Guiding Light Discussion Thread

[Khan]

Charlotte Waring Bauer fascinates me.  There, you have a character who was overly arch - certainly more arch than many GL characters had been up to that point - but who manages to stick around for SIX YEARS, even after the witch is exposed as a fraud.

[Faulkner]

Tony hired Lujack to work at Company. Here’s one of their scenes.

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VI mentioned that he and the person later got to a good place but I’ve heard a lot of stuff about GA’s behavior.

[j swift]

Greg Beecroft did not have a great reputation.  This is from one of my favorite SOD exit interviews of all time with Melanie Smith when she left ATWT because it was juicy and not sugar-coated.

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[Khan]

I wonder if his brother, David, was/is any better.

[TEdgeofNight]

Yup. Lujack lived in the Reardon boarding house. And they had physical scenes.

Anyone who could survive Ellen Wheeler and her stupid idea of Peapack deserves a medal!!

[Mitch64]

Very nice, funny, sad story...thanks for sharing.   I loved the comment section, not only people who were on the show (who confirm it was a crazy, sometimes dysfunctional family) but the viewers remembering Nola and Reva and that GL and soaps were communal kind of viewing. 

Yes.... I am sure it was GB...he was the stud up to that point and had to act like a big brother figure to Lujack. Its too bad, I loved Tony and GB was sexy as hell and I now know why they never brought him back..(I wonder what a Tony/Reva pairing would be like...)

[TEdgeofNight]

Vincent was totally talking about Greg Beecroft. Sexy as hell, but he had a jealous streak and was not easy to work with. Greg's reputation followed him at ATWT and GH. 

[Vee]

Beecroft has always annoyed me watching old GL. Him being chosen as a Duke recast on GH (which I've also seen - his one note in the role appears to be 'effete') is truly bizarre.

[China Jones]

I just got through watching several clips of Guiding Light's Peapack era on YouTube and I just realized something: all of the action at that time must have taken place during daylight hours! I never got the sense that nighttime ever fell in Springfield because everyone was outside practically all of the time. Even heiress Lizzie Spaulding got married in a field!

I know filming was moved to New Jersey because it's less expensive there. But what I'm realizing now is that there must not have been any money for indoor sets and the cheapest solution was to tape outdoors because filming in a public park in front of a stagnate, algae-filled lake is free.

Although I've long heard about how bad GL was in the end, I'm just now viewing it for the first time. I'm sure you guys have talked about this before, but the daytime only thing just hit me.

Also, I'd rather have organ music than some of the songs that were played in just about every scene!

Sorry for the rant, LOL!

 

[Vee]

The folk muzak often drowned out dialogue.

Then there was the fact that both Harley and Cassie's houses looked condemned like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I'm pretty sure the church/'convenience store' was just a production office.

Characters would often just wander along the side of the road at all hours of the day before coming across others, like drifters. It seemed like a lot of stuff had zero blocking or rehearsal. I still remember Zimmer's story from her book about how they had no workable footage of Jeffrey's proposal to Reva, so instead they did what they often did in Peapack with failed footage - shot a bunch of 'atmosphere' shots of leaves, trees, lakes, animals etc. and just put a shot of a waving American flag over Jeffrey's tinny voice-over for the bulk of the scene.

[DRW50]

Thanks. A nice read. My favorite part was the story about the actress who wanted to give an emotional speech and he said it wasn't the best time. 

I do think he had to stretch to come up with OTT stories for the last years. The electricity story was a brief fantasy gimmick for a comic tie-in, and the menopause/pregnancy was, sadly, old hat for soaps. I think GL dialed down the more ludicrous fantasy sequences after the time travel story (that doesn't mean the stories were good, of course).

[China Jones]

That's what was strange: outdoor scenes in (American) soap operas were rare and generally reserved for location shoots that aired during sweeps. So, watching Alan Spaulding wearing a sweat outfit and playing frisbee with his grandson in the park was bizarre!

As for the few indoor scenes I watched, Alan shopping at the 7/Eleven was hilarious. And I had to wonder how Alexandra, probably the oldest character on the show at that point, managed to make her way up that narrow spiral staircase in the Spaulding "mansion."  

[Vee]

Everyone going into that gas station Kwik-E-Mart/office was mortifying.

[soapfan770]

David had his own behind the scenes issues on Falcon Crest and was dismissed; the show didn’t even bother to wrap up his story lol but I’ll save it for the FC thread.

[Dan]

You touched on it at the beginning, but in fairness to Roger and Holly, roughly 75% of the show after Curlee and Demorest left in March until the end of the year was mostly tremendously uneventful and boring. Shame cause it's not like Curlee and Demorest left the show in an awful position. (Some mis-steps later in their tenure but nothing that couldn't be fixed). 

Also someone correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the church set Wheeler's office? It really is a shame cause Peapack absolutely could have worked, but it was done in such an amateur way it was sabotaged from the start.