Strange Paradise

[danfling]

Robert Costello, the executive producer of Strange Paradise (or, at least, the first) has passed away. Here is the obituary from the East Hampton Star:

Robert Costello, TV Producer, 93

April 26, 1921 - May 30, 2014

By Irene Silverman | June 26, 2014 - 10:06am

Robert Costello, TV Producer, April 26, 1921 - May 30, 2014

Robert E. Costello, a pioneering producer of classic ’50s television shows who later won a Peabody Award for the PBS series “The Adams Chronicles” and two Emmys for ABC’s daytime serial “Ryan’s Hope,” died of a heart attack on May 30 at his summer house in Amagansett’s Beach Hampton neighborhood. He was 93 and had been diagnosed many years before with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

In the ’60s and ’70s Mr. Costello introduced viewers to “The Patty Duke Show” and “Dark Shadows,” a vehicle for TV’s first vampires. He was most proud, however, of his work on “The Armstrong Circle Theatre,” a series of true-life “docudramas” that ran from 1950 to 1963 and gave such movie stars as James Dean, Grace Kelly, and Jack Lemmon their first taste of the small screen.

One legendary episode, “The Contender,” starred Paul Newman as a professional boxer who fears he will be brain-damaged if he keeps fighting; another, “The Engineer of Death: The Eichmann Story” (with Carroll O’Connor, a k a Archie Bunker, as Eichmann), included actual footage of Auschwitz and was rebroadcast the day after Eichmann’s trial in Israel.

Mr. Costello took a roundabout path to television. Born in Chicago on April 26, 1921, to Robert E. Costello Sr. and the former Bernice McClure, he was an only child. His father sold advertising space in farm magazines, and often took the boy with him on cross-country business trips. The family settled when he was 5 in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he attended high school.

He entered Dartmouth College in 1939 but left to join the O.S.S., the Office of Strategic Services, soon after America went to war. He was a code-cracker and ciphers man, stationed in Europe and North Africa, where he met his first wife, the former Mary Eddy, now Mary Eddy Furman. They were married in Algiers.

Many other members of his Dartmouth class of ’43 enlisted in the military before they could graduate. Along with those classmates, Mr. Costello finally received his college diploma 50 years late, marching proudly with the class of 1993.

He returned home after the war to attend the Yale School of Drama, graduating with an M.F.A., after which the Stevens Institute of Technology hired him for his first job, in its theater research unit. Mr. Costello had been something of an artist as a child — his parents once gave a railroad porter $10 to keep him busy, according to family lore, and the porter taught him to draw — and while at Stevens he illustrated a book called “Theaters and Auditoriums.”

Then came an odd but entertaining interlude: The book caught the attention of a wealthy Dutch businessman who owned a team of performing Lipizzaners. He hired Mr. Costello as the lighting and theater designer of the horses’ act, and later sent him through Switzerland supervising the animals in a one-ring circus.

Mr. Costello married his second wife, Barbara Bolton, the actress Barbara Dello Joio, in 1950. Five years later they bought the Amagansett house, said to have been the first one built on Marine Boulevard. They were divorced in the 1960s.

His TV productions in those years included “Mister Peepers,” “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” “Another World,” and many more. The demands on his time allowed him little time for hobbies, but he managed to amass a vast collection of whaling harpoons and scrimshaw, including one Civil War-era carving bearing the words “Death to the Confederacy” and the carved heads of several Southern generals.

After retiring in the ’80s, Mr. Costello became a tenured professor at New York University’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. With his third wife, the former Sybil Weinberger, a TV music producer and Emmy-winner in her own right, he also lived in Manhattan. They were married for 37 years.

He leaves three daughters and a son. Martha Keating of Church Creek, Md., and Julia Costello of Mokelumne Hill, Calif., are the children of his first wife; Kathleen Bar-Tur of New York City and Ned Bolton Costello of Old Lyme, Conn., are the children of his second. Both former wives survive, and “all spouses are friendly with each other,” said the family.

