OLTL: Michael Malone question

[Cheap21]

I loved it and thought it rocked. Things were great until they killed him off and never properly resolved that

[mr. sweet]

I loved his first era. It was really good and very dark in tone. His second run was good in the first year (not as good as his first tenure) then it got pretty terrible.

A little off-topic:

Who killed Mitch again?

[Cheap21]

Jessica

[JONNYSBRO]

Malone's first tenure was great but lets remember he had help along the way. He had the amazing Linda Gottlieb who produced the show like a movie and he also had co-head writer Josh Griffith. Things started going a bit south when Gottlieb left the soap and was replaced. Then another thing happened during Malone's last year Griffith quit OLTL to actually develop Sunset Beach. The writing got very muddled and by 1996 Malone was let go apparently from the show. When Malone/Griffith returned in 2003 the original situation was Malone was consultant and Griffith was head writer. It was pretty good the first couple months but it went south quickly. Griffith quit after about six months due to Frons interfernece and then Malone was upgraded as solo head writer. Things started getting ready bad with lots of convoulted storylines, boring new characters, history rewrites galore like Victor returning from the dead(I hope that one is long forgotten), and very bad writing. The Santis invading OLTL was just awful. I would not want Michael Malone back at this point because his tenure did nada for me.

[mr. sweet]

Thanks. Funny, I can't remember this.

[Cheap21]

they dropped it pretty abruptly, so Im not surprised. Heres a brief summary of the end

http://onelifetolive.about.com/library/bio...aurence_bio.htm

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Michael Malone sucks, but that's another topic I guess.

I've always felt that he always wanted to create show history, rather than use show history in a positive way to create storylines. I was never a big fan of Malone's writing, both first and second run. Though I will agree that his first run, mainly with Gottlieb, was better than what came afterwards. Gottlieb revamped OLTL's production values, and the show never looked better that it during that time aesthetic-wise.

[EricMontreal22]

I think Malone really needed Josh Griffith to make his stories work as a soap. He has said this somewhere (i think it's in the interview where he mentions that most of the Todd early stuff was actually Josh Griffith who loved the character--for good and bad). His run at AW (which I watched--even though I had no history with AW--simply cuz I adored Malone's run at OLTL so much) had tons of interesting stuff yet was kinda a mess--and that was without Griffith. And at both his first and second OLTL runs as soon as Griffith left it fell apart (OLTL in 1996 with the Men of 21 or whatever mob story mess which was all when Griffith left--)

Griffith actually was first HW for the early months of the second Malone era--then they became co headwriters. I think within a year Griffith left and he actually said in an interview it was cuz Frons and all wouldn't let him write the stories he wanted. Yet without him Malone's writing started getting worse and worse. From what I've gathered it's Malone who comes up with *most* of the major ideas but Griffith who really helped him shape them into soap opera-shape--pacing, etc.

I know now it's become popular for some to say his first era was overated--but it really wasn't for me even with some misfires. One amazing ability that era had was to mix more intellectual and new soap stories with VERY well told "soap cliche" stories (returns from the dead, etc).

There was a thread only a month ago--but it's prob burried in an OLTL week thread--where peopel went into depth about what was wrong with this last era of Malone. One poster spelled it out brilliant--i forget who though. But I have to say I still found it interesting to watch even in a trainwreck way--something I didn't at all for most of Higley's unfathomably long reign.

[EricMontreal22]

Sylph some articles I actually saved to my harddrive years back (I know I have a habit of mentionign articles to you but not saving them or knowing where to find them) that might help ya

Here's two by our very own Marlena DeLaCroix about his solo run on AW. She doens't really mention the Josh Griffith missing element but I think his second tenure has proven that that plays a big role. (I forgot about that weird TIKI idol! LOL of course afte rhe left AW went even more Days with the vampire story, Rachel's evil twin/lookalike etc) Interesting to read as the first was at the start fo his brief run, the second at the end.

"SWEEPS SAVED BY OLD MASTERS

by Marlena DeLacroix

Until recently, soaps had become so dreary and so lackluster that Marlena was ready to begin negotiations to return to her old job in Paris as a cancan dancer. Then May sweeps started, and what I saw got moi excited about daytime all over again! So what made me rethink my career change? It was superlative material created by some of the medium's best veteran writers and producers who have recently joined new shows. Here are some comments on the work turned out in May by such old masters:

Michael Malone, the new head writer of Another World (formerly of One Life to Live): What a dazzling debut the always interesting Malone made on AW last month! His scripts in his first two weeks were so bracing and sharp, I could hardly believe I was watching dusty old AW!

Malone took twin evildoers Grant and Cindy (sparkling performers Mark Pinter and Kim Rhodes), a soap super couple waiting to happen, and wrote two wedding ceremonies (one in Las Vegas and another in Bay City) that were so hilarious I darned near laughed myself silly watching them. Best of all was Cindy's line when she insisted that she be written into Grant's will before she went through with the Las Vegas ceremony: "No will, no way!"

AW was so entertaining during those two weeks that you could almost forgive Malone for doing a bare-faced ripoff of The Fugitive in establishing a badly needed backstory for Bobby Reno. (We found out Bobby is really Dr. Shane Roberts, on the run from jail for allegedly murdering a woman.) Marlena was most impressed that AW managed to stage actual chase sequences-rarely done on soaps taped on indoor sets-in and around Vicky's house as Shane ran from Detective Morris (Robert Gentry, perhaps best known as All My Children's Ross Chandler). The sequence in which incognito "Dr." Shane tended to an injured Jake in the hospital is the closest these two disparate characters have ever come to being civil to each other.

And the always dry Gentry did such a fantastic imitation of Tommy Lee Jones from The Fugitive that I almost excused AW for recasting Gentry on the show a mere 16 years after he stopped playing the major character Phillip Lyons on the very same soap.

Let's hope Malone's AW continues to be as good in the months to come as it was in May.

(Soap Opera Weekly, June 10, 1997)

"

"AW: MALONE ALONE

by Marlena DeLacroix

As I was finishing the first draft of this column about Michael Malone's rocky head writing tenure at Another World, word came that Malone is out. Now, I'm not clairvoyant. Any AW viewer could see that Malone (a Daytime Emmy winner at ABC's nicely budgeted One Life to Live) brought some magnificently insightful and dynamic ideas to AW when he arrived last spring. But I speculate that one reason Malone's work came off as so tragically half-baked is because the NBC show is so cheaply and unimaginatively produced.

