Another World Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSXhwccBTyI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80dE8OUnHkM&feature=channel

[DRW50]

I'm not sure if the Matthews were reminiscent of the Hughes family. Mary didn't seem to be cold or manipulative, the way Nancy could be. Liz seemed to take that role in the Matthews family. I guess Russ played a similar role to Bob, with Rachel as Lisa, but Alice and Pat don't follow the pattern.

The problem with writing out so many members of the Matthews family is this meant a lack of stability and of balance. So many people came and went from AW starting in the late 70's, so many families. I think viewers did need that stability. I don't think they were solely interested in the witticisms of the elite. You had Ada and Clarice, and the Ewings, but they were more blue collar. There was no middle class.

I think the sad sack state of the Matthew family in their last years on the show made it worse. They just seemed downtrodden and out of place.

I think eventually Felicia, Cass, and friends brightened the atmosphere, and they did strike more of a balance, but the 1979, 1980, etc. episodes I've seen, while good, have some of that stale emptiness about them. I even find myself looking forward to the very few scenes with Jim Matthews, helping someone with their taxes, dealing with jealous Liz.

I guess they couldn't get away with writing her out at that time, but beyond that, I can see Lemay/Rauch wanting her in a central role to "prove" that the part was not a success due to Courtney's work.

Edited April 9, 2012 by CarlD2

[DRW50]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXpJfp4YiFE

[Susan Hunter]

Since we've only really heard one side of the story, I guess we'll never know the entire truth, however I choose to believe Lemay when he says that he was more than willing to write stories for the Alice, Steve and Mary characters, but the egos of JC, GH, and VD got in the way. I think I read that George Reinholt was acting out in other inappropriate ways that lead to his dismissal, but I'm not sure.

From his side of the story it seems like all he wanted was the actors to memorize their lines, play the scenes as written, and not rely on a bunch of acting crutches that they'd developed over the years. Connie Ford, Beverly Penberthy, Michael Ryan, et. al. seemed to adjust just fine and Lemay says that he even adjusted his writing style to fit their acting styles. I'm not sure why the fired three couldn't make it work, but he was sort of vindicated when George Reinholt turned into a disaster on OLTL and Jacquie Courtney played Pat Ashley exactly the same way she played Alice.

I've changed my opinion on this over the years, because I think that Harding Lemay is the best daytime writer ever, but I think he and Rauch should have given into Dwyer's ego. When Mary died, so did that middle class, middle America sense of home and family that every soap needs, imo. That always comforting and supportive force was gone. Ada was great, but she was always focused on Rachel. Liz couldn't fill the bill and neither could Rose Perinni or crazy Beatrice Gordon. So AW didn't have that Alice Horton type of character to balance out all of the New York sophisticates who found it chic to hang out in, of all places, Bay City, IL. Even when Days was at it's wildest, you could always count on Alice Horton to hold things down. AW didn't have that post Mary.

[DRW50]

I agree about Reinholt, who seems to have had huge problems, but I never knew what Virginia Dwyer did - I think he said she changed scenes to make herself more important, and she didn't want to change this method. That isn't appropriate, but I kind of feel like they just wanted rid of her anyway.

[Susan Hunter]

According to Lemay, she would change the dialogue and other actors would miss their cues. I love the blurb in his book about meeting her (Virginia Dwyer) for lunch and that she was the antithesis of Mary in real life. I gather her greatest sin in Lemay's eyes was not wanting to play what he had planned for the character. I get the impression from his book that she was going to be like Aunt Liz. So I'm not really sure what Aunt Liz was going to be, unless she was going to be her old snobby self.

[AMCHistory]

I believe the only reason Aunt Liz was brought back was to take the place of Mary because of Dwyer's acting up. So, I doubt Liz would have been brought back had the Mary character worked out the way he envisioned.

[vetsoapfan]

The 1975 firing of Jacqueline Courtney, George Reinholt, and Virginia Dwyer from ANOTHER WORLD was a major soap opera scandal at the time, and of all the principle players involved, Harding Lemay has capitalized on it the most over the decades.

Much of his criticism of the actors involved is self-serving, if not downright hypocritical. He justified his terminating Dwyer, in large part, because of her changing his dialogue to better keep in line with how her character had always been established and played. Mary Matthews had been conceived and presented as a strongly maternal, protective woman with a wry sense of humor. Think Ruth Martin with a touch of Myrtle Fargate thrown in. Or Audrey Hardy with a touch of Lila Quartermaine's tongue. This is how Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon had written the role, and it was quite effective. Lemay, however, did not believe that warm, nurturing mother types actually existed. (Dwyer, for her part, disagreed, saying that she modeled her portrayal of Mary after her real-life sister.) Lemay envisioned Mary Matthews as a grasping, aggressive woman with control issues. Dwyer would play against that and try to keep the integrity and consistency of her character intact, which irritated the writer who had a different intention of how Mary Matthews was supposed to be under his reign.

Interestingly, when Dwyer cut, edited, or changed dialogue to protect her character, Lemay balked. When his pet actors like Constance Ford or Victoria Wyndham did the exact same thing, he praised them highly for "embroidering" their dialogue and enhancing their characters.

As well, Lemay complained of Dwyer's supposedly throwing off actor Hugh Marlowe, who played her husband on the show, when she would change dialogue and leave him without proper cues. Anyone involved with the series at the time, however, knew that Marlowe was forever going up (forgetting his dialogue), no matter with whom he acted. It appeared he was starting to have trouble memorizing lines at the time, as he continually stumbled with most of his scenes, whether he was appearing with Dwyer or not. His troubles continued long after Dwyer was gone, and the show started to give him fewer and fewer lines to memorize over the next few years. To blame Dwyer for Marlowe's faltering memory is unfair.

