Agnes Nixon's Website

[SFK]

I caught a bit of The View's AMC special they reran today, and I just want to comment on how damn good Agnes Nixon looks. My buddy DaytimeFan would concur, she has had some excellent work, she looks wonderful for her age.

[Jonathan]

We've actually never heard DaytimeFan's comments regarding any work Agnes may have had. I'm curious now.

[EricMontreal22]

LOL facelift for sure--I think she admitted to that. I don't honestly think she's had all that much though lol

[EricMontreal22]

Bizarre I swear it's not for me--I think cuz it detects in settings I have a lower kps rate or something. Oh well it's nice I can actually watch them now lol

[SFK]

Yeah, I'd say conservative face and brow lifts, and I'd almost bet money that Dan Baker was her surgeon.

[All My Shadows]

I happened to watch #23 and the Paley Center thing just a couple of days ago myself. The AMC episode was good and moved along very well. It's hard to believe that it was once the norm for soaps to devote an entire episode to just one storyline. Can you imagine it like that today? I think I'd kinda like it...as soon as I turned AMC on and saw Zendall, I'd know that I'd be watching a full episode of B&B that day.

Re: the Paley center interview. I'm a sucker for listening to Agnes, and any time she's talking about Irna, I'm all ears. It seems Irna didn't do a lot of interviews (shocking, right?), so Agnes is really all we have in terms of revealing the processes in which soaps were made back then. As always, there's a huge amount of respect given to Irna from Agnes, and my favorite part is definitely before she shows the charm bracelet, when her voice cracks, and she says "I just really loved that woman." I wish I could have just been an atom in Irna's apartment those meetings were going on.

[EricMontreal22]

(Re my complaint about not being able to watch full screen, it must be my wireless connection--it works on my home comp)

I think even 30 min AMC did later break off to two stories or so an episode--the 1971 Erica episode does--but this was still early on in the show when they were trying to really connect to the audience.

Yeah I love how touched she was--of course Agnes is always class, sometimes I wish she'd dish more but you know that despite the difficulties of Irna, Agnes really feels devoted to her, still.

[R Sinclair]

Stockholm Syndrome, I guess.

[EricMontreal22]

HAHA! You could be right Well she does give Irna basically complete credit for Agnes not being stuck working with her dad with burial and funeral clothing so...

[DRW50]

I think Bill Bell was also fond of Irna. She might have been nicer to the writers who worked closely with her than she was to everyone else in the business.

Even Harding Lemay seemed to become fond of her, after a poor start, from what he said in his book.

[SFK]

Okay, I almost just cried in my coffee watching that clip of Agnes talking about the Carla/Sadie Friday denouement. I really wish I could see that scene with Ellen Holly and Robert Milli with audio. I haven't been to Paley for a while, so perhaps it's there. But it may also be from the lost promo Ellen Holly talks about in her book. It was unearthed at some affiliate several years back.

[Scotty]

I'm still ticked off that just about everything on the site relates to AMC, with hardly anything devoted to OLTL. But then again, AMC was always her baby. But it still sucks.

[SFK]

I know how you feel, AMC is my "home" soap, the show I grew up with and I love seeing these rare glimpses of the past, but I must say that it's OLTL's early days that really *intrigue* me... Carla, Viki/Niki, and a couple of years later, Victor/Dorian.

[EricMontreal22]

I agree---though it seems there's even less saved from OLTL's early days, we know there's at least another 1968-69 episode out there. AMC is my home soap too but OLTL is a close second and I do get why some fans feel Agnes almost abandoned it. In a sense she did--playing Devil's Advocate one reason there's probably so little there about OLTL compared to AMC is Agnes probably doesn't have it--most of this stuff is from her archives. She sold OLTL in... 73 I think? And around the same time left as writer. It's well documented how extensively she trained the person she hadn picked to replace her, the superb Gordon Russell and in some capacity stayed on as a consultant as she did for all of ABC Daytime--and Michael Malone said when he came to the show he would call her late at night with advice and questions for a while too. Still she really didn't have much control creatively or otherwise on the show (witness her trying to appease Ellen Holly when she was fired by saying she'd bring her character to Loving--there was nothing she could do about her position on the show). The fortieth anniversary ep is there but that's cuz she was involved in that. I still feel she left OLTL in a great position (it arguably never was better than the final years of Russell's era) and obviously cares about it a lot but yeah AMC seems to be her baby--partly as it ws the soap closest to her heart sentimentally from the start and partly because she's remained involved with it in some capacity since the start.

But yeah those years she wrote for it, the five or so have an almost magical appeal to me--maybe partly cuz so little from them remains...

(As a Loving fan it disappoints me how little material from that there is on her site but I chalk that up to both the fact there's prob not too much demand for it really and that Loving was almost eternally ignored, the first premier year aside, by both the mainstream and even the soap media--though one or two pisods would be nice).

Is it out there somewhere without audio? I don't think I've seen...

[Scotty]

According to the OLTL 40th anniversary book, Nixon stepped down as co-head writer of the show in 1973, but stayed on as a consultant.

In 1974, she sold her production company, Creative Horizons, to ABC, therefore giving the network total control of both AMC and OLTL.