Sylph, I see you explained the same thing that I just did. Good job.

You added a very nice, actual example!

Is the "surfer" he's talking about "Bob Purvey"?

If so, is this clip of him during this era?

http://bobpurvey.com/clips-from-the-1970s.html

The final scene on that clip was of SURFING, LMAO

If that is true, he was apparently recently back on GH.

http://bobpurvey.com/gh-promo3.html

Is this Backus? If yes, I do remember his face from RH...but nothing more .

Interesting too...here's a link to a video with Backus, Nancy Marchand, and Mark Lamura, Soldier's Home. A still is pasted below.

You added a very nice, actual example!

Thanks. It is strange to look at the scenes and think about the technique instead just the story. This interview has been very illuminating and has increased my already very high regard for Marland's work.

Someone simply should write a biography on Doug Marland. He sounds like such a wonderfully classic eccentric genius of a man. I'd love for someone to just delve into his psyche.

What a wonderful idea! I would buy a biography on Marland in a heartbeat. FrenchFan should team up with Richard to undertake this project.

Ah, the power of the daytime slut. I don't think the audience (certainly, judging by SON) still likes the "slut". Not even in a "love to hate" way.

But Emily was not a slut, at least not a stereotypical one note slut like Stacy on OLTL. Under Marland, Emily was a mess and complex. She constantly fell in love with the wrong men. She fell in love with James Stenbeck, but betrayed him to save his son, Paul who she had grown to love as a sister. She then passed off James' baby as Holden's child. Eventually she fell in love with Paul who had always loved her desperately love her, only to dump him for a man who treated her badly. I loved Emily because she was flawed, but she was never deliberately cruel or manipulative.

Melanie Smith also had a natural sultry sexuality which Hensley does not have. The last acting job I saw her was on Deep Space Nine as Ziyal. She must be doing something else now.

After reading this interview, I am feeling so nostalgic about Marland's ATWT. I loved the show, the stories, and characters so much back then. William Fitchner (Josh) was my favorite actor. I was convinced that he would make it in prime time or in the movies and now he has to some degree.

Edited May 17, 200916 yr by Ann_SS

It was a great read. I loved what he had to say about Marland. So much detail about his writing. I knew about the Emma reference to his mom. I also liked what Backus had to say about the two Emilys. I so much prefered Smith's version over Hensley's.

Edited May 17, 200916 yr by Ruxton Hills

Juliet and I laid out each week in detail which was incredibly time-consuming. We came up with some very interesting stories, I think, but also had a "bible" which Doug had recently submitted giving general guidelines for the show's next 6 months or so (very general), and we tried to implement that as best we could. It was hard coming up with endless material, and stories seemed to just flow from Doug's brain in a way neither of us could easily duplicate. I lasted about 18 months and then, exhausted in pretty much every way, I was fired. It was devastating to get fired (my first experience) but also a relief to be free of the burden. I'm sorry I've never had a second chance at head-writing once I learned the craft better and knew how much more responsibility you could delegate to the breakdown writers, but I moved on happily to other things.

This is probably my favorite quote out of the entire interview. When has a writer apologized for any misteps they've taken during a certain tenure. He seems very genuine, and who can really blame him? When DM passed away, Marland had so many stories going on at the time. I don't think anyone would have done those stories any justice other than Doug.

FANTASTIC interview, FrenchFan! I'm really glad he took the time to really answer these questions in detail.

CZ: You wrote for a long time for ATWT under the helm of daytime legend Douglas Marland? How was it working with him?

RB: Douglas Marland was absolutely a phenomenon. Marland was actually his real first name (His mom called him "Marly".) He grew up in upstate New York, close to the Canadian border, something he had in common with Harding "Pete" Lemay. I think Emma Snyder was, at least in part, based on his mother. He worked out of a grand colonial home in Connecticut, and when he came to the city, he had a driver. Like me, he had started as an actor, and often laughed about playing a doctor in a storyline with Eilene Fulton (I think) when she had a "phantom" baby. Apparently, she believed she was pregnant, but when he went to deliver the baby (by Caesarean, I think), he turned to the others and announced, "There is no baby!" He thought it was absurd that the doctor would get that far into it without already KNOWING there was no baby.

One of the things that attracted me to ATWT and Doug's writing style was that it was very realistic, a heightened reality to be sure, but there were no aliens, time-travel, people returning from the dead, etc. etc. It was about a real group of people going through various dramas, and I liked that.

