Greenfield Recorder, Monday, August 12, 1985
Revived 'Dallas' ready to return for ninth season By JOE RHODES Dallas Times Herald
DALLAS — It has been going on for eight summers now, long enough so that it is hardly even noticed anymore, long enough that it is expected to happen. As August begins, they are out there somewhere with their lights and their cameras, with their scripts and their makeup, making the city of Dallas famous with their lying and cheating and sneaking around.
Talk to the cast members of 'Dallas', the producers and the crew, and they will tell you there has been a subtle change in the relationship between the city and the television show in these eight years, a shift from skepticism to tolerance, from tolerance to fascination, from fascination to an almost nonchalant acceptance. It is not that people do not still get excited when they see "Dallas" stars' here, it is just that they do not think of them as outsiders anymore.
"I've always felt welcome here, from the very beginning," Victoria Principal was saying in her dressing room, waiting for the next scene involving her character, Pam Ewing. "So that wasn't a problem. "But there was a time, particularly after the 'Who Shot JR.' phenomenon when the enthusiasm generated a kind of hysteria that was frightening, where you couldn't go out in public without people really pressing in on you. "Once traffic actually stopped on a freeway because of it, when people found out I was in the car. They were banging on the windows saying, 'Hey, Pam, come out.' "But that doesn't happen anymore. People no longer become hysterical to the point of it being frightening! I think they have learned that we need to be treated with a certain amount of dignity, just like anyone else."
"In a way I think people here are grateful to us," said Linda Gray, who plays Sue Ellen Ewing. "Because as the show's popularity has grown around the world, it's made them feel important. In a way, the show has made celebrities out of everyone who lives here." With practically the entire cast, from Larry Hagman on down, signing shiny new contracts, the show is guaranteed to run for at least two more years. Think about it: a decade's worth of Ewings and Barneses, of cliffhanger episodes and behindthe-scenes gossip. Ten years qualifies as s immortality in television land. Just as Southfork has become a landmark in Texas, "Dallas" has become one on the screen, the "Gunsmoke" of its time. "I don't think of it as 'Gunsmoke' as much as I think of it as 'I Love Lucy' or 'All In The Family,' shows that were the first of their kind," Principal said. "We were the first show of this kind. More than just being known for our longevity, I think 'Dallas' is a show that has changed the face of television.
They filmed the 200th episode last week and it seemed as good a time as any to wander onto the "Dallas" set, to find out whether success breeds complacency, whether the show's going through any major changes, whether any extras have died from heat stroke lately. "Dallas" has survived the comings and goings of a lot of key actors — the death of Jim Davis, who played the patriarch Jock Ewing; the absence and return of Barbara Bel Geddes, preceded and then Donna Reed as Miss Ellie, departure of Patrick Duffy. But Larry Hagman as J.R. Ewing, almost everyone agrees, is indispensable. "The show can go as long as Larry doesn't get bored," Howard Keel, who plays Clayton Farlow, said, putting it bluntly. "He is the man."
A lot of things have changed since April 2, 1978, when that first episode aired. For one thing, the producers have gotten a lot smarter about Texas and the weather. Not only have they learned not to bring their stars out into the sun (Victoria Principal remembers being moments from fainting several times in the first few years) until it is absolutely necessary, but they have stopped putting things in the script such as the hurricane that swept through downtown Dallas in the original miniseries. "I think this is one of the most exciting years we've had," Principal said. "There's more rawness. I was beginning to think we were maybe getting too polished, but the show is getting grittier again.
Philip Capice, the show's executive producer, says one of the benefits of success is the freedom to be left alone. Before "Dallas" was a hit, he said, the network was always sticking it's finger in. "In the beginning the network didn't want us to make it a continuing drama," Capice said. "They didn't think an audience would watch it every week and said we couldn't risk them being disoriented or lost if they missed a shot. So they said that every show's plot had to be self-contained. And they were. almost ludicrously so.
What you had in that first season, Capice said, was a problem of the week, a crisis that would come out of nowhere and be solved before the hour ended. But it did not take king for the producers to realize that audience response was not coming so much to the contrived story lines as to the relationships between the characters, particularly J.R. and Sue Ellen. "So," Capice said, "we began to play more to that." Capice, and practically everyone else on the set, thinks it is the audience fascination with the characters that is responsible for the series' long-running success. He is quick to point out that it is the actors who are responsible for the characters coming to life, the actors who give them their personality. "Linda and Larry's roles were among the least well-defined when we started," Capice said, pointing out that Sue Ellen's character had no name and only four lines in the original mini-series. "Originally J.R. was pretty much the traditional villain and Pam and Bobby the hero and heroine. In fact, Pam was in many ways the central character, a sweet poor girl from the other side of the tracks who meets and marries this wealthy playboy and becomes the innocent in the den of vipers. Bobby was supposed to be kind of a ne'er-do-well in the beginning. "But the character can go as far as the actor wants to take it." That, clearly, was a reference to all the things Patrick Duffy has been saying about why he left the show. Duffy had been complaining for years that his character, Bobby Ewing, had terminal goody-goodness. Finally, Duffy said he had to quit because there was nothing he could do with the limits of Bobby's personality. So, for everyone's sake, they ran over Bobby with a car at the end of last season. No more Bobby. No more Patrick Duffy.
Duffy does not get much sympathy from the returning cast members. The consensus here seems to be that if Bobby Ewing was boring, it was because Patrick Duffy made him that way. "There was a time when I felt my character had become too passive, passive to the point where I lost respect for her," Principal said. "So I went to the producers, and we They've always been willing to listen."
Ken Kercheval says it would be just as easy to say that his character, J.R's primary adversary, Cliff Barnes, had nowhere to go, either. After all, everybody knows that Barnes will never win, that no matter how hard he tries, J.R. will always best him in the end. "Cliff Barnes has been defeated so many rimes for him to fry again this season to rise to the mission of toppling JR., you'd think they had him taken out and lobotomized," Kercheval said.
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