HOW TO SURVIVE A MARRIAGE

[amybrickwallace]

Assante and White weren't on the show long before it was canceled, right? 

Strange casting for Dr. Mike Powers was par for the course on TD. Peter Burnell, who had played the part for five years, left in September 1973. He was blond, skinny and stood no taller than about 5'7". The character had been off the canvas for about a year and was subjected to a hackneyed reconstructive surgery storyline. That's why you had Michael Landrum come in, who certainly had a different face but no one could explain how Mike had gained about 5 inches in height!

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[Nicholas Blair]

Yes, Assante and Lauren White hadn't been on HTSAM long before it was canceled. That's also true of F. Murray Abraham. I gathered they were going to do a mob storyline with his character.

I had forgotten the facial reconstruction story on TD. Trying to make logic of cast replacements is often good for a chuckle! I remember Peter Burnell quite well and thought he was a good actor, well cast as Mike Powers. One of the many we lost to AIDS. I believe he had come out at some point after he left TD.

[danfling]

Three of the writers mentioned above had previosly for daytime serials on NBC.    Robert Cenadella had written both Another World and Somerset.   Ian Martin had written Somerset (with headwriter Henry Slesar).    Rick Edelstein had produced and written for The Doctors (as well as producing The Edge of Night on CBS).

[amybrickwallace]

Robert Cenedella also wrote for TD, but I believe that was after HTSAM.

[FrenchFan]

On Facebook, someone sent screenshots of an episode from « How to survive a marriage ». The tape was given to him by Rosemary Prinz (he also got many « All my Children » from her and many « As the world turns » from Barbara Rodell »). Don’t think he will share the episode video as he is known for selling his stuff but here are the screenshots.

 

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[Paul Raven]

That's so cool. Who is that with Rosemary?

Hopefully at least some snippets will become available.

[robbwolff]

The actor bears a resemblance to James Shannon, who was on HTSAM and earlier played Paul Bennett on The Doctors.

Edited November 12, 2022 by robbwolff

[danfling]

I know that James Shannon was on The Doctors, Dark Shadows and As the World Turns.   Who did he play on All My Children?

[danfling]

F. Murray Abraham Would Make ‘The White Lotus’ All Over Again

The buzzy series is one of several featuring the actor, who at 83 is finding some of the most satisfying work of his career. “I still am thrilled by acting,” he said.

 

 

F. Murray Abraham has made a memorable impact in a wide range of recent TV series, including “The White Lotus,” “Mythic Quest” and “Moon Knight.”Credit...Sara Messinger for The New York Times

 

 

By Chris Vognar

Dec. 5, 2022

Not long ago the venerable actor F. Murray Abraham wanted to get lunch at a favorite restaurant in Greenwich Village. Unfortunately the place was overrun by New York University students shooting a film. As the Oscar-winning star of “Amadeus,” “Angels in America” and dozens of other movies, plays and TV series stood on the outside looking in, one of the students turned to another and expressed his outrage: “Don’t you know who this is? This is the voice of Khonshu!”

Abraham laughed. He gets a kick out of telling the story and the fact that, to many youngsters, he’s best known as a mask-wearing, staff-wielding Egyptian god in the Marvel fantasy series “Moon Knight.” He gets a kick out of a lot of things. He loves that, at age 83, he’s still working regularly, including a plum, often hilarious role on the hit HBO series “The White Lotus” and a far different, darker turn in the Netflix horror anthology “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.” He also made his mark on two seasons of the Apple TV+ workplace comedy “Mythic Quest” as C.W. Longbottom, the head writer on a hit video game.

He punctuates sentences with superlatives — “Isn’t that fabulous?” — and he always sounds like he means it.

“I still am thrilled by acting,” he said in a recent video interview from his Manhattan home. “I still can’t wait for the next project. There’s more work to be done.”

