One Life to Live Tribute Thread

[amybrickwallace]

Thanks for sharing those!!

[Max]

I had totally forgotten about Baz until reading about him on another message board. Here's some typically dreadful RC dialogue:

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Definitely some of Baz's mannerisms and characteristics found their way into GH's equally terrible Felix. (For instance, Baz gloating about how great his music is reminds me of how Felix crowed over what a superb job he would do with the Nurses' Ball.)

[DRW50]

I'd forgotten about him too.

That pouty Our Gang face Kristen Alderson makes does not wear well.

Oof that scene is awful.

Some worthless scriptwriter took "Don't Take Away The Music" a little too literally.

[Max]

LOL!

+1

[cassadine1991]

Some of the characters RC created were too horrible for words and even worse was the writing. at least Racina and co. made Rama and Cutter a bit more interesting

[allmc2008]

I don't think I ever experienced an anxiety attack caused by bad soap writing before......

It did, however, give me an excuse to watch:

Followed by:

[cassadine1991]

Are you implying that Malone/Griffith are bad writers back during their first stint

[Mathewson]

Baz was just awful! "Your precious musAc"?!?! Shut up, Baz. And shut up, Starr. Another fine example of RC's writing and casting. It doesn't help that Kristen Alderson is painfully bad in chem testing. She's painfully bad in general but the chem tests are the worst of it. It also doesn't help that Cole, James, Baz, and GH's Michael were very annoying characters played by untalented actors. Oy vey.

The Cole recast was OK but that's mostly just because Brandon Buddy was so unlikable. That, and the distractingly untalented guys that played James and Baz. Other than the second actor that played Cole, every guy a Kristen Alderson has been paired or chem tested with has been a flop.

Edited April 19, 2014 by Mathewson

[DRW50]

[amybrickwallace]

Wow!! Thanks for sharing those clippings. These days, who would write a headline proclaiming someone "bites the hand that feeds them" and not worry about being sued for libel?

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at AW and OLTL when JC and GR were on. They were before my time, but my mother remembers them, even though she worked full-time in those pre-VCR days. (She was a home health care nurse who would sometimes watch whichever soap was on at her patient's house as she worked.) All I've seen of their soap work is the few scant clips I've found on YT.

GR sure bore a strong physical resemblance to a later soap actor, Dane Witherspoon of Santa Barbara and Capitol fame. So ironic (and sad) that they passed within months of each other. They could've easily passed for father/son or even brothers (albeit with a large age difference - I've seen GR's birth year listed as both 1939 and 1940, and DW's as 1957) and been cast together in some project had circumstances been kinder.

I know that both GR and JC were on a talk show (either Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin) where they talked about the whole AW controversy. I sure wish it was available and posted online because I'd love to see it. Was it just a matter of money, not being the main storyline on the show anymore (with the emergence of Rachel, Mac and Iris), or a combination?

[allmc2008]

I would like to know as well. Did you post this in the AW thread?

[DRW50]

I didn't. I guess I should.

I don't think it was as much about money as George and Jacquie being angry about their material and changes to the characters.

[amybrickwallace]

Yeah, I think it belongs on the AW thread as well. I recall reading elsewhere that George took umbrage at Harding Lemay creating a poor family background from a farm with many siblings for Steve Frame (based on Lemay's own background), as he was going by what Agnes Nixon had given him to go by, a self-made millionaire and an only child from Philadelphia (which is where both Reinholt and Nixon hailed from). Plus, with three men working together who were/are known for stubbornness and anger, among other things (Reinholt, Harding and Rauch), it's no wonder that so much venom was being spewed, both on the set and in the media.

On the other hand, I don't understand much about what their beef was with Jacquie Courtney, other than the fact that she didn't play a nervous breakdown storyline the way Lemay had envisioned (he was looking for catatonia and she went with full-blown hysteria, and as a result Alice was given a much speedier recovery than originally planned) and that she supposedly wrote her lines on her hands (on OLTL, both Bob Woods and Phil Carey delighted in getting their hands wet and shaking her hand so that the lines would smudge). She was an original cast member and had been working on AW since she was 17 (JC and my dad were born in the same year, just mere weeks apart). The audience had watched her grow up onscreen. What a bizarre situation all around.

[cassadine1991]

Bob and Phil actually did that?

[amybrickwallace]

Yup, it was written up in the OLTL 40th Anniversary book, by Gerry Waggett. It only mentions Philly as wetting down his hand and shaking Jacquie's so hers would be wet as well and the lines would wash away, but I read in an old article that Woodsy did it, too. Then again, Bob Woods was known as the most notorious prankster for years on the OLTL set, and also in several sources (including the aforementioned book), it was revealed that he and JC did not get along offscreen (and I'm guessing the pranks had a lot to do with it). Even though they were sent to Paris in 1980 to film a romantic storyline for Bo and Pat, once it became obvious to the producers and writers that the two didn't like each other very much, the Bo/Pat was shelved and both characters were moved into different stories.