Paul Raven

All of the goings on at GH makes me hope The Gates doesn't fall foul of conflicting agendas/visions and what not. Let's hope CBS has realistic expectations of what the show can accomplish initially. And the budget is there for it. Let's not kid ourselves that the ratings will be great iniyially. Launching a new network soap after decades is not easy. MVJ needs to come up with a viable long term story and the casting and production has to be on point. Having said that, until the show is onscreen and rolling TPTB won't be able to really assess what is working and what changes need to be made. That is part and parcel of a new show and there may have to be recasts or some tweaks to the stories. Ideally the budget would allow them to ease into it-something along the lines of 2 weeks to tape the first week of shows, 3 weeks to do the next 2 weeks before going to the regular schedule. I'd hate to see massive overhauls the minute the show is perceived to be underperforming.

Interrupting this 80's edge discussion to go further back to Slesar's beginnings at the show. Millette was a popular 60's soap star. She returned to ATWT after her initial run, the went to EON for 2 gigs before GL snapped her up for her long run as Sara. The Record Hackensack New Jersey 16 May 1968 Edge Of Night' Star Shines All Day By JAY RAE OFFEN Staff Writer PIERMONT - - Soap opera queen Millette Alexander makes housewives feel better when she plays Julie Jamison on TV's "Edge of Night." No matter what a woman's problems, she can tell herself, "At least my life's not as bad as Julie Jamison's. No one's blackmailing me. I'm not a murderess. I'm not going to jail." Julie Jamison's soap bubble troubles runneth over on screen. Offscreen, the most striking quality of the actress who portrays her is her happiness. That's the way it is with the real life of Millette Alexander. With a husband she calls the doll of the world, four children, a 19-room house, a job she loves and the world's most adoring audience, her woes won't match Julie's. But Millette would never call her life placid. "With four children of our own and five children who belong to the couple who live with us and work for us? Then there are seven dogs, and four cats, one pregnant. It's not placid but there aren't any murders." In contrast, TV Julie's life is nothing but toil and trouble. Divorced from a guitarplaying no-goodnik, she comes to "Edge of Night" as the new nightclub singer at the Riverboat, a gambling den. Good-guy Orrin Hillyer sees her and falls in instant love because she looks just like his dead wife. Former husband shows up to make trouble. Julie passes out from one drink (she's allergic to alcohol). While she's unconscious, former husband is killed in a fight. When she wakes up, real killer persuades Julie she did it, then blackmails her. Orrin lends her money, marries her secretly, and the plot thickens. Back In Script That's one plot. There are at least four more that make up TV's cops and robbers soap, "The Edge of Night." Only the daily watcher can keep track of all the problems. Even the writers get confused sometimes and add things that can't happen yet. But the most amazing thing that's ever happened I during this soap opera's 13 years is an act of reincarnation that wrote Millette back into the script after killing her off. Audiences liked her so well as Laura Hillyer, first wife of Orrin, that she's been revived as Julie, Orrin's second wife. Millette first became Orrin's wife, Laura Hillyer, two years ago. Laura had troubles too. She was a faithless wife who chased a disc jockey who loved her money but not her. So she killed him, then died, herself, in a car crash. The TV ratings hit an all time high. Nine months later, Millette was back in town as Julie with a Southern accent and long yaller hair. The dialogue ran, "Have you seen that new nightclub singer? She's a dead ringer for Laura Hillyer." Indeed. Trying on a new, ash blonde wig for the secret wedding last week, (Julie tones down her yaller hair for love), actress Millette said she was not bride-nervous. She'd done it all before. At Laura's wedding. Millette received pot holders and hankies from believing fans. Anticipating more wedding gifts for Julie, she said. "It's weird in a kind of wonderful way." The world's most devoted audience, soap opera fans are all kinds of people. Tallulah Bankhead watches. So do teenagers and retired men. They love soap operas. So do the actors, who adopt each other as family and sometimes act together for years. For Millette, her working life in "Edge of Night" is strenuous. She commutes from her Piermont home to a CBS studio two, three or four days a week, depending on the script. She's in her dressing room by 8 a.m.,rehearses all morning, dons makeup and costume, does the show from 3:30 to 4. then has a pre-rehearsal from 4 to 5:30 if she's acting next day. Evenings, she memorizes 20 or 30 pages of dialogue. An actor with a poor memory doesn't do soaps. It's gruelling, but actors love it. Millette has never really had a vacation from her career since she graduated from drama school at Northerwestern University. She admits her four children slowed her down a bit. But she did head and shoulders TV commercials and radio commercials throughout each of her pregnancies. Time Out For Baby The day that Will, her third child, was born, she taped a radio commerical. "I kept teasing them to hurry up, that I was in labor. When we finished the taping, I said, 'Now can I go home and have my baby?' and I did!" As with any woman, all days are not all smiles. Millette copes by crying, woman's first right. And she relies heavily on husband James Hammerstein. "When I'm most upset, that's when he's most calm," she says. Hammerstein is director of off-Broadway's "The Indian Wants the Bronx." Because he understands that the show must go on, he understood why Millette went on with a temperature of 105 recently. The last stronghold of live acting, soap opera doesn't allow for sickness. "They were wonderful to' me though," Millette says. "They got a doctor and set up a cot next to the set so I could rest. Millette Alexander is a pretty woman with a girl-next-door look. What keeps her from being the girl next door is her whole life style and a high energy level.To relax, she gardens and translates modern paintings into needlepoint canvases. "I woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning one night and thought, 'Wow, wouldn't Picasso look great in petit point?' What girl next door would do a thing like that?.