Take last summer's trial of Nick for raping Toni. Here was a bold stroke meant to diversify the show's bland canvas of characters and designed to deepen AW's flat dramatic tone both intellectually and spiritually. And what kind of courtroom set does the notoriously low-budget AW build for this showpiece of a trial? One that's about as deep and as wide as a tuna fish can! Compare this to the vast Palladian trompe l'oiel of a courtroom set Guiding Light executive producer Paul Rauch had constructed for the Reva/Annie murder-of-the-fetus trial early last summer. I rest my case.

It's unfortunate, but maybe AW just couldn't supply the resources needed to meet Malone's dramatic vision. His current front-burner story, what he has called in interviews :The Fall of the House of Cory," is grand and sweeping in its' dramatic intent. By allying Carl's ancient enemy Alexander with Rachel's bitter children Amanda (a.k.a. Hadley) and Matt in a plot to break up Carl and Rachel's marriage, Malone has primed his characters for a classic Greek family tragedy. But who does AW cast to play opposite the classically-trained Vicky Wyndham and Charles Keating (Rachel and Carl), two of the most powerful thespians on daytime television? A girl fresh out of drama school (Laura Moss, who plays Amanda) and a callow young actor who starred in the film Return to the Blue Lagoon (Brian Krause, Matt). Duh!

What's most telling is that what worked best for Malone were stories in which the only resources needed were sets and good, proven actors. Malone gave Lisa Peluso the role of a lifetime in Lila. She has been so good, in fact, that we've barely noticed that she has been given neither a plot to play nor a love interest. In the tragic diet pill story, Malone wrote beautifully for Judi Evans Luciano and Joseph Barbara, the actors who play those rare, middle-class soap characters Paulina and Joe. And, of course, Malone produced the biggest daytime miracle of all-getting me to not only love but fully appreciate the diversified talents of an actor I had long thought of as a soap world cartoon: Tom Eplin. Remember the scenes last summer at the playground in Lassiter, in which Vicky reduced Jake to tears by proposing to him? I never knew that the oft-buffoonish Jake could be so tender, or that the oft-overblown Eplin could absolutely tear my heart out of my chest. Emmy! Emmy!

Malone later said in an interview that he knew if he could finally make Vicky see why she loves Jake, the audience would fall in love with him, too. The ability to analyze, the intellectual curiosity to ask why: That, darlings, is the mark-and the miracle-of a really good head writer.

Conversely, there are many things about the rest of Malone's Aw that I flat-out didn't understand. I turned on my TV last week, and there was the otherwise delicious Kim Rhodes (Cindy) dressed in a Spiderwoman costume grinning at the fertility statue, whose electric eyes were blinking. Huh? And what the hell is that statue anyway? A prop left over from the never-aired, New Orleans-based 13 Bourbon Street? The disembodied spirit of notorious NBC stuntster James E. Reilly (Days of Our Lives former head writer)?

Mark Pinter is so wonderful he can play anything, but why in the world has his Grant morphed into comic relief as Mayor Grant Harrison? In his previous incarnation, when Grant was a haunted Shakespearan villain, Pinter's performance was the most brilliant thing on daytime television! No one was happy to lose longtime cast members David Forsyth (ex-John Hudson) or Kale Browne (Michael). Ironically, Browne put in the best work of his soap career on the way from contract to recurring, as Michael counseled son Nick during his rape trial. I can't make heads or tails of the new comic characters of Cass and Donna (Stephen Schnetzer and Anna Stuart), both of whom seem lost at sea. And what's the deal with RKK (Robert Kelker-Kelly, who plays Shane)? Talk about lost! The actor (who may or may not still be in the cast when you read this) is drowning! I just don't get it.

It's easy for amateur soap analysts to speculate that Days-happy NBC was forcing Malone to do this, and P&G was forcing him to do that. But who realy knows what happened behind the scenes out at AW's studio in Brooklyn? Maybe Malone was in over his head from the start.

All I can see is that Malone's vision never fully made it to the screen. That's a waste, because he is a gem of a head writer. Literate and humanistic, he's a natural heir to the intelligent writing tradition of Agnes Nixon and Claire Labine. In an era of shallow, dum-dum (think Sunset Beach, The Bold and the Beautiful!) soap writing, he is sorely needed. Let's hope that by the time you read this, another show will have hired Malone-one with an imaginative producer. I never thought I'd live to see the day I'd miss (Malone's OLTL executive producer-and Marlena's old punching bag) the ever-grandstanding Linda Gottlieb.

(Soap Opera Weekly, November 18, 1997)

"

[EricMontreal22]

Some sligthly less interesting articles about his early OLTL run (I think they might mention how much help he got from Agnes Nixon who he apparantly phoned a lot for guidance)

What the Dickens!

After years of contemplating his novels, Michael Malone turns his talents to an ABC soap

by Michael Neill and David Hutchings

Michael Malone insists he is not at all defensive about his new job as head writer on the ABC soap One Life to Live. "If Dickens were alive, this is what he'd be doing, " he says. Then, to further emphasize his absolute, total lack of any insecurity whatsoever, he invokes . . . who else? "Shakespeare was considered low culture in his day, " he says. Then he drags in The Novel. "Novels were low culture in the 18th century, " he says. "Lord knows what the low culture will be in the future! "

The problem is that in the literary and academic world where Michael Malone has spent his life, any conversation about low culture can move rather quickly to soap operas. As a visiting writer-in-residence, first at Yale, then Swarthmore and later at the University of Pennsylvania, Malone taught writing and produced seven novels before plunging into the frenetic world of daytime last July.

The new job pays obscenely well by the parsimonious standards of academia -- which was one reason Malone signed on. And since he joined the show, the venerable ABC soap has jumped from No. 11 to No. 4 in the daytime ratings. But there remains the nagging question: What will the neighbors think?

Many of them, it turns out, are thrilled. "I've found an astounding range of people in academia who admit they sneak home to watch soaps after teaching, " Malone says.