After I had written scripts for Doug for a while, he asked me to write breakdowns or outlines. I was very nervous about it. Afterall, a script writer gets a breakdown which tells him or her exactly what the scene was and who was in it and what they did (and, even, sometimes some of the dialogue). Douglas was famous for the detail of his breakdowns. As a scriptwriter, you had to cut material in order to bring the script in at the correct length. I didn't know this was uncharacteristic of soap writing in general. Most breakdowns are much sketchier. Well, the breakdown writers would take a train to Connecticut from Grand Central Terminal and be met by his driver to be driven to his house. There we sat while Doug dictated the first breakdown which John Kuntz always got. We'd break for lunch which Doug's cook would serve and then, after lunch, we would continue. Doug would dictate through the second breakdown (usually) and occasionally part of the third breakdown before time ran out. The first time I went home in a panic because I was not assigned the first or second, or even third, breakdown and had nothing. (Actually, now that I think of it, I attended several sessions before Doug suggested it was time for me to starting writing myself.)

I needn't have panicked. Doug called me and dictated the breakdown over the phone while I desperately tried to get it all down on paper. Like the scriptwriters, my job was more to cut material than anything else. As I became more confident, Doug would occasional leave me to finish out scenes, but he always (or almost always) dictated the opening prologue, act one, and act two, and the final act. We did contribute suggestions but it was his show from start to finish. He had certain rules: there were always three stories started in the prologue. Those three were picked up in Act One. Act Two always intiated two secondary storylines. We had to track the time of each scene (a somewhat arbitrary 5 minutes per scene, so that if Prologue A started at 10 am, Prologue B started at 10:05. If the scene ending one section was picked up immediately after the commercial break, the scene was continuous. If some other scene intervened, then we had to account for the missing time by having the interrupted scene show that time had passed. Sometimes this was accomplished by coming back to find one of the characters on a one-way phone call in order to justify why five minutes had passed but the scene hadn't advanced. All of this was very different, I subsequently learned, from other soaps. As a breakdown writers there was less you had to make up than on other shows, but it still allowed a lot of creativity. When you had finished writing a breakdown, Doug would have you read it to him over the phone, and he would make changes as you went along. I was always in a high state of anxiety about this.

There were also never any two character scenes that carried over into a subsequent scene without someone arriving. That way you couldn't start a highly emotional confrontation between, say, Holden and Lily, and have that confrontation continue throughout the show which made for some difficult challenges, but it kept the show relentlessly moving forward. Most people found the show difficult to get started on because there was so much happening and so many characters. Doug kept a bigger cast than other shows. He also kept the history of the characters alive. If one of Emma's children had been written off the show, there would still be phone calls from that child (sometimes to justify that time passage!) and if he could, Doug loved to have the missing characters make guest appearances at Christmas time or other significant times. This gave the show a depth and complexity that was quite special. On most shows, when a character leaves the show, he or she is never mentioned again. On ATWT under Doug, Emma would mention his missing children and what she'd heard from them.

Once, when I was still a scriptwriter, Doug came to the city and met with a bunch of us in a conference room at the studio. There was a monitor in the background which had a feed from the studio floor where scenes were being rehearsed. Two of the best actors, Larry Brygman and Elizabeth Hubbard, were doing a scene and it was a show that I had written. Suddenly, Larry broke off and said something very derogatory about the writing. I winced, but Doug laughed and said, "Oh, shut that thing off." Douglas, as a former actor, knew what I knew: that actors come in in the morning worried about putting it all together in the short space of day's rehearsal and they protect themselves by almost always announcing in some way that the writing was terrible but they would "somehow" make it work. This meant if it didn't go well, they had already set things up to blame the writing, rather than themselves.

Speaking of Elizabeth Hubbard, as wonderful an actress as she was and important to the show, she was notoriously difficult to work with. Doug loved her, but found her trying at times, and as a joke, he always had reference to a Hubbard squash at Thanksgiving time and it was always about how hard it was to crack a Hubbard squash (a real squash with a notoriously tough outer shell).

