The Great Douglas Marland

[Soapsuds]

Thought of this topic last night and just popped into my head again.

What in your opinion was Douglas Marland's best stories, mediocre ones and bad ones on ATWT.

Please discuss

I am curious as to everyone's replies.

One of the best ones he did was Lily's paternity story with Iva and Lucinda. It was pure brilliance.

I will post more later.

[EastMA2]

He did so many brilliant stories - the Douglas Cummings story was my favorite. Also topping the list is the Iva/Josh story, Angel Lange is raped by her father, Margo pulling the plug on Casey, Hank Elliot is gay, the Bob and Susan affair, James saying "Hello Barbara". He did so many fantastic stories and I remember loving the show so much back then.

Among the mediocre for me, I was never a huge fan of the Duncan MacKechnie character and Tonio Reyes was no James Stenbeck. I also wasn't a fan of the Shannon has a shrunken head story. Great topic!

[Paul Raven]

The Frannie/Darryl story didn't seem to have many fans-way too convoluted.Mary Ellen Stewart was blah as Frannie.

[EricMontreal22]

I know Chris Schemering, one of his biggest fans, said in the Soap Encyclopedia that every so often Marland would go gothic and it sounds like usually with mixed to terrible results.

[reallyhateskateonlost]

Here is a clip of the great Douglas Marland and some of his work. None of the soap writers of today can capture the work that this man did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_gJXZbrxFo

[leevo64]

^^Did the show actually do a tribute to him when he died? That's wonderful. Looks like there were a lot of really powerful moments on the show when he wrote it.

[DeeeDee]

John Wesley Shipp!

So hot.

[SteveFrame]

The Douglas Cummings Story was my absolute fave

I loved the whole introduction of Sabrina too. It was a great use of history and wasn't a total rewrite or badly convoluted.

I loved the Lily paternity story, but I also loved the introduction of Holden and the whole Lily/Holden/Dusty/Emily/Meg cycle that followed.

Andy's alcoholism was another great one too.

I know Marland had nothing to do with the casting of young folks, but his stories for them was the best ever. I loved the way he wrote Lily, Holden, Dusty, Emily, Meg, Andy, Paul and so many others.

I loved that he gave Nancy a story too and let her find romance again.

I think above his stories was how he tied characters together. He was one of the best writers about that. He tied Lisa to so many on the canvas. He used her ties to the Hughes better than anyone has. And then he tied her first to Shannon by having her married to Earl. He set her up in business as a rival with Lucinda through The Argus and with Fashions which he used very well.

He tied John Dixon to the Snyders and the Walsh family which broadened the ways he could be used.

Oakdale just felt like a community under him.

I know he had clunkers - every writer does. But sadly I would take any of his clunkers over pretty much anything ATWT has done in several years.

[kalbir]

My favorites:

Douglas Cummings

Lily and Holden meet and fall in love

Lily's parentage

Sabrina's arrival

Bob/Susan affair and the fallout

I also was not a fan of the Carolyn Crawford murder mystery; it dragged on too long.

[Quent]

I loved the way Oakdale felt like a real town then, with people from different storylines interacting. And remember when the actor who played Caleb died and had to be replaced? It was a shock to see the re-cast, not like last month when four roles changed hands. (And DM must be rolling in his grave seeing how Martha Byrne and Scott Bryce have been treated.) The only real negative I can think of with DM was the Carolyn Crawford story, which started off great, but then went on FOREVER, until no one cared who killed her.

[brimike]

Shannon's shrunken head was the other one that made me kinda bewildered, the way Carolyn Crawford did.

It's okay, though. They can't all be perfect.

[Quent]

I'll never know how Michael Swan kept a straight face, holding up that miniature head saying "Oh, Shannon, my wee lass!"

[ClassicsSoapFan]

I loved just about everything Marland did.Most of my favorites have been mentioned.

My least favorite was the ghost of Margaret and the haunted castle.

I will agree the Daryl~Frannie did get too convoluted.

The Laura in love with Bob story came to an end during a writers strike.Hal and Barbara got married for the first time.

I remember Marland was livid because he left a detailed story outline and the scab writer went through it in little time.

On GL I loved the Quint and Nola romance.

Also the story where Andy Norris broke in to Dr Sara McIntyre's files and would blackmail her patients with what he learned.

[EricMontreal22]

The haunted castle was the gothic one I was trying to think of

[Paul Raven]

Interview from SOD 1985

He brought you General Hospital's Scotty and Laura love story,a romance so popular with teenage viewers that it catapulted the once dying soap into the number one spot. But,if it had been up to Doug Marland, GH's head writer at the time,Luke would have been long dead.

