The Great Douglas Marland

[brimike]

Oh, Doug... it's all of that AND a bag of chips at P & G now.

Great story - thanks for sharing this, Paul Raven. It's absolutely an industry run on panic. And the worst thing that can happen to a show is somebody's granddaughter or maid saying that morning "I don't like this..." Network execs take that as gospel.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Much isn't written about Marland the mentor. We know he was mentored early on by the great Harding Lemay, and prior to joining ATWT, I believe he was a uncredited consultant for CBS Daytime in some capacity. I've also heard from a number of people that Marland served as something of a mentor to Curlee and Demorest early into their GL tenure, probably at the suggestion of the great Robert Calhoun, who IMO never gets much credit for some really sensational years at both ATWT and GL. He's one of the last soap EP's that totally "got" the genre. While Marland praises him for being something of a "writer's EP," I think Calhoun's experience at GL with Pamela K. Long was quite the opposite, I've heard those two couldn't stand one another.

I'd really like to know how Marland managed his writing team. From what Patrick Mulcahey has said from working with Marland on GL in the early 80's, Marland was very detailed and wrote so much of the actual scenes and dialogue himself that it didn't give others the room to make their mark. Harding Lemay was very much the same way at AW. Mulcahey went on to say that Marland was a genius writer, but horrible teacher, but he picked up quite a lot nonetheless.

[Mitch]

The Walsh siblings vs. Lucinda...just giving my opinion,(as usual) that time frame of ATWT had great ratings, didn't meant the Connor/Evan thing did it. I just thought the Connor actress was the usual unsexy Marland creation and I coudln't believe that Evan actually liked girls. True, it was more of the performers then the writing but I wanted to see a full blooded battle, Marland didn't do full blooded or passion well, as I said, everyone was too damn polite all the time.

I thought that a great combination of writers would have been Marland and Pam Long, he would provide the structure, the discipline, the respect for the core, and Long would have brought the sexiness, passion and family warmth.

[Faulkner]

James Wlcek, of course. Definitely one of the top five STUDS ever in daytime.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I feel like I've read somewhere that he was...but I can't remember where and I can't imagine any reliable source that could have printed such a thing at the time he was alive. But I definitely got that vibe from most everything I've seen of his work, for some of the same reasons you mentioned as well as the Donna Summers disco montage at the climax of the Roger/Rita GL suspense story that someone else mentioned earlier. Plus weren't there all those new wave stars (the B-52s!) making guest appearances at Tony Reardon's nightclub? I do know he was not married. If he was gay, he definitely was not out...I can't imagine he could have been. In any event, Robert Calhoun was said to have been the life partner of that former movie star he brought on as one of Lisa's husbands in the obit recently. (I'm trying to imagine if a producer brought on his lover as a love interest for a veteran character today...it would be all over the internet and I am sure he would be ripped to shreds.) So I'm sure Calhoun accounted for some of the gay sensibility on ATWT at that time, but I like to think Marland was on the team as well. They did work well together, whereas I am not surprised to hear how Calhoun (did not) get along with Pam Long...he must have thought Reva and Bud and their assorted relations were complete trailer trash and been all too eager to send Reva off that bridge and make worldly divas like Holly and Alexandra and Vanessa front and center.

I can kind of see what you mean, although it feels blasphemous to say that and I have a slightly different take on it myself. I was too young to have been watching at the time, but I get the sense watching just about any episode of a P&G soap from the late '70s (at least) until the mid '80s or maybe even the early 90s that the just-barely-disguised latent homoeroticism was practically jumping off the screen. I mean, really, how many people involved in all aspects of these shows were creative gay men who came to NY sometime after Stonewall to come out, and somehow found themselves working in a weird little niche of one of the most conservative industries in the country that did not involve manufacturing weapons or something (selling detergent to housewives)? Unfortunately we lost a lot of those guys on-screen and off, and I think somewhere around that time a lot of the barely-closeted gay folks in power who were still with us started using their influence less for in-jokes and fantasy fulfillment and more to lobby for serious coming out stories meant to challenge viewers' homophobia. Too bad most of those stories have been extremely tepid and were killed by the networks before they even began, and that earlier era seems more interesting to me in a lot of ways. (Not that I would have wanted to have had to live through that.) But while it lasted, from what I've seen of Marland's shows, he definitely seemed to be the king of that era, and I can definitely see where the straight couples were not nearly as steamy as the male bonding. As much as people revere the ATWT 30th anniversary episode, and I have seen it and I too think it was first-rate, but I have to say the speech of Penny's at Chris and Nancy's party where she said Chris was the perfect father, the perfect husband, etc... and that was it(!!!) just made me think that Marland must have thought these characters were from another planet. But I don't hold that against Marland - nothing I've seen of the Irna era seemed like her characters were more realistic or passionate, and even the Dobsons who later wrote such far-out stuff later on Santa Barbara seemed to be stuck in the '50s in the way they wrote couples on GL. Marland just seemed to continue writing in that vein, while (no question) pushing the genre forward in so many other ways, but the unspoken vibes sometimes overshadowed the Ozzie and Harriet aspects.

