Michael Malone at AW

[EricMontreal22]

Very very well said. I guess that's one drawback of coming from the world of novels (and no soaps, or screenwriting, or playwrighting...) I think Malone alone also has serious pacing problems--which ties into some of what you say (I admit I enjoyed his recent come back a Hell of a lot more than Higly's era just because, like you said, it was at least usually entertaining in a WTF way).

[soapfan770]

Funny about that because during the Justine story Wyndham strangely picked up a British accent and continued using it as Rachel for the rest of the series' run. Although by her L&O SVU appearance in 2007 she no longer had the accent and sounded much like her pre-1995 self.

Brian Krause is such an atrocious actor I'm sure how he even got a career going. It wasn't because he was a hunk, because he was never one and really let himself go as of late.

This article pretty sums up my thoughts often on AW in the 90s whenever I would watch. It had good acting, interesting characters but terribly weak storylines and even before Savitz and JFP it looked cheap. I could never fully invest into AW, for me it was always the soap that aired before Days or that other P&G soap in addition to ATWT, SFT, and GL. Like Capitol, it was something my mom would "watch" while vacuuming the house on our days off from school (her being a school teacher).

[Vee]

Oh, I absolutely enjoyed Malone's second run more than Higley. That's why I still talk about it. It still had several elements which made it OLTL. It was just insane; it was like a high schooler trying to mesh soap with crazy other genres in a very clumsy way - his "big idea", be it action or horror-based, was much more important to him than making the show function in an acceptable way from day to day. Every day it was some new weird setpiece or idea or quirk that was so above daytime and yet below it due to bad execution and bad storytelling. I admired most of his ideas, but the execution was usually ridiculously bad. That's why I think he'd be perfect for DAYS - in the past decade, he was always clumsily trying to turn OLTL into a mix of social drama and high fantasy. What was awful for OLTL is just another Wednesday on DAYS.

I do think RC was and is able to strike a much better balance of the outre with the down-to-earth. But he too has problems, especially since the strike.

[SFK]

I think VW affected a bit of a posh sound back in the '70s too when things really started to heat up with Mac and Iris, like she was trying to fit in. At least that's what I got from the episodes I've seen. But indeed, CK seemed to have an affect on her and artsy willowy Rachel of the later '90s did sound to the manor born.

[Khan]

LOL!!!!

That's harsh. True, but harsh.

[EricMontreal22]

Of course it didn't help that so many of his ideas the second time at OLTL (and it sounds like at AW too) were dropped so suddenly (be it gimmics like The Voice of the Night or whole stories).

[Vee]

Yes, and he replaced Al with River as "The Spirit of the Night," taking over Al's work. That didn't fly.

[DRW50]

The Blue Lagoon films seem to automatically give a career boost to the people involved. I thought Brian looked good enough, not great but generically attractive I guess, then and on AW. He was not right for Matthew but then Jeff Phillips showed up and that was even worse.

For me what made AW work was the characters and the actors. That's what I watched for. AW had some of the most complicated and most compelling characters ever on soaps, and actors who could play anything. I didn't care about the budget issues, and frankly, I thought AW actually looked worse after JFP's remodeling efforts, because it was the equivalent of someone going into debt to put a HDTV in their hovel of an apartment.

The problem was that AW spent their last few years running away from what worked best for them, perhaps because what made the show most watchable didn't translate to ratings. To her credit, JFP did get ratings up, but apparently that wasn't enough to make up for the budget-busting or whatever else was going on. Malone never did, in the time he was there. I think both he and JFP in their runs were too focused on reshaping everything to their whims.

Fall of the House of Cory was a stupid story because Amanda would never behave that way. It still bothers me because I feel like Laura Moss was a decent actress and she had some fun chemistry with Jake and then that story took a wrecking ball to Amanda and Moss got the blame.

All the flowing hair and poetry reading and stiltedness. VW said she only stayed as long as she did because of the fans. I believe that's true but I also think her friendship with Keating probably drew her in the most. I guess I can't blame her, because there wasn't exactly a lot left for Rachel by then (she had lost most of her personality and most of her family), but I preferred Rachel when she was tougher and was about to cut somebody.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

SOD once called AW the longest soap ever in transition, because the show seemingly had a new HW or EP every 5 minutes. In those last 20 years or so, it never quite seemed like this show knew what it wanted to be be, and NBC and PGP just let it rot away, despite constant interference.

It's weird though, but for a good part of the 80's and early 90's, PGP took very good care of ATWT and GL, but somewhere in the 80's, it felt like they gave up on AW, SFT, and Edge. They never really put much effort into these shows by the end, and eventually that came around onto GL and ATWT, too.

