Another World

[Efulton]

It was Harry Shea who died and was in that clip. Pete Shea did leave town with Diana Frame.

[DRW50]

Apologies - I had forgotten Pete was not the father. 

I still don't know why that family was written out so quickly, but then I've barely seen them. 

[denzo30]

Johnson had already been hired for the role.  He knew he was playing a gay character.  It was not scrapped after he was hired strictly on the actor himself.  I forget either the network or P&G last minute backed out and thought it was going to be too damaging. From what I remember, I think the actor was disappointed as it was going to be a groundbreaking storyline.  He lived in LA and they sought him out and moved him to NY to take over the role of Michael Randolph. But yes, he seems to have disappeared in the entertainment industry.  I don't recall if he did anything further after AW. 

[denzo30]

I don't think that Lemay was fired in 88.  He clashed with DS on writing storylines.  I thought it was stated that he quit. I am sure Lemay wanted to focus on the past of the Frame's & Cory's.  DS was probably more interested in writing new ideas and for younger characters.  I think he was also bought  in 1988 to prepare for the 1989 anniversary of the show and the idea was to focus on the original families.  I recall EP even stating back to the basics meaning the Frames and the Corys.  After the anniversary, I am sure Lemay's family focus's would have faded.  DS used some of Lemay's ideas as it was fit for the time for the 25th anniversary and we saw Iris and some other older characters reintroduced but I don't think Lemay's bible was so far written in advance that DS copied from.  The ideas where thrown on a wall but how much of his ideas and writing stuck, who knows? 

[Efulton]

We Love Soaps: Speaking of that story, how did you decide to have the character of Michael Randolph come out of the closet?
Harding Lemay: Well, I wanted to break up his parents. And I didn’t want to go to the usual route. He was a twin. I wanted him to confide to his sister that he had just started college and had fallen in love with a boy. And they all agreed with it. It was all in the script. I had not signed the renewal of my contract yet. And once I signed it they pulled out the rug from under this story.

We Love Soaps: Who was “they?” Who exactly made this decision?
Harding Lemay: Procter & Gamble, probably.

We Love Soaps: How did they communicate that to you?
Harding Lemay: I got a call from Bob Short, who always leveled with me, saying, “We’re just not going to do it, because we don’t think the audience would appreciate it. They’d turn over to GENERAL HOSPITAL or something.” When I first took the show over, Irna said, “You can’t have a black person have lunch with a white person, or you’d lose everyone in the South.” And so one of the first things I did was to have a white nurse have lunch with a black nurse, and build up a black character. And nobody turned it off, it was just as popular as it always had been. There were a lot of myths about what people would watch or wouldn’t tolerate. There were all these things that they felt very strongly about. And this was way back in 1970, before you were born probably. People go on clichés about what other people think and what they want to see on television. I think that’s why television is so bad. Nobody takes a chance on anything. It was always a big fight to get anything going that was close to reality. Aggie Nixon did it from time to time later on. She always did topical things on ALL MY CHILDREN. She also did gay stories, but that was quite a bit later on.

We Love Soaps: What could you imagine the impact would have been on soaps if you had been allowed to tell that story?
Harding Lemay: One of the reasons I think it would have been successful is because we were very careful in the casting. We got a very good young actor, a very normal, straight, young actor. And he was very ingratiating. And also the audience had known the characters since they were toddlers. You weren’t introducing a new character saying, “Here’s a gay guy.” You were saying that this character, who they had known since he was a baby, was gay. Finally what we decided on, because they wouldn’t let me do the gay story, was that the daughter would become pregnant, and have an abortion. And that’s what would split their parents up.

[Contessa Donatella]

What happened was this. P&G had been after Pete Lemay to sign a new contract with them. Everything was going forward in development to do the gay storyline. The actor was hired & was, as you say, fully informed. So, Pete signed their contract & then, they pulled the plug on the story. It was a corporate dirty trick. 

And Pete Lemay was still bitter about this one thing, near the end of his life. 

Edited June 12, 2024 by Contessa Donatella

[Efulton]

We Love Soaps: So when you were asked to come back to ANOTHER WORLD in 1988, was the plan to be a consultant or the head writer again?
Harding Lemay: I don’t know what they had in mind, really. I was the head writer for awhile. And then there was a strike. And during the strike they hired some NBC people to do the writing. Then they fired me and kept the ones they used during the strike, and the show got worse and worse and worse. But even by then, when I went back, it wasn’t going to work. I could see they weren’t interested. They weren’t excited enough by what I wanted to do, whereas before they had been very excited about the ideas I had. Procter & Gamble were very upset by my book [“Eight Years in Another World”]. I was very harsh on them. Nobody thought they would ever hire me again. But they were in deep trouble, so they hired me, and forgot all about it.

I was no longer that keen on doing it either. I didn’t need the money. And then I began to be a consultant. And it’s very interesting, the consultant’s fees were very high. You’d make $2,500 a day. I had a contract that said I had to be paid for three days a week whether they used me three days or not. I did that on four shows altogether. What you do is sit in with the other writers, make suggestions, and try to help them work out what they’re doing.

[DRW50]

@Efulton Thanks for the quotes. When he talks about the black character, does he mean Linda? Peggy was already mostly gone by the time he came in, wasn't she?

