here for me.”

Still, it took her a few years to collect that ‘‘something.’’ She decided to commute to her Los Angeles jobs, which gave her a chance for some more schooling. She also snagged herself a husband, a good-looking University of Michigan graduate named Jack Demorest, who was employed by a billboard firm in San Francisco.

“1 told him my needs,” Carla recalls, “and outlined the rules of the game. He understood. I know |’m not easy to be married to. At one point we had to take a trip around the world to get reacquainted. Then a couple of years ago I persuaded him he couid do better in Los Angeles.”

Carla read biographies of Bette Davis and Helen Hayes and even arranged to be caught carrying a copy of Stanislavsky’s “An Actor Prepares.’ Nothing rubbed off. She had to content herself with making ‘‘a great deal of money doing commercials. Photographers used her extensively because, said one, “She was sexy but had the -nice look when you needed it.” She wasn’t satisfied, however. “Modeling is one-dimensional,” she says. ‘‘Acting is three-dimensional. I wanted to be something of an Anne Bancroft, to use my total self.”

Last season the “‘total self’ was finally allowed to get into the act. Universal Studio needed ‘‘a very beautiful girl with a visual look who could move” in a Name of the Game episode. She had only one scene, but the part was fat—an Italian playgirl who dies of an overdose of barbiturates. Carla swung well enough in it for the studio to sign her to a contract which allowed her to keep up her modeling activities. She did an It Takes a Thief episode. She appeared as one of Don Knotts’s ladies in “The Love God.” She even got herself cast in an underground movie called “Don’t Throw Cushions in the Ring.” The film, made on a shoestring by the actor Steve Ihnat, is about a man who strives very hard to be a successful actor but, when he gets his desire, experiences disappointment.

“It is the problem of our Affluent Society,’’ Carla explains. “What do you do after you have everything?”

Last spring she made a second Name of the Game as a woman of ill repute. When the scene was over, all the studio still photographer had to do was make a slight motion toward his Rolleiflex. The sloe-eyed beauty wearing the Rita Hayworth-like black lace chemise fell instinctively to her knees on the satin bedspread, head up, lips slightly parted in the classic Hayworth pose. When the still photo was released to 900 papers a few weeks later, even The New York Times printed it.

Carla was born 25 years too late to be another Hayworth. However, she might make it as the house Raquel Welch. In any event, she'll make it. “I'm finding out what works for me,” she says.

59 minutes ago, Vee said:

Millette Alexander's EON role has always fascinated me from reading up about it on the old EON fan site back in the day. I never saw any of her on GL until much long after. She was a stalwart presence. I don't know if Kevin Bacon has ever talked about her when referencing his time on the show (not that I've ever heard of him talk about it much at all) - didn't he play her ward?

Yes TJ (Tim) was a young boy that Sara and then husband Joe adopted in the mid 70's.

They never followed through with a reveal of who his real parents were.

That lack of camera movement is because there is not enough time for rehearsal to block out scenes and have actors move about to create interest.

At one time they would have a camera block rehearsal where the director would choreograph the actors movements and camera operators could work out their shots, but there is no time or budget for that.

It's also why scenes are so short- fewer lines to learn, less chance of things going wrong and having to retape.

That GL reference was so random...

Here's a TV Guide article from 1969 on Millette Alexander

This lady has a 17 room house, four children, six dogs, seven cats and a soap opera career, too -  by Judith Jobin

“Soap opera at its worst can  be black-and-white—but most of the time the characters are as a real and the conflicts are ones the average person really deals with. I’m proud of it and I'm livid because the industry ignores it. There are no Emmys for soaps!'

So says actress Millette Alexander—looking authentically angry—as she defends her membership in television’s much maligned soap-opera club. And it might smack of a case of sour suds if it came from a lesser talent. But by all accounts, Miss Alexander plays  soaps with a degree of involvement and intensity usually reserved, in an image-conscious profession, for more prestigious theatrical endeavors. The case in point is her latest role, a young, attractive lady doctor. For the past six months Millette has been feeling her way around the psyche of Sara McIntyre, M.D., one of the central characters on CBS’s The Guiding Light. Says producer Peter Andrews: ‘‘She’s quite an intelligent girl and she works very hard in preparation—much more than most. She always has a point of view—she has the whole edifice of her role constructed by the time she gets in.”