Still, the high-culture/low-culture rift almost kept him from even finding out about the One Life job. He had met producer Linda Gottlieb in 1980, when she was negotiating to buy the movie rights to one of his novels. When Gottlieb became executive producer of One Life last year, she thought of Malone. "She told the network she needed a novelist, someone who wrote huge-canvas novels, " he says, "and that's when a mutual friend called my wife and told her. " His wife, Maureen Quilligan, is a professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "She didn't even bother to tell me about it, " says Malone. "She laughed and said I'd never be interested. A week later I got the call from Gottlieb, and I started watching the show. "

Malone had just finished writing Foolscap, a comic novel about vicious academic politics. (Published last fall, it won mostly positive reviews.) He had never even watched a soap opera before -- and Maureen advised him not to start. "She said, 'You're an American novelist. Your duty is to your art,' " Malone says. "But then she started watching them too, and we saw all this interlaced structure and an endless chance to tell stories. "

Storytelling has long been Malone's forte. The son of a physician father and an English-teacher mother, he was born in Durham, N.C., the eldest of six children. "I wrote plays when I was young and forced my brothers and sisters into costumes, " he says. "I'd make them sing 'Be My Little Baby Bumblebee' in bee wings. "

He went to Syracuse University and then pursued a Ph.D. in English at Harvard, where he also met Maureen. "She was a real scholar, " he says. "My dissertation was on archetypes of innocence and eroticism in American film. Hers was on the Renaissance. " It was at Harvard too that Malone began writing Painting the Roses Red, a novel about graduate school, published in 1975. "I got $2,000, " he says. "I thought I was rich and I'd go off to Europe and be this artist. " Instead he married Maureen and began to bob along in her academic wake, all the while writing his novels. "Maureen thinks it's very convenient to marry a novelist because you just move them with you from place to place, " he says. "All they need is a pencil and paper. "

Malone expects to return to writing books eventually, but for now he's in New York City five days a week, writing in his One Life office about people named Asa and Clint, while Maureen stays with daughter Maggie, 15, in the family's restored Philadelphia townhouse. Malone works long hours, often until 10 at night. He's writing soaps, but he still has standards. "Agnes Nixon, the creator of this show, had a very clear vision of what she wanted -- class problems, differences between the haves and have-nots, " he says. "I've tried to put that back in. "

The show's actors like his style. Says Erika Slezak, One Life's Victoria Lord Buchanan: "Michael has created such wonderfully complex situations. I've never had much of a relationship with my children on the show -- and that is happening now. "

There are, however, special problems with soap writing. "You get actors who come and say they are quitting, and you have to write in their departure, death, disappearance, " Malone says. "And you have to watch death. In soaps you can be dead -- or you can be dead, dead, dead. The actors we know won't come back we make dead, dead, dead. "

He receives plenty of kibitzing from home -- from both Maureen and Maggie, a high school sophomore. After school she watches the show on tape and is generous with advice. "I'll say, 'Oh, Dad, why are you putting those two together? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.' "

If only Shakespeare and Dickens had had that kind of input, think what they might have accomplished

(People Magazine February,1992)

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One Life to Live Went Looking For a New Writer and Found a Novelist

by Kathy Henderson

When ABC hired movie producer Linda Gottlieb ( "Dirty Dancing ") to revitalize its ailing soap opera "One Life to Live, " she didn't round up the usual bunch of daytime soap writers.

"What she said was, 'I'm looking for the American Dickens,' and what novelist could resist that? " said Michael Malone, who had published seven novels and worked with Gottlieb on a screenplay but had never watched an episode of a soap opera, not even "Dallas. "

"My wife thought the idea was so hilarious, she didn't pass on Linda's first phone message, " said Malone, a soft-spoken Harvard Ph.D. who looks like he could be the Pillsbury doughboy's bearded uncle. But, as he sampled the show, Malone began to realize that soaps -- or "the stories, " as he prefers to call them -- had a lot in common with his work. "I write big novels with lots of characters and interlaced structure, " he said (his most recent, "Foolscap, " is a funny adventure in an academic setting). "For someone who likes to tell stories, this is heaven. "

"One Life " needed a jolt when Malone joined it last summer. Created 24 years ago by soap doyenne Agnes Nxon, the show originally centered on the push and pull between classes and races in Llanview, a fictional suburb on Philadelphia's Main Line. In recent years, plots had grown increasingly bizarre, including the introduction of an underground city called Eterna and a story featuring rap music that Malone deemed "terrible. "

"One of the dangers of this form is to try to go around what it (a soap) can do best, " he said, "which is draw viewers into the characters' lives and emotional relationships. I wanted to re-create a sense of place and then unfold what seemed to me to be the essence of these characters. "

In taking the soap from a low of eighth place (out of 11 daytime soap operas) to a sustained rating of fourth or fifth, Malone has balanced stories about the show's core family, the Buchanans, with quirky new characters and unexpected cameo appearances by the likes of Dick Cavett (as a sleazy radio talk-show host), Paul Bartel (as a nervous lawyer) and Wallace Shawn (as a restaurateur). "One Life " reaped high ratings and extensive publicity last winter with a week-long clip retrospective during the death throes of Megan, a popular heroine, and a Valentine's Day show using classic lover poems to spotlight each of the show's couples.

"He's very clever, " Lynn Leahey, editor- in-chief of Soap Opera Digest, said of Malone, "and he takes chances with the characters in ways that might not occur to a more experienced soap writer. But he can also pull off good old cliches like 'Wife Coming Back from the Dead' and reposition characters that aren't working, which is just as important. "

In one startling transformation, Malone made Alex, a run-of-the-mill blond vixen played by Tonja Walker, into a sassy, hilarious mob widow who said to her late husband's henchman, "May I call you Bulge? " When he replied, "Only my friends call me that, " she cooed, "I'm looking forward to finding out why. " Another lovely young home wrecker turned out to be a virgin. "That's a rare one these days, isn't it? " Malone said with a laugh.

Without irony, Malone invokes Shakespeare and Spenser as forerunners of soap-style evil twins and orphaned heirs. He takes great exception to the idea that daytime drama represents "the basement " of TV.

"To do this well, you must never look down at the audience, " he said. "A few of my friends thought I would come in and do some sort of Monty Python version of a soap, but my work is very mainstream, and I believe deeply that there is a place where all audiences can meet. An example is Dickens himself, or from our culture, 'Gone With the Wind.'