It's a shame all that I have seen of Linda is a few scraps near the end of her run (and she didn't even get an exit, IIRC).

I do think if they had framed Michael's story within the context of the fallout for his parents, audiences would have accepted it, but then it's easy for me to say. It's just depressing to think about in a time when soaps are increasingly hesitant to even acknowledge that gay men exist (Emmerdale just dumped three gay men in a month and the only two left are barely shown or have no life).

[Mona Kane Croft]

I didn't mean to imply the storyline was scrapped because Johnston was cast.  I was just saying it must have been cancelled shortly after he was cast.  Because, as you mentioned, Johnston was cast specifically to play out the gay plot.  Yet the storyline never even got started on-air.  So, it must have been cancelled shortly after he was cast. Otherwise we would have seen some hints or some lead-up in the scripts, before it got scrapped. 

Edited June 13, 2024 by Mona Kane Croft

[Paul Raven]

I'm sure the gay reveal would have been months into Michael's introduction as Lemay stated they wanted the audience to like and sympathize with the character.

Audience would be given hints and assume he had some typical soap secret eg an affair with a married woman (he didn't know!) or impregnating a fellow student etc.

So any hints that did make it to scripts would have been vague eg

John-I'd really like to see my son married and a father-after all that's a man's job in this world.

Pat - Michael has always been such a sensitive boy etc

[Mona Kane Croft]

I won't argue about it, by Lemay did state in at least one or two interviews or articles that he was fired. He never worked with Swajeski.  She had been a scab during the strike and was released when the strike ended.  TPTB immediately fired Lemay (before any of his scripts had even aired, according to him) and rehired Swajeski , this time as head-writer.  Lemay and Swajeski were never on the payroll at the same time.  And it's likely they never even met, especially since Lemay seldom visited the studio, and was fired immediately after the strike ended.  

By the time Lemay was working on AW as a consultant, Swajeski was long gone.  He was a consultant on AW during the time Jill Phelps was executive producer.  

Lemay had submitted his storyline projections just before the strike occurred and those projections would have been for either 6-months or 12-months. And it was obvious Swajeski was using many of Lemay's plans, which was perfectly legal, since the production company had paid Lemay for the projections, and after he submitted them they belonged to P&G. Swajeski also introduced some of her own ideas during this same period.  Swajeski's focus was very different than Lemay's, and it's fairly easy to see when she stopped using Lemay's plans and went forward with her own ideas for the entire show.  Again, no interest in arguing on my part. So I've said enough about it.  

I believe, yes he is talking about Linda, because Peggy wasn't a nurse.  And the white nurse he mentioned was almost certainly Alice, because Linda and Alice became very close friends. 

Peggy was still on the show when Lemay arrived, and he even began to create a family around Peggy.  He introduced Peggy's mother, her sister Linda and eventually Linda's boyfriend Zac (I think the name was Zac).  But soon after the family was introduced Peggy was written off.  I don't know if the actress left willingly, or if she was fired.  After Peggy left, Linda continued to have a fairly large presence on the show for a couple of years.  Then she began to fade into the background and mostly appeared as a nurse when the show needed a nurse.  

[DRW50]

Thanks. 

Given how beloved Alice was by the heartland viewers I suppose it was something of a risk to have her with a black best friend (to this day soaps don't really know how to write those friendships - GH recently had a black woman calling herself a "bitch" as she asked her white BFF to forgive her). I guess that friendship was forgotten about as Susan Harney came in.

[Contessa Donatella]

Pete Lemay specifically talked about Jill Farren Phelps as an EP. He sat in on the meeting when she pitched Felicia & John's affair to Anna Holbrook, Linda Dano & David Forsyth. He was quite impressed with her ability to sell them on her idea. Later in the interview the WLS guy told him about Frankie's murder & he was appalled. He basically said he'd have never killed a character like that & gave the example of Walter Curtin dying due to a car crash as something they would have, and did do. 

Having a discussion about that on twiX I got called a racist & somehow the way my mother raised me was brought into it. My pov was that it was an example of perfect best friend communication & their pov was that whoever wrote it was racist. That was the first time that an ex-BDW who was fired riled up some Trina fans. 

[Xanthe]

I spent a little bit of time looking over Lemay's version of events in Eight Years in Another World as compared to the AWHP synopses to see if that illuminated the timeline, and the odd thing is he always mentions how they swapped out the gay storyline for the abortion storyline, and yet in terms of what played out onscreen, basically on Johnston's first day as Michael, Marianne appears to start at least hinting or possibly even directly confiding that she might be pregnant. This was September (onscreen) and we get weeks and months of Michael trying to either expose her boyfriend Chris as a two-timing snake or to persuade him to do the right thing for Marianne's sake. Around Christmas Marianne has the abortion. If the abortion was substituted for the reveal that Michael was gay, what had they otherwise expected to do with the pregnancy storyline?

In the book of course it isn't always clear when events occurred.  Lemay describes getting the go-ahead to make the pitch, then draft the outline and audition actors to play Michael. Christopher J. Brown last aired in early June 1975. 

 

Edited June 13, 2024 by Xanthe
[sic]

[Contessa Donatella]

Did he misspell Procter?