Legendary Emmy-winning soap scribe PAMELA K. LONG comes to Brandon's Buzz!

[Brandon's Buzz]

Many call her the most interesting, most imaginative, most important storyteller in the illustrious seven-decade history of "Guiding Light," and she owns two Outstanding Writing Daytime Emmys to back up that assertion. Now, on the eve of that classic soap's heartbreaking final episode, the incredible PAMELA K. LONG is coming by Brandon's Buzz to discuss her memories of the show and to talk about the characters (Reva! Josh! Fletcher! Alexandra! Harley!) whom she continues to hold dear to her heart.

Brandon's Buzz Radio w/ PAMELA K. LONG

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

10pm EDT / 7pm PDT

www.blogtalkradio.com/brandonsbuzz

[MichaelGL]

Nice coup! I wonder what she will say about the network interference she had to endure with, ooo and Lujack's death as well. (Did she write his death or was that Jeff Ryder?)

[R Sinclair]

Oh, drat! I have a performance tonight so I won't be able to hear it. I keep missing all of these blog talk shows live!

[Brandon's Buzz]

Next-day podcasts of the show are available at iTunes, and also, can be listened to from the show's website, www.blogtalkradio.com/brandonsbuzz, and from my blog, http://brandonsbuzz.com

[Y&RWorldTurner]

This was a great interview, Brandon. Long certainly carved her place in GL history, even if I wasn't too fond of many of her story decisions. Her stories about working in daytime and outside of daytime were very interesting.

She seems to welcome the idea of coming back to daytime too, while many from that era of soaps seem to be done with that whole idea.

Anyway, great job Brandon!

[Brandon's Buzz]

Thanks so much for listening! I had a total blast speaking with this woman, and she didn't disappoint!

[Dale]

Brandon, what a terrific interview! I really liked when Pam talked about the actor that she put in a coma just to shut him/her up! LOL! I am wracking my memory banks to try and remember who was in a coma during Pam's reign!

Thanks for great interview!

[RavenWhitney]

Great Interview...I am surprised that she didn't recall that she DID write Reva going over the bridge in her post partum Florida storyline. Pam was there for at least another six months and wrote the Harley/Josh story after Reva's death.

[chuck89]

That was a great interview and I especially loved hearing about Texas. I never knew that Patricia Kalember(Sisters,LOVING)was up for the role of Ashley.

She did have a recurring role on the soap as Meredith,Vicky Bellman's secretary at KVIK.

http://soapworldclassicsoaps.yuku.com/topic/5132

Pam actually showed up on Texas in a non-speaking role one month before she showed up as Ashley.

http://soapworldclassicsoaps.yuku.com/topic/5117

This is her first appearance as Ashley Linden:

[MarkH]

I'll put in my (unreasonable) request for a transcript or little snippets of text--"highlights"! Some of this is selfish and personal (hearing impaired), but some of it is genuinely because I believe written transcripts would have even wider impact!

[EastMA2]

GREAT interview Brandon. I loved hearing her voice again. She's a hoot. I'm a little surprised that she didn't remember writing Reva going off the bridge in 1990. That was such a big deal that KZ was leaving the show.

Anyway, thanks for the interview!

[DeliaIrisFan]

This was wonderful. It was almost as fascinating hearing her speak as it was to read that Nancy Curlee interview a few months back, and that's coming from someone who is a much bigger fan of Curlee than Long. It's clear that they are both very intelligent, though very different, writers/women. I have a newfound respect for Long, though I never watched her GL stint and have never liked a lot of the characters she focused on (Reva, Beth, etc.) when they returned to the show. She clearly made some missteps and GL may not have been the best venue for her to do the kind of material she wanted to do (I must say the final episodes of Texas that were posted on the old World of Soap Themes a few years back are my favorite of her work that has made it online) but hey, at least she tried something interesting and different. I wonder what would have happened if more soaps had nurtured new talent like that over the years.

I do know a lot about that era of GL in 1990-91 when Long (and many of her creations) left the show in quick succession, having sought out as much as I could about it in later years, wishing that I was old enough to have watched regularly and really been able to recognize just how GL evolved into Curlee/Demorest's show that I loved so much in the '90s. And I can attest, Long was definitely writing when Reva drove off the bridge. I can only assume she was being very gracious (and she's a master at it - the way she explained why she and JFP didn't mesh at OLTL was incredibly nice and yet probably at least 90% truthful). The conventional wisdom is that she was fired, and of course the new head writers were promoted from within her own staff, so I'm sure there were hard feelings. I'm still glad we got the Curlee-Demorest era, and although everyone (including Long, in this interview) likes to speculate about whether killing off Maureen led us to this point, I don't blame them for that and I actually think the two years or so when GL was vying for 4th or 5th in the ratings before Maureen died may have actually bought the show more time. If it had limped along in 8th place like it was by the time Long left (or worse, sunk even further with nothing to fill the vacuum left by Reva, et al's departure), Zimmer probably would have returned sooner and the stories for Reva would have probably gotten ridiculous sooner, as well. I think we probably would have reached the end even sooner. But it's too bad Long never found her niche in daytime again. She obviously has creativity and talent to spare.