Also, until recent years, I always thought the PGP soaps cast the best and most natural actors. They always seemed to look for a very particular type of actors, when compared to the ABC and Bell soaps.

[EricMontreal22]

It's really too bad that it never really seemed to find its vision again after Lemay left... I guess one reason many fans liked the Swajeski era so much was partly that it just finally had some continuity.

(of course I can think of other soaps with this prob--my much loved Loving for example, but...)

PGP did definitely seem to focus on a couple of soaps and sorta abandon others--I think part of it was they tended to come tot he decision that a show was too out of date to fix or something (SFT, etc). Of course NBC being the least successful with soaps played a part, I'm sure (DAYS and AW were leading the entire pack in the early 70s but by the 80s that really changed--DAYS at least still had hugely popular supercouples and arguably the most rabid fans in soapdom--AW never seemed to get that).

"Also, until recent years, I always thought the PGP soaps cast the best and most natural actors. They always seemed to look for a very particular type of actors, when compared to the ABC and Bell soaps. "

I suppose though I think that's more a New York soap trait--the ABC New York shows at least through to the early 90s had that too (partly cuz they cast so many stage actors, etc_)

[Paul Raven]

'Victoria Wyndham only stayed because of the fans'-is anybody buying that??

She stayed because it was a job and paid the bills.That interview she did a few years back was so self-serving,claiming she proposed plots and was told by Brandon Tartikoff that the show was only renewed because of her etc etc

[DRW50]

You're probably right, I just remember the comments she made at the time the show was ending and given how angry she probably was around the time of Charles Keating being fired, I could believe it.

[Paul Raven]

Some quotes from that interview

'Brandon Tartikoff was the last programmer and he was certainly not daytime programming, but he was the last bit honcho at NBC who was honest with me. He was a huge fan of mine, which was just so adorable. He didn’t have time to watch the soaps, but he had said at one point when I ran into him and was introduced, “Oh my God, you’re the only reason we keep that show on the air.” I’m like ‘Wow. You are my favorite head of networks now!’

VW: Well I pitched the last two years we were on. They often used me for story, long-term story, not just for my own character often but also for other characters. They would turn to you for ideas?

VW: Yes, because I’m a writer also.

And you also knew history. VW: Yes, but that was less important for them than the fact that I was a good storyteller. I read that they didn’t care about the history and the traditions in Another World?

VW: They did not. They also knew that I knew the company, knew the actors we had. I knew what they could act with and what they couldn’t act with. So I could come up with story that would make them look good. “She’ll never be able to play that off. He’ll be able to…..” That kind of stuff?

VW: It wasn’t that dishy. It was more like, “Look this gal can’t do this stuff you’ve been giving her. But if you give her a storyline like this, where she gets to just be beautiful, she can do that and it will be fabulous.” There were a number of times where I could help them. Other times when some of the male stars who were awfully good … and this is going way back in the seventies and eighties … and we were worried about losing them to Hollywood. And we did. Like Ray Liotta and Jerry Fitzpatrick. They would come to me and say, ‘Can we give them a good story? What would keep them?’ I’d come up with a storyline that they’d pay me for; they’d give it to their writers and my name was never on it because I didn’t want that responsibility. I didn’t want to be put in that situation with my cast. I didn’t want to be lobbied. And that worked. They knew my storylines worked. When they didn’t work it was usually because they’d taken away the very elements that made them work in order to homogenize them. That was an ongoing battle. Towards the end, when we were fighting for the life of the show and trying to keep it on, because I felt a great deal of responsibility to try and help it stay on the air. Those were jobs for almost three hundred people. That was like another family for me. Stage hands and property people.I said we’re the one company that can do this because we’re sponsored by Procter & Gamble. We can put all of the commercials, which were mostly Proctor’s, into the show. Product placement. I had really cute ways of doing it so it that it was very comedic and sweet and fun. Then you’d never cut away to a commercial so you’d never lose your viewers. You would have all of the other viewers from the other shows go, ’You don’t have any commercials. That’s a straight hour of programming. Great!’ It really excited everybody. They flew me out to California. They had me do a big meeting for NBC. Everybody was seeing dollar signs. But the bottom line was NBC wanted to own the whole show and Procter & Gamble would not give it up. So they said no. Now we’re starting to see more and more of that happening.

[Vee]

Has Wyndham tried to work since, or does she not need to?

[EricMontreal22]

She truly kinda scares me...