Doug loved Christmas and had three or four Christmas trees in his house and many decorations. He also loved his actors and threw parties for them, though, strangely, not for his writers. He once worked with Agnes Nixon on one of the shows as co-head-writer and they entered the studio as an actor was leaving. Agnes hid. She didn't want to think of the person as an actor but as the character she was writing. Doug was just the opposite (but Agnes, wonderful as she was, was never an actor). Although I never got to one of those parties, Doug did send wonderful gifts to his writers at Christmas time, often a big basket of food, organized around some theme. The last Christmas before his death, he sent me a Baccarat crystal decanter which I still treasure. I sometimes think it was almost as though he knew it was his last time to send out gifts.

I keep scotch in the decanter because that was what Doug drank. Indeed, if you were on the phone with him in the afternoon, when five o'clock arrived, you were hear the clink of ice cubes as the clock struck. One of his servants had brought him his scotch. After that, he usually didn't go on dictating for very much longer. Like most of the successful headwriters, Doug had no life outside of daytme. He ate, drank and slept the show. He was once hired by General Hospital he told me but for some reason was immediately fired. He had a year's contact and they had to pay him for the full year. I asked him what he did during the year. Did he travel? What? He said he immediately got another job on another show. He spent every cent he earned and more and lived lavishly. And when he died, there was nothing. There may even have been debts that had to be satisfied. So, in that sense, he successfully "took it with him." I think that was a legacy of his having grown up poor.

AMAZING information...

CZ: Do you have a favorite storyline, scene or character from this great era?

RB: I particularly liked the complicated, needy, craziness of Barbara Ryan, and I always loved watching what Coleen Zenk did with the material. She was a great asset to the show because her character could do anything, good, bad and ugly, depending on the circumstances. It is always more fun to write those flawed characters. For the same reason I loved writing Caleb Snyder back when Michael David Morrison was playing him. Caleb lived in the shadow of his handsome brother, Holden, and had a hard time with that. He was a complicated character. Sadly, Michael was equally tormented and died of a drug overdose in 1993. Graham Winton, who replaced him, is a wonderful actor, too, but didn't have quite the same quality of living on the edge. Larry Bryggman was always fun to write for, as well, because he was such a superb actor. The hardest ones to write for were always the "good" people because you had to keep them true to their inherent goodness without letting them seem simpering and boring. I liked Emily Stewart more when she was played by Melanie Smith. When the producer recast Emily with the current, and very good actress, Kelley Menigham, he was excited because,as he put it, she's so much more classy than Melanie. Classy? Who needs classy? I loved the sluttish quality that Melanie brought to the role, and the possibilities of doing the wrong thing that she always embodied. However, it wasn't my choice, obviously. One of the dilemmas of daytime is that the writers don't have the control of casting or storylines or anything else. Ultimately, it's the network and the producer who gets the final say.

CZ: When Marland passed away in 1993, you became co-HW with Juliet Law Packer. What do you think today of your time as HW?

RB: 's death was sudden and unexpected. He died a kind of soap opera death in that he had an aortic aneurysm that burst, and aneurysms are often a way of quickly killing off a character in the soap world. However, with Doug it was very real and very tragic. The fact that he was a heavy smoker didn't help. He lingered for a few days and the executive producer asked Juliet, Nancy Ford and me to continue the lay-out of the week's shows Doug had been working on. When Doug died, we became de facto head-writers, but Nancy didn't want the added demands on her time (she's a very talented song-writer as well). The job for me was simply overwhelming. I had never worked for anyone but Doug so I assumed the way he wrote was the way soaps were written... with the headwriter basically dictating everything. Juliet and I laid out each week in detail which was incredibly time-consuming. We came up with some very interesting stories, I think, but also had a "bible" which Doug had recently submitted giving general guidelines for the show's next 6 months or so (very general), and we tried to implement that as best we could. It was hard coming up with endless material, and stories seemed to just flow from Doug's brain in a way neither of us could easily duplicate. I lasted about 18 months and then, exhausted in pretty much every way, I was fired. It was devastating to get fired (my first experience) but also a relief to be free of the burden. I'm sorry I've never had a second chance at head-writing once I learned the craft better and knew how much more responsibility you could delegate to the breakdown writers, but I moved on happily to other things.

CZ: Then you moved on OLTL? Was the show very different from ATWT?