 

For now, he’s more than happy to be a key part of one of television’s buzziest series. In “The White Lotus” he plays Bert Di Grasso, one of several deeply flawed tourists vacationing at a luxury resort in Sicily. With a glimmer in his eye and a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time (much like Abraham’s “Mythic Quest” character), Bert is traveling with his son, Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and grandson, Albie (Adam DiMarco), hoping to find some distant relatives in the old country. Dominic is a serial philanderer, a trait he seems to have inherited from his dad.

 

 

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Abraham and Michael Imperioli in “The White Lotus.” “He has this command of craft, yet also this incredible depth of soul and truth and honesty,” Imperioli said.Credit...HBO

 

 

In the second episode of the current season, as the three men and a new female friend named Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) soak up the ancient atmosphere of the Greek theater at Taormina, Bert is compelled to share the story of how, in Greek mythology, Hades raped Persephone nearby. As he keeps repeating the word “rape,” the other characters (and viewers) cringe, much to Bert’s obliviousness. The moment is both painfully awkward and brutally funny, and Abraham sells it for all it’s worth, gusto and wonder in his voice.

Welcoming You Back to ‘The White Lotus’

The second season of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s incisive satire of privilege set in a luxury resort, is currently streaming on HBO.

• Dressing Gen Z: The costume designer for “The White Lotus” sees your mean tweets about how the younger characters dress. She told us how she created the chaotic and divisive looks.
• Michael Imperioli: The “Sopranos” star is enjoying a professional renaissance after years of procedurals and indies. In the new season of “The White Lotus,” he tries his hand at comedy.
• F. Murray Abraham: The buzzy series is one of several featuring the actor, who at 83 is finding some of the most satisfying work of his career.

The scene is an encapsulation of what inspired the “White Lotus” creator, Mike White, to cast Abraham in the role.

“Bert says a lot of questionable things and has kind of a problematic attitude toward sex and women and relationships,” White said in a telephone interview. “I just thought it’d be funny to have an actor who also has this kind of buoyancy and a ‘What me worry?’ type of attitude. There’s something very mischievous about Murray, and he could obviously play the villain. But he also has this likable, unsinkable quality to him.”

 

That unsinkable quality was an integral part of his otherwise macabre role in “The Autopsy,” one of eight episodes in “Cabinet of Curiosities,” which debuted in October. In it, he plays Dr. Carl Winters, a medical examiner called upon by an old friend (Glynn Turman) to conduct post-mortem procedures on some unusual patients. Dr. Winters carries his own burden into the operating theater: He has cancer, and only a few months left to live.

“It was not an easy performance,” he said. “I see an end. I mean, I’m 83. And when it becomes a reality like that, when you face that and then you try to take that feeling to a script like this, where a man is going to die in six months, that really begins to cloud everything you do.”

 

 

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In “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” Abraham played a medical examiner asked to work on unusual patients. Credit...Ken Woroner/Netflix

 

 

Abraham was born in Pittsburgh and raised in El Paso; his father was a Syrian immigrant, and his mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants. As a teen he worked in his father’s auto garage and never thought about acting. Then he enrolled in what looked like the easiest high school class available: speech and drama. He fell under the spell of a teacher, Lucia Hutchins, who taught him that acting could be more than an easy A.

“She introduced me to Shakespeare,” he recalled. “She introduced me to Arthur Miller.” He remembers performing a monologue by Mitch, Stanley Kowalski’s buddy in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” It all went against his working class upbringing: “Acting in our family? Get out of here.” He studied for a year at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), then, under the influence of Jack Kerouac, hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where he began pursuing his career in earnest before relocating to New York and studying under Uta Hagen at the HB Studio.

Small parts in film followed. He was one of the cops who busted the Watergate burglars in “All the President’s Men” (1976) and an antagonist of Al Pacino’s in “Scarface” (1983). His big break, and the role that won him an Oscar, was Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s obsessed nemesis in “Amadeus” (1984). “I just understood the script instantly,” he said.

 

“Apparently it’s so clear that kids love that movie,” he added. “Isn’t that extraordinary? They like that, and they like Khonshu.”

