Edited September 14, 20187 yr by victoria foxton

 

Audrey Peters!

 

 

Edited September 16, 20187 yr by victoria foxton

 

 

Susan Lucci interview and photos from Harper's Bazaar.

 

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a23282358/susan-lucci-unretouched-interview/

 

Edited September 18, 20187 yr by Jonathan

SL looks fantastic!

 

I met her last year. She was amazing. 

14 hours ago, Jonathan said:

 

Susan Lucci interview and photos from Harper's Bazaar.

 

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a23282358/susan-lucci-unretouched-interview/

 

Thank you for sharing this link. I hadn't realized how much I've missed seeing Susan Lucci on my television screen. Gosh, I miss AMC something bad right now. 

Edited September 19, 20187 yr by mikelyons

Erica ends up in the holding cell next to Janet....
 

 

On 7/3/2011 at 2:16 AM, DRW50 said:

From the July 1974 Daytime TV Stars.

 

Deborah Channel reviews AMC.

 

It's Gregorian Chant, Pretending To Be Bach

 

The basic dramatic conflicts and plot core of All My Children are usually satisfying and well-constructed; the only problem is, however, that these elements are terribly conventional and at least three or four years behind the broad, rapid, and important creative developments that have happened on other serials. It is almost as if Agnes Nixon, the creator and over-seer of All My Children, were still struggling with the mechanics of Gregorian chant, while the rest of soapland has advanced to Bach, and occasionally even Beethoven. Where most other serials - learning their lessons from the overall disaster that happened in soapland three or four years ago, when creativity in the writing and producing of serials had dropped so low that millions of viewers were simply giving up on them and turning to the game shows (awful as they are) - have stopped using "devices" such as the obligatory murder trial in which the heroine or hero is threatened and then exonerated, or the return of a husband after being assumed dead, or the fabricated conflicts between a rich family and a poor one, Mrs. Nixon chooses to run these worn out, useless plot talismans into the ground on All My Children. Interetingly though, even Mrs. Nixon's mentor, the late Irna Phillips (who, along with the Hummerts of radio, had practically invented all those old devices, such as the amnesia victims who stumbled in and out of her radio serials), eventuall thought it prudent to abandon, in her own writing, the old-fashioned techniques that Mrs. Nixon still refuses to let go of.

 

Of course much has been written about All My Children's "relevance" in using many references to the Viet Nam war, filming a double-amputee Vietnamese boy saving the life of Phillip Brent (Nicholas Benedict), speeches by Ruth Brent (Mary Fickett) against the cruelty of war. Very admirable. But this is like packaging a Gergorian chant LP in a jacket decorated with a Jackson Pollock painting. Mrs. Nixon's product is still in need of a real creative overhaul, and real relevance, not the decorative kind. For example, the serial's obsession with focusing on the wealthy Tylers, especially Phoebe Tyler, and their continual concern over marrying their children "into the right families" is no longer a typical dilemma of twentieth century America, and is therefore unreal and irrelevant. Society today is concerned with interracial and interethnic problems, rather than intereconimic ones (which were interesting to writers like Henry James fifty years ago, but not today). Trying to justify dinosaurs like the Tylers with contrasting "contemporary" story lines such as that of Phillip Brent's troubling re-aclimation to Pine Valley after his return from Viet Nam (which is just a rehashing of the old amnesia-victim device) is merely embarrassing camouflage of the truth of All My Children's real vintage.

 

While Mrs. Nixon does not display much creative vision with Children, she at least knows how to tell a story. Her invention of the character of Nick Davis (much like her invention of Steven Frame when she ws writing Another World) was sheer felicity. Her instinctive understanding that the combination of heel and incorrigible romanticist is always of great interest to an audience - and especially so when the heel is played by an actor with as much talent as Larry Keith - shows that Mrs. Nixon at least knows her viewers. His great love, Ann Tyler, is also a well-executed, involving character, played with delicatesse by the marvelous Judith Barcroft. The story of the star-crossed lovers Ann and Nick, although it has been going on for years, and although there seems to be little interest on the part of the writers to explore the real source of the barrier which keeps them from finding the happiness that they seek, is nevertheless continually compelling.

