Guiding Light Discussion Thread

[Khan]

Ironically, as much as Ellen Wheeler had touted that the new production style would help to make Springfield feel and look more like a real city ("I want to see which plants Cassie is planting in her garden!"), I think the move did the very opposite: it made Springfield feel and look LESS like an actual city than ever before.  Springfield might have been a mythical city located somewhere in the midwest (but most likely IL); however, even a REAL midwestern city has an altogether different vibe or atmosphere than an East Coast town like Peapack, NJ (and vice-versa).  Factor in the shoddy camerawork and editing, and you have just an unbelievable (and unwatchable) mess.

 

Frankly, if cancellation still wasn't an option at that point, then I wonder whether P&G/CBS would have been better off relocating GL's production to Stamford, CT, or even to L.A., like ABC would do with AMC.

Edited August 3, 2018 by Khan

[Khan]

 

Paul Rauch really took a sledgehammer to GL's aesthetics, taking a venerable soap that used to have good actors and tasteful production values, and turning it into another JER era-DAYS/PASSIONS knockoff; and although I think John Conboy managed to improve the production somewhat, his GL still had the same problem that all his shows that weren't Y&R had: shitty writing.

 

 

Yeah, I remember their testing the waters, so to speak, either determining whether the new style WOULD work, or getting viewers accustomed to it, so it wouldn't be a TOTAL shock for them.

 

Frankly, I found the all-purpose Beacon Hotel suite -- meaning, the same set they would re-dress for each new scene/character * -- more inviting.

 

 

* Sound familiar, DAYS fans?

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Edited August 3, 2018 by Khan

[Mitch]

Why Stamford...cheaper...non union? I think that would have been a whole lot better then Peapack and..using closets and offices in CBS for sets..remember the 7-11 set that was built in a storage closet and they made poor Alex go in and say she "LOVED the hotdogs!"  Or Josh's church altar which was really Wheeler's desk?

 

They needed more imagination for the whole thing,...there are no exec offices they could use for Spaulding..no large rooms for the Spaulding Board Room..I remember Alan and Alex having a discussion in a closet and then walking into Phillips office which.was a bigger closet.

 

Things that did work included cemetery scenes and some good work outside what could have been a hospital. Other then that..crap.

[j swift]

Here's the thing about old soaps.  I started with Beth/Philip/Mindy/Rick, I left daily watching around the Cooper period, I checked back in to giggle at San Cristobal and stare agog at Peapack.  But, at the end, (spoiler alert) I still shed a genuine tear when Philip found Alan dead.

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

The remotes in Peapack were dreadful. It was like the cast just showed up with their clothes from home. Nobody was really dressing the way their characters had dressed prior to changing the production model. The hand-held stuff has already been mentioned, but the lighting was even worse. Because people were wearing clothes from home, they might choose something bright which clashed with the outdoor lighting. And there was no real cinematographer trying to balance these bright color schemes or overabundance of light in the shots. It was just a director and some young camera operators, probably just out of college, running around chasing the actors trying to record it all. And the sound quality was abysmal. Zimmer talks about the sound problems in her book. She says one of her most dramatic scenes with Bradley Cole was destroyed because of background noise. But instead of reshooting it Wheeler just added in a track of background music to drown out the background noise which also drowned out all of the dialogue. It really was a mess, very amateurish. Wheeler was in over her head by that point and the whole ship was going down.

Edited August 3, 2018 by JarrodMFiresofLove

[Vee]

 

I remember it and my reaction was 'holy fúck.'

 

IIRC they had been doing more and more bad remote stuff for awhile up to that point but the beginning of Peapack - woo. It was a brutal, ugly winter in an ugly-looking town, or a town GL made look ugly. Cassie's house had scrap metal outside and looked like a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Harley's house, I don't even know. They also kept filming with the same new cameras they used outside inside some of the actual old sets and soundstages - which made every actual set look like a McDonald's countertop.

 

 

This was also, verbatim, one of my early impressions of GL, which I didn't first take notice of til the late '90s. Everyone was blonde and loud, the colors were too hot and it all looked too tacky and cheap. Paul Rauch.

 

 

They did. And Kim has told the story of having to change in the back of a car on the side of the road. Her book has a number of great anecdotes about Peapack, as you've mentioned. I think she says that with the scene with Cole, they simply cut to a static shot of an American flag blowing in the breeze with him talking over it because they'd failed to properly shoot the actors. They would cover for bad footage with shots of local scenery - flags, flowers, etc.

 

The shït where Wheeler's office and other studio facilities were doubling as onscreen locations was the nadir for me. Her office was the church! God knows what the hell that awful gas station store originally was. People would hang out in these incredibly drab, functional gray/white office spaces with fluorescent lighting that were clearly part of the studio. It was unbelievable. And that damn folk rock muzak would play under everything, to the point that you could sometimes not hear them.

 

Remember when a Spaulding press conference or board meeting was held outside in a field with some metal folding chairs?

Edited August 3, 2018 by Vee

[j swift]

I keep forgetting that Josh became a minister.  Josh Lewis, the guy who was introduced seducing models away from their husbands and running a country music label eventually worked in a grey office as a minister?  IMHO, Josh was never even that nice of a guy.  He always had a chip on his shoulder, he was never a significant asset to Lewis Oil, and I don't recall him having many friends. Billy had Hamp,  Buzz and Frank were close, but nobody hung out with Josh.  I recall that he had a religious conversion after a medical crisis but, given his history, I would think Josh was as likely to run a church as Alexandra would run a day care center. 