There are two original American art forms: musicals and soap operas. My gosh, people in cultural studies departments are teaching soap operas now! "

Even Malone's own wife, Maureen Quilligan, has become hooked. Separations from Quilligan and the couple's teen-age daughter have been the job's major drawback (they live in Philadelphia; he lives in New York during the week), plus a brutal workload that includes overseeing a staff of nine outline and dialogue writers and editing every script personally, a task few other head writers take on.

"About 500 pages of material come out of this office every week, " he said, likening soap production to "a machine that works in this day when so many American machines don't. "

For a novelist accustomed to dreaming up characters in solitude, the three-ring circus atmosphere of a soap set was a happy surprise. "It's like having fictional characters wander into your office, " said Malone, "because the actors talk about themselves inside their characters. 'I don't wanna say that,' or 'I don't see why I have to do this' -- these are real human beings, but they are obsessed by the parts they play. " Malone confessed that he, too, finds himself intensely involved in "One Life " life: "I dream in Llanview; these people are very close to me."

With a Daytime Emmy nomination for outstanding writing already to his credit, Malone has found ABC receptive to his ideas. "If things were a disaster, the network probably wouldn't have been as good, " he said, adding that a story involving homosexuality has been planned for summer. Is the handsome Episcopal minister with the stern military father secretly gay? "No, but that doesn't mean people might not accuse him of it, " Malone said mysteriously.

Though he works hard to connect plotlines and maintain the proper storytelling tempo, Malone said he never worries that his fountain of ideas will run dry. "The network people used to say, 'Watch out, you're burning up stories,' which flabbergasted me.

In one of my novels, 'Dingley Falls,' I had planned to tell a year's worth of story in this little town, but by the time I got to page 1,200, I'd written six days. My wife said, 'Just make Sunday a church service -- you've got to stop now.' With me, there are endless things that seem to bubble out. "

(LA Times-July 5, 1992)

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Emmy Acceptance Speech:

"There are alot of us up here, but there are hundreds more that should be--other writers, the cast and crew, the producers and directors of One Life To Live--without you what we do would just be typing. And the wonderful ladies across the street at ABC-Mickey and Pat and Maxine and Barbara.. and two very extraordinary women-Linda Gottlieb, who had the amazing courage to hire all of us and to turn us loose in Llanview-thank you.....also, Agnes Nixon, who created the world that we live in... If Charles Dickens is the father of daytime, she's his daughter and we're very proud to be among her children. Thank you."

(Michael Malone)

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Scared Scriptless

by Jason Bonderoff

Creating a soap opera is a lot like playing God. Birth, death, happiness and misfortune-it's all in a writer's hands. He can make a character fall in love or fall off a cliff. He can even bring people back from the dead.

Soap writers win Emmy's, get good tables at the right restaurants, and earn big-buck salaries. So why are so many of them scared scriptless?

Maybe it's fear of the blank page. Coming up with a never-ending supply of entertaining (yet believable) plot twists for 40 or so characters-then putting lots of snappy dialogue into everyone's mouth-isn't easy. ONE LIFE TO LIVE'S talented head writer, Michael Malone, admits he's had sleepless nights worrying about the Buchanan's and their cohorts. "I do dream about the people in Llanview," he confides. "Once I had a really horrible dream where all the characters had blank faces because I didn't know what their stories were going to be. In my dream, I saw white, cut-out faces of people, all void. That was terrifying."

For inspiration, Malone keeps photos of the OLTL cast hanging in his office wall. "Sometimes, I move the photos around," he says. "I put people next to different people and think, 'How would these two people look together?' Right now, I've got Wanda Wolek's picture next to Joey Buchanan's. But don't make anything out of that," he laughs. "They're not getting invovled."

....Accident-prone stars pose another hazard..... Some emergencies are...difficult to handle. "A real nightmare," says OLTL's Malone, "is when the phone rings and you find out that Clint Ritchie [Clint] has been in a tractor accident," When that happened last year, OLTL executive producer Linda Gottlieb immediately summoned the writing staff together, "We sat down and talked," says Malone. "Actually, first we all sat down and prayed because nobody knew if Clint was going to make it or not. Then we had to make a decision about recasting, because no matter what, he was going to be out for a long time and we were building our big Viki/Clint/Sloan story."

Malone and company decided that hiring a pinch hitter didn't make sense because the whole story was based on the deep history Clint and Viki shared. How could a new actor convey that? "Besides, with a new actor, we wouldn't be able to use any Clint/Viki flashbacks [to remind the viewers of the couple's happier times]," Malone notes. So, OLTL opted to hold the Clint/Viki/Sloan story in abeyance until Ritchie's return several months later.

...Even without such worries, head writing is never a nine-to-five job. "Characters become like family. It sometimes distresses people in your personal life," admits Malone, who jokes that his wife and daughter don't always want to hear about Max and Luna during dinner.

...Today, most writers are up on world affairs, although Malone jokes, "I remember thinking, 'I really am inside the world of One Life To Live' when somebody told me that the Soviet government had fallen, and I just said, 'Oh, God, no. Are we going to be preempted?' ". But he's grateful for small favors: Malone has yet to lose a long-term story outline in his computer (just the breakdown for one script) and his dentist hasn't tried to sell him ideas while plying him with Novacain. What would Malone's worst nightmare be? "If Erika Slezak [Viki] walked into my office and said, 'I'm leaving the show tomorrow, I've decided to raise roses.' " Oh well, Malone would just have to go back to the bulletin board and play musical photos.

(Soap Opera Digest Jan 18, 1994)

And a late 90s--I think--online Q&A

Malone on Daytime TV, One Life to Live, and Another World

Question: What were the biggest challenges (if any) writing for characters already in existence, whose personalities and backstories were already fleshed out and in place?

Malone: Among the tremendous strengths of daytime serials (and I believe the genre to be a great and one of the few truly original American art forms) are the richness, complexity, longevity of the characters. Unless you're writing a series (like Nero Wolfe or Anne of Green Gables), when you start a novel, you give birth to characters full-blown. In daytime, you adopt many of them already formed. You have to study their histories, discuss their personalities with the actors who play them (and know them in some ways far more deeply than you ever will), and develop stories for them that evolve FROM their characters. Aristotle's credo, Character is Action, is nowhere truer than in daytime drama where story must be driven not by plot but by character.