RB: Watching OLTL, I couldn't believe how different it was from Marland's ATWT. Michael Malone was very free with time. One storyline would pick up directly in a subsequent act while another would show a time-passage. The characters were much more broadly written and in many ways unrealistic, compared with ATWT. There was a certain playfulness in the writing that subtly tweaked soap opera conventions. Michael called it the "hoot factor", meaning it was sufficiently outrageous that the viewer would laugh at the audacity of it, but still be intrigued at how it could be pulled off. I didn't think I'd like writing such melodramatic material but I came to love writing for the show and for Michael. It was a great gift and a huge treat and such a pleasure after the high pressure existence I'd been living as head-writer of ATWT. I started out writing scripts but Michael soon brought me in to write breakdowns and the meetings with Michael and Josh Griffith were highly entertaining and lots of fun. Jean Passanante and Chris Whitesell were both writing for Michael at the time and they were excellent and highly amusing fellow writers. Eddie Brez was either on the team when I joined it, or came on to the team shortly after, and I loved writing with her. It was a very happy time.

CZ: You left OLTL for a short time between 1997 and 1998 to write for AW? Would you explain what happened? Was it to save AW for cancellation, which arrived in 1999?

RB: Inevitably, no matter how well liked you are at first and how much you are welcomed as the savior of a show, there comes a time when the network and the producer thinks they have to make a change. And, indeed, after I'd been writing for Michael for some time, he was fired and Peggy Sloane and Leah Laiman took over. Michael and Josh were developing a late-night soap opera for the Fox Network to be broadcast at 11 pm. It would compete with the late-night talk shows and news programs and would offer a great alternative to those two genres. It was to be set in New Orleans and entitled 13 Bourbon Street. They very much wanted me to write for them, and I convinced the new executive producer at OLTL to let me out of my contact to join them. A cast was hired, a pilot was shot, a studio in Queens was rented, sets were built, and then the executive at the Fox Network who had hired Michael and Josh was,himself, fired and his replacement had to prove that everything his predecessor had okayed was worthless, so he canned the idea of the late-night soap. For a while, he decided it would be a primetime (once a week) show and we switched gears to write a weekly show. Then, after we'd written several episodes, he dumped the whole idea. It was a costly decision as something along the lines of $13 million dollars had been spent on cast, sets, etc. The pilot, which I don't think ever aired, was terrific, but the show was over. Michael was immediately hired at AW in hopes of rescuing that show, and, once again, he brought me with him. The executive producer balked at many of the wild ideas Michael had for the show which is too bad because some of them would certainly have attracted an audience. Finally, it came to a head and Michael was fired, and as his protege, I too was fired when my contract came up for renewal. Not too long afterwards, I was happy to hear that the executive producer was also fired, but the damage she had inflicted was already done.

Wow, so much here, just very detailed and informative.

CZ: Why did you leave OLTL in 2004?

RB: That's easy. I was fired. It was ironic because Jill Farren Phelps and I hadn't gotten along all that well, but she had never fired me because she apparently thought I was indispensable, or at least had not found anyone who could and was willing to replace me, but when Frank Valentini became EP, although he was a fan of mine, he was forced to fire me by the network because I was, by that time, pulling down a fairly big salary and they figured they could cut costs. Indeed, I was replaced by a brand new writer who would work for union minimum. Also, in all candor, I could be prickly at times when material I knew was good was thrown out by the network execs, so I rubbed some people the wrong way. Oh well.

I'm surprised he didn't talk more about JFP's time as defacto HW at OLTL. I'm surprised his firing came from higher-ups, but not really, it is all about budget after all...

CZ: Would you like writing for a soap again someday? "Guiding Light" is getting cancelled. Can you see a future for daytime soaps?

RB: I'd write for another soap in a minute, but jobs in daytime are disappearing as shows get canceled and other shows cut back on staff. I'm very sorry to see Guiding Light get the axe as it was the oldest show still being broadcast. It started on the radio; then, for a time, it was on both radio and TV before switching exclusively to TV. I watched it for a time when Melina Kanakaredes was prominent on the show and really enjoyed the writing that was being done at the time.

Curlee era GL.

And he should be writing for daytime again, and he WANTS to write for daytime again. Shame no one cares anymore.

Edited May 18, 200916 yr by Y&RWorldTurner

Richard is exactly what GH needs. He could help fix a lot that is wrong with that show. His agent should contact Brian Frons.

The interview is sublime. I did laugh when he said the producer found KMH's Emily to be non-slutty. At first, maybe, but by 1994, those puppies were on display 24/7.

I thought he was great on RH, his relationship with Delia was the high point for Randall's Delia (she got far too much crap material during her run as Delia). I was disappointed when he was moved away from Delia, instead just stuck in a friendship with Frosty Faith, then working for Joe, hooked on gambling, and...did he even have an exit? That era of RH depresses me.