On the surface, the action is uncomplicated: Millette puts in upwards of 40 hours a week alternately clucking over patients and getting into clinches with a handsome colleague. But under the clucking and clinching is “much more than the words say,’ insists Edge of Night actress Teri Keane, who remembers Millette’s nimble portrayal of a dual role on that series. “She's complex. There's nothing surfacey about her acting.”” And a Guiding Light actor agrees, pointing admiringly to her ‘‘emotional quicksilver quality.”

But at this point, an inevitable question leaps out: after 15 years of landing television, Broadway and summer-theater roles with ease and regularity, why isn’t Millette Alexander more famous, a little closer to stardom?

“She could definitely have it if she tried,’ declares producer Andrews, confirming that her talent is widely acknowledged in the trade. Teri Keane agrees: ‘‘Absolutely. She's tops. But she doesn’t want it.” And Millette herself, recalling an early offer from 20th Century-Fox, confers a convincing air of distastefulness on the whole business: “They wanted me to sign a seven-year contract, move to California, become a starlet.I didn’t want to be locked in.” Her friend Ed Zimmermann explains: ‘‘l’d say she wants most to do good work.” Finally, Andrews points to her off-stage existence: ‘‘She thinks a lot about her home life.”

By any standard, it’s a life worth thinking about. At 35, she’s married to rangy Jimmy Hammerstein. He is the son of Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, is a respected director in his own right (most recently of a pair of off-Broadway Pinter plays), and was. undeniably a catch. They live in a 17-room Stanford White house in Nyack, N.Y., complete with a six-acre spread of rolling lawns, fruit-tree orchards, greenhouse, lavish swimming pool, and hilltop gazebo overlooking the Hudson River. Their four children are abundantly rosy-cheeked and well-fed. And they solved their servant problem by importing an entire family from Honduras—but the bargain included five more children and an  88-year-old grandmother, all of whom live-in.

After that the law of diminishing returns takes over and things look a bit raffish at the edges. There’s a bright red four-wheel-drive jeep in the driveway, and unwary visitors are assaulted by a friendly tangle of six dogs and seven cats. A tour of the interior turns up stray dolls and hobby horses, jars of freshly made fruit preserves in the kitchen, a pair of well-used pianos, an alarming assortment of electronic instruments and an open Dickens volume in the bathroom. Not to mention sound effects—the indecorous clatter of nine children, plus sputtering balloon sounds and Indian yells.

It all looks disarmingly like a television headache commercial featuring Millette as its miscast heroine. As keeper of the house and grounds, and Big Mama to that brood, she’s more like the earthy old lady who lived in a shoe than an other-worldly Cinderella. ‘‘! don’t even nose-count any more,” she laughs.

“She looks like quite a socialite,” says Teri Keane, ‘‘but she can get down there in the garden and weed!” And that’s not just a figure of speech. In off hours, Millette weeds with gusto, dips deeply into art and music (she’s a highly skilled pianist, also plays violin), finds time for exquisite needlepoint projects and generally has a disconcerting affinity for over-achievement. “She's got a helluva lot of energy,”’ says one friend, and another adds, “It must be pretty exhausting.”

Which raises a final question: How did an admittedly ‘“‘overly sensible’’ teenager from the Great Neck (Long Island) High School Orchestra find her way from first-chair violin to the center of such a helter-skelter life?

“I finally got sensible about myself,” she explains happily.

Two other actors I don't believe have been mentioned

Palmer Deane (Hank the Doctors)

Wayne Hudgins (Beau Spencer As The World Turns)

12 hours ago, GymnastGuy said:

I believe Russom and LePlat are str8?

As I stated most (not all ) of the cast were gay. Russom and LePlat were two who were not.

They got less than a year out of the Ashland marriage. That is not good storytelling.

To me one big problem was the SORASING of the next gen way too soon. 

It began with Victoria. They lucked out with Heather Tom and Bill Bell's writing but it immediately aged up Nikki in particular but it was workable.

Then came Nick who was only 6 in real time when he suddenly was aged up. And married within a few years. Victor and Nikki were soon grandparents, but still getting romantic stories.

Then in about 10 years Noah was aged so you had the romantic travails of 3 generations of Newmans.

Too much too soon.

Requests

Christopher Templeton

Robert Drivas

Crystal Carson

Camille Yarborough

@danfling Enjoy!