Watching the Jill/Devon/Lily scenes (as awful as the story is) and Jess was bringing it -from a computer screen, no less and CK was giving a sense of her feelings with little dialogue. Meanwhile Bryton was blandly reciting lines sounding like a whiny kid. Dullvon drags down any scene he is in.

I think he had a bit of a thing for Don... and Don was playing along with that 'I'll sit on your lap' reference.

Disappointed if Chance/Connor has been demoted. The whole Abby/Devon/Chance story had so many beats to play but instead Chance just walked away with little angst and Devon/Abby got together and now have zilch story. Has Josh written one decent story in all these years?

I did some thinking about the blonde stud and I hope I have the Luck of the Irish...

OK I got it. At least the twosome-but not the blonde stud. However, the lady in question is married and has children....

I thought one of the basics in laying out the weeks stories is A. What are we building towards for a Friday cliffhanger? B. What can function as a M-Th cliffhanger from the various stories we are playing that week? I can remember Bill Bell even having fake cliffhangers to hook us eg 'That's it, I'm going to Dad's office right now to confess about my night with Jill' only to have him change his mind in the next ep.

Christine and Nick would be snoozeville- 2 decent characters- where would the conflict and interest lie? At this point, apart from being reunited with Sharon and being supporting, the only option I could see for Nick would be a femme fatale who worms her way into Nick's life a la Cassandra and Paul.

So Lipton wanted a hurricane in Springfield circa 74? How odd...

OK so Claire, newfound member of the billionaire Newman dynasty ,who has business qualifications, is going to work as aNanny? Speaking of Harrison, just a note that Tara is the child's mother and although she went to jail , has she given up/lost parental rights? Summer, ex stepmother, is acting as though the boy is her natural child. Surely responsible parenting would have Harrison aware of Tara in some way, given the fact that at some point she will return to (rightfully) claim him.

What show are you referring too?

Agree, an interview dealing with some specifics about their intentions would be great.

LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING These actors also appeared most likely day player or brief recurring roles Michael Pendrey Christine Lavren Nancy Reardon Don McGrath

CONFIDENTIAL FOR WOMEN 'The Ugly Duckling' David Jess Osuna

TV Guide 3/26/1966 Errol Flynn’s widow SOAP-OPERA ACTRESS with a SOAP-OPERA LIFE Daily, ABC telecasts the lugubrious goings on of a group of teenagers and their unhappy parents in a soap opera called Never Too Young, referred to by its cast as “Gloom-a-Go-Go.” One member of the cast is Patrice Wymore, widow of Errol Flynn. Her story would make a better soap opera than the writers of Never Too Young ever dreamed of. Can’t you hear it? Time now, intones the announcer, for Our Gal Patrice, the story of a young girl from Miltonvale, Kansas, who danced her way from tent shows to Broadway and Hollywood, where she became the wife of one of filmdom’s richest and most flamboyant actors! Although the Flynns had been separated when he died six years ago, Patrice, as widow of record, inherited a reported million-dollar estate, including a cattle-and-coconut ranch in Jamaica, which she now runs (“I’m the only real cowgirl-actress”), and the yacht Zaca, still in litigation (“By the time this is all over, I'll be ready to take a bar exam”). Despite her apparent affluence, however, she has been working steadily and hard. A month after Flynn’s death, she opened at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas—“And now Patrice Wymore starts to pick up the pieces of her life" reported the Associated Press. Only last summer she starred in four musical comedies in 10 weeks—“Carnival” in Chicago, “Guys and Dolls” in St. Louis, “Bye Bye Birdie” in Fairfield, Conn., and “Irma La Douce” in San Diego. Then, in September, she took on the rigorous five-days-a-week schedule of Never Too Young, which is shot like old-fashioned “live” television—from the top with no retakes. Since Patrice is extremely nearsighted (“When I do theater-in-the-round, they have to have four Seeing Eye dogs for me”), she can’t even use cue cards. Patrice Wymore has been working hard since she was named Patricia and doing tent shows at age 6 back in Kansas, where she was born Dec. 17, 1926. The only break was a dubiously idyllic few years with Flynn aboard the aforementioned yacht— years of which the actor wrote, “On board the Zaca, Pat cooked and comforted me. . . .I invented a role for her, that of homebody, Hausfrau, sweet domestic thing.” This was hardly the role her mother, a former singer and concert pianist on the Chautauqua circuit, had trained her for, or exactly what Pat herself may have had in mind. She recalls her early days: “I would get out of school at 3 and rehearse with my mother until 7. Then after dinner I’d do my lessons at 8:30.” Despite its “Gypsy”ish overtones, she describes this as “a marvelous kind of childhood—the other girls would go to the local malt shop and waste their time. I knew I was going somewhere. Out of Kansas. I was in a hurry.” She got out of Kansas for good when she was 16. Her father, who ran a trucking line, gave her the money he had put aside to send her to college and let her go to New York. Soon she landed a part in a road company of “Up in Central Park,” followed by roles on Broadway in two other musicals, “Hold It” and “All for Love.” Columnist Earl Wilson would write that “she had magic in her toes.” In 1950 she got a contract to go to Hollywood for Warner Brothers. After a brief appearance in an early Doris Day picture, “Tea for Two,” she became “the fair-haired girl on the lot” and was rushed into something called “Rocky Mountain” as Errol Flynn’s leading lady. Flynn, who at the time was involved with a Romanian princess, suddenly decided that Patrice “typified everything I longed for, or thought I longed for.” The mother of his most recent ex-wife said that Patrice “likes to fish and hunt and do other things Errol likes.” Pledging that “this is for keeps,” Flynn and Miss Wymore were married in Monte Carlo on Oct. 23, 1950. Her mother said, “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re getting married and settling down.” Of course, it did not quite work out that way. “I grew up in a hurry when I married him,” says Patrice. She led a vagabond’s life with Flynn, mostly in Europe. A daughter, Arnella Roma, was born in Italy on Christmas Day, 1953. Five years later, after a number of partings and reconciliations, Patrice Wymore returned to Hollywood and went back to work. When Flynn died in 1959, she conducted herself with dignity amid the highly publicized grievings and threatened legal actions of her late husband’s teen-age “protégée,” one Beverly Aadland. She has never remarried. Today she lives quietly in the Hollywood hills with her 12-year-old daughter, a tall blonde like her mother, who wants to be an actress. At the moment, Arnella is taking dancing lessons. Who knows? Perhaps in a few years she'll go to New York and make good on Broadway and then go to Hollywood, where she will meet this handsome movie, star, and then... But who would believe it? It sounds like soap opera.