On the other hand, that very strength of a character's full past leads to potential weaknesses in daytime that must be guarded against: One is repetition (after a quarter of a century, Viki Lord is likely to have suffered every calamity, illness, lost love, family crisis, financial woe, moral dilemma, dynastic rivalry, that can befall a woman (even a woman with multiple personalities). The un-tried plot becomes an increasing challenge.

The open-endedness (everlastingness) of daytime is another strength that causes a weakness: Art likes to have a beginning, middle and end--to have a shape, a form, a denouement. The curtain closes when the lovers kiss, the novel ends when the couple says I do. Daytime has to keep going. And going and going.

Question: To what extent did the fans (if they did at all) dictate the decisions you made as a head writer? Would you, for instance, give the fans a particular storyline that they were asking for?

Malone: As with any dramatic art form, the audience is part of the performance--two stagings of Uncle Vanya will be different because the audience is different. The intense interest daytime fans take in "their stories" and "their characters" naturally plays a role in the story-telling. (And also makes re-casts terribly challenging.)

It is not so much that fans dictate story in a specific sense (someone doesn't call up and say, "Kill SoandSo" and the person's dead!), but the love fans feel for characters certainly affects their longevity on the show. And

vice versa. Todd Manning began on One Life as a short-term non-contract player called "Frat Boy # 1); the rest, as they say, is history.

Question: When you decided to break up Clint and Viki Buchanan (OLTL) many long time fans were upset. Was it ever your intention to reunite them--some place down the road?

Malone: Breaking up a couple as firmly established in a marriage as Clint and Viki Buchanan can feel as traumatic to writers as the collapse of a marriage of real friends or family. That's how everyone at One Life felt when we made the decision to explore the dramatic possibilities in a mid-age ex-marital affair for Viki. We did so at a time when she was emotionally vulnerable because she had lost her daughter Megan, and chose as her partner General Sloan Carpenter, the father of the minister with whom she'd dealt with Megan's illness.

There was tremendous dramatic potential in such a story BECAUSE Viki and Clint were such good people, had been through so much together, had shared children and a home, shared professsions (running the Banner together), and were both highly moral, fair, faithful leaders of their community. The story evolved directly out of the Accusation (the Billy Douglas/Andrew Carpenter homophobia story), which itself would later grow into the Marty's Rape story: What would happen if a girl was known in town to be a dangerous liar (she had falsely accused Andrew of making sexual advances to Billy because Andrew had rejected her flirtatious overtures), and she then accused four young men at the local university of raping her. Would anybody believe

her, particularly if she then admitted that she'd made a mistake about at least one of the boys (Kevin Buchanan).

As the Accusation developed, we brought General Sloan Carpenter to Llanview and led him into conflict with Viki over Andrew's embattled effort to bring the Aids quilt to town. Viki's leading Sloan to a more compassionate, tolerant view of his homosexual son's death from AIDS (she ultimately persuaded him to join her in placing a panel in the quilt), evoked in them feelings for each other that both worked long and hard to suppress because of Viki's commitment to her marriage. At the same time, Clint took a different moral position on the issue and that distanced him from Viki. And at the same time, Dorian began in her inimitable way, to do everything she could to foment jealousy.

All these threads worked to create drama: Viki's moral torture, Clint's pain, the children's distress, Sloan's evolution from a cold, withdrawn man to a loving heart--all gave us rich sources of story for months and months.

With an actress as astonishingly gifted as Eriki Slezak, drama of that sort is a writer's joy.

After Sloan and Viki married, Clint and Viki were able to reconnect and to sustain a friendship based on a love deeper than their hurt and loss, as Viki was struck by Sloan's critical illness and death.

But you know what? There is one moment I remember vividly that suggests to me an inevitable move back together of Clint and Viki. As least in the pure narrative sense (I mean, taking away all the external factors that control story in daytime--actors move to Hollywood, networks cut costs, contract negotiations fail, recasts don't work, etc.) That moment was a shot of Clint (tired and unhappy) walking up the stairs to be with a crying Jessica during the time when he and Viki were working out the divorce. I always thought of it as the "John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" shot--it revealed Clint as the quiet man who would never stop loving a woman his whole life long. And that makes the audience hope that someday, some way, maybe she'd

come back to him.

Question: Whose decision was it to flesh out Todd from Marty's gangrapist into the character he ultimately became at the end of your run? If it was someone else's decision, how did you feel about it? If it was your decision, what reaction did it get from the higher-ups?

Malone: One of the things I love about daytime writing (which makes it very different from the solitary creation of novels and more like the communal creation over decades of a great medieval cathedral) is that the story-telling is a genuine collaboration, not just among writers but by the actors. Directors, producers, and audience have their input as well. In the creation of Todd Manning, no one played a larger role than the remarkably talented Josh Griffith, first associate head writer, then co-head writer, during my stay at One Life. Josh loved, lived and breathed Todd and fought passionately for his position on the show.

Second, Todd never would have evolved from "first frat boy" to the major cast member he became without the powerful talent of Roger Howarth. Because of Roger's ability to convey the complexity of Todd (the hurt as well as anger, the insecurity as well as bluster, the brains, yearning, manipulativeness, sexiness, tenderness, nastiness) we were able to explore both the deeply dark side of this character (the effort to destroy Marty to cover the rape, the attempted revenge on his lawyer Nora, the attack on Luna) and at the same time slowly uncover his growing struggle (usually a failed struggle) towards some kind of redemption.

Romantic leads have often begun their careers playing villains (Valentino, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart among them). These characters appeal because they make women feel both the thrill of the "bad" and the lure of the hidden "good": they can lead the man to change through love. "I'll save him!" Fans loved Todd from the beginning because he always had that appeal. The network was therefore happy to have him return to Llanview whenever Roger would come back, and happy to have him move into story in major ways.

Making him Viki's younger brother and an heir to the Lord fortune gave us huge story--first because we could lead in with the mystery of the false heir (the David Vickers con man and his corruption of Tina) and then develop Todd not only as Viki's unwanted sibling (what horror for the good Viki to learn that the bad Todd was her blood), but as her professional rival when he uses a splashy tabloid newspaper to wipe out her venerable Banner.