More Perils Than Pauline

Kathryn Leigh Scott is the Super Victim of daytime TV

By Robert Higgins

The day Kathryn Leigh Scott stood before an ABC camera and uttered the words “You jerk!” (not too classy a line, but that was it), the curtain rose on Dark Shadows. That's the daytime soap crammed with vampires, ghosts, et al., which insiders predicted would be buried in 13 weeks. Today, 156 weeks later, ABC’s teatime harpy hour is not only alive (well, comme ci, comme ca) but kicking up a ratings storm to boot. Miss Scott, in her role as governess Maggie Evans, has grown to be the Jinxed Jane of ironing-board TV. Between gulps of coffee that she lugged into our Manhattan offices, Kathryn lost no time telling why: ‘‘Maggie’s a Super Victim! Always running around screaming, ‘Run! Run! Here come the ghoulies

The ghoulies are fast steppers. Maggie, it seems, gets mangled more than Silly Putty. Werewolves maul her, vampires partake of her plasma, and, once, none other than the devil had his way with her. If that wasn’t enough to make Mag feel jinxed, Kathryn reports: ‘‘Then he jilted her!”

Poor Mag. Poor Kathryn, too. Life upon a Shadows stage, one learns, is roughly akin to traipsing across the Hollywood freeway blindfolded. Miss Scott has been hurled off cliffs and tossed through windows—‘‘backwards, yet.’’ Even makeup’s a problem. To simulate lumps from a beating, she once had split ping-pong balls glued to her face. The effect was swell—but Kathy’s skin turned ‘‘raw.”'

Happily, Kathryn Leigh Scott comes from hardy stock. Born Kathryn Kringstad to a Norwegian couple in Robbinsdale, Minn., she was a farm girl until her late teens. She entered college to study journalism. In 1962 she quit to study acting in New York. “In high school,’ she explains, ‘I toyed with both writing and acting. Acting won out.’”’ After getting her diploma in ’64, she found parts scarce. At liberty, she took the typical (selling in stores) and not-so-typical (walking dogs) jobs.

Such work kept Kathy out of the poorhouse. She’d embarked for Manhattan with only $200. “My father,” she continues, ‘thought I had $600, otherwise he’d never have let me come.” Still, $200 was probably more than Mr. Kringstad had in his pocket when he immigrated from Norway. ‘I’m first-generation American,’ Kathy says, “My family—uncles, aunts, cousins— are ‘over there.’

“Although I was born in Minnesota,” Kathy continues, ‘I became involved with my Norwegian relatives early.” The involvement came at the end of World War Il, when Mr. Kringstad took his family to Norway to help resettle lands devastated by the Nazis. ‘‘When we arrived,’ Kathy remembers, ‘‘three of my uncles, like many Norwegians, were still in the mountains, where they were in the Resistance movement.”’ Memories of the valorous atmosphere remains with Kathy, although the experience was no picnic. “Food was scarce,”’ she recalls. “On the boat coming home my brother and I would sneak around the dining room swiping leftover butter and sugar."

Miss Scott enjoys talking about herself and she’s not a bit shy about mentioning her many good qualities and attitudes. Such as: 1) she ‘has a need to do things,”’ doesn’t believe in ‘‘negative answers” and thinks “where there’s a will there’s a way’; 2) she’s ‘open, honest and outgoing’; and 3) she’s “independent.”

Boy, is she “independent.” The word, in fact, came up nearly a dozen times in our talk. It ranged from the “‘independence” that permitted her to ‘‘come to New York and become an actress” all the way over to the ‘‘independence”’ that started her sewing all her own clothes. (‘I refused to pay the prices for ready-made things.) She opposes the war in Vietnam and resents “paying taxes to support it.” Civil rights has her all in a lather. Yet she won't join picket lines. “I’m too independent.”

The “independence” showed up on the set, too: “When I first started, people were always fussing with me— telling me how to do things, how to stand. I felt |Ihad contracted my mind and body to somebody else.”

Such cheery bull-horning of ‘‘virtues’’ and “independence” hasn't made Miss Scott greatly loved in some quarters. “She's a bargain-basement Saint Joan,” opines one actor. Another: ‘Anyone who ballyhoos her ‘independence’ has a nest of insecurities somewhere.”

Self-confidence comes in handy on a show like Dark Shadows, where keeping one’s head at all is a chore. But Shadows characters seem to have the proverbial nine lives. Consider hapless Maggie. She’s entered rigor mortis twice. With luck, she has seven more shots before giving up the ghost.