But Abraham still considers himself a creature of the theater. He has been a regular in the plays of Terrence McNally, including “The Ritz” (made into a film, starring Abraham, in 1976). He played Roy Cohn in “Angels in America” on Broadway. He hated the man, but the role taught him a valuable lesson: Don’t worry about being liked. If you’re playing a bad guy, make him bad.

For Abraham, the theater is like a love affair that never ends.

“Eight times a week, you get to do it again and again,” he said. “If it’s bad, then that’s horrible. But when it’s good, there’s nothing like it. It’s like really good sex: Give me more.” He paused. “I sound like Bert.”

Imperioli, who also comes from a theater background but is best known for his roles in “The Sopranos” and “GoodFellas,” found a friend and kindred spirit in Abraham. On off days in Sicily, they would organize impromptu rehearsals with DiMarco and sometimes Richardson.

“We would just read the characters and talk about them,” Imperioli said in a video interview. “He has this command of craft, yet also this incredible depth of soul and truth and honesty. It’s a combination that I very rarely have seen, and I’ve never seen it come to fruition as it does in Murray.”

Abraham and Imperioli ended up getting Covid-19 at the same time, confining them to their hotel rooms. “I had such a bad sore throat I couldn’t even talk,” Imperioli said. “And I could hear Murray upstairs doing his vocal warm-ups every day. Singing. This is an 82-year-old guy with Covid.” Abraham has memorized more than 50 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which, as Imperioli observed, he recites regularly to keep his memory sharp.

 

 

For Abraham, the “White Lotus” experience was among the best of his career, thanks largely to White’s writing. “It’s his sense of humanity,” he said. “He’s written real people. I think Bert is absolutely legit — you know he’s for real. I grew up with people like that.”

The whole sun-dappled Sicily thing wasn’t bad, either.

“I got to tell you, man, if there was some way to make it happen, I’d shoot this whole thing all over again,” he said. “The thing about some of these interviews, which I’ve done for many years, is that you try to make nice: You think of the good things that happened; you don’t want to talk about the crap. But this was all good.”

 

[danfling]

The composer of the theme for How to Survive a Marriage, Susan Otto, was married to Robert Isreal (the president of Score Productions).

I think that she also composed the theme for the syndicated version of To Tell the Truth with hosts Gary Moore and Joe Garagiola

[DRW50]

Reading a Daily TV Serials goodbye to the show, where they talk about the show's problems, including interesting or prominent characters not staying, in some cases just vanishing (they mentioned Brad Davis' character suffering this fate). Two bits I hadn't heard before or had forgotten - that Michael Landrum was fired after "violent disputes over his interpretation of the role." And Steve Elmore "left in a huff and wrote about it in TV Guide."

[j swift]

The only source that I could find:

One element of the series was so consistent that it became an in-joke among the show’s staff. Anyone leaving the show invariably had his or her character “transferred to Detroit,” as was the case for Michael Landrum when he was written out as Larry.

https://nostalgiacentral.com/television/tv-by-decade/tv-shows-1970s/survive-marriage/

[Paul Raven]

The YouTube poster who has been gifting us with classic episodes the past few days has added a 10 min clip of HTSAM with Miss Rosemary Prinz!

[EricMontreal22]

And it's fascinating.  It really does show exactly what the show set out to do--and why some felt it was slow to catch on (I mean the 10 minute sequence might as well be a therapy session.)

[dc11786]

The clip posted on YouTube was very interesting. I thought the dynamic between Peter Willis and Dr. Julie Franklin was very different for daytime, but on brand for the work of Rick Edelstein. This reminded me of how others had described the relationship between Johnny McGhee and Fran Bachman after Dave's death. I wonder if this was Edelstein's work or something that possibly inspired Edelstein based on the work of Anne Howard Bailey. 

I'm curious about the time period because I know George Welbes who played Tony had cancer towards the end of his run and his death resulted in Tony being written out. I am curious if Tony was still onscreen at the point this scene aired.

I hope that someday some work of Brad Davis from this series appears. He is such a soulful actor in the work I've seen of his. I would love to see Alex Kronos' story.  

I really love the look of the set. I know it is very of the era, but I don't feel like that is the look of other series of the time.