GH: Classic Thread

[victoria foxton]

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Two GH episodes from 1968.

Edited June 25, 2020 by victoria foxton

[Planet Soap]

Wow! What a rarity!

[Bill Bauer]

Hey there. Those two 1968 videos came from me. I just posted some more classic episodes. I am not familiar with GH at all. If any of you historians could help me place the episodes with exact dates I would greatly appreciate it. I posted two from 1963 and two from 1975 that all I know is the year. I'm not even 100% sure about the year. Thank you!

[amybrickwallace]

Those are great!! Thanks!!

[victoria foxton]

It's a long story your channel. I've been enjoying it. 

[Paul Raven]

From the book 'Beating The Odds' about the history of ABC

One of two areas where ABC remained weak was daytime. To remedy this, Fred Silverman brought Jackie Smith over from CBS in March 1977. They were old friends who had first met at WPIX in New York, where Jackie was in charge of on-air promotion and Fred bought films. When Fred became head of CBS daytime, he brought Jackie in to do children's shows.

 

OTHER RECOLLECTIONS: Jackie Smith

"All My Children" had been bought as a half hour. Silverman's first move, in 1977, was expanding "All My Children" to an hour, so that "Ryan's Hope," which had debuted in the summer of 1975, would get sampled. Next, he expanded "One Life to Live" and "General Hospital" to forty-five minutes from thirty minutes. Fred was looking at how everything was laid out, and he said, "Now I want 'One Life to Live' and 'General Hospital' to become an hour in January of 1978." Then he must have looked at the shows and said, "My god, they really are lousy. They're only fifteen shares." They'd just expanded to forty-five minutes, and he was going to expand them to an hour. I think at that moment he must have said, "I've got to bring someone in to get this under control so it's not a disaster." And that someone was me. I'd been with children and primetime specials and two-hour movies. But I had two children of my own to care for, and while I took care of my area I wasn't ambitious to learn everything that might be helpful to me. I just didn't have that kind of drive at the time. So I didn't know anything about serials. It was really very brave of him to have brought me in and think that I could have been effective.

 

Silverman's instincts were correct. Although Jackie had always been content to be a very good follower, she soon became a dynamic leader. Jackie inherited Agnes Nixon, the writer who had created "All My Children"  and "One Life to Live." She also brought in Gloria Monty, who had become almost an institution in daytime serial programming.

 

OTHER RECOLLECTIONS: Jackie Smith

Gloria's career was kind of wandering, and she didn't quite know what to do with her life that was special. She was looking for something to do. Although she had a reputation for being difficult, I liked her.a lot. She took five "General Hospital" shows and five scripts and came in to see me. She said, "I know you have writing problems, so I won't address myself to that. I'll just show you what you could have done with these scripts." It took her about three hours. She showed me how these scripts could have been redirected. She was brilliant and astonishing. I knew at once we had to bring her in right away. I was then living in Los Angeles and waiting for my daughter to finish school, so I couldn't get to New York until June—but these shows were going to expand to an hour in January. When I started figuring all this out, I started asking myself what I had got into. I hadn't seen Fred for months when I finally moved to New York. I walked into his office and he said nothing except "Who are you going to get to produce 'General Hospital'?" I said, "Gloria Monty." Gloria had worked for Fred as a serial producer at CBS. He had a few comments which I'm not going to repeat. But he let me bring her in.

 

There were two keys to "General Hospital." One was Gloria Monty. The other was A. J. Russell, a writer from television's Golden Age. I called him in Orleans, Massachusetts, and somehow interested him in the show. He wrote the "bible" for what I call the "New General Hospital" and the Quartermain family. A.J. introduced many of the elements that are still going strong.

 

Producing daytime dramas is like running an enormous factory. Each program requires five shows a week, and the schedule is extremely demanding. Jackie became a catalyst, a sounding board who ensured her shows got good stories and casting. Equally important, she kept peace among the monumental egos that inhabit show business. Jackie was equally capable at promotion. As ABC began to dominate prime time, she and Fred Silverman used this huge audience to promote daytime.

