Morning Star

[dc11786]

So Katy and Bill are still around.

 

This episode worked a bit better for me. While I didn't like the musical cue, I thought the opening with the Carousel Building was an effective shot and more than we would get today in a world where the camera doesn't seem to move much.

 

Edward Mallory was a bit over the top in some of those scenes and the actress playing Katy appears very mature for the young ingénue role.

 

The Katy/Bill scenes do seem to clear up the very messy first episode we see. The show was definitely leading the audience into a mystery regarding whether it was Grace or Stan who was poisoning Dana. I guess the back and forth in that episode was intended to be suspenseful.

[DRW50]

 

I didn't catch that last part. Thanks. 

 

I liked the scenes in the chambers. The other scenes were decent too but everyone seemed to be on uppers. 

 

The skyline looks a bit more like something from the '50s but I guess they didn't have a budget. 

[DRW50]

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[Soapsuds]

Why are there no ratings for this soap? I am looking at the archives and no ratings.

[beebs]

Was only on for the one season, it tied for 13th with Dark Shadows and Paradise Bay (according to Wiki, at least)

 

• 13. Morning Star 4.1 (Debut/Final Season: September 27, 1965 to July 1, 1966)

 

Usually those ones we see in our threads only go to the Top 10, and I doubt this show ever got high enough ratings to rank above 10, so...

Edited April 25, 2017 by beebs

[amybrickwallace]

 

What a great article about the show and its music. As a coda to the last sentence, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" is the most played song in the history of radio!!

 

Cynthia Weil co-wrote another song, this time with Michael Masser and Tom Snow, that would serve as a love theme for a popular soap couple. In 1984, their "If Ever Your In My Arms Again" (sung by Peabo Bryson) became Kelly and Joe's song on the brand-new NBC soap Santa Barbara. The song was #1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary Chart the day SB debuted.

[cassadine1991]

I'm surprised Corday didn't connect this show and Paradise Bay to DAYS

[slick jones]

 

 

 

 

[Paul Raven]

Ed Mallory had a week when he was taping on both Morningstar and DOOL. Whether those scenes aired the same week I don't know.

When the show was facing the ax, Ted Corday has a scene taped whereby Mallory's charcter Bill was defending the actions of Norman Burton's character Joe. He faced the camera and asked the audience directly something along the lines of 'Do you believe Joe deserves a second chance? If so write to NBC and gave an address. Thousands of letters poured in which Ted Corday hoped would show the execs that the show had a following.It didn't work...

[Paul Raven]

NBC press release

 Stars of 'Morning Star' -- Elizabeth Perry plays the role of Katy Elliot, a young girl seeking her career in New York City, and Edward Mallory is seen as Bill Riley, a free-lance photographer, in "Morning Star," NBC-TV's new daytime color serial drama. 

 

 

 

[Paul Raven]

Scrolling through some old Australian TV listings from 1966 and there is Morning Star.

I have read that Young Dr Malone screened on Aussie TV in the early 60's but apart so Morning Star becomes the second US daytime soap to get a run in Australia.

I wonder if the entire series was shown and if the tapes were wiped?

 

HSV7 Melbourne Wed June 8 1966
12.23 First Edition News
12.30 Lunch Time Movie “Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary?” (A)
1.55 Talking Programs
2.00 Morning Star (A)
2.30 People in Conflict
3.00 Time for Terry

[Paul Raven]

Edward Mallory and Sherry Marshall

Edited September 18, 2021 by Paul Raven

[Paul Raven]

Carolyn Weston, who wrote for Morning Star later authored a series (3) of books that formed the basis for 'The Streets of San Francisco' so I imagine she made a bit of money out of that.

A TV Guide article from 65 says she had a 7 yr contract to write the show. Later she wrote for Days.

The article says she was a struggling novelist when she took on the show but no details of how she got the gig.

Her co writer was another novelist Jan Huckins .She and Weston wrote the novel "Face of My Assassin' in 1959. Huckins had written for Irna Phillips on radio.

 

[danfling]

Sebastian Blayne was a pen name for Ms. Huckins.

[Paul Raven]

The TV Guide article about Carolyn Weston. Do we have any other info on Morning Star writers?

This short-order cook is now frying soap-opera scripts with relish

Until one day last August, fry-cook Carolyn Weston had never seen a television script, let alone written one, nor had she ever watched a daytime soap opera. Suddenly last summer, there were some changes made in the hours, wages and fringe benefits of the Hickoryburger Lady of Malibu.