 

The other story lines range from lukewarm to catatonically uninteresting. Charles Frank and Susan Lucci do an excellent job of portraying the romantic antagonists of Jeff and Erica Martin, considering the poverty of dialogue and storyline that they have to cope with. Erica comes off like the Evil Queen in a fairy tale: beautiful but deadly, neurotic but together enough to be more cunning than anyone else in the story. She parades about in beautiful clothes, getting involved in murder conspiracies, leaving her serpentine words all over Pine Valley to haunt all the good people, while poor Jeff - struggling to get free of her so that he can marry the spotless Cinderella of the story, Mary Kennicott (well played by Susan Blanchard) - must endure months and months of a murder trial, after Erica's New York boyfriend is bumped off by some unknown fiend. Jeff and Mary are all good; Erica is the demon incarnate. This is all bona fide Soap Cliche; but even so. It might work better if the dialoguers and plotters (Mrs. Nixon has overall control, but this sort of work is done by sub-writers under her direction) were to give these fairy tale people more substance, more dimension in their interrelationships. Jeff, as written, seems duller than pea soup, for he does little more in the story than defend himself from the tyranny of others. Erica is hardly more interesting, although she is a shade more laughable. Supposedly Pine Valley has never been menaced by a more loathsome human being, but all I see is an actress doing her best to prance around, look glamorous, and appear menacing with such remarks as, "Oh, Mary, what a beautiful engagement ring Jeff gave you...but you know, the one he gave me was much bigger!"

 

However, what I find much more patently offensive about All My Children than some of this one-dimensional writing is the show's direction. This is highly unusual, for on every other serial the work of the directors is at least as good, and normally much better, than the day to day dialogue writing. Yet on All My Children the directors seem to do their best to destroy any script interest they find. Actors are encouraged not to talk to one another, but to declaim, to announce their feelings, as in the old silent movies. Every time Bill Mooney, as lawyer Paul Martin, must say something, it's as if he were in a courtroom; when he talks to his wife Ann, or father-in-law, Dr. Tyler, he doesn't just talk, he addresses a jury. There's so much shouting going on on All My Children that occasionally I have trouble trying to pick out what the characters are really trying to say to one another.

 

Another offensive example of the above is Ruth Warrick's incredible portrayal of Phoebe Tyler. I simply can't believe that a fine, experienced actress like Ruth Warrick has by herself, without coersion, chosen to caricature her role - not simply play it. On camera, she wiggles and giggles and gsticulates as if she were playing in a parlour game. With every line, she finds it necessary to throw her arms about spastically and underscore every other word she says with kindergarten monotonousness. Recently, when Ann, her daughter, was close to death after a terrible car crash, I saw not a hint of true grief in Miss Warrick's acting, only a lot of absurd writithing on chairs and dreary semi-orgasmic hysterics. Granted, Phoebe Tyler is supposed to be a silly woman, but even silly women show real sadness when their offspring are on the verge of death. Judging from the way other actors on All My Children are directed, my only conclusion is that Miss Warrick has been seduced into this God-awful freak show she puts on as a "grand dame" by either the directors, or the producers, or both.

 

Some actors, however, seem immune to this self-destructiveness that the directors impose upon the rest of the cast. Ray McDonnell and Mary Fickett, as Dr. Joe and Ruth Martin, always handle themselves with good taste. They know how to do "re-cap," have their pacing honed down to a fine art, and are wonderful to watch. Occasionally Miss Fickett is thrown off by some of the other "declaimers" in the cast, but Mr. McDonnell is never. It also seems to me that Frances Heflin, who plays Mona Kane, manages to cope well with the same declaimers - allowing her voice level to rise unnaturally (for television), in order to keep her pacing on a par with theirs so as not to destroy scenes, but also somehow managing to temper all of the distracting shouting with a real urgency that she conjurs. Eileen Letchworth, as Margo Flax, also does a fine job in the face of poor direction.

