Llanview In The Afternoon: An Oral History of One Life to Live, by Jeff Giles out today

[allmc2008]

Who is TDS??? I forgot!

[John]

Timothy D Stickney (RJ Gannon, OLTL)

[EricMontreal22]

Absolutely. It's a job--and like any job sometimes you care about it and sometimes you just get through the grind. It's sometimes hard to realize this as a fan (and I'm speaking from my own perspective)--it can be disheartening to find out that the actor whose performance meant so much to you felt nothing for the role. But...

(Though I admit FV's indifference to Higley's work gives me more respect for the man.

[cassadine1991]

I wonder was Higley hired.by Frons??

[John]

Yes Tom Casiello former breakdown writer at OLTL admitted this to We Love Soaps a few years back

http://www.welovesoaps.net/2011/04/casiello252.html

[Vee]

Roscoe Born (Mitch Laurence): I had hookers and crack dealers come up to me on the street with these really hard-assed personas, and then they'd recognize me - and in a minute they'd turn into little children. To watch the transformation of a crack whore who recognizes you and starts to ask you what Maeve from Ryan's Hope is really like - and hard-assed cops would go through the same thing. Soaps were America's guilty pleasure. People would practically whisper when they told you about their experiences watching the show.

Erika Slezak: I loved [executive producer] Jean Arley. She was so sweet. And then Paul [Rauch] came in and said, "Get out."

Steve Fletcher (Brad Vernon): Paul Rauch was not my kind of person, to put it mildly. He was abusive to the actors. If you were typecasting for an evil producer role, he'd be the perfect guy. I heard things that made my skin crawl, and he did things to me that were wrong. Brad was a rascal. He'd had a lot of affairs, and I'd done many, many love scenes. Judge me however you want as an actor, but I think I knew my way around a love scene. Rauch had been on the show for a couple of months, and I was doing a love scene with an actress - I think it was rehearsal. Anyway, I got out of the bed, and Rauch jumped on her. He was in the shadows, and he just jumped on top of her. The actress is horrified - here's the producer groping her, basically, on this bed. He tried to make a joke out of it, but it was very distasteful. And later, he called me into his office and said, "Do you know how to do a love scene? I want to see your tongue down her throat." Stuff like that.

Sam Hall: Oh, Paul Rauch. Oh, God. What a piece of work. You couldn't trust Paul at all. You knew from the minute you met him that you were never going to be able to trust that man. He could be just delightful when he wanted to be, although I don't know how good of a producer he really was.

Jean Arley: Honey, Rauch would smoke a cigar in the control room. I can't tell you what that's like. You miss a few shots that way. You can do a small miniseries on Paul Rauch.

Margo Husin Call (continuity coordinator): Paul was very tough to work for - those were seven years that were not very enjoyable. Although he did change the open, which I thought was great.

Tracy Casper Lang (associate director/editor/etc.): Working for Paul was certainly interesting - it makes for a lot of good stories. Somebody once told me that he wouldn't yell at you if he didn't think you were teachable and worth it, so I sort of held onto that. [...] He was a screamer. But when I transitioned to being a [production assistant] in the booth, it was fascinating to me - I finally understood how he got to be where he was. We didn't have non-linear editing at the time, where it was simple to just cut the show where you needed to make cuts, so when we were shooting the show, the idea was to get it relatively close to where you wanted it to be. We'd dress rehearse the scenes, we'd be five minutes along, and he'd be sitting there with the script, saying "Okay, cut this. Cut this, cut these" - he had such a facility with that process. He understood what was important and what wasn't, and he knew how to execute it. Because of the way editing is now, it's kind of a lost art to be able to do that while you're in the process.

Margaret Klenck (Edwina Lewis): Joe Stuart told me once, when I was arguing about something with him - politely [laughs] - "Look, you're all talent, small t. That's where you are in the pecking order, and don't think differently." He was actually being very paternal, and trying to teach me, but it was disgusting. And it only got worse.

Peter Miner: [The show] was never written about character, and I think I have the ultimate proof of it. The first show I directed at [OLTL] was the episode where Victor Lord died. At the time, he was played by Sheppard Strudwick, and the character passed away with a flatline on his hospital monitor and family members standing by. Well, of course, 20 years later, they come up with this story in which Dorian is going to be tried for his murder, and you see a pair of hands killing him with a pillow over his face. I said, "Guys, I was there! He died perfectly peacefully with his family standing by!" And they said, "This is a better story." [laughs]

Roscoe Born: Sometimes I ran into snobby people. I remember when I was working with Marg Helgenberger on Ryan's Hope. [...] As soon as I worked with her, I knew she had it. Anyway, a couple of months later, I was at a club in New York, and some girl recognized me - she said "Oh, you work with Margie! We all went to Northwestern with her." She took me over to her friends and introduced me, and one name stood out - Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She had just come to New York. Her personality stood out, too, because she said something snide, like "Oh, he's on a soap opera. Big deal." Just cut me dead. There were definitely times when that happened to me.

