Massive, Across the Board Paycuts at ABC Daytime?!

[rhinohide]

Hush your mouth!

[DaytimeFan]

LOL on the 'organic flowers'... I can see it now...

LML: These flowers need to be organic and grown is pesticide free greenhouses!

LML: The diamonds on Katherine Chancellor's fingers must be conflict free! I don't want BLOOD diamonds on MY show!

Helpless Staffer: But Lynn, it's all cubic zirconia!

LML: WHAT! MAN MADE! Have none of you morons been listening to me!

LML: You're telling me that Melody Thomas Scott wants to wear a SILK shirt that THOUSANDS of worms had to DIE for?!

Helpless Wardrobe Staffer: But Lynn, the shirt is from a few years ago, it's been hanging for years!

LML: Excuse me! So you're saying that you've sent this murderous message to viewers BEFORE?! I'm going to have to write a storyline about this, Eyall Podell will carry it!

Helpless Wardrobe Staffer: I guess it's a bad time to let you know that we've found some old fur coats for Jess Walton to wear in the wintertime.....?

LML: *faints*

Eric Braeden: What in the damn hell are you doing Lynn Marie Latham! Victor Newman does NOT drive a hybrid!

LML: Eric, either you carry the hybrid storyline or I'm giving it to Don Diamont!

Eric Braden: I WILL CRUSH YOU!

LML: Like the mounds of garbage this studio dumps into landfills yearly? I'm going to start a compost heap in the parking lot, I take it you, Jeanne Cooper, Jess Walton, Peter Bergman and Melody Thomas Scott will happily give up your parking spaces for that?

Eric Braeden: *steams*

I agree with you, LOOKS MATTER. I'm not just saying that because I work on peoples looks for a living. When it comes to GL I think new viewers are disgusted with how it looks and turn off.

[detroitpiston]

[marceline]

Remember Megan? She had an alter named Ruby Bright. As long as OLTL insists on treating DID like a genetic condition I'd prepare myself for Nat and "Pat."

[rangethatrover]

Oh man. Ruby and Marco. Good times. RIP Gerald Anthony.

[SFK]

I was at a soap symposium years ago, and Courtney Simon mentioned John Conboy's infamous floral budget for Santa Barbara.

I'd be lying if I said that Y&R's look doesn't make the viewing experience even more enjoyable. I'm on the fence with the faux furs though.

[alphanguy74]

Flowers shouldn't be that expensive. Any production studio should be able to get flowers wholesale at any of the local suppliers. Fresh cut flowers have a high cost markup, because of their perishablility. But if you aren't worried about making up for your losses of what doens't sell, then they are quite cheap. I'm a part time floral designer, and was assistant manager at a shop for a time. An arrangement such as what you see in the Abbott living room behind the couch... the actual cost of that arrangement to make would be around 30$, and it lasts for the entire week of shooting. An arrangmeent such as that would proabably go for 60-70$ retail in a flower shop. So 100-150$ or so per WEEK is really not that much. If they buy pieces ready made form local florists, then they are doing it WRONG, they need to have set decorators do it, almost all set decorators ahve floral design expereince, or if they DON'T, they SHOULD.

[SteveFrame]

I'm still trying to catch up after being out for several days but two things said in here are so right. One is the details part and how much they matter and the other is you often have to spend money to make money.

And those 2 things are what will hurt daytime in the long run.

I am not a firm believer that the greatest sets will make or break a soap. Two of my favorite soaps of all time (Edge of Night and Dark Shadows) never have had lavish sets or productions but they did pay attention to detail. One of the biggest complaints laid at EON's door though was that it was hard to believe that the Whitney's were as wealthy as they were because their mansion didn't look any richer than the other sets. That was one detail that hurt them.

So many times over the years I have heard the old casting directors or costume designers etc. talk about the things they did to make sure that things appear real or looked real for different characters, etc. I can remember that The Doctors always kept a medical director on staff to make sure that the medical scenes were done right. Irna Phillips kept a lawyer and a doctor on staff at her disposal to make sure the medical and legal issues she wrote about were true.

Doreen Ackerman who was an early costumer for many soaps in an interview in the 70's talked about how that on The Secret Storm the majority of the characters at the time were supposed to be housewives in the mid-west. They actually studied what housewives in the mid-west wore at the time and made sure that the clothes that appeared on the females were something any housewife in the mid-west could go into to their local stores and buy. She said one time she allowed an actress to use something from her personal wardrobe for a party scene. It was Judy Lewis I believe (not looking at the article and just going on memory). She played Susan Dunbar at the time. She said the show got many a letter stating that Susan would never buy or even wear a dress like that.

She talked about when color came in to play that blue eye shadow had become the big norm for actresses and women in the big urban cities. But in the small towns and the mid-west only a whore or a loose woman would wear blue eye shadow - so they had to really pay close attention that the actresses wiped off all traces of the blue eye shadow that the majority of them wore at the time.

In a book right now that I am reading called The Soap Opera by Madeline Edmondson, it talks about how each show and even each network had a look as far as fashion. The California shows like Y&R and Days were the first 2 to adopt the braless look for women on their shows in party scenes and the like. It was a look that you would not see on the other shows in particular the P&G shows. Fans of ATWT in particular expected doctors like Bob Hughes to always have on a tie. While John Reilly was playing Dan Stewart they relaxed that a little but they got many letters about it.

Story is the most important thing when it comes to soaps and the familiarity of the characters, but those details is what makes them real to the soap viewer and not only real but believable.