Malone's second run on OLTL definitely did not have the sophistication of the first, and I felt the scripts were all over the place and often terrible, underlining broad "Malonian" ideas and archetypes that might've seemed poetic in 1993, but under the then-current team came out clunky and childish, like slogans.

Some of what he did at AW seemed interesting to me, but a lot of it seemed just as campy as his second turn at OLTL (some sort of mummy's curse at a museum?), or rehashing Marty's rape - certainly the story of black policewoman Toni being raped by a fellow officer could've worked, but from what I saw, it didn't turn out too well.

Ron Carlivati started at OLTL around '95, I believe; according to Malone, he worked with him for a number of months before Malone was canned in order to bring back Roger Howarth.

Every time I watch it Doug Marland's ATWT feels like a totally different animal from soaps today, full of a strange, simultaneous mix of home, hearth, and family, and sharp, ambitious professionals. It seemed like the characters were often unfailingly polite, keeping their true feelings close to the vest, dancing around things - much like we do in real life. I think today some would find that "too slow," sadly.

Every time I watch it Doug Marland's ATWT feels like a totally different animal from soaps today, full of a strange, simultaneous mix of home, hearth, and family, and sharp, ambitious professionals. It seemed like the characters were often unfailingly polite, keeping their true feelings close to the vest, dancing around things - much like we do in real life. I think today some would find that "too slow," sadly.

This is why I became a big fan of the show.

He'd be an asset to any writing team right now, and he seems genuine when he says he wants to write for soap operas still.

This is just classic because it holds true to this day:

Once, when I was still a scriptwriter, Doug came to the city and met with a bunch of us in a conference room at the studio. There was a monitor in the background which had a feed from the studio floor where scenes were being rehearsed. Two of the best actors, Larry Brygman and Elizabeth Hubbard, were doing a scene and it was a show that I had written. Suddenly, Larry broke off and said something very derogatory about the writing. I winced, but Doug laughed and said, "Oh, shut that thing off." Douglas, as a former actor, knew what I knew: that actors come in in the morning worried about putting it all together in the short space of day's rehearsal and they protect themselves by almost always announcing in some way that the writing was terrible but they would "somehow" make it work. This meant if it didn't go well, they had already set things up to blame the writing, rather than themselves.

I have no idea who this guy is but absolutely incredible interview. It is rich with information, I am appreciative for having read it. Loved Loved Loved the entire read. Thank you for conducting and then posting

He'd be an asset to any writing team right now, and he seems genuine when he says he wants to write for soap operas still.

I wonder what he would do as HW of ATWT. He can't be any worse than Jean. I think the last time there was too much pressure to live up to the Marland legacy.

I thought he was great on RH, his relationship with Delia was the high point for Randall's Delia (she got far too much crap material during her run as Delia). I was disappointed when he was moved away from Delia, instead just stuck in a friendship with Frosty Faith, then working for Joe, hooked on gambling, and...did he even have an exit? That era of RH depresses me.

LOL. This is my favorite time from RH.

My favorite Barry Ryan story was Delia's search into his past. Barry claimed his wife Catherine had perished in a plane crash while pregnant with their child. So depressing. One day, Delia is at Ryan's Bar (which she owned at this point in time) and in walks Elizabeth Shrank-Ryan, Barry's ex-wife! Elizabeth was looking for overdue alimony and had tracked Barry down to NYC. Delia was upset and even more upset to learn Barry had another ex-wife. When Delia went ot see this ex-wife, Bonnie?, Delia leared Barry had another ex-wife. Delia's reaction was classic. As her engagement present, Delia through a party at the Crystal Palace and invited all three ex-wives as well as two former lovers. It was a delightful mess. This eventually led to the car accident storyline, which was also great. Who's Sorry Now? Not Delia.

Barry departed for California in September 1981. He was going back to the entertainment industry. By Thanksgiving, Maeve revealed that Barry had reunited with Lilly Darnell.

Interesting to hear him talk about "Lovers & Friends" and "For Richer, For Poorer". There were two Rhetts, one only lasted a few weeks. Jason was a fascinating character. Too bad his story didn't heat up on "For Richer, For Poorer" until the show's final months. Funny, the way he described Caleb Snyder is the way I would describe Jason based on what I've read.