The spiritual journey that a man like Todd might make towards being offered forgiveness and being able to accept forgiveness (sometimes the harder task) always intrigued me as a story--and particularly so because Roger was too honest an actor ever to make the journey an easy one for a character as dangerously wounded as Todd.

Any reformation of Todd of course had to lead to a re-confrontation with Marty. That's why he had to risk his freedom after his prison break to pull her from the car wreckage, and even donate to her his blood. That's why

later he did what he could to help her and Patrick Thornhart. But nothing could ever make Todd feel less twisted about the crime he had committed against Marty, and nothing could balance the scales for Marty until she had found a way to deal with her rage against Todd.

Frankly, I could have seen the tangled relationship between those two playing out for years to come. But sadly Marty has left Llanview and Todd doesn't seem to stay very long. And like life daytime keeps moving in other ways.

Question: What made you choose to pair Blair with Todd? I never would have thought of these two together.

Malone: Todd and Blair were a great deal alike, two bad apples, two lost souls: conniving, deceitful, wounded and hiding the wounds for all they were worth behind a smart and sexy facade. Both were very much on guard against ever being susceptible to love. (A Scarlett and Rhett match-up, to use my perennial GWTW analogy that used to drive Josh Griffith crazy. I loved the movie, he didn't.) The idea for Todd/Blair came from wondering what would happen if two tricksters set out to trick each other, with no genuine thought of romance,

and what if the ultimate trick was on them and they fell in love? In the beginning, Blair was trying to marry Todd for his money before he found out he was the heir to the Lord fortune, and Todd was trying to hurt any and

everybody in town. Slowly they learned how much they had in common--both had rotten childhoods that left them with deep insecurities, both had rotten reputations in Llanview (and deserved them), both were willing to go to any lengths to get what they wanted--the safety of immense wealth, the thrill of somebody else's spouse, social acceptance by those who'd rejected them.

As soon as we put them together, the chemistry between Roger and Kassie was wonderful and we knew they would work as a couple. But deepest down, we planned to play that Blair was still in love in Max. That old flame was going to flare up and start fireworks as she and Todd started to fight over the ultimate prize of their daughter, Starr.

Different producers, network folk, different writers took their story other places.

Question: There have many changes on One Life To Live since you left...some feel that the changes have not been for the better. Bo and Nora are no longer together, the Angel Square community is barely in existence, Todd Manning, Patrick and Marty Thornhart, Dorian Lord, and Andi Harrison Vega (to name just a few) are

no longer on the show, and many others such as Andrew Carpenter and Carlotta Vega are rarely seen. Do you ever watch the show these days? If so, what changes would you make?

Malone: No, it was a heartbreak for me to leave One Life, and the truth is, I don't watch the show except rarely--for example if a friend mentions a particular episode for which he or she has written a favorite breakdown or script. But I hear and have heard about many of the changes you describe and some of them

are naturally distressing.

The changes I would make would be the changes I made the first time. When I first came to Llanview, it was vitally important to me to restore the heritage of the Lords, which seemed to have been absorbed and swamped by Buchanans. To revitalize a matriarchal rivalry by opening up the history between Viki and Dorian and by giving Dorian's side some allies (the Cramer women--Blair and Kelly). To find the human core of established characters and let them act out of that core.

I wanted very much to broaden Llanview's citizenship from its white-bread class-less comfort to a rich and troublesome diversity: To bring in more African Americans (Hank and RJ and Rachel Gannon). To create and develop a world of working class people who didn't have the advantages of the Lords and the Buchanans (Angel Square). To explore spiritual sensibilities--from Luna's New Age faith to Andrew Carpenter's traditional Protestant ministry. To make realistic workplaces and create stories out of them: This is why we made Bo a police officer, Andi a cop, Nora a lawyer, Hank a DA. It's why we reestablished The Banner for Viki and the Buchanans and gave Dorian/Todd a rival paper. (We had just started to create a comparable medical world with Marty when I left.)

Most of all, I wanted to tell stories that brought together all these very different kinds of people in highly dramatic situations (lfor example Marty's rape trial or Dorian's trial for the murder of Victor Lord) where I

could let strongly positioned and fully realized characters act out of that character. If you create strong characters with real human natures and habits and strengths and flaws, characters who are true to themselves, they will always tell you what their stories are. You just have to listen. And follow them.

Contorting plots for artificial drama, violating the integrity of character for special effects, deeply troubles me. We get enough of it in the movies. Daytime is uniquely positioned to tell story through the development of

character and relationships, through not just romantic love, but family feelings, friendships, work relationships, social factions, race and class and age differences, and that's what it ought to be doing.

Question: I’m a big fan of Bo and Nora, though they’re no longer a couple (which is a travesty!). I think that, with these two characters, you created one of the best, most fun and down to earth couples that I’ve ever seen on TV. It’s been said that you can’t have a happily married couple on a soap without having them become boring and stale, therefore they can’t stay “happy” for long. Do you agree with this theory?

Malone: Nora and Bo were magic to me from the first audition screen between Bob and Hillary. They had the classic chemistry of the great romantic comedy stars of films--that Tracy/Hepburn thing. They were equals, 50/50, strong, bright, opinionated, shared tastes, same age, but with very different personalities. Their romantic sparring was as perfect as their offbeat wedding. I absolutely believed in their relationship from the start. In their battles (whether they were over her defending clients he'd arrested or just over the choice of furniture for the house), Bo and Nora were worthy adversaries and real lovers. To me, breaking up Nora and Bo could only be for the purpose of bringing them back together.

I say this knowing that the lack of an ending to soap opera stories is always a narrative challenge--and nowhere more so than in the crucial area of romance. Our very concept of romantic love is classically founded in obstacles. The lovers cannot be together because of some barrier--their families hate each other (Romeo&Juliet), because the woman is married and the man is a minister (The Scarlet Letter), or the man is a married minister (The Sandpiper), or both are married, or one is rich and one is poor, one is black and one is white, one is Jewish and one is Christian, and so on and so on. If these problems aren't worked out, the curtain closes on a tragedy (Anna Karenina jumps in front of the train). If they are resolved, the curtain closes on the marriage proposal or the marriage ceremonoy (as it does in all romantic comedies from Tom Jones and Pride and Prejudice to You've Got Mail.)

