Richard J. Allen

As the career turns: The days of Richard Allen's life are devoted to teaching, but by night, the restless professor transforms his darkest thoughts into soap-opera scripts

By Malcolm Mayhew

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

It's midnight, and Richard Allen is pounding away on a computer keyboard. His fingers are numb and calloused.

He can't sleep; he tosses and turns for hours, fighting back the illicit dreams, the tension-filled thoughts, the horrific secrets that plague his slumbers. He MUST write. It's the only way he can keep sane in this world as it maniacally turns.

So write he does, turning his unsweet dreams into someone else's, lending his thoughts of unholy matrimony, exorcisms and coming back from the dead to the characters that haunt his nocturnal hours.

It's THEIR fault he can't sleep. They torture him, demanding new hearts to shatter, extra backs to stab, more than one life to live.

But he does their bidding. They do, after all, help him make his living. Richard Allen is a soap-opera writer.

Actually, Richard Allen, 41, leads a double life. By day, he is an associate professor of radio-television-film at Texas Christian University, where he has taught for nearly eight years.

By night (or by early morning, rather), he writes soap operas. Good ones, too: He was recently nominated for a Daytime Emmy for his dialogue-writing on As the World Turns. (He'll find out if he won when the Daytime Emmys are announced May 18.)

This is nomination No. 2 for Allen, who received a Daytime Emmy nod in 1987 for his writing on Days of Our Lives. He has also written scripts for One Life To Live, General Hospital and a half-dozen other soaps.

Last year, Allen even mounted his own 10-week soap opera at TCU called Studio 13. More than 100 TCU students were involved in the show's development and production.

Writing somewhat seedy dialogue for soap scripts does pose its problems for Allen. First off, there's the TCU professor thing. For nearly eight years, he has taught a variety of radio-TV-film classes at TCU -- including one strictly devoted to penning soap operas -- all the while writing soaps. In the eyes of some, it may not be the best combination -- teaching students, writing about deceit, sex and talking dolls.

Perhaps a little surprisingly, TCU brass has been very accepting toward Allen, he says.

"I think initially, they were a tad skeptical," Allen says. "But I showed them I was able to apply the soap-opera lessons I had learned in the industry to the classroom. The students have always been excited about it."

Some of those students have gone on to become interns for soap operas.

"Basically, he has contacts at every soap opera out there," says 21-year-old TCU junior Rebecca Wren, who interned at NBC soap Passions, a gig Allen helped set up. "He teaches us about professionalism, how to act in this industry. He knows all about it. He's been there. He knows what qualities we need."

Another one of Allen's students, 20-year-old TCU junior Kristin Moon, says the experience she gained from Allen's class -- and his production of the mock soap Studio 13 -- has proved invaluable.

"I'd really like to direct soap operas," says Moon, who started watching soaps in junior high. "It was just really cool to work on [studio 13 ]. I learned a lot from it."

As if the professor/soap scriptwriter discrepancy weren't enough, Allen also has a wife and three children, who range in age from 8 to 13.

And he and his family take their Jewish faith seriously, -- so seriously, in fact, that Allen will not be attending the Daytime Emmy awards ceremony because it falls during the Sabbath.

"We're very observant toward religion," he says. "The way I justify it is, anyone who does anything immoral on the show gets punished twofold. Terrible things wind up happening to them. Nobody on a soap opera escapes justice."

Although they don't get to spend as much time with him as they'd like, Allen's family does fully support this other side of his life.

"It's just one exciting moment after another," says Sheri Allen, his wife of 17 years. "Having two full-time jobs, he works a lot, and that leaves me responsible for everything else that goes on -- and that's OK. I enjoy that. But despite all the work he does, he does try to be home every night for dinner."

Currently, Allen writes the dialogue for one episode of As the World Turns every other week. The scriptwriters send him scripts filled with wordless scenes; he fills in the blanks.

"There was one about a man who finds out his daughter is a lesbian because he came onto her roommate," he says. "I'll write about anything. I'm not prudish. But I would never write something that I thought would glorify violence or something like that. I don't think soap operas glorify anything."

"What am I gonna do?" Richard Allen is trapped in his own words, cornered by his own creativity. Writer's block is far more traumatic an affliction than those he lets loose upon his characters -- the car-accident deaths, the "mysterious disappearances," the never-heard-of-that-before diseases. If HE can't do his job, his characters may as well just off themselves.

Looking for inspiration, Allen taps into the murky side of his subconscious. It's the Richard Allen no one knows, the man behind the big smile he beams at work and the grocery store.

He dreamed up an episode in which a character dies a horrific death. In another, he scribbled about a torn relationship. Mishaps, undoings, disasters -- c'mon, Richard, snap out of this writer's block. You've got scandals to stir up and mayhem to unleash.

When he first started writing network soap operas, in the mid-'80s, Richard Allen would have very strange dreams.

"You're trying to come up with stories all the time, and I used to dream about how I'm gonna make this story work," he says. "I used to have dreams in which the characters would look at each other and not know what to say because I hadn't written it yet."

Back then, however, there was far more pressure on Allen. After getting his start in 1986 -- landing a dialogue-writing job on Days of Our Lives, courtesy of a supervising executive producer friend of his mother-in-law's -- Allen climbed the soap opera corporate ladder, eventually landing a head-writing position; he stayed at Days of Our Lives six years.

After management cleaned house, Allen soap-surfed from General Hospital to One Life To Live to Another World to, finally, As the World Turns, for which he has worked two years.

Over the course of his 15-year soap-opera writing stint, Allen has seen the show go from focusing on family issues to, um, supernatural ones. Nowadays, exorcisms, coming back from the dead and talking dolls are soap-opera norms.

Allen says he misses the days of good old-fashioned marital problems, lust, greed and jealousy.

"The soaps are scrambling for new ideas because of lower ratings," he says. "There are so many choices for daytime TV viewers now. When I was on Days of Our Lives, Santa Barbara was canceled and replaced with Jenny Jones . I said, `Are they crazy? Who's gonna watch that?' But talk shows are more outrageous than soaps, and supposedly they're real, so a lot of people watch them.

"Daytime TV will never be what it was," he says. "There was a real family feeling to a lot of early soaps. You watched how the families got through a lot of tough situations. That's getting pushed aside for sensationalism. I think it's kind of sad."

Will Richard Allen ever shake this case of writer's block? Will he ever get a decent night's sleep? Will he win that darn Emmy? Most importantly, will he come up with enough lying and cheating and backstabbing to keep As the World Turns turning? Stay tuned.