Peter Miner: There are some people who can't do soaps - Marisa Tomei asked to be let out of her contract on As the World Turns because she said there were so many words in the script that she couldn't do anything more than stay on top of them, and she didn't want to be that kind of actress. That's an absolutely valid thing.

Erika Slezak: Farley Granger (Dr. Will Vernon) couldn't believe what the work was. He had a total meltdown on the set one day and begged the producers to let him leave - he said he couldn't work at that speed. He was a very accomplished film actor, but it's different; the pace, and the requirements, are different. In those days, we had prompters, but we didn't stop.

Mark Derwin (Ben Davidson): I've met actors who aren't working, and they'll say something like "I'll never do soaps." I just say, "You're an !@#$%^&*]." [laughs] Get me another drink, please, while you're at it? Because that's what you're going to be doing. I catch that negative stuff all the time. Even to my face sometimes! I remember one show I did, this other guy came up to me - this stand-up comic or whatever - and said, "Oh, you're on a show? I thought you were just a soap actor, or retired." Right to my face, and in this offensive way. I was just...I mean, do you even hear what you're saying? !@#$%^&*] you. Even if I was accepting an Academy Award - which I never will - I'd thank daytime for getting me started. I've heard stories about people denying having done daytime, or refusing to talk about it, and that's just awful. It's given a lot of people a very nice career, and I'm on the top of that list.

Robert S. Woods: I remember one guy saying, "You think you know your character better than I do?" I said, "You're goddamn right I do, I'm the one who's playing him, and I was doing it a long time before you showed up. I know how he got here." I think probably 90 percent of the time [the writers] respected - or at least they were always nice to me about - staying loyal to the character. I know people, and some of them weren't there that long, who would show up one day, look at the script, and say, "All of a sudden I'm a maniac! I'm a killer! This is a story about whodunit - I did it!" Like Matt Walton, who played Eli Clarke later on - he went from being our attorney to being a murderer. I came in and said, "What the hell happened to you? Did you drink some weird water or something?" All he could say was, "I don't know. I guess I'm a bad guy now."

Margaret Klenck: Lee Patterson (Joe Riley) just played himself, and he played himself really well. There was no big deal; what you saw was Lee, and that's how he did it. Other people kept working on character, like Robin Strasser - she had certain Dorian things that were not Robin at all, and she kept honing those. Al Freeman - it was such an honor to work with him, and you could see him crafting. Doing the imagination work for his character. That's what keeps it lively, and helps you resist the pull to make the character you. There's a tension there, and the great actors kept creating their character. For my money, that's more interesting than turning the character into yourself - because then you have no job. Then it gets murky, and it gets murky with the fans. I think it's harder in a way to be yourself.

Roscoe Born: I got killed four [!@#$%^&*] times.

Dennis Parlato (Michael Grande): I think Larry Pine (Roger Gordon) hit me over the head with an ashtray. It was a hell of a way to go.

Jerry verDorn (Clint Buchanan): If they fire an actor, they have to get their money's worth, and send him out in a blaze of shark [!@#$%^&*] and flamingo feathers.

Roy Thinnes (Alex Crown/Sloan Carpenter): Alex Crown died twice [...] [He first died] from a shotgun blast to the chest, so I assumed he was dead as a doornail, and two weeks later I was back in California when I got a call asking me to come back. I said, "I don't have my apartment anymore and you must have the wrong guy, because my character is dead." They said, "We want to kill him again." I said, "What? The show's already been aired! What are you talking about?" They said, "It's a very forgiving audience."

[DRW50]

Those Roscoe Born stories are surprising. Not that surprised about Julia Louis Dreyfus though.

[cassadine1991]

These people are Constantly disrespected, and yet they work hell of a lot harder

[Darn]

I love JLD but until she lucked into Seinfeld she was only known for one disastrous, unfunny season of SNL so...she needs to clap back is basically what I'm saying.

[SFK]

"Shark [!@#$%^&*] and flamingo feathers", what a turn of a phrase. Love it.

I love JLD but I'm admittedly resentful of very privileged children who would have been stinking rich regardless of fame and through connections became even stankier rich. But such is the world.

[John]

and I saw an interview pannel where JLD said she hated her 82-85 stint on SNL

[EricMontreal22]

Boo it won't play.

[John]

I told Roger newcomb. Maybe he can fix it

[cassadine1991]

http://michaelfairmansoaps.com/one-life-to-live/the-jeff-giles-interview-llanview-in-the-afternoon-an-oral-history-of-one-life-to-live/2013/10/02/

[allmc2008]

I'll listen to it tomorrow!!