“There was going to be a long love story between Luke and Laura before he was going to be killed,”remarks Marland,who hastens to add that”'Luke's popularity would have been noted by then and it(the story)would have changed”.But before he had the opportunity to script Luke and Laura's storyline,he was fired. Although it has been reported that bitter disagreements with Gloria Monty as to how the Scotty/Laura/Luke triangle should progress was the reason behind Marland's dismissal,Douglas denies those allegations. After noting that he wanted Scotty and Laura's marriage to last longer than three weeks and Gloria wanted the marriage gone,”Marland says,”I wasn't fired because of Gloria's storyline demands. She wanted me to move to California and I refused. I had written the show for two and a half successful years from Connecticut so I didn't see why I suddenly needed to be in California.

Despite the fact that Marland missed out on the most popular story line in daytime history,Douglas says,”My only regret was leaving a wonderful cast I had become very close to. But I had no regrets about not staying on the show because I was so excited by what I was doing on Guiding light by that time.

Evidently others were excited by Marland's writing for he won a daytime Emmy in 1981 and 1982.”I was freer to do the kind of work I wanted on Guiding Light,”comments Marland,who strongly believes that when story lines are forced on a writer,”those are the stories people don't write well because they don't believe in them.”One of Marland's favorite story lines is the Nola/Quint gothic story which he believes he”would never been allowed to do on General Hospital..

Originally an actor,Douglas Marland joined Harding Lemay's writing staff on Another World. He advanced to headwriter on The Doctors and is credited with rejuvenating that serial. After stints on General Hospital and Guiding Light, Marland went on to create the cable soap a New Day in Eden,which was later cancelled. Next Marland co-created Loving and is currently the top scribe on As The World Turns.

During his three year tenure on Guding Light,Marland says,”I never had any stories I wanted to tell that weren't approved and I was never asked to tell any I didn't want to tell. Nevertheless,he left the show at the end of his contract. “My problem on Guiding Light,as everybody seems to know,”says Douglas,”was that when Jane Elliot's contract was cancelled, I had long term story plans already approved for the character of Carrie and I felt it was a terrible cheat to the audience and to the Carrie/Ross love story to have her go off so quickly. That was part of what prompted my leaving Guiding Light. Part of it was because I didn't get along with the producer”,says Marland who emphasizes the importance of the writer/producer relationship.”I think a lot of people don't understand it. They think this person does this job and that person does that job. But that trust,that mutual trust,has to both ways. A producer has to trust the head writer's instinct and the head writer has to trust his producer once that material is handed in.”Marland did not have that kind of relationship with his GL producer,a man whose name Douglas asks not to be mentioned.

“I didn't get along with him because,primarily,he wasn't as interested in the show and in producing it as I was in writing it. I wasn't getting enough back up from my producer.”In contrast,Marland says,”I had wonderful support and back up from Joe Stuart on Loving. And I have incredible support from Robert Calhoun on ATWT.”When I give him something,he is excited about producing it and putting it on screen.”

Marland's next network assignment after GL was Loving,which he left after two years amid rumours that he and the show's creator Agnes Nixon,were blaming each other for the serial's failure to rise in the ratings. Waving aside those rumours Marland says,”We had never collaborated ,either one of us before. But we certainly got along professionally.”

Marland scripted daytime's most daring storylines when he introduced incest to afternoon television. But the story ended abruptly and Marland thinks he knows why the network ordered him to wrap it up ahead of schedule.”This was the only time in my head writing experience where the network said,”This storyline must be over and never mentioned again by January 15th.”I kept saying,'I don't understand'.Well the reason became apparent when their (ABC)movie of the week about incest Something About Amelia,aired. ABC promoted it by saying that it was a subject that had never been on television before when their own network had been doing it sucessfully for five months on daytime television.(ABC declined to comment on Marland's statements.)

Returning to As The World Turns is a homecoming of sorts for Marland. He played gynecologist Dr Erich Londsberry on the show when it was live.”I was working with Eileen Fulton and Don Hastings and they are both still there. They were both seasoned professionals and Eileen was so dear to me during that time that it's wonderful now to be able to write for her.

Depite his current honeymoon on ATWT,Marland doesn't plan to settle there forever.”I am not a writer who is going to stay on the same show for 15 years. It doesn't work for me. I need new characters,new challenges. I look at a show that has been playing a long time like ATWT and I see what I can do with it for two or three years and then I want to move onto something else. By Andrea Payne