Irna Phillips article 1972

[Paul Raven]

Writing on : Irna Phillips mends with tradition

It's safe to say that among soap-opera script writers, 71-year-old Ima Phillips is the grandmother of them all. Her career goes back to a 1930 radio serial out of WGN Chicago entitled Painted Dreams,and it comes up to today. She is the headwriter on CBS-TV's long-running As the World Turns.

Today's soap operas, however, turn Irna Philips off. "The daytime serial is destroying itself, eating itself up with rape,abortion, illegitimacy, men falling in love with other men's wives --all of which is often topped by a murder, followed by a long, drawn-out murder trial," she says.

She's very critical of what she calls "this trend toward sheer escapism," although she acknowledges that the public seems to be buying it. "Nevertheless," she says, "I feel my obligation to the viewing audience is tó write constructively.

The essence of the drama is still conflict, of course—conflict within each person,conflict in the relationships between two

people. But these relationships don't have to be sordid to be interesting. I'm trying to get back to the fundamentals: for example, the way in which a death in the family, or a serious illness, brings the members of that family closer together, gives them a real sense of how much they need each other, how much they're dependent on one another."

This sidestepping of sensationalism represents something of a change of heart for Miss Phillips, a change at least partially brought on, she says, by the experience of helping her adopted daughter (Miss Phillips has remained unmarried) through a broken marriage and of lending a hand while her adopted son and her daughter-in-law went through the birth of their first child.

"She's very much concerned with getting back to the older values," says Tom Donovan, a producer at CBS and a longtime friend and former working associate of Miss Phillips. "She's avoiding the more theatrical characters to get back to real people, to family roots—to moral problems, if you will. In other words, to things that have been sidetracked in this terrible malaise that's abroad in the land."

Another friend who goes back with Miss Phillips to the days when The Guiding Light was a radio serial, the actress Charita Bauer, would agree with Mr. Donovan. "Her storylines are believable because, despite the rigid format they're put into, they truly reflect life," she says. "And this commitment of hers to the traditional family values and to strong family ties is present in all of her writing

because she really believes in it—it's not just a gimmick."

Miss Phillips was teaching speech, drama and play production at a college .in Dayton, Ohio, in 1930 when she took

a trip to Chicago to try out as an actress (her main ambition at the time) with WGN. "The station manager told me my voice was not pleasant, that it was too low for a woman, but he signed me up anyway to do a program called Thought for the Day," she recalls. "I got a release from my teaching contract, took the job with the station and was promptly fired a couple of weeks later. But soon after that, the station asked me if I'd be interested in writing and performing in a family drama that would in effect be a continuing story, to run for ten minutes every day. The serial, called Painted Dreams, became the first of its kind on the air,

with all the voices and even sound effects done by Miss Phillips and another woman who worked with her on the show.

"There were six characters on Painted Dreams," Miss Phillips says. "I took two of them and she took the other four, plus an Irish setter named Mikey. She was an expert at imitating barking dogs. But we never had to do male voices—the men

were all offstage. Male characters weren't introduced on the air until two years later, on another serial I wrote called Today's Children, which was on W M AQ in Chicago."

Miss Phillips both acted and wrote during her first seven years on the radio, "but I finally had to give up acting to devote full time to my work as a writer. You might say I never stopped acting, though, because I dictate all my scripts. That allows me to play the parts of all my characters and give them dialogue that sounds like real, colloquial speech. And I avoid tape recorders—I dictate to

another person, to get that essential human contact, that other person's reaction to my dialogue, that raised eyebrow that tells me a word or a phrase doesn't sound right. Dialogue that's typed or written out often sounds stilted when it's spoken by actors. That's why writers wedded to the typewriter find working on television serials so incredibly difficult."

The latest Nielsen nationals put As the World Turns at the top of daytime with a 10.6 rating and a 35 share, and Miss Phillips thinks one of the big reasons for this success is that the show is still done live. (As the World Turns and Edge of Night are the only two live serials left on the air.) "I'm out of patience with pre-taping way in advance because that locks you in," she says. "Daytime dramas should be flexible so that you can rewrite an outline if it doesn't seem to be working out in the performance. I'm usually about three weeks ahead on my outlines, but I have no objection to changing horses in midstream on a moment's notice. And of course another advantage of a live show is that it gives you a 'firstnight' charge of excitement that you just don't get with tape or film."