I actually think James Reilly's writing was kind of a throwback to that era, and I was bizarrely entertained by his early DOOL stories as a closeted young teenager. Although once I was older than 15 or so it turned me off because the religious overtones were so extreme and the interactions between the hetero couples were so stylized that even I knew at that point they were completely absurd. Whereas from what I've seen of Marland's writing I got the sense that he was perfectly comfortable in his own skin and had a keen sense of all kinds of human emotion, but with standards and practice still thinking hetero sex was taboo at the time, I bet he just wasn't overly motivated to break new ground in that regard the way female writers like Agnes Nixon and Claire Labine seemed to be doing on ABC at that time in their writing for straight couples.

I feel like I'm going to regret writing all of this, because I so don't mean to speak ill of Doug Marland - or even James Reilly, as much as his writing was not my cup of tea as an adult. I do believe he loved the genre and was a success at giving a lot of viewers what they wanted to see, and indeed he brought me some much needed escapism as an adolescent, and I truly hope that he had a very rich, full, and happy personal life. I just frankly never saw it reflected in his writing. Whereas I clearly get the sense watching any episode of GL or ATWT that Marland was having a good time writing this stuff and he understood people and the world...I just suspect his world was a little different than Oakdale or Springfield.

[SteveFrame]

I don't know about Marland's women being unsexy. I guess in looks maybe they weren't but I always found Marland's female character more sexy because they were strong characters and well defined. It made them more beautiful and sexy to me.

I think Meg and Emily were definitely sexier under Marland.

[DeeeDee]

Emily & the tango.

[Soapsuds]

What was your favorite story from Douglas Marland? One of my favorites was the Ruxton Hills murder. Yeah, I spelled it wrong. An observant SON member noticed it. So this is what my username refers to........This story was truly one of the great classics of the Douglas Marland years. James Stenbeck is in hiding at Steve Andropolis' development house in Ruxton Hills. He has taken Paul and Emily there with him, along with his employee, and crooked cop Nick Costello. In Part 1 you'll see Tonio, Meg, Lucinda, Barbara and others trying to decide what to do about Stenbeck...as well as James discovering that Emily is carrying his child

Things go from bad to worse when James gives Monica Lawerence the directions to Ruxton Hills and her mother overhears. Duncan finds out that his former associate is working for Stenbeck, and Lucinda receives a disturbing call.

The moments that shake all of Oakdale to its core. Nick is locked in the basement...James Stenbeck, Emily, and...Paul are upstairs, and half of Oakdale is headed to the Ruxton Hills house. An explosive conclusion!

I highly doubt Jean Passanante or Chris Goutman could come up with something like it.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Didn't you start a thread like this a while back already?

Nothing wrong with bumping up those old threads.

ETA, Here it is: http://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/index.p...c=29087&hl=

[Khan]

I don't know if this counts (since it wasn't on ATWT), but I'll be eternally grateful to Doug Marland for GL's Quint and Nola. Those two, and their romance, meant everything to me, and still do.

Oh, and the Douglas Cummings story wasn't too bad either. ;-)

[Soapsuds]

I thought I did but wasn't sure. I was too lazy to look it up...LOL. Toups, can you merge the two threads por favor!

[Khan]

And why shouldn't they (take it as gospel)? Number one, it sure beats the responses you get from focus groups, since these people are ones who actually watch the show(s) everyday. And number two, I've always said I learned more about how you tell a story from my mother and grandmother, who would get on the horn with each other during commercial breaks and discuss what had just happened on GL, than from any professor or workshop.

[brimike]

Not everybody's moms and grandmothers have great taste like yours do.

[Khan]

Yeah, but everybody's moms and grandmothers (and maids and beauticians) are just like mine: average, everyday people who earn a living and who want to be entertained without having their intelligence insulted at every turn.

[brimike]

Which I'm not arguing with. Had I not known about fired popular actors because someone in a network's exec house says "he looks like he'd have smelly feet and stinky armpits"