So for writers the problem is to find the drama for a "happily married couple." It has to come from the outside: conflicts in career (she's a defense attorney, he's a police chief) or conflicts in principle or a tragedy: one of them is ill or whatever. The couple can even THINK they've fallen out of love, they can even believe they're in love with someone else, they can even think the other one's dead, but the audience will always think

they're wrong. The audience is always going to want the great couples back together. That's how I feel about Bo and Nora.

Question: You gave OLTL so many unique and interesting characters. Do you have one favorite character that you created? How about one favorite couple?

Malone: Oh no, I could never say a favorite character or favorite couple. I really loved them all. just as much as the characters in my novels. And that includes characters I DIDN'T create--like Viki and Dorian and Asa and Bo and Megan and Cord and Tina and Renee.

I suppose I have a special fondness for my original children: Luna who parachuted into a party at Viki's on the first day of my air shows, and Blair who stirred up the town with Dorian's secret and then snapped up Max and then stole Asa, and Andrew who fell in love with Megan against all his scruples, and Marty who was so unhappy and destructive. The remarkable Nora. The Irish Patrick. Carlotta and her sons Antonio and Christian. The Gannons. I loved deeply characters we created who didn't get to stay in Llanview--among

many, Maggie, and the tormented Billy Douglas and the rapscallion con artist Cain Rogan.

I love too the way we reintroduced former characters. Like Alex Olanov, taking her into outrageous comedy and power-lust until she married Asa from her Cleopatra barge and tried to take over Llanview!

Question: Which story did you have the hardest time getting by the OLTL “Powers that be” that actually made it on the air?

Malone: Ironically, there was initial opposition to stories that proved the most successful in ratings terms. The story of Marty's rape, for example. And the homophobia story (originally we'd wanted to bring it closer to home by having Joey Buchanan reveal that he was gay.) In both these cases, the courage and daring of our producer Linda Gottlieb was crucial. She fought for the stories and she won. Some stories never got told because of network concerns or they never were told as they should have been because network fears weakened or compromised them.

But I must say that, at least during my tenure there, ABC tried hard in general to be supportive even of stories they weren't sure about--allowing us to re-open the mystery of who killed Victor Lord, for example, which took us into the risky territory of multiple personality and childhood incest abuse. Other times, stories can get truncated or dropped for unavoidable external reasons--an actor quits, or the network learns that a highly similiar story is being told on another network.

Of course, about that I used to say, it doesn't matter. All the stories have already been told anyhow. Just not by

all the storytellers.

Question: Soaps today are facing declining audiences and falling victim to cancellation (Another World, Sunset Beach) What do you feel soap operas are doing wrong and how should the problem be corrected?

Answer: The problems are fear, stagnation, and impatience. The fear leads to impatience on the one hand and to a stagnant return to outmoded content and style that is ignorant of, or at least indifferent to, the current culture.

The people who own the soaps (ABC, CBS, NBC, P&G) say they want to change but they don't appear to mean it. In their fear, they fall victim to naive marketing analyses and endless second-guessing.

What is needed is boldness, commitment and clarity.

Genres come and go. We don't have Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show now; instead we have MTV. Big nighttime hits rarely last more than ten years (Cheers, Seinfeld), much less thirty years. So we could say that daytime drama has had a good long run, and its time is over. But I don't believe that. I think longevity is proof of a remarkable appeal still there to be tapped. This genre was largely created by women, and like so many art forms for which that is true (the novel and quilt--to take two), daytime is sometimes considered second-rate, and it has sadly sometimes treated itself that way. But I have always believed that the daytime serial is not only one of the few original American narrative forms (musical comedy is another), but that it is a great narrative form and should never be treated as otherwise, never apologized for, never looked down upon.

Like any art form, daytime has to change to last and change is scary. We can't assume that what worked in the 1970's or 1980's or even 1990's, will work in the 21st century, anymore that we can assume that the 18-34 yr old woman of today thinks/feels/cries/laughs/lives the way her older sister or her mother did. Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, and E.R. are all successful television doctor shows, but they are very very different in content, in structure, in pace and in style. And maybe most of all, in TONE and RHYTHM. E.R. succeeds today because it is written in a tone and rhythm that makes sense for today's audience. (For example, there are three times as many scenes in E.R. as in Marcus Welby, which means the scenes are three times shorter, the pace is three times faster.)

Real daytime change cannot and will not come out of fear. Concern about shifting demographics, the alternatives offered by cable, the return of women to the workplace, etc, etc, all the variables that have led to falling ratings have unfortunately driven networks to worsen the very dilemma they are so desperate to correct. By failing to understand the audience, by impatiently changing casts and writers, by trunacating stories, by chasing this gimmick, then that, soap operas are neither gaining new audience nor maintaining old audience.

There is only one way to change that: Tell compelling stories about clusters of characters that the audience identifies with, finds highly attractive, cares about emotionally, and has to be familiar with because they want to share knowledge about what's happened to these characters with their cohorts--the way nighttime audiences felt they had to watch or talk about Seinfeld or Friends. Cast those parts right and stay with them. Choose people to tell those stories, empower them to do so, and then committ to what they do. It is the unity of style, the constancy of casting, the committment to story, that has kept Bill Bell's Young and the Restless so successful for so long. I'm not at all saying other shows should be like Young and the Restless. They shouldn't. They should be what they are. My sense is that many shows today don't even know who they are, much less stay true to it. I believe that in the early nineties we gave One Life a real identity, that a new audience started watching because they liked what they saw--its boldness, its contemporary feel--and when that identity went away, so did they.

Shakespeare's Othello is a great story, but if a committee rewrote it out of fear, and if Othello couldn't be black because an interracial marriage might bother some people, and Iago couldn't trick him because the actor doesn't want to look foolish, and Iago can't be evil because that would make him hateful, and Othello can't really kill Desdemona on purpose because he's the rooting interest, so he can only accidentally push her down the steps--we end up with a safe and boring story about indistinctive people to whom nothing much of real consequence happens.

Question: If you had OLTL to do over again, is there anything that you would have done differently?