If Miss Phillips is something of a sociologist in her approach to the content of her scripts, she's also a technician of form. As a veteran script carpenter, she disdains voice-over-narration and flashbacks as "lazy devices." She also tries to keep away from plots that so overwhelm the characters that they become mere cardboard weathervanes, spun this way and that by the whims of melodramatic exigency. "Characters have to be multidimensional," she says. "The story has to come from the characters, to the point where your viewers will get to know a character so well they can predict this or her behavior in a given dramatic situation."

Miss Phillips also steers clear of the unrelieved depression that characterizes some soap operas on the air by creating characters whose sole function on the show is to provide comic relief. But those quarts of numberless tears that are jerked out of soap-opera addicts hour after hour, day after day, still constitute the main appeal of the genre. "Women often get together later on to talk about that day's shows," Miss Phillips says.

"But they watch the shows in solitude. When there's a lot of crying to be done, they want to do it alone."

Irna Phillips—head writer, CBS-TV daytime serial As the World Turns; b. July 1, 1901, Chicago; BS in eduation, University of

Illinois, 1922; MA in speech. University of Wisconsin, 1924; taught school in Missouriand Ohio, 1924-30; has written radio and

television serials since 1930, among which are: Painted Dreams, The Guiding Light, Today's Children, Young Doctor Malone,

The Road of Lile, Woman in White, The Road to Happiness and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing; unmarried; adopted children: Thomas Dirk, 30, and Katherine Louise, 27

[DRW50]

Thanks. I was surprised to hear that she believed in comic characters - I don't remember her having any on ATWT, and on GL it was just Papa Bauer, at times.

The talk about disliking voiceovers and flashbacks was also a surprise. I agree with her there.

It's great to read such a matter-of-fact article on her. She still sounds very sharp and full of ideas.

[EricMontreal22]

It is a great article. AndI had the same thought about comic characters--although I suppose there was some minor comedy in her radio shows I've listened to...

Wouldn' this article have been shortly before she was fired from ATWT and then passed away?

[Vee]

I find Irna Phillips' second, evidently-disastrous run at ATWT fascinating because I know so little about it but some of it seems to have flown in the face of her supposed ethos.

Didn't she create Kim? A singer who fell for her sister's husband, and supposedly lost his baby? Wasn't Kim her fictional avatar? I read somewhere about Irna giving Kathryn Hays scenes addressing 'the lady in the mirror' in a bunch of dedicated monologues. Isn't all of that the opposite of what she publicly preached? Or am I simplifying this or missing a key detail?

[DRW50]

Yes. Kim was basically everything Irna was, and everything she wanted to be. This was even supposed to go to the point of Kim raising a child on her own, not caring about needing a man, as Irna had done. Only after Irna was fired did Kim lose the baby.

[Vee]

And yet, it would seem to me that Kim as described was absolutely the opposite of everything I've ever heard or read Irna espouse - traditional family values, including here, where she derides illegitimacy and infidelity. So, take that as you will.

[DRW50]

I think a lot of this family values was what Irna thought was ideal, not what she'd experienced in her own life. I guess toward the end, she decided to show people what she thought true life was actually supposed to be. I think she also likely saw Kim as pure. She seemed to see the Stewart family, what had become of them in her absence, as disgusting, rotten, diseased, full of wife-swapping and endless paternity lies. In her mind Kim was going to be more than this. Kim knew what she wanted and was prepared to live with the consequences.

[Susan Hunter]

This article was written in 72. Wasn't this sort of a transition period for soaps, when they were becoming more frank and open in their portrayals of love and sex and relationships, spearheaded by her two greatest pupils Bell and Nixon? She sounds like a great old bird, but maybe a piece out of touch with what was happening in the genre she created.

I love the comment about flashbacks and voice-overs, Bill Bell relied heavily on both.

Great article, thanks for posting.

[allmc2008]

Even though voice-overs seem outdated I wish they were still used...not just with crazy people. I think the audience being able to hear characters thoughts can bring in a level of intrigue and mood that can not be accomplished otherwise. Why are people always bashing flashbacks?? I never watched any of Bill Bell's work except for a a few scenes from Y&R such as Jill fantasizing about electrocuting Katherine and Katherine fantasizing about shooting Jill.

[Khan]

Because many HW's rely on them to the point where new scenes are nothing more than characters thinking back on old ones, thus advancing the story not at all.