Another World Discussion Thread

[AbcNbc247]

Yep.

It’s a self storage facility now lol 

[Contessa Donatella]

But, of course, it was a very famous studio. Down in the sub-basement there was even Esther Williams' swimming pool. 

[Mona Kane Croft]

Did anyone else ever think Clarice was a bit similar to Lahoma??   

[Contessa Donatella]

No, I never thought it. But, I can kinda see what you mean. 

[Contessa Donatella]

Bringing this over from the discussion about dark stories on soaps. It was a segue from the murder of Frankie Frame. 

Write-ins, phone calls, petitions, you name it, we threw it at it! We had Eddie Drueding working with us. Tom Freeman was our fearless leader who applied political experience to fan campaigns & who had single-handedly gotten AW back on the air in Seattle. He talked to Victoria every day. And then Diva Lisa who talked to another cast member, also every day. They relayed info & strategy to all of us. And, the rest of us did what we were told, if you see what I mean! I don't know if you will credit this or not, but 6 of us are still in touch. It was invaluable that the actors were savvy & could not only give us advance info but could suggest strategy to us. That's how we knew ahead of time, usually, what they were planning. Frankly, in retrospect I find it gratifying that we drove JFP crazy. And, the next EP Charlotte Savitz hired bodyguards. Recently I have learned that NBC forced RKK on JFP. So, in effect, the fact that DAYS stopped using him as Bo (supposedly thanks to KA) indirectly caused Frankie's murder because NBC didn't want to pay him without playing him. Weird to learn this so many years later. Who knew?!

There were 3 waves of Another World Fan Activism. 
1.Tom Freeman's campaign to getAWback on the air in Seattle. He ran it by what he'd learned in political campaigns. It was offline, had a large mailing list, phone calls, petitions, etc. He named it the Another World Fan Brigade. 
2. Then, in the 90s, he used the name again, the Another World Fan Brigade, but this time online & centered around Usenet's RATS soap group & Eddie Drueding's AW Home Page website. That's when we saved Donna Love but lost Frankie, which I mentioned before. After the gruesome onscreen murder of Frankie Frame by JFP & MDP, many AW fans gave up the show & the fight.
3. The Committee to Save Another World led by Silas Kain. 

This is an article about Tom Freeman in THE OLYMPIAN, Dec. 8, 1994.  
In the past 20 years, Olympia resident Tom Freeman has certainly made sacrifices for the sake of his favorite daytime soap opera, "Another World." As a high school student, Freeman skipped classes to catch the really good episodes. And years later, he impulsively spent $1400 on a new televsion and VCR one afternoon after his co-workers in the office television lounge refused to let him watch the soap. Of the purchase, he admits, "It was just so I could watch 'Another World,' adding with a touch of shyness, "It's a little embarrassing." 
But nothing compares to the full-fledged attack, Freeman, 35, is  aunching to bring back his beloved show, which was pulled from the Western Washington market in October 1993. 
A devoted fan for about 20 years, Freeman still remembers the fateful morning in October 1993 when - with no warning - his show was canceled. 
"When I tuned in on Monday morning, it wasn't on, and I went ballistic," he says. "I called (KING-5, the NBC affiliate that canceled the show) immediately, and of course the lines were busy," he says, so he kept calling - and calling, and calling and calling. 
PERSISTENCE 
In fact, Freeman has called every day for the past 13 months to request that the show be put on the air. 
In addition to calling KING-5, Freeman, business manager for KAOS Radio, has contacted people at NBC and at the soap opera itself. And when his solitary efforts seemed to be getting him nowhere, Freeman, a self-described leftist political activist, employed his political campaigning and organizing skills for a concentrated, organized group effort. "I thought, same skills, different campaign," he says. "And after the last election, I thought this was a lot more fun." 
Taking to the electronic mail network, Freeman first solicited advice from about 100 "Another World" fans nationwide. After hooking up with some other local fans, Freeman also started the Another World Fan Brigade about a month ago. One of the club's goals is to "work to bring 'Another World' back on the air in the Western Washington television market," Freeman says. 
SOME HELP 
Freeman has been helped by a friend and devoted fan, Seattle resident Rita Blood. 
"When it got taken of the air, (Freeman) said, 'We've got to start doing something (like) inundating them with phone calls," says Blood a fan for eight years. Blood and Freeman have also gotten friends, co-workers and other fans to call the station, they say. 
But the club also serves as a social network and support system, Blood says. "After 'Another World' was pulled from the schedule here, fans suddenly found themselves with almost no one to talk with about their show being gone," Freeman says. "We know there are a lot of fans out there, and we need an organization to help them communicate with each other." For both fans, there's just nothing that can compensate for the loss of this show.  
"That's the only one I watch," Blood says. "It's just the one that caught me. I like the story lines and I like the characters." Freeman's devotion to the show stems from a long history of watching the characters. 
"When the guy who played the main character died, I sat and sobbed," he says. "It was just like a member of my family died." 
DEVOTED FANS 
Although it may seem extreme to some, Blood and Freeman's devotion is far from unusal, says Tony Twibell, president and general manager of KING-5. "Soap opera audiences are very hard-core," Twibell says. "You get a lot of calls." 
Twibell says the decision to cut the show was based on low ratings and a decreasing number of viewers. "It was the lowest-rated daytime show and no one was watching it," Twibell says. After repeatedly asking NBC to improve the show, Twibell says they had no choice but to cut it. "A soap opera has to have some kind of continuity," Twibell says. "Unfortunately, the show just had been going nowhere for a long time." "Another World" was originally replaced with the talk show "Sally Jessy Raphael," which Twibell says drew six-seven times the audience "Another World" garnered. 
But Blood disagrees, calling the shows that have replaced "Another World" "garbage." 
"I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't for the fact that they put absolute trash on," she says. "That's the thing that bothers me the most." Luckily, the two fans are not completely starved of "Another World." Soon after the show was dropped from KING-5, a close friend of Freeman's who lives in Minneapolis began taping the shows and sending them to him. After he and a friend view them, the tapes go to a co-worker of his, and then on to Blood, who sends the tapes back to Freeman's friend. 
COMING TO AN END? 
Their complex (and expensive) mailing system may soon come to an end, however. KING-5 dropped the show in Western Washington, Twibell says NBC has brought in new producers and writers, and the network is now considering resuming the show next fall. 
"We will continue to look at it (and) monitor what it does on a national basis," Twibell says. 
Meanwhile, Judith Kritch, the regional director of West Coast affiliate relations for NBC, says the network can do little more than sympathize. "The only thing we can do is say we understand that, being a loyal viewer, it is upsetting to them. We are working to get (the show) back on the air," Kritch says. -30-

