It's interesting to me the attempted differences with this story and the Michael Delaney story on AMC several years later. Here, Clint and Sloan were the two main characters who were presented as homophobic (with plenty of layering given to Sloan before he saw the light), although I imagine others would have gone hogwild in being bigoted if they hadn't been tied up elsewhere (like Asa). On AMC, they were, IIRC, going to have several more established characters like Adam and Palmer express homophobic views until the actors insisted their characters would not feel that way.

I think that it might have been believable if someone like Kevin had had some questionable views, and they could have used that to cause conflict for Viki and Clint as Clint might defend him and Viki would be appalled, rather than Clint himself saying all these things.

Clint didn't deliberately throw a chair at Erika, but he had been drunk, it was an accident and his fault. I won't quote the whole passage from Llanview in the Afternoon, but this is some of the other stuff from her following that extended anecdote:

Clint apologized, and a couple of years later I found out he's done the sweetest thing for me. We'd been taping this party scene - they'd go on forever [...] I've always had a bad back, so I was lying down on the floor. [...] Anyway, Maxine Levinson took me aside later and said [...] "We just did a renegotiation with Clint, and he accepted our terms, everything was fine, but he wouldn't sign unless ABC bought you a chair."

Clint would come back from lunch high as a kite - happy, everything's great. And in the half hour or 45 minutes after run-through while we were getting notes, he'd come down from the booze. He could get mean. When he was drunk, he was just appalling. In 40 years, I stopped scenes maybe four times, and one of them was with him. [...] [Clint] was respectful, and kind of sweet and funny, really. It was the alcohol that destroyed him. It was Linda Gottlieb who made him go to AA - she told him she wouldn't renew his contract unless he stopped drinking, and she told him if she caught him drinking while she was there - or if he missed a meeting - she'd fire him. And he was completely sober for as long as she was there.

But a week after she left, Roy Thinnes told me Clint went to him and said, "Hey, you want to go get a drink?" Roy said, "But you don't drink." And Clint said, "Oh, she's gone."

Edited 35 minutes ago35 min by Vee

Here's the chair incident from the book:

There you have it. A lot of it was already on the board in old posts and I went back to those, I didn't feel like screenshotting from my Kindle or wherever lol.

Edited 11 minutes ago11 min by Vee

1 minute ago, Vee said:

There you have it. A lot of it was already on the board in old posts and I went back to those, I didn't feel like screenshotting from my Kindle or wherever lol.

Vee, I didn't see you had summarized before I screencapped again. I tried to edit but it wouldn't let me.

My feeling is that Ritchie got away with a lot of bad behavior ("could get mean"/chair) that should not have been tolerated. I applaud Gottlieb taking a stand and making him attend AA, but her way of getting back/warning him through the storytelling is another matter.

3 minutes ago, chrisml said:

My feeling is that Ritchie got away with a lot of bad behavior ("could get mean"/chair) that should not have been tolerated. I applaud Gottlieb taking a stand and making him attend AA, but her way of getting back/warning him through the storytelling is another matter.

I think what happened with Ritchie was a drunken accident, but it was still unacceptable. And then there's James DePaiva, who threw a chair in Gottlieb's office during a tantrum. There was a lot of that going around at ABC back then (Tony Geary too).