I guess that with PM and EK being appointed w/o the time to create a bible, they have to establish a working relationship with each other and FV and any other ABC people involved. Follow the mandates they are given as to what characters need to be featured and how to accommodate them into storylines that various factions are happy with as well as letting things play out onscreen to see what actors/characters they want to maintain and who to cull. Tie up existing storylines and establish relationships b/w characters and story points that will have them in place to fully implement their vision/version of the show. This is really a 3 to 6 months project to get everything in place.

Same here. The basic GCAC room set isn't too bad (better than Gran Phoenix) but identical furniture is ridiculous. Is it a union thing? Only certain people are allowed to touch the sets and it would cost extra to have them on set to redress the sets on taping day.

Information is scant on Hotel Cosmopolitan. CBS didn't really publicize it and various press sources eg Variety barely mentioned it. So a lot of well known soap actors probably appeared but at this stage we can't find any more names.

I think Bernie was brought on quickly to replace Farley, who left suddenly? They needed someone who could step into the role with ease and Bernie had daytime experience. He was then replaced by Anthony George who was more in keeping in what they wanted from the character, an older but still attractive man.

LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING Spence Garrison. Ed Power...June 1968-72 Walter Travis...John Carpenter August - ?1972 Campaign Manager Sam Watson...James Burge Nov 71- Jan 28 72 paraplegic Vietnam war vet attracted to Betsy Chernak who couldn't teurn his feelings. Reconciled with ex Donna Patrick Donna Patrick...Barbara Stanger 72 Renne Jarrett assistant at Mark Eliot's architecture firm- rejected by Sam Watson after he was paralyzed. They reconciled. Celia ________Winters...Abigail Kellogg...1972-73 murdered Walter Travis blaming him for the death of Alfred Preston who she loved. Julie Richards...Beverlee McKinsey 1970-71 aka Martha Donnelly, presumed dead wife of Tom, spoiler in his romance with Helen Elliott. Now an actress, returned with boyfriend Jim Whitman. Roommate of Sarah Handley. Wanted to see her son Ricky and blackmailed Tom saying she would fight for custody. Tom paid her off but Jim was killed and Tom arrested. Revealed that Julie had accidentally killed him in a struggle. Dr. Sanford Hiller...Peter White ? - September 1971 ...Stephen Joyce...September 1971-72 married workaholic doctor in love with Betsy Chernak. Marian ______Hiller...Constance Towers April 1971-72 lonely wheelchair bound wife of Sanford who was attracted to Pete Chernak. Lily Garrison...Caroline Miner 68-69 7yr old asthmatic daughter of Spence and Jean Chandler Garrison...Martin Wolfson 1968 ...William Post, Jr...1968-71 domineering father of Spence, against Spence's relationship with Iris ex wife to Margaret ,married to Jean who was cheating with Mark Elliott.

Slesar was one of a kind- also an award winning novelist. It's disappointing he was dropped from EON- he was hardly to blame for the ratings woes. Especially when Irwin Nicholson remained as EP. Maybe it was a financial thing as Slesar just became too expensive and Sheldon couldn't command the same salary.

@Brolden Don't know whether you will ever be updating? I have some episode info from 50's and 60's that will fill in some gaps. Some examples #22 May 1 1956 #176 Dec 3 1956 #1334 May 25 1961 #2923 July 3 1967 Let me know if you are interested and if so I am more than willing to collaborate on updating the episode list and character debuts/departures.

How many years was it that Dee and Suzanne were not in scenes together? So why now are they bothering to play up that relationship? What has changed?

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