I have just learned that Tom Freeman died Aug. 12, 2023. I have messaged with his husband, Mauro. He had been suffering with Alzheimer's & he broke a knee & then he got an infection and he died.  

When we saved Donna, Jill took it to one of her focus groups & had them decide between Frankie & Paulina. Alice Barrett thinks, and I agree with her, that she had been rested, or back-burnered most recently & that is why it ended up being her. 

Then other strange things happened at & near the end. In Jan. 1993 the Dobsons, finished with Santa Barbara, were headed to Brooklyn to HW AW. P&G 100% on board & they're excited but then NBC blocks it! 

Then companies came calling: Columbia-TriStar (now Sony, previously Screen Gems) wanted to do a deal to co-own AW with P&G. FOX wanted AW to start a daytime schedule. Angela Shapiro wanted AW for ABC. (Where was she gonna put it?) What became Paramount wanted to do the same deal that what became Sony wanted. And, P&G said NO to everyone!

I have realized that the original poster was also asking about the DAYS/RKK connection. I will try to explain. When DAYS released RKK as Bo , and Peter Reckell came back on as Bo, they did not fire him per se, they just released him from work & he had 2 years left on his contract & at first he was being paid but not working. Naturally no one liked that. So, NBC told AW that they should find a way to use him. But, then, his pay would come out of AW's budget. When he began to have an ongoing conversation with Jill Farren Phelps, who was then EP at AW, she said upfront right off the bat, that he was being forced on her & she didn't like it, not one bit. And, this meant she had to find money in her budget to cover him. She had been planning to kill off more characters, anyway, and they had a serial killer story at the time, so she decided to pick a medium income actor so she could use that money to cover him. And, that is how RKK indirectly caused the gruesome murder of Frankie Frame. 

Tom Freeman with Victoria Wyndham & Charles Keating

Please register in order to view this content

Edited January 2, 2024 by Donna L. Bridges

[Jdee43]

It's too bad that Sam and Lahoma were forgotten after 1974. With Sam being Ada's brother, they gave Ada and Rachel family ties and people to talk to. Sam was also friends with Steve.

I guess Ann Wedgeworth was hitting the big time by 1973 and wasn't coming back. They had Sam as a stand alone character for a year in 1974, but I  guess that didn't work out and he was gone. The actor Jordan Charney did play other soaps in the mid 70s, including OLTL. 

I guess the writers tried to create new characters that echoed Sam and Lahoma, Sam and Lahoma types, but the new characters didn't have the family ties or the history of the originals.

A Sam and Lahoma return, with original Sam and a recast Lahoma, with their kids, could have been interesting, especially in the early or mid 80s, but I guess the show had gone through so many writers by then, perhaps the writers weren't aware those characters even existed. I believe neither was mentioned for the 25th anniversary?

Edited January 1, 2024 by Jdee43

[China Jones]

I remember him from the 80s on General Hospital. He played Heather's psychologist Dr. Sy Katz.  

[Khan]

I still think it was a shame that Jordan Charney and Ann Wedgeworth were not on "Three's Company" at the same time.  I would have loved to see "Lana" and "Mr. Angelino" in a scene together, lol.