One of the most absurd parts of his book is when Lemay recounts his luncheon date with Dwyer, which he clearly did not want to attend. He takes it upon himself to attribute all sorts of negative motivations to her behavior in the restaurant, as if he could read her mind and "know" what she was thinking when, clearly, his perceptions were colored by his personal distate for the actress rather than anything she actually did.

In the end, the writer had taken a dislike to Dwyer and how she played her character, and just wanted to get rid of her. The excuses he gave were just that: excuses.

[AMCHistory]

I never thought of Lemary from your perspective vetsoapfan. He did praise a lot of his newly hired actors for working off the page, but panned Virginia Dwyer. He made it a point to pay up her ego, though never mentioned any of the members of the company complaining about her unlike Reinholt.

That quote about people going to the back porch when times get tough is so true. My familiy's New York house is often vacant during the non-Holidays. One time, I was the first one back, and it was so eerie to see all the lights turned off and the furniture covered with dust catchers. I could imagine viewers feeling the same way coming back to a empty Mathews home without their beloved Mary their to offer a friendly welcome.

[vetsoapfan]

Lemay was the only one to publicly complain about Dwyer, but then again, he was the one who campaigned to get her fired, so he needed the justification.I think his referring to her supposed ego was unfair. When Constance Ford, Doug Watson or Victoria Wyndham changed their dialogue to enhance their characters, Lemay never lambasted them for having "egos". If a new creative team had taken over the STAR TREK franchise, and had been intent on writing Spock as a dizzy comedic character, better suited to a Jim Carrey film, would Leonard Nimoy have been accused of having "ego problems" if he had tried to change the dialgue and play against the camp, in order to protect his legacy character?

[AMCHistory]

So is your overall assessment that Lemay's run actually hindered and did not help the show?

[vetsoapfan]

Lemay, overall, proved to be one of the best, most intelligent and talented scribes in soap history. His determination to focus on family dynamics, class conflict, and interpersonal and romantic relationships was exactly what daytime drama is all about. The problem is, his ego is huge, and even by his own account, he tends to dismiss the opinions of anyone who disagrees with him. When asked about his opinion of soap legends like Agnes Nixon and Irna Phillips, he smugly retorted that their work had only shown him "what NOT to do".

Lemay needed to be controlled, and forbidden to make sweeping, damaging alterations to the show which would fracture its core and alienate the audience. Of course, he was teamed with Paul Rauch, whose own massive ego and haughty, often abusive treatment of actors is well known. Between the two of them, Lemay and Rauch did serious damage to AW as their reign went on. From 1971-1974, however, it was the show to watch. And even though I disagree with Lemay's opinion of certain actors, and how he wrote them out, even when his writing began to deteriorate (around 1975), it was still miles above anything we've seen on the soaps in the last several years.

Edited April 10, 2012 by vetsoapfan

[teplin]

I was quite young when Mary Matthews "died," but I can remember her death scene. I was never fond of her (or her husband), so I didn't mind her departure -- though in retrospect it certainly didn't do the viability of the Matthews family any favors. I think it would have been better to have killed off Jim (vetsoapfan is correct that Hugh Marlowe was already faltering) and let Mary's grief manifest itself in her trying to exert more control over her children as a (misguided) way to keep them close to her. Though I suppose Dwyer wouldn't have wanted to play that, either.

And then we might not have gotten Irene Dailey's Aunt Liz, who was a wonderful creation -- though often mishandled through the years.

By the way, when it comes upper middle class mothers of that AW era, I much preferred Helen Moore (Lenore's mom) to Mary Matthews.

[DeliaIrisFan]

Does every soap need that, though, and to what end? As a completely disinterested bystander, the latest debacle behind the scenes at DOOL really makes me question whether the so-called stabilizing core family on some of these shows that have otherwise been adrift for decades is a positive thing or just a legitimizing token. The latest "new era" of DOOL didn't even last 6 months, but all they had to do was invoke Alice Horton's name in a story that sounds like it was pretty much DOA and all of this spin about how the show was going back to its roots practically wrote itself. A part of me can't help but think that AW may have been mismanaged by and large, but it ended more or less as a show about interesting people who were worth watching in their own right, even if the revolving door of writers couldn't figure out how to integrate them into a canvas that was greater than the sum of its parts. In a way, I wonder if that may have been a blessing.

That's the other thing about Mary Matthews that I am loath to bring up, because I have literally seen no footage of her, but I can't help but wonder: If she wasn't all that interesting in her own right, then would this figure have been much of a draw if viewers could just watch the real deal on other shows?

[Susan Hunter]

It depends. I think Another World would have benefited from having a core middle class family with roots to the show's beginning in later years to keep it grounded and develop new stories from. I think Mary was the heart of the family and her presence would have been an interesting contrast to playboy Mac and spoiled Iris and all of their New York friends.

I know very little about Dwyer. There is not a lot of info about her and Harding Lemay's account of the woman is one side of the story. However, Hollywood,etc. is filled with actors who claim to be protecting their character's integrity when in fact they're just afraid or don't have the acting chops to try new things. I just go back to Frances Reid who played a very similar character to Virginia Dwyer. Whether she agreed or disagreed with the writing, it appears that Reid just went for the ride and allowed writers to take her character to many different places. Again, it is a one-sided story, but it seems like Lemay only wanted to give the character more layers, not send her down some crazy path.