Mr. Costello is survived also by seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He was cremated, and his ashes will be buried at Green River Cemetery in Springs on July 23 following a private family service there.

[danfling]

Harding Lemay began his serial writing on Strange Paradise.   He evolved into one of the best writers for daytime television that there was.

 

Here is his obituary from the New York Times:

 

Obituary

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LEMAY--Harding.

Harding "Pete" Lemay, born March 16, 1922, died peacefully on May 26, 2018 at 96 years of age. The many friends and colleagues from his long and storied life mourn his passing. We knew him as a gentle and loving man of remarkable accomplishment and humanity. And we knew him as a great romantic. Our hearts go out to his beloved widow, Gloria Gardner. Playwright, teacher, memoirist, editor, and an early pioneer of television soap operas, he is said to have single- handedly written almost every episode of Another World from 1971-79 as head writer. He won a Daytime Emmy for that show and another for Guiding Light. Born into rural poverty, as the fifth of thirteen children near his mother's St. Regis Mohawk Indian reservation in North Bangor, New York, he escaped his parents' alcoholism and his father's suicide by running away to New York City at age 17, finding early refuge at the famous Brace Memorial Newsboys' Home. After Army service in World War II took him to France and Germany at the end of the war, he entered the Neighborhood Playhouse on the GI Bill to become an actor. By the mid-fifties, he was deeply ensconced in the world of books and publishing, He was co-host with Virgilia Peterson of a WNYC radio program Books in Profile leading to working at Alfred A. Knopf in 1958 as Publicity Director. He became Vice President and editor working with Elizabeth Bowen, John Updike, John Cheever. His ground-breaking memoir, Inside, Looking Out, Harper's Magazine Press (1971) was dubbed "an American classic" by Newsweek and "a literary event" by Saturday Review. It was nominated for a national book award for biography. A second memoir, Eight Years In Another World (Atheneum) was published in 1981. His deepest passion was for playwriting. He entered New Dramatists, the NYC playwrights laboratory, in 1963 along with John Guare and Lanford Wilson, where he became a long-serving board member. His 13 plays were first presented in readings and workshops at New Dramatists and featured his longtime friend and collaborator Marian Seldes. A devoted teacher, he taught literature and drama for many years at Hunter College and The New School for Social Research. As part of the Pen American Prison Writing Program, he read dozens of plays a year by incarcerated men and women. His first marriage, to actress Priscilla Amidon, ended in divorce. His second wife, Dorothy Shaw, died in 1994. He is survived by his wife of 20 years, Gloria Gardner of New York City; his son, Stephen Lemay and daughter, Susan Pain, and son-in-law, Kevin Pain; and three grandchildren.

Published in The New York Times on July 4, 2018

[dc11786]

I guess it's not surprising, maybe just a little disappointing, that little is made of the fact that Harding Lemay was Native American through his mother's line. When Lemay wrote "Strange Paradise," he created the character of Phillip Desmond, a distant cousin of the main Desmond clan who had populated the series. Phillip's grandfather had married a Native American woman and had been shunned by the Desmond clan generations earlier. When Phillip arrives, he arrives to fight the battle between good and evil that has plagued the Desmond family for decades. Phillip's connection to his people's gods is important in the main storyline. Barring the battle of good and evil aside, I wonder how much Lemay drew on his own family history when crafting Phillip's narrative.

 

Lemay's work isn't well received by the SP fanbase, for some legitimate reasons, but I do enjoy the material he wrote for the series. He also happened to be the writer who had the longest influence on the show.  

 

[te.]

I've started watching this since I'm finished with Peyton Place and it feels like an appropriate companion piece to Dark Shadows. Already in the second episode there's an inconsistency with when Jaques was born - in the first episode he's born in 1760 and died in 1789, then in the second episode that's suddenly changed to 1660 and 1689. I'm not sure if it was originally a mistake by the set designers or if they just changed their minds and decided to pull him back a 100 years randomly.

 

Too bad "only" the first 130 episodes seem to be online and the last 13 week arc isn't. I wonder if it'll ever be reuploaded to YouTube again? The first 130 episodes have been up for almost 10 years now.