This year, tied to a seven-year contract as head writer of NBC’s soap opera Morning Star, the same Carolyn Weston routinely turns out a script a day, five days a week, the pages flowing out of her typewriter, without rewrites, straight to mimeo, thence to the actors in Studio 2 at Burbank, Cal., and she is making pots of money. “Pots,” in her case, is defined as something in the neighborhood of $2000 a week.

The strategic factor in this dramatic switch in her workday is the fact  that she has been a lifelong secret writer who has been stacking up unpublished manuscripts by the closetful ever since her first full-length novel written at the age of 11. She always used to hide everything she wrote. Eventually the bulk of it was lost or thrown out. “I wrote millions and millions of words,’ she says today. “Sometimes it horrifies me to think of the waterfall of language that has poured out of my typewriter.”

Of this torrent of outpourings, only two of her works, possibly as a consequence of her secretiveness, survived. They sort of accidentally got printed, though causing scarcely a ripple in the publishing pond. Just splash enough, however, for NBC to enter the scene.

Soap operas have traditionally “emanated,” as they say, from the East. But Morning Star, even though it’s all about a fashion designer in mid-Manhattan, was unaccountably scheduled to emanate from the West Coast. And it seems that NBC, in its executive wisdom, decided that Hollywood-type writers were not ideally suited to soapsuds, that a novelist’s emotional makeup was more appropriate, and that a 40-year-old West Coast lady novelist would be just the ticket. That’s when they got wind of the Hickoryburger Lady of Malibu who went home to write novels at night after she turned off the grill.

In recent years Miss Weston had become even more diffident about the writing that she did after work. That’s because, though she had always written with serious intent, the publishers marketed her first novel with a lurid dust jacket and equally lurid slogans. One blurb ran: “The beast within found voice as it vented its savage rage of desire.” The reader was promised “surging passion,” “savage pleasure” and “a triangle of the flesh.”

“I was mortified,” says the authoress. “And you can’t imagine my shock when I saw those naked orgies on the cover.” She became more of an attic typist than ever.

She recalls her childhood in Hollywood: “I was unbelievably, fantastically shy. I didn’t talk to anybody. I had no friends. Books were my friends. All I. ever did was daydream and read novels. Before I ever went to high school, I had decided that I was going to be a lady novelist someday.

“At 11 I wrote my first full-length novel, a romantic saga about a girl named Carlotta (coincidentally also age 11), who inherits a great rancho in Spanish California. Everything I wrote I hid. One day I came home and there was my older brother reading my manuscript out loud to two boys in the neighborhood, making fun of it. ‘Har-de-har-har’ and all that. I went in the bathroom and cried.”

For several years recently Carolyn Weston supported her secret writing habit by working, for $1.60 an hour, at a roadside stand called the Malibu Frostie Freeze, down the Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu Colony, where the movie stars live. Among her customers were Louis Jourdan, David Niven, Ann Sothern,: Burt Lancaster and Doris Day. “For years the major part of my conversation was limited to a few phrases such as ‘with or without’ [onions].”

The best-selling item on the menu was the “hickoryburger” (seven patties to a pound of meat; eight on holidays), whose flavor, an amber-colored fluid called “liquid smoke,” was squirted on from plastic bottles. “A customer might order ‘one well-done, one medium-rare and two mediums’ but they all came out the same. What can you do with a piece of meat a quarter of an inch thick?”

Too, of course, there was the Frostie freeze itself, a whipped ice-milk concoction produced from a machine looking not unlike an iron lung. “I called it ‘Gertrude, the Money-Making Fool.” A number of her regular customers were dogs. “An astonishing number of people buy Frosties for their pooches. Always Frosties, never hickoryburgers. Any number of poodles preferred vanilla Frosties. A pair of Chinese pugs ate any flavor.”

Today, Carolyn Weston never watches other people’s soap operas, though she follows Morning Star with interest. Each day’s episode is one she wrote four weeks earlier. How are soapers different from novels? “Well, the dialog is more conventional. I guess pedestrian is the word. Also, I’ve learned that an interrupted speech like ‘John (pause), you see (pause), I’m (pause) dying,’ works beautifully.”

The serial’s “promo” shows a big eye with a teardrop and a narrator saying: “Into each life some rain must fall. Cry yourself a bucketful. Watch Morning Star, 11 o’clock weekdays.”

Carolyn Weston cries all the way to the Bank of America in Santa Monica, corner of 4th & Arizona.