 

OTHER RECOLLECTIONS: Jackie Smith

I told Fred I didn't want to promote anything until we're very, very good—and when we're good, then we'll promote ourselves. After our shows improved, I came into his office unannounced. It was full of people—some kind of meeting. He looked up, very irritated, and said, "What's your theme going to be?" I trilled, "Love in the Afternoon." He said, "Good." And that was the way we communicated sometimes to one another. This did not come to me suddenly. I had been working on it. But no one liked it until I sang it. "Love in the Afternoon" became enormous. It was everywhere, on T-shirts, bus billboards, and bumper stickers. Macy's had a boutique with a "Love in the Afternoon" sign. It became part of the public consciousness. One day I opened The New York Times Magazine, and it had a football picture with the headline, "Violence in the Afternoon." It was a takeoff. They could not have done that if Love in the Afternoon hadn't been so big.

 

 Jackie also developed a stable of actors and actresses. From this came such present prime-time stars as Judith Light of "Who's the Boss" (formerly of "One Life to Live") and "MacGyver" star Richard Dean Anderson. As Jackie blossomed, ABC's serials began to dominate the hugely profitable daytime schedule. By 1979 we were clearly the leader.

 

Interesting that AJ Russell was given credit for a bible that included the Quartermaines.

What role did Doug Marland play? Did he have freedom in some areas but required to follow the bible in others?

eg Were the Q's just a vague outline that he could flesh out? 'A wealthy family comes to PC with a bitchy daughter etc

Edited July 1, 2020 by Paul Raven

[DRW50]

Thanks for finding that, @Paul Raven .

 

Linda Cristal has passed away.

 

https://deadline.com/2020/06/linda-cristal-dead-obituary-the-high-chaparral-actress-89-1202972591/

 

She is best known for High Chaparral, but she had a brief stint on GH in 1988. Here is one clip.

 

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[Vizion]

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[titan1978]

Thank you for posting that article @Vizion

 

How interesting that they spent the holidays together and then a year later she has driven both of them off the show.

 

She was right in her overall vision- then show needed to be more grounded and contemporary.  It needed to move away from the Dynasty excess.  She just did not have the writing or the expertise to make it work.  Riche and Levinson, then Labine got it grounded and emotional again.

[titan1978]

Does anyone know what happened to Laura’s house?  The one from the 90’s to mid 2000’s?  I dropped out from the show quite a bit during the later Guza years.  I remember it got a facelift with brighter colors before Genie quit in 2002, was still around when Laura woke up from her catatonic state, and then I have no memory of it.

[vetsoapfan]

 

Folks tend to take for granted that what is printed in books is true, but that is not always the case in soap-related publications. There were even painful errors in the Agnes Nixon tome.

 

I think Jackie Smith made an error and got her writers mixed up. The actors who played the Quartermaines, and Douglas Marland himself, have all acknowledged many times that he was the one who created the Qs. He was also the writer on board when Gloria Monty took over as producer. It was the Montry/Marland pairing that ushered in the new and improved General Hospital.

 

I believe Russell came aboard as a consultant in the early 1980s after the divine Pat Falken Smith was foolishly fired. I remember scanning the list of writers at the time, cringing at how awful their material was in comparison to the DM/PFS regimes.

 

If you are the uploader known as It's A Long Story, thank very much for all the time and hard work you have taken to share so many amazing vintage gems. Believe me, longtime soap fans appreciate folks like you, Eddie Drueding, and all the other people who share your treasures.

 

 

[Bill Bauer]

 

Well you are very welcome! I have a massive videotape collection that I had to transfer to digital because, as you can maybe see in some of the videos, the videotapes are deteriorating. Why not share it with others who would enjoy it? I know I would appreciate others sharing their gems. The only problem is that I can't share everything for fear of getting taken down due to copyright issues. What I feel free to share, I do. 

[FrenchFan]

 

Thanks a lot ! You can't imagine how happy classic soap fans are to see these gems.

[vetsoapfan]

 

I foolishly waited too long to digitize many of my ancient videotapes, and by the time I finally got around to doing so, many of my treasures had deteriorated badly and would no longer play. Fortunately, many of my "lost" videotapes have been popping up on your youtube channel, so I am both relieved and thrilled!

[Bill Bauer]

That's why I'm doing this not just for myself but for the other collectors out there who are in the same position. I figure if my tapes are dying, other collectors' tapes are dying or have died and so me doing this will help them. I wanted to preserve these episodes before they're gone forever.