Headwriters who change with their shows

[juniorz1]

This is true.

It was definitely Susan Seaforth Hayes that he wanted for the role, not Bauer.

According to Hayes too.

As far as writing styles, I thought that Michael Malone's OLTL was drastically different from what he did on AW. I expected stories with heart, humanity, depth, and a nudge of creativity and was I ever disappointed. The only good thing he did on AW IMO was create the character of Lila, Shane's ex-wife.

Another one I feel who's style differs from show to show is Jean Passanante. Though she may not be the greatest headwriter in history, I don't think anything she's done on ATWT is even remotely similar to her stint on AMC. She had this knack on AMC for creating just terrible new characters. Kit & Raquel both come to mind as two of the most ill-conceived characters in the history of soaps. The only storyline she did on AMC that I liked was killing Stuart & I think Tad (can't remember who exactly but I think it was him) and bringing them "back from the dead" on the same day. I thought that was terribly original & tongue-in-cheek. Very Santa Barbara-like lite. On ATWT, she started out with the baby switch, spiraled that into Emily gunning down Paul into Meg nursing him back to health into Dusty's mystery kidnapping into Jennifer's death & so on & so forth. Her work has been a mixed bag, though I still think she plotted & mapped out a great baby switch storyline. Everything was so meticulously planned, from Iris vs Cawrly (MY BOOOOOOYYYYY!) to Casey not being the paternal father of Gwen's baby (it was really Jenn's) to Emily becoming obsessed with keeping the secret in order to hold onto Paul, to Meg falling for Dusty while watching him fall for Jenn, then finding out of the switch, then coming up with such a clever way to expose the secret while not making herself look too bad in the process, to Jennifer being reunited with her baby & Carly having to be the one to tell Gwen that hers was dead, plus Carly & Gwen as half sisters & Carly being a b!tch adopting the baby in the name of Ro & screwing Gwen at every turn, not to mention that Nancy was the one (I believe) who figured out that Carly drugged Gwen- sorry, but sheer greatness. Made Kwak & her baby girl keeping Bianca's daughter away from her, even though Babe thought for the first few months that her son's penis fell off & she had a girl, look like bumbling idiocy of a storyline (which it was, in hindsight). And, I gotta say, the Barbara/Henry/Vienna triangle has to be the best-plotted triangle I've seen on daytime since the years of the Reilly-angle on DAYS.

The last one I can think of is Bob Guza, another good writer who became mediocre. He penned some really great stuff at SB and his first run at GH was vastly different from what he did at SB. He then moved onto SUN, a show that was night & day when compared to GH & could have been a carbon copy of SB, but he went in a very different direction. He & Meg Bennett did a great job plotting out the Gregory/Olivia/Cole/Caitlin storyline. It's a shame they cast Vanessa Dorman in the part of Caitlin, though, because it took away from the plot. Kam Heskin was an improvement, but by then, the initial story was pretty much over. It was a doozy though & it helped that Leslie Anne Down & Eddie Cibrian looked like Queen Victoria & her jeweled boytoy together. Talk about chemistry- Colivia was where it was at and no couple on the show ever had chemistry like those two. Tim & Annie did, but they never were a couple. Plus, he created the role of Annie Douglas, one of the best anti-heroines to ever grace soaps IMO. It's a shame that what SUN had in camp & writing they lacked in casting, because, once again, a potentially great storyline was spoiled by the casting of Susan Ward as Meg (UGH!) and the subsequent (disappointing) casting of Christina Chambers as Maria. Maria was so often referred to by Annie, Ben, and Ricardo and so built up that they needed to cast someone luminous in the role and, as anyone who watches ATWT or OLTL could tell you, Chambers wasn't going to cut it. But back to Guza- seriously, you can't say that anything SUN even compares to anything GH.

[DRW50]

I really wonder how much of Malone's heart at his first OLTL run was down to Gottlieb. His second OLTL tenure was full of shock and horror and emptiness and a real disconnect to any emotion (the attempts at emotion were like weights falling through a rotting floor).

His AW run was like a warmed-over version of his OLTL tenure. The ha ha story of a psychopath becoming mayor. The storyline about a rape victim who cannot clearly remember her accuser. That story was especially clumsy -- Nick randomly become some kind of sleep-raging town wanderer right before the rape, and endless scenes of Nick as the suffering victim while Toni and her family were hostile to the point of berating Cass for even taking Nick's case. They somehow made the rape victim the least sympathetic person in the story. They also made a mistake in trying to make the real rapist a mystery when it was extremely obvious from the start.

The only part of his AW tenure I liked, besides Lila, was the Jake/Vicky relationship.

That was McTavish. Jean created such deathless characters as Dogboy.

Her AMC was a bottomless pit of horrors, so what I've seen of her ATWT isn't as bad, but some of her unbelievably sicko stories for Emily (like having a pregnant KMS play Emily being roughed up by a john) and the wholesale destruction of Adam Hughes are up there.

[juniorz1]

THIS! This was the Jake/Vicky relationship I yearned for since, like, forever. But I'll be forever disappointed that it happened with Buchanan in the part & not Heche. Eplin had chemistry with Anne's Vicky like no other (sorry Ellen Wheeler Eplin Wheeler). Can you imagine how much better those Lassiter scenes would have been with Heche in the part?

I gotta ask, who's Dogboy?

And yes, I was going to mention what she did to Emily- it started with the baby switch, when I kept saying why on Earth is EMILY going along with this, but making her a call girl was just wrong on all kinds of levels. Yes, it gave Robin Mattson some work (which is always a +) but it just ruined Em. Emily was always misguided, but never without a moral center IMO.

[DRW50]

Dogboy was Gabriel, Anna and Alex's black brother who was raised to believe he was a dog, and was kept in a cage.

[juniorz1]

That's right. I forgot that Finola Hughes started out as Alex & then morphed into Anna. Really, Alex just should've been Anna all along. One thing I was disappointed in was that Hughes & Walker didn't share many scenes. I always thought they'd be interesting together & they never really crossed paths until the tail-end of Hughes' stint.

[teplin]

Does anyone know why Susan Hayes didn't end up as Stephanie Forrester?

I totally agree about Michael Malone. I was so jazzed when I heard he was coming to AW, because even though I didn't watch his OLTL, I was excited about the ideas he presented there. But his AW tenure was just awful. I did enjoy Jake & Vicky, but I much preferred Jake & Paulina, and I couldn't understand why everybody didn't appreciate the chemistry between Tom Eplin and Judi Evans.

[DRW50]

I think Susan turned down the role.

I loved Jake and Paulina but I think that Judi's weight gain worked against her, as did the show wanting to help keep Jensen Buchanan in a star role. Jake was there, waiting, when Shane/Vicky died an ignoble death.

[juniorz1]

Probably because many of us saw him with Cali Timmins' Paulina and those two were FIRE.

[juniorz1]

To be honest with you, for my money on AW, the ladies Tom Eplin had the most chemistry with were Cali Timmins, Anne Heche, Anna Stuart, Carmen Duncan, and Christine Tucci (ex-Amanda).

[EricMontreal22]

Josh Griffith as co-headwriter deserves more credit than he gets as well(to be fair, Malone makes an effort to give him credit whenever he can). While no great writer on his own, he really seems to keep Malone in check--OLTL fell apart when he left in 95 or so (?) and Malone went solo. And while little was good about Malone's second run at OLTL it *was* better for the period Griffith was back.