General Hospital Welcomes Soap Royalty...... Kinda

[Khan]

I'm with Carl as well.

He seems attractive enough -- but can he act?

[soapsnstuds]

Obviously he doesn't vist SoapOperaNetwork or else he would know that he shouldn't be liking Frank and Ron.

[allmc2008]

Why does Bridget of a reputation of been a bit odd? I honestly don't know that much about her except that people claim she is a bit, well, out of it.

Is she Brenda Dickson bad?

Does anyone know were I can find that photo the interview mentioned that was in the Hollywood Reporter? I guess it was a photo of the gate with Bridget's face on it.

[Khan]

Not really, IMO. Unlike Brenda Dickson, who has, in the past, suggested Bill Bell did everything to her short of taking her up in his attic and forcing himself on her while she wore her old high school cheerleading uniform, Bridget Dobson doesn't have a history of making outrageous and unable-to-substantiate claims about others. She was barred from the NBC lot for a time, but her claims of the network and New World Television usurping her and hubby Jerome's creative autonomy at SANTA BARBARA appear to have some basis in reality. (Plus, by most accounts, her relationships w/ P&G and even ABC (when she was at GH) appear to have been very amiable. Aside from Jeanne Cooper and Thom Bierdz, I'd be hard-pressed to think of anyone at Y&R who got along with Brenda or enjoyed working with her.) Bridget, though, can also be very capricious and mercurial. She and Jerome have their defenders -- Lynda Myles, Patrick Mulcahey -- but they also have their detractors, such as Frank Salisbury and Thom Racina. They respected their fellow writers, but they also had a tendency to fire them on a whim (Salisbury claims Bridget let him go b/c, among other things, he didn't know how to write SB's Mason Capwell, even though, as he claimed in an interview, he contributed a great deal to his overall development); and as Racina has claimed, story meetings with them often verged into the contentious, with audible shouting matches between Bridget and Jerome held behind closed doors and such.

I can't remember which SB vet made the analogy -- maybe Nancy Lee Grahn? -- but I think the analogy was apt: the Dobsons were like SB's Lionel (Nicolas Coster) and Augusta (Louise Sorel) Lockridge, two eccentrics who were nevertheless brilliant, and brilliantly funny. I've no clue about Jerome's history -- although, I suspect, from reading various comments over the years from people who've worked with the two, that Jerome served as a buffer of sorts for Bridget and might be the (comparatively) calmer or more level-headed one -- but I tend to think Bridget's personal eccentricities and demons are the result of a fractious childhood, spent under the thumb of mother Doris, who just seemed all kinds of over-bearing and hysterical; and father Frank, who looks hen-pecked by comparison.

At the risk of reading too much into Hursley-Dobson family dynamics and possibly raising some danders here or elsewhere, I think Frank Hursley was an altogether amiable fellow who wanted a better relationship with his only son -- hence, the offer extended to Frank, Jr. to have him live with his other family in CA after Madeline's death as well as pay for his education -- but who was prevented greatly from doing so by Doris, and later, by Bridget. I think Doris was a very bitter, very jealous individual who resented her husband's "other family," and I think that resentment was passed onto Bridget -- who, by her own account, was regarded by both parents (and probably not entirely without reason) as frivolous and undependable. And if you think I'm off-base about Doris' temperament in general, then consider what Mary Stuart wrote about her in her autobiography. Now, I'm sure Stuart herself was a real piece of work IRL, but this much I think was true: that, as Stuart learned second-hand, Doris, a heavy drinker, had blabbed at a social gathering how she didn't like the character Jo on SEARCH FOR TOMORROW or Stuart; and that she and Frank had plans to get both removed from the show.

[allmc2008]

I still haven't read the article on the whole HursleyDobson family dynamics that was posted. I guess I need to...

[allmc2008]

I just read:

http://michigantoday.umich.edu/a8670/

Hell!!!

[titan1978]

He sounds like a nice guy, and so did his father Frank JR. Bridget Dobson sounds kind of awful.

[Khan]

On the one hand, titan, I agree. But, on the other hand, I can't help but feel sorry for her, because she comes across to me as being massively insecure about her place within the family. Bridget herself has suggested that she had to overcome her parents' impression of her as a "party girl" in the early days of her career. Frank and Doris probably saw her as talented, but not as being serious enough to handle HW'ing a five-day-a-week series. Indeed, I suspect she convinced Jerome to begin collaborating with her at GH because it was more work than she was used to handling. And because she always saw herself as someone with something to prove -- even after P&G hired her away from her parents' show to work on GUIDING LIGHT -- she probably picked more fights, made more enemies and burned more bridges than she needed to.

[titan1978]

Had she ever made her way back to GH, I bet she would have been a fantastic writer for Tracy!