Harding Lemay's soap Lovers and Friends

[SteveFrame]

I never got to see Lovers & Friends or For Richer, For Poorer - only read synopsis in Soap Opera Digest.

for the person who asked, SOD started in 1975.

The biggest thing that hurt L&F and FR,FP is that for some weird reason many NBC affiliates did not pick it up. Our affiliate out of Nashville never aired either program - thus the reason I never saw them. We watched all the NBC soaps in the 70's and anything related to Another World was seen in our household. We saw every episode of Somerset ever made. I just wish my memory was better to remember all of it. Since the 3 strokes I had last year I lost a lot of my memories of things or they get jumbled from time to time.

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As to Harding Lemay, the biggest reason that Lemay didn't succeed as much in later stints, I have always theorized was due to the soap opera writing format changing in the 80's.

In the 70's when Lemay wrote AW, he had a staff but they didn't really have a lot to do. Tom King once made the statement as I said that Harding did the HW job, did the breakdowns, and even wrote his own scripts or assisted them in writing them. before he left AW in May 1979, he wrote all of the scripts. That was from Mar 5, 1979 to May 11, 1979 he wrote every single script. and those were 90 minute shows.

He was more hands on in what he did and things really changed in the 80's as the staffs started getting bigger and all. I personally think the way they did things in the 60's & 70's was better. The less people involved seemed to keep the stories concise and all.

Many times the staff writers only had the job of looking over the script for errors and continuity issues.

I don't think Lemay could write at all in the current format. It has changed even more than it was in the 80's and the writing staffs have gotten even bigger.

[EricMontreal22]

Well one thing I've always loved about the NEw York based soaps in general is how much Broadway talent they use--but yes Rauch and Lemayparticularly took advantage of this. As for Lemay's credentials though, he was primarily a playwright but accomplished? Not to sound snotty but that's overstating things--he never had any plays run on Broadway or in London's West End for example. THere are a good ten or so, some with descriptions, available for amateur groups to perform listed here: http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsL/LemayHarding.htm and otherwise I've never found much else. None seem to have been published...

He was picked by P&G for AW because of his excellent autobiography Outside Looking In from 1970 I think, which did win awards and I think made P&G think of a soap opera

Steve--I agree with you about the older style of writing soaps. I'd still love to see some eps of Lovers and Friends though...

[Sylph]

He didn't come to AW from theatre. He was a very successful editor at Alfred Knopf. And yes, his memoir got him the job.

Don't criticise Lemay. When you write something the way Lemay wrote AW, then you can. Until that very moment... I seriously do not understand your so evident hate of this man and the constant mentioning of his consulting stint at OLTL.

[EricMontreal22]

What? I think AW under him from all Iv'e seen and read would prob be my ideal soap. I'm gagging to see ANYTHING from Lovers and Friends. The man is *great* I just think he sorta burned out on the world of soaps. I'd prob rank him right under AGnes Nixon as best soap writers. Where did I say I hated him?

I just wouldn't ever bother hiring the man to consult for a soap

(And I always found it odd that people always went on about him being a playwright yet I'd never heard of performances of any of his plays. )

[Sylph]

You didn't say you hated him, you just mentioned the consulting stints in unflattering terms so many times that I got the impression you despised him.

And he is a playwright, it's only that his plays aren't all that popular. As I said, he was an editor even before he became a true, performed playwright.

That's true. There is no use in him consulting.

[EricMontreal22]

I sorta wonder about the whole consulting position anyway--as he himself said often he was completely ignored. So why bother?

ANyway I'mglad it's been cleared up that I don't hate him

[EricMontreal22]

Going back to this--how big were the staffs on average? I was just watching on youtube an AMC ep from 1978 that was repeated on SoapNet (Tom and Erica's wedding) which was fairly soon after they went to an hour I guess--and was surprised that the writing team seemed larger than I expected.

The credits arein this clip and there are 8 writers listed--the only one I recognize being Wisner Washam (Agnes Nixon's name isn't on the writing credits but I'm sure she still oversaw things--)

[SteveFrame]

Here is a for instance from AW:

1965 to 1968 there were only 4 writers on staff

1969 to 1971 they went to 5

At various times through the 70's they got up to 6 or 7, but 1980 they only had 6 again - including headwriters on all of these.