[chrisml]

MY grandparents were still talking about Lahoma and Sam long after they had left. Being born in the eighties, I had no idea who they were but the name always stuck with me since Lahoma had such an impact on my grandparents. I actually had a teacher whose first name was Lahoma after the character. 

With some of the recent AW uploads, it made me think of the missed opportunities with the character of Caroline Stafford. I never understood why she was not given much to do. She had chemistry with everyone. Swajeski did not have much luck with longterm luck with so many of the characters/actors she brought on. 

[Paul Raven]

Jon Michael only seemed to be voicing what everyone was thinking. Why couldn't Rauch/P&G/NBC see it?

Corinne Jacker should have been paired with a more experienced soap writer.

Austin American-Statesman Oct 3 1982

The soapy decline of 'Another World' By JON-MICHAEL REED Special to the American-Statesman NEW YORK

The decline in eminence of "Another World" during the past eight years could provide a classic study of how not to run a soap opera. The most recent fiasco involves the abandonment of an admittedly horrible storyline of a "movie-within-a-soap." All of the performers connected with the filming of Jamie Frame's "Peyton-Place'like novel have been axed, including Ben Masters (Vic) and Tracy Brooks Swope (Chris), two of the more interesting and accomplished performers to surface on soaps in quite a while.

Other "AW" cast members given the boot include Linda Borgeson (Alice), Ann Rose Brooks (Diana), and Chris Marcantel (Pete). But "AW's" problems go deeper than the axing of performers. The show doesnt seem to have a sense of what it' about. The frequent addition and deletion of characters and plots over recent years is a symptom of badly-focused and desperate story emphasis.

Frequent turnovers in writers haven't helped consolidate a coherent interesting and attractive theme. "Another World" has generally enjoyed superior dialogue. Under current headwriter Corinne Jacker, individual scenes frequently have a pungent reality. The words that spew forth from characters' mouths are often dry, witty, clever. But these are isolated from the whole script which tends to meander.

Obviously, the main problem is that Jacker is a superb playwright accustomed to telling one prime story at a time. But in soaps, a writer must be versatile enough to keep interest high on a multitude of story fronts. And there hasn't been a major story on "AW" in a long time that gets "the juices boiling," that makes a viewer shake his head in disbelief or annoyance or any emotional response that will goad the viewer into talking about the story situation with friends as though they were gossiping about the awful events in a neighbor's life..

[Liberty City]

nvm. test reply.

Edited January 6, 2024 by Liberty City

[Contessa Donatella]

Update!

https://www.greenvelope.com/card/.public-8efca4cc5d754199b8abcf5451a6cc4235373031343331

ANOTHER WORLD 60TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

Sat., May 4, 2024 in Tarrytown, NY

About 80 tickets left to sell.

 

Actors:

Judith Barcroft Washam (Lenore Moore 1966-1971)

Barbara Rodell (Lee Randolph 1968-1969)

Leonie Norton (Cindy Clark 1970-1972)

Ariana Muenker (Marianne Randolph 1975-1977)

Susan Keith (Cecile DePoulignac 1979-1981)

Janice Lynde (Tracy DeWitt 1979-1981)

Linda Dano (Felicia Gallant 1983-1999)

Lewis Arlt (David Thatcher 1983-1984, Ken Jordan 1990-1991, Scriptwriter)

Sofia Landon Geier (Jennifer Thatcher 1983, Donna Love 1990-1991, 1993, Scriptwriter 1992-1999)

Kale Browne (Michael Hudson 1986-1993, 1995-1998)

Laurence Lau (Jamie Frame 1986-1990)

Anne Marie Howard (Nicole Love 1987-1989)

James Kiberd (Dustin Trent 1989)

Russell Todd (Jamie Frame 1990-1993)

 

Crew:

Janet Iacobuzio (Scriptwriter 1989-1992, Associate Head Writer 1994-1995)

Steven Bergman (Set Photographer 1990-1999)

Jim Semmelman (Stage Manager 1996-1999)

 

Family Members:

David & Honor Heath, representing their Mother, Liza Chapman (Janet Matthews)

Mark Penberthy, representing his Mother, Beverly Penberthy (Pat Randolph)

[Efulton]

Linda Dano! Now it’s a party.

[Contessa Donatella]

Mona, you had asked about Beverly Penberthy? I specifically inquired. She's 92 & unable to either attend or to sit for an interview. 

Sigh. So, life happens. 

EF, yeah, seeing Dano's name on the list put a huge smile on my face!! BTW, she has recently joined my forum. So now I have 1600 soap fans, Mimi Torchin, Marlena deLaCroix, Sharon Rose Gabet & on very rare occasions: Kim Zimmer, Maureen Garrett & Ellen Wheeler. Oh, and Veleka Gray. 

[Maxim]

 

Please register in order to view this content