James DePaiva interview SPW April 95

[MissLlanviewPA]

As long as Max got to return with Al a few years later when Gabrielle was released from prison, newly divorced from Luna, I'm fine with this scenario .

ETA: Or at least have a throwaway line that they divorced off screen and he and Gabrielle reunited and got remarried. I just hate to think of Max & Luna going off together while poor Gabrielle is left to rot in prison for having the audacity to keep quiet and save her young son's life .

[DeliaIrisFan]

I'm ambivalent about these specific players... I didn't watch OLTL during the Gottlieb era and am not so impressed with how the actual content of the show holds up on YouTube, et al; also, it makes me burn that the producer who brought us Dirty Dancing of all things came into this medium at a time when individuals like Nancy Curlee, Douglas Marland, and Claire Labine were putting out some of their finest work and claimed she was going to show them how it's done. With underwhelming results, IMO. On the other hand, DePaiva never impressed me that much - I do remember reading years ago when he was still on OLTL about his impressive TVQ rating, and being at a loss - and I really never gave Max a second thought in the intervals I watched OLTL until his last six months or so, during his marriage to Roxy.

That said, the polarized reaction to Gottlieb raises a much larger question for me, about the division of labor itself behind the scenes at these shows for at least the past 30 years or so, when the "executive producer" title became the norm. It's baffling to me that someone who manages a staff of god knows how many people - many of whom have been there much longer than the current showrunner - is also directly responsible for something as technical as lighting. (Literally, in Gottlieb's case - the difference even in YouTube clips compared to Rauch's work after just a few months is remarkable. Not to mention her other, post-production innovations that have been mentioned.) Those are very different skill sets than managing a staff. People who are adept at Final Cut Pro don't necessarily have the people skills needed for casting/negotiating/giving feedback to actors. Granted, post-production was probably a much more collaborative process with the technologies of 20+ years ago, but still.

Maybe part of the problem is that there is some truth to LG's snobbery...surely, the garish aesthetic elements that Rauch favored would have been laughed out of town by any movie producer or director, so there's probably a larger stable of technicians who are available in movies and primetime that are up to the universally agreed upon standards, so it's just a matter of calling them. Whereas LG probably had to be much more hands-on at OLTL to make it look the way she wanted. Her technical innovations atn the show speak for themself. Still, even if JdP was a complete prima donna and totally in the wrong, LG was ultimately in charge - and I would say that any workplace where an employee can publicly throw furniture around with impunity has got to be extremely mismanaged.

There seemed to be very limited pathways for promotion behind the scenes in the soap industry for those with valued technical skills, that didn't involve taking on unrelated responsibilities that didn't necessarily go hand in hand with those aspects where they proved themselves in the first place. Meanwhile, writers and producers have surely butted heads on story and other creative points at times. I wonder what would have happened if a soap had been structured such that one individual oversaw the technical side of things and set the tone for the stories and maybe even did some directing, and then another person managed the cast/crew? It sounds like that's kind of how Y&R is currently run, and speaking as someone who's never watched regularly it doesn't sound like that has worked too well, but maybe that has more to do with the specific people involved?

Anyway, just a thought.

[AdelaideCate007]

Considering how bad Max's stories were and how trashed his character became after Luna died, it probably wouldn't have been a bad idea.