On another note, does anyone know Jeff Ryder's story? I had no idea he had been a network exec at NBC before writing GL with Long in the mid-80s, and he sounds like quite a character, from her shoe-throwing story. I was also reminded of what Nancy Curlee said about him in that interview a few months ago, how he got "all of the blame and none of the credit" at that time. What did he get blamed for? Phasing out the Bauers and the Reardons, or what? What did he do that gave the impression that he was more to blame for the less successful components of the show? And what has he done since GL? He doesn't appear to have an entry in the writer/director forum, and there's nothing else listed about him on IMDB besides writing GL and "special thanks" on a few projects that sound like recent made for tv movies.

Anyway, again, great job. And what a travesty that fans have had to take it upon themselves to go out of their way to track down and interview two of the most influential living head writers in the show's history and interview them, while Soap Opera Digest wouldn't even devote a cover to GL in its final week on the air. This is why soaps (and the soap press) are dying. Now is the time for the mainstream soap press to be using their circulation and their clout in the industry (if either of those are even worth anything anymore) and give a platform to people who know first-hand what made soaps successful back in this genre's glory days. Well, at least someone is practicing journalism, even if they're not the ones getting paid to do it.

[DRW50]

I think Jeff Ryder was blamed for the big slump around 1986 when viewers started to flee. He was picking up the pieces of what Long left behind but he got more of the blame. I don't know the exact stories then. Was that Zanzibar? And Billy being hypnotized to kill Kyle? And Jerry Lanning as the man who saved Reva after her suicide attempt, and he lived with her, and then they found out he was a lunatic? And Claire having some brain tumor and trying to kill baby Michelle, and going off with Keir Dullea?

I wish someone would ask Long if she hated the Bauers. And ask for her opinion of Trish Lewis, who seemed to be the one Lewis she didn't write for.

[DeliaIrisFan]

Ah, I see. He stayed on after she had left. Yes, I've heard that era was kind of a black hole book-ended by Long's stints, which may have been polarizing but at least, by definition, had their fans. Still, Ryder may have brought something equally important to the mix that was gone when she returned without him. It never made sense to me why GL did worse in the ratings in Long's second stint - when at least there were old favorites like Holly and Roger and Peter Simon's Ed, and new characters like Harley and Blake, all of whom were front and center during the 1991-92 renaissance - in addition to the Shayne-Lewises, et al, who seemed to eat the show alive in the mid-80s.

I think Brandon did ask her about the Bauers, and she side-stepped it by saying that viewers didn't know at the time how ill Charita Bauer was IRL and that they couldn't utilize her more. Which of course doesn't explain why she wrote out Mike, Hillary, et al. (Interesting what she said about the decision to kill off Reva's mother by later regimes - "Why would you kill someone's mother? Send her out of town if you don't like her, but to kill her?" - when sending them out of town never to be heard from again was exactly what she did to Mike and Hope.) But it's not like she was going to come right out and say she hated them, even if she were grilled about it - I think what was great about this interview, speaking as someone who is ambivalent about Long, is that he let her speak for herself. I know there were holes in some of her explanations for things, but I also saw her in a different light than I have in the past, and got a sense of the imagination and heart that she brought to this show once.

[Brandon's Buzz]

Hey all, thanks so much for all of the comments and insight into this interview. I appreciate you guys listening, and I'm thrilled that it has generated such conversation.

I intend to sit down this weekend and transcribe the highlights of the interview, so that those who haven't heard it yet can read what Pam Long had to say about her daytime experiences.

For those who haven't heard this or any of my interviews, you can find all 35 (so far) episodes of my show in the radio archive at Brandon's Buzz: http://brandonsbuzz.com/brandons-buzz-radio-the-archives. (In searching for the show, many of you have been clicking on the banners that my pal JoAnn makes to help me advertise the show, when in fact, the shows themselves can be found in the radio archive at the top of the page.)

Thanks again for listening, you guys!