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Texas usually had 5 to 7 on staff from 1980 to 1982 including the headwriters

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In 1977 Days only had 7 including the headwriter.

In 1976 the first year they were an hour for the whole year they only had 3 writers and William J. Bell was working on both Y&R and Days. The staff included Bell, Pat Falken Smith and Margaret Stewart that year. I had thought Sherri Anderson was still on staff that year, but maybe it was just the first part of the year. Days had 6 in 1975 to 1976.

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Y&R only had 2 on staff from 1975 to 1976 but it was only 30 minutes - they were Bell and kay Alden.

[Sylph]

Here's a list of SW changes during Harding's tenure of AW:

Harding "Pete" Lemay, August 1971 - May 1979

• In 1971, with Robert Cenedella, Kathy Callaway, Theodore Apstein, and Robert Newman
• In 1972, with Kathy Callaway, Theodore Apstein, Robert Newman, Robert Cenedella, and Stan Silverman
• In 1973, with Theodore Apstein, Robert Newman, Rodney Anderson, Tom King, Jan Merlin
• In 1974, with Rodney Anderson, Tom King, Charles Kozloff, Jan Merlin, Douglas Marland, Mel Brez, Ethel Brez, Bibi Wein
• In 1975, with Tom King, Jan Merlin, Bibi Wein
• In 1976, with Tom King (Monday), Peter Swet (Tuesday), Jan Merlin (Wednesday), Barry Berg (Thursday), Arthur Giron (Friday), Kathy Callaway, Douglas Marland, Kevin McDonnell. Swet, Berg, and Giron were also playwrights

(Note: Lemay's last script was Friday, May 11, 1979)

[EricMontreal22]

Thanks to both of you. I have no doubt AMC's staff went up quite a bit when it went to an hour--in the 1976 book ALl Her CHildren Agnes still soudns VERY reluctant to expand. I've watched a number of Y&R eps which just list Bell and Alden (when B&B started how many were on staff?)

SO on AW for a while different writers took each day each week? Interesting. One reason I always thought maybe Lemay was starting to burn out was his reaction to Lovers and Friends and having Tom King take over the revamp--for a show he created he didn't seem to really fight for it (I know this is unfair of me to say I'm just going by his brief bit about it in his book)--often times you think that a soap writer is gagging for the chance to created HIS own show and would lose interest in his previous show--but maybe that's to Lemay's credit.

It's funny the number of writers and how it increased. THat great 1984 episode of Loving has the following writers (keep in mind it was a 30 minute show and had nearly as many as the hour AMC in 1978)

Douglas Marland

Nancy Franklin

Percy Granger

Kathleen Lawlor

William Levinson.

Recently I found my video tapes of the last four months of The City, and one of the episodes from the final week had these credits for writers--again this was a 30 minute show (seperated into these three groups):

James Harmon Brown

Barbara Esensten

Ron Renaud

Juliet Law Packer (who apparantly was a writer on the Waltons back in the 70s..)

Rick DiGregorio

Tony Lang

Tita Bell (who was a Happy Day actress who recently did the scenario for the Russian telenovela Bednaya Nastya which was a huge success and Paul Rauch was involved in 2003)

Lynn Martin

Randy Holland

Kirk Aames

Royal Miller

Story Consultant Agnes Nixon.

12 people! I really loved the City in its final months especially (glares at Sylph) but I just don't even know what all those people did on it.

[Sylph]

OK, I just found out he was vice-president at Knopf's for less than a year, somewhere between 1965 and 1966.

[Sedrick]

Back in the 60's and 70's the writing on shows was done very differently than it is today. The headwriter was basically a contractor who was given an annual fee by TPTB and he/she then hired their own staff of sub-writers. Back then it was the HW who did the longterm story, the weekly and daily breakdowns, and then editing, and many of the HW's wrote scripts too. Therefore it was in a HW's best financial interest to keep as small staff of writers.

We can thank the WGA for the current setup of bloated writing staffs. During contract negotiations in the 80's the union fought for and eventually won the elimination of the old system and got the higher salaries and recognition for staff writers as well as individual titles and job descriptions for each rung on the writing staff. Lemay in an interview years back in one of the rags blamed that development for the decline in quality of the programs, as it effectively shifted the medium from being one consisting of strong HW's to one where the EP's now held all the power.