 

Among the other shouters, announcers, and silent-movie declaimers on this show are Francesca James (Kitty Shea Davis), Hugh Franklin (Dr. Charles Tyler), and, unfortunately, the new arrival, Nicholas Benedict (Phillip Brent), who is perhaps too young and inexperienced to resist the general repulsive and hysterical mood that the management of this show wishes to encourage. It may be superfluous, but I'll point out that such unsubtle acting may be suited for certain kinds of grade-B crime and horror movies, opera, and legitimate theater (musical pastiches for example), but certainly not for television. Any first year student majoring in radio and television learns that the least little bat of an eye-lid or breath of a performer is magnified ten times in its effect on the audience by the cameo effect of the video camera.

 

Occasionally, switching from nicely-paced shows like Another World and As the World Turns, to All My Children, is a little like going from a quiet Virgin Island beach to the wilds of Siberia. I must admit, however, that the Nick Davis and Ann Martin story is strong enough to make me endure some of that cold weather now and then.

I came here looking for this review as I wanted to pull quotes from it for a Masters thesis I'm doing about Nixon and AMC and soaps and critics (to put it in general terms), and remembered this being posted.  Re-reading it now is kinda hysterical. 

She REALLY doesn't hold back in the second half. It's funny this was in 1974 and the excellent (my fave as everyone here might remember) book All Her Children by Dan Wakefield was written between 1974-75 and all about his immense love for the show and how new and different it feels--they sound like they're talking about completely different shows. I am biased towards AMC and AGnes Nixon but I admit that AMC in some ways felt like a throwback--it used the classic structure ATWT introduced of a rich but troubled family vs a middle class but "good" family which was very old fashioned compared to what Nixon did when she started One Life to Live with its four urban fractured families (as well as the Lords but they were different than traditional soap rich families)--though of course that became lost by the 1980s, and even more to the point Nixon of course wrote the bible for AMC back in 63-65, so first.

However, I think the reviewer fails to realize that characters like Pheobe were *meant* to be somewhat caricatures in the classic Dickens sense--or that Nixon did use soap cliches but in a knowing sometimes even self referential way (although most people generally feel AMC didn't really come into its own--and gain better production values until the second half of the 1970s). As others have suggested this magazine also seemed to have an agenda against all the attention AMC was getting in the press compared to "their" shows. Anyway, thanks for posting this all those years back!

It's good to see you here again! I had forgotten I used to type those up. If there's ever anything else for AMC in those years (in terms of magazine articles) you think you might need, let me know and I'll see if I can help. 

57 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

It's good to see you here again! I had forgotten I used to type those up. If there's ever anything else for AMC in those years (in terms of magazine articles) you think you might need, let me know and I'll see if I can help. 

Thanks!  Really ANY critical reviews like this from AMC at ANY era (even recently), OLTL during the 60s/70s and the first Malone era and Loving would be of help for my focus.  As you say somewhere here... most of the soap press really wasn't offering critical views at all, so I know it's pretty obscure stuff, but...

Nice to see you again as well

On 9/15/2018 at 4:32 PM, Pine Charles said:

 

Thanks for making me aware this was posted!  I know not every soap fan will agree but this is like perfect soap for me. 

On 9/22/2018 at 5:07 AM, EricMontreal22 said:

Thanks for making me aware this was posted!  I know not every soap fan will agree but this is like perfect soap for me. 

I thought Kent was hot.  LOL
I loved the ''All About Eve''/''Gaslight'' storyline they did with Silver and Erica.

5 hours ago, Pine Charles said:

I thought Kent was hot.  LOL
I loved the ''All About Eve''/''Gaslight'' storyline they did with Silver and Erica.

It's too bad he was apparently a jerk on set which is why Susan used her clout to get him fired....