Peyton Place

Paul Raven · December 18, 2011

Ted Doniger was one of the directors on PP.He also worked on many primetime shows throughout the 50's,60's and 70's.The above shots illustrate his mastery.

. Here is an extract from an article dealing with his time on the show.

Then came Peyton Place, the 1964 megahit prime-time serial. Doniger directed the series’ second pilot, after an initial hour (directed with Irvin Kershner, and with some significant differences in the cast) was rejected by ABC. The series ran twice a week, and Doniger split the directing duties with a far less flashy director named Ted Post. In his episodes, Doniger crafted a consistent aesthetic based around deep-focus compositions and lengthy dolly shots. This technique required the actors and camera crew, accustomed to the bite-sized, shot-reverse shot approach that was common in television, to master longer sections of script at a time and to hit their marks with absolute precision.

Doniger drove everyone crazy on Peyton Place. Producer Everett Chambers briefly fired him after an on-set blow-up between Doniger and actress Gena Rowlands, and Chambers’s predecessor, Richard DeRoy, sniffed that Doniger “would give me fourteen pages of notes on a half-hour script and I’d . . . put it in my drawer and forget it.” But Doniger knew that he had a protector in executive producer Paul Monash, and he used that impunity to get away with some of the most daring shots ever executed on television. “I could try anything because I knew they wouldn’t fire me,” Doniger told me in a 2004 interview.

In one episode, for instance, Doniger staged a three-and-a-half-minute party scene, with dialogue divided among almost the entire principal cast, in an unbroken shot that had the camera circling through the Peyton mansion set several times. In another, Doniger placed the camera in a fixed position on a crane overlooking the town square. After the crane had descended, the operator removed the camera from its mount, stepped off the crane, and followed an actor onto a bus that drove off the backlot. (Doniger’s cinematographer on Peyton Place, Robert B. Hauser, was also a genius, who had helped to establish the newsreel-influenced, handheld-camera aesthetic of Combat.)

In a show that maintained a dangerously disproportionate talk-to-action ratio, Doniger’s imagery created a formal density, a cinematic quality, that distinguished Peyton Place from the corps of superficially similar daytime soap operas. Taken as a whole, Doniger’s episodes of Peyton Place comprise a suite of some of the most elegant compositions and camera movements ever executed on television. Below I have assembled a small gallery of “Doniger shots” – a term that he used proudly in our interview, although I can’t remember whether it was Walter or I who introduced it – but of course they can illustrate only Doniger’s eye for framing and lighting. To see his camera in motion, you’ll have to track down the thing itself.

(Only the first sixty episodes of Peyton Place, one of the four or five great masterpieces of sixties television, have been released on video; tragically, Shout Factory appears to have abandoned the series due to poor sales.)

Edited December 18, 2011 by Paul Raven

DRW50 · March 13, 2012

As always I'm late to the party, finally getting to see Peyton Place long after anyone stopped talking about it.

I was drawn into the show very quickly, mostly through Mia Farrow's soulful work as Allison. A young woman who has really never been able to be either of these things, worried for her mother, fumbling towards first love with a boy she senses is too good for her. Farrow has such a natural connection with everyone and makes her character so easy to care about. I think my favorite scene was when she walking down the sidewalk, trying her best to avoid any cracks, and then Ryan O'Neal yells for her attention. From girl to woman. And the scene also has good character detail for Rodney, as he tells her he hides being being "flip."

The Harringtons are probably the most one-dimensional part of the show for me so far - I think Leslie is a bit of a coward, and I enjoy the moments when people call him out over his not so secret longings for his secretary. Rodney and brother are a little interchangeable, and O'Neal has never been one of my favorite actors, although he is competent enough here. I was surprised to see the very clear and contrived "beefcake" scenes, as for some reason I wasn't sure if they were done this way on TV this early on. For me the highlight of this family is the mother, played by Mary Anderson. In her first scene, a bed scene, so sultry, she reminds me of Julie Newmar. In her everyday scenes, with the townspeople, she seems like a different character, so cold and controlled.

I would never have known Kasey Rogers played the last Mrs. Tate on Bewitched. I think the show did a tasteful job of depicting the abuse she suffers and how isolated she is. Even her great love for Leslie Harrington is full of misery and punishment.

This show has a certain style which I haven't seen anywhere else. Just little touches. One that I love, and I guess can't go on much longer, is when Constance, the fallen and broken woman, has to leave her shop to go somewhere else. She staggers out into the sunlight and just looks like it takes everything she has to get through that walk.

At first I didn't care for Barbara Parkins at all - she just seemed to be doing a lot of hammy acting. Once I started to see how scared and damaged Betty was, I began to care more. The scenes where she was degrading herself by doing all that writhing in front of Rodney were tough to watch.

EricMontreal22 · March 18, 2012

I need to get back into PP. I took a break around episode 100 but that was nearly six months back...

I think your views are really astute. I was actually very surprised at just how beautifully filmed the show is--something I didn't expect. Even compared to the best of primetime tv from that era, it seems to have been directed with special care.

Paul Raven · March 30, 2012

DRW50 · March 30, 2012

Such a loud outfit.

DRW50 · April 15, 2012

October 1966 TV Radio Mirror. There are a few other articles in here, on Lana Wood and Barbara Parkins. If you want to see them, let me know.

DRW50 · April 15, 2012

DRW50 · April 11, 2013

August 1966 TV Radio Mirror

saynotoursoap · April 12, 2013

Thank you for the articles. The photo of Dorothy Malone is not very flattering, and I always hated her bouffant to one-side anodyne hair, but when photographed correctly, she was so beautiful. I love the shot of Pat Morrow and Chris Connelly on the railroad. It's a cute pose.

DRW50 · April 12, 2013

Thanks for taking the time to read (who is your avatar?). There were so many articles on PP in those few years, I only scaned some, but others did have nicer photos of Dorothy.

I've only seen the first season (or part) of PP so I've never even seen Pat Morrow as of yet, but I thought Chris Connelly was good in the role of the little brother in Ryan O'Neal's shadow. I loved the scene where they went from arguing to having a snowball fight, like kids.

I remember when Connelly passed away, one of the soap publicists or journalists told SOD that he was so kind to her.

saynotoursoap · April 14, 2013

Pat Morrow was fantastic. I absolutely loved Rita and Ada. Rita's relationship with Norman was so poignant. I only wish more had been written for them. The scripters struggled to keep the couple in the narrative, and often they were reduced to providing exposition.