[DRW50]

 

I didn't have a problem believing Josh could become a minster - he always had extreme emotional swings, career doubts and jumping into one thing or another (especially in the '80s), he was always very holier-than-though. It's just the story didn't really have any purpose in the end. 

[Khan]

 

Agree.  "GL in Peapack" was like watching the soap opera equivalent to "Rollergator."

 

 

Am I wrong, or did they actually try to explain away the exposed drywall by having Gus tell someone he and Harley were renovating?

 

 

Both.  Also, because Stamford isn't that far from NYC, or where most of GL's cast were living at that point, you didn't have to worry over whether everyone would be willing and able to make the move.

 

Personally, I always had it in mind that Andy Norris should have returned to Springfield as a minister.

Edited August 4, 2018 by Khan

[Vee]

It's worth mentioning that the Stamford remotes for AMC and OLTL 2.0 on Hulu were the most part lovely and very well-shot. But they were also a very small portion of the run.

 

 

Yep. And that never ended. What the excuse was for the rotting metal on Cassie's front lawn, I have no idea.

Edited August 4, 2018 by Vee

[DRW50]

 

That would have made sense, especially when Holly was on the show (although most of Andy's run was after she left so history repeating itself would have made sense).

 

I agree with the comments about how awful Peapack looked, and I am also aware GL was pretty much done anyway, but I do think with better writing the production values wouldn't have mattered as much. Admittedly that was difficult with Ellen Wheeler being so heavily involved.

[Mitch]

I thought the rotting junk was in Harley's backyard..her small children had to dodge the construction inside and the rusted junk outside. Wheeler excused the drywall as symbolic of Gus and Harley's relationship...undone. Right. Peapack is actually beutifull, I think we spoke of it here, the remote of Reva hilarious wandering the countryside after her aborted wedding to Kyle as shot by Peapack. Zimmer looked beautiful there and the scenery was even more so. Flash forward 30 years and Zimmer is wandering around a dump and is wearing too tight t-shirts and looks like some slattern tumbling out of her trailer.

 

The main problem was the writing. If they had gone back to pre 80s soap writing..family and relationship problems...people talking in a house, a bar,  backyard parties with family...but they still had spies, and assasins, and jewel thieves...If they whittled it down to some really good old sets...Company, Towers, Spaulding exec office, Bauer House...(I would have had Rick open a family practice to make sense of people walking in and out) Hospital, Bloss House (Ross would have been the patriarch of SF and would live in the Mayors house to makes sense again of people walking in and out) and the common big room at the Beacon..and make the hotel room look like a nice warm vintage condo room..and switch out furnishings...it could have maybe worked.

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

What did everyone think about the remotes where the cast went to help build homes in communities across the country? Sometimes the normal plots would end five minutes early so we could watch little segments at the end where Frank Dicopoulos and the others were building homes in New Orleans or wherever they went. Ellen Wheeler way trying to show them all becoming real guiding lights away from the studio. No other soap did that before or since, to my knowledge. Zimmer talks about it in her book. She hated it at first but then changed her mind, because she realized the good they were doing in some of those communities dealing with natural disasters and poverty.

[Khan]

Their humanitarian efforts were laudable, yes, but I don't think they warranted stopping the day's action early for glorified "human interest" news segments.

 

OTOH, the writing at that point was so abysmal, it was almost a relief to turn our attention elsewhere, lol.

 

But that's the difference between a show WITH a budget and a show without one.  If GL had been able to switch production styles with the kind of money they had even during the Paul Rauch era, it might've been more successful.  Instead, the whole affair was being shot and edited on some college kid's MacBook Pro that his parents had purchased for him with his student discount.

Edited August 4, 2018 by Khan

[j swift]

The thing about early Josh and Reva, (before the bridge) is that Josh's responses to Reva's actions always seemed over the top given her misdeed. 

 

For example, when she came to town (remember those days of turbans, funny personal maids, a masseur and those faux-victorian phones?) she told the Lewis' that she was there because her divorce with Billy had never been finalized.  Later, Josh finds out that Reva was paid to come to town to break up Billy and Vanessa, he freaks out and leaves Reva.  Meanwhile, a year earlier, he was messing with Morgan's marriage and running around in a speedo but nobody called him the Slut of Springfield.  That whole period was so reminiscent of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; it was reflected in Reva's clothes, the summer heat, and drapes that fluttered in the wind during love scenes.  There were also allusions to Body Heat; the film that KZ never let us forget.  The production staff at the time expected that their audience would appreciate and recognize those literary and film references. 

 

I know I've been hard on Josh in recent comments because I am reading the SOD synopses of that period.  However, drunk Phillip hit on Reva and Josh didn't defend her and that's why she yelled in the fountain.  Josh also put up with a lot of craziness from Tangie, Sonni, Terri DeMarco, and Annie Dutton that he never tolerated in Reva.  I just think, like many supercouples, Reva tolerated a lot more of Josh's foibles than he did for her. 

Edited August 4, 2018 by j swift