One of Douglas Marland's rules for soap operas:

Don't change a core character. You can certainly give them edges they didn't have before, or give them a logical reason to change their behavior. But when the audience says, "He would never do that," then you have failed

I think that rule can be applied to the overall look of the show. When you tune in and something just doesn't look right or look believable, then you have failed. When you tune in to GL and you see everyone staying in one set or everything happening on that one set and the people are talking about that and not the story - then you have failed.

Or when policemen are doing police work in the Brady Pub on Days instead of the police station then you have failed because that is something that would never happen. And it jars the viewer and makes them forget the story and focus on that. Or last summer when all those people were staying at Bo & Hope's for no real apparent reason. Everyone was always there but Bo & Hope it seemed.

It's all in the details.

[Sedrick]

You hit the nail right on the head!

With soaps, it's not so much as looking expensive or well polished...it is about, or at least it used to be about, creating a distinct look and feel to each individual program that viewers could become accustomed to and identify with. AMC is a good case in point...For most of its first ten years on the air, AMC employed some of the cheapest, dowdy sets ever seen in daytime television. However, the look worked for what we came to know as Pine Valley...it felt homey and familiar, a true community that the audience recognized and could identify with. Even when the production standards were upgraded significantly in the 80's and furthermore in the early 90's by EP Felicia Behr, the show maintained its small-town, close-knit community feel and appeal. However, in the late 90's, as the rest of the show went into decline, so did the attention to the signature look and appeal of Pine Valley. I was one of the fiercest opponents of the show's move to the film-like video processing: AMC is not and never was meant to be THE CITY.

[SFK]

SteveFrame, that was some very interesting information!

ITA, looks certainly help in creating a soap's "world", it's tone/feel/experience for the viewer. When I look back on fond memories of soaps, I remember an entire picture, not merely words or just actors' faces. I think AMC was its "prettiest" in the late '80s/early '90s. There was a lovely brightness, a soft glow that wouldn't necessarily work on any other soap but it was perfect for AMC. Someone posted a clip about a week ago with a good chunk of the cast at a gala with the then Miss America, this is a perfect example of that era. On AMC, it was special when everybody got dressed up and showed out at a big party. You looked forward to it. And I'm sure we all have mental images of memorable outfits characters have worn.

But it doesn't work both ways. Y&R has been for the most part excellent in terms of writing for several years now. The visual element is just rich decadent icing on an already good cake. When a soap puts too much emphasis on its look and forsakes the writing, it's like that ep of The Cosby Show where Cliff sneaks a slice of cake and fills the hole with icing. Hollow.

[MarkH]

So, I'm trying to evaluate this "overpaid actor" thing.

In 2007, Susan Lucci appeared in 131 episodes.

At $10,000 per episode, that is $1,310,000.

This is a decent salary to be sure...but didn't the Friends make that much in a single ep of their final season?

We're not talking "extraordinary riches". That's a decent salary...but on par with some physician specialists. If she represents the top of the game....it seems like the newbie salaries are getting in range of the lower middle class...not much better than an autoworker with seniority.

Daytime is relatively cheap. When they do cost cuts, they're actually moving into genuinely abysmal salaries, IMO. What that does to MORALE, I feel, is cancerous.

What is a newbie getting these days? Say a "Melissa Claire Egan" on AMC or a "Billy Miller" on Y&R?

[SteveFrame]

Mark,

That is the reason it is hard for me to get behind the cuts at all. And I guess I think about the actors and the amount of work they have to do and cannot see the fans who throw out sarcastic remarks about what Susan makes or EXPECT the actors just to take the cuts and be happy with it - just as long as their show is not cancelled.

Daytime actors work harder than any other actor in the business. And yet they get paid less and now they are asked to even cut that.

And many fans think it is just fine and fully expect them to take the cuts and be happy about it. And even hold it against them if they don't take them.

As to the newbies I know that they cannot go below what is scale and I am not sure of what that is now. Even with someone like Lucci she has to make what the union says she has to make. But I have not seen in a long time what is scale now for a newbie, a mid-line veteran and a long-time veteran.

[Juliajms]

Ok, but I think a physician specialist should be paid way more than a soap actress. Way, more. The fact that they aren't kind of tells you how jacked up our priorities as a society are. I like my soaps as much as the next person and have watched since I was a child, but lets keep it real. Doctors hold life and death in their hands and work harder and with high stakes than any actor.

If the current crop of newbies aren't willing to do this job for middle class salaries, I'm going to bet that people of equal talent will. A decent soap actor is a dime a dozen. There are tons of people in any college drama department who have what it takes to be the average soap actor (with the help of a little plastic surgery). Don't get me wrong, someone who has truly distinguished themselves and is the face of their show certainly does deserve to be rewarded, so I don't begrudge Susan Lucci a much bigger salary than the average. I'm just saying, I think the newbies need to suck it up. The product they are producing isn't worth as much as it used to be, so they need to take a pay cut, just like most people do in similar circumstances.

And if any daytime actor needs a morale boost maybe they should be happy they still have a job when so many people don't. Maybe they should also be glad they have a job in their chosen field when so many others don't or soon won't. After all many of the people starting out in soaps still see it as a stepping stone and that hasn't changed, so at least they have a start in acting. If they don't want it, someone else will.

[marceline]

Here's the problem though: the people on this board and others i.e., the "loyal" soap fans, the "real" soap fans don't want to watch a bunch of newbies regardless of talent. I contend that you could bring on a heavenly host of actors with real, true dramatic talent and the people watching soaps now would hate them anyway because they aren't "vets." They'll let a few "core" or "legacy" characters through but in the end it won't matter because it will never measure up to the good ole days. That's nostalgia. It kills the very thing it's meant to preserve.

[MarkH]

Okay, this is the essence of the Marceline axiom. Nostalgia kills the soaps. I will now archive it on my blog.

You now join Jack Peyton in having an axiom :-).