[Mona Kane Croft]

 

I wonder if it's possible the actor just got the lines wrong in the first episode. I watched the first few episodes years ago, but didn't catch the birth year inconsistency.   If I'm not mistaken, doesn't the show suddenly change locations at some point in the storyline?  From one mansion to a completely different mansion in a different town?   Very few soaps have changed locations.  Guidling Light and Love of Life are the only others I am aware of.   

Edited December 20, 2020 by Neil Johnson

[te.]

 

It's actually not the actors fault - it's the set designers:

 

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Seems like an odd change, but maybe there was some time between filming the pilot and the second episode?

[te.]

For the past 10 or so episodes they've been afraid of a damn rabbit. I'm not even kidding.

 

Poor Raxhl, she wants to make bunny stew so badly.

[te.]

Oh wow, I'm done with the Maljardin arc and in all honesty, I don't see how it could've gone differently. It was such a limited concept to base the series on and literally keeping the cast there forever just wasn't going to work. Something definitively did happen around episode 45 though; for one thing they started with Dark Shadows-esque opening narrations.

 

Poor Erica. She was my favourite character for her murderous ways.

[dc11786]

I remember the rabbit. The rabbit of evil. It was bad. 

 

I think the change in date may have been related to costumes. I know when they revisit the Jacques character in the Desmond Hall story I believe they place Jacques in the timeline of the French Revolution. 

 

There was a producer change around 45. Robert Costello, previously of "Dark Shadows," came on. Then Ian Martin, the show's creator and headwriter, was dismissed. I believe the rabbit of evil stuff appeared around the time of the switch. There was another storyline that was suppose to happen that was cut. Episode synopses were provided to the papers based of outlines that had another past lives plot involving a witch Tarasca and Jacques. I believe Elizabeth Marshall was the reincarnation of Tarasca. 

 

There were other storylines that I think they could have done on the island, but, for the life of me, I can't remember which ones were hinted at for Maljardin and which ones were hinted at in the next location. I like the early weeks (the first 8 or 9) before the rabbit. Then, the island stuff just becomes plot driven, but intense at times. I wish they had killed off Holly. How so many characters were killed off and she escapes boggles the mind.

 

Is any of Lemay's stuff online? I watched his material years ago. It's good, but complicated. There were lots of references to Native American mythology (I don't know if they were real or fictional) and spirits possessing bodies and a lack of clarity on who was actually who. It's fascinating, but insane. 

 

The only thing more insane than the rabbit though are the curls they put on Raxl for a single episode of the Desmond Hall story. That should be something to look forward to. 

[te.]

 

There was a plot about the missing medical journals papers that they could've expanded on I guess - in the end they only found one of five papers that were missing. The medical aspect of Erica's resurrection is just entirely dropped when she reappears; add that early on in the show it seemed like Jacques was trying to keep Erica from getting resurrected, I assume because the doll was in the capsule with her.

[te.]

LOL, so I'm about ten episodes into the first Desmond Hall arc and Jean Paul has now started killing random women. I guess he's technically cursed, but still, we thought keeping Ben on DAYS was bad... oh and there's also something-something about witches and a gay sex dungeon where the ghost (?) of his brother Philip appears at times .

 

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[te.]

Agatha is too funny. First she's going to throw herself into the river, then get murdered by Jean Paul, then blackmails her way into the Desmond mansion.

[te.]

Oh right, about 30 episodes into the second arc they're letting us know why this all is happening - there's a Desmond treasure and the witches want it. Erm.

[Mona Kane Croft]

It's hard to imagine Harding Lemay writing a soap like Strange Paradise.  Knowing how Lemay's writing style was completely character-driven and nearly plotless -- how could he write a plot-heavy show like SP or DS?   He must have had to literally force himself to write strong plots for SP.  

[te.]

Erica (or at least the actress) is back! I loved her so I don't mind. She still seems quite evil.

Also, very little to nothing about the Desmond treasure. Witches are just evil.