Answer: Dayrime is like a huge slow moving river and the tiniest choice can lead miles and miles away to a shift in a whole direction. There are thousands of such tiny choices I know I could have made better. But mostly I would have fought harder--about casting, about story--to maintain the wholeness of vision we tried to put in place.

The heart of a soap opera has a unique and steady beat. every part of the show must be unified to keep that beat true. When it is true--when it has honesty, integrity, clarity, consistency--when it never violates the truth of human nature (and that doesn't mean that stories can't have ghosts and dreams and angels and devils and fantasies), then the audience comes to feel so close to the heart beat of the show that they can't bear not to keep hearing it. They come to love the people, to feel a part of their lives. When your audience really wants to know what is going to happen next to people they care about deeply, that's when you have daytime at it's best. And that's when the ratings go back up.

Question: Would you ever consider a return to daytime? If so, under what circumstances? If not, why?

Answer: I have no plans to return to daytime--right now I'm trying to finish a novel called FIRST LADY, the sequel to TIME'S WITNESS--but then I had no plans to go into daytime in the first place either, and look at how much I loved it. So, I've learned to never say never. Under what circumstances? I would want the power to tell the stories right and the right team to tell them with. I'd either want to go back to One Life which I know and already feel a part of, or to create a new show. I still believe there's a great waiting market for a late-night soap of the sort we did for Fox(13 Bourbon Street) Most of all I would want to feel a strong commitment from a network to a shared vision of what daytime drama can be--and must be if it is to survive.

Question: Why was your time so short at AW, and why did you ultimately decide to leave?

Answer: I very much liked the stories I was starting to tell on Another World, I was happy with the ways in which the canvas was broadening and its people connecting. But it soon became harder to tell the stories, and then impossible.

One of the great and to my mind still unsolved dilemmas of daytime drama production (a genre that is in general brilliantly constructed in its organization--indeed I've often said that it's the last American machine that

really works) is the potential for problematic differences between a head writer and an executive producer. In nighttime of course, the show's creator/writers and the show's executive producers are usually the same

people.

The traditional assumption in daytime has been that the enormous ongoing demands of serial drama make it impossible not to split up these two demanding jobs. If the EP and the HW were ideal soulmates, that would be fine. They rarely are. The more integral the dramatic vision for a show, the more successful that show will be. This is even truer for daytime than for other genres, because daytime is about characters, not plots, and if

characters are to evolve with integrity, they must grow from inside their on-going stories. Over the years, creators with authority over their shows (Agnes Nixon, Bill Bell) have proved the success of this strong and single empowered vision.

It is possible to write a show where the producer has the vision and subservient writers are hired to implement it. It is also possible to write a show where the writer's vision is the "boss" and the executive producer does what the words of the title say: he or she executes the production. But where the proverbial "artistic differences" lead to a collapse of support between a strong head writer and an organization in which the executive producer "runs" the show, conflict is inevitable and inevitably harmful to the Herculean effort that a whole company of dedicated talented professionals has to make to produce a show daily. Someone has to go. And that's why my stay at Another World was so brief.

..

[EricMontreal22]

What show for internet? Dr Horrible is a one off (so far) and he's still invested in Foxe's DollHouse--did I miss some news?

I still wish there was a way to bring back him and Griffith and Gottlieb's 13 Bourbon Street in some format (or I could see that [!@#$%^&*] pilot).

I knwo Gottlieb left OLTl in 1994--did people see a direct change? At the time I was less aware of EP's and their influence--and don't remember a change till Griffith left and it all fell apart around late 95 I think.

E

[Vee]

Malone's interviews are always fascinating and I truly believe he loved OLTL like few else. I believe he had the best of intentions. But without powerful control elements in place, a strong EP who shares his vision and a firm hand by Griffith as a co-writer, he falls apart. Within the first week back, things began to fall apart. The first three days were great - new Jessica, new Joey, Nora dumps Troy, hot Troy and Lindsay sex, Blair excoriates Todd - and then by the end of the week or next two weeks, you had Flash lusting after her cousin and a Valentine's Day ep centered around people like Flash and Joey (who had just met), you had Jessica and Antonio, you had Victor back from the dead with no explanation, and then over the next several months you had Mitch Laurence: Subterranean Underground Dweller, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, living in the sewers, playing with cursed diamonds, looking for a "river of souls" under Llanfair. It turned into DOOL and Malone's operatic excess undermined everything else he could've hoped for. Same thing happened the following year with the OTT Santi mess.

In fact, if his last two years proved anything it's that he'd probably do well at DOOL. I'm serious, try it.

[EricMontreal22]

I actually always think i shoudl read more of his novels--I know several featured a character who became Nora Gannon--no?

I picked up the OLTL tie in "Macie McBane's" The Killing Club--partly cuz I'm a sucker for bad soap opera tie ins (I have Having it All by Erica Kane, Patrick Thornheart's book of his thoguths and fave poetry--which Malone wrote--etc) and cuz it was on the remainder shelf. This tie in had many ironies--one was that the story that played out on OLTL that was meant to be by someone emulating the murders in the book had VERY VERY little connection to the book (I didn't even see much of a similarity with the murders)--I guess cuz Dena Higley was writing the story as Malone had just been fired. Also in the book's thanks it says that the basic storyline wasn't by Malone--but by Josh Griffith, but Malone did the writing.

That said it was, if a very unambitious, a very readable, charming and even compelling murder mystery with interesting characters. If Malone churned it out in his sleep, the man really is a great novelist--I'm not a huge mystery fan but gave it to my mom later on to read--who IS a huge mystery reader and she thought it was an above average murder mystery.

[EricMontreal22]

Vee I think it was you who just a month or so ago posted a bunch of great thoughts about Malone's last run. I've NEVER been partial to DAYS though so I'm not sure about him going there -- but I agree that he definetly needs Griffith with him. I admit I know a lot of people hate Griffith cuz of him producing Y&R but as a writer I've always thought he was great--perhaps just cuz him and Malone are such a born combo. I have no idea how he is on his own.

Griffith actuallyw as HW for most of the Storm of Change openign to this last era of Malone wasn't he?

Either way what is random/weird is Malone this time around seemed to want to go in a more adventure story direction than his 90s era--was this on purpose? It seems it musta been.

[EricMontreal22]

Oh and I see Toups wisely posted a link to the Malone thread I keep refering to of just a while back already on here. LOL sorry