The soap opera writers' discussion

[j swift]

I wonder if Agnes Nixon and Bill Bell ever spoke to each other about Irna Phillips with the same type of derision that Pete Lemay used in his book?  

 

I know both of their memoirs lack any real criticism of Irna, but it is hard to believe that they never had a bit of a kiki about her antiquated style.  Y&R was publicized as a modern soap for young people in direct contrast to the other Irna-created CBS soaps.  Ms. Nixon always included socially relevant stories that would have been verboten on older soaps.  I don't even know the personal relationship between Bill and Agnes, but it would be fun to hear how they felt about her, and her capricious relationships with her actors, once they were running their own shows.  Because it is an interesting contrast to hear the Nixon and Bell acolytes praise their mentorship, while Irna is not remembered as kindly.

 

[Khan]

 

IA.  In its heyday, AMC had a marvelous sense of humor, and I think the Dobsons could have revived some of that, had they ever been approached about taking over, and allowed to write without interference.

[Soaplovers]

 

I could see the Dobson's working on AMC due to the humor the show was known for, as well as the show's choice of featuring larger than life characters.  They proved on GL that they could masterfully write a community based show with deeply enriching characters... and they proved on SB that they could write tongue in cheek... and AMC had both the humor and community based elements that the Dobson's would have been a master at writing.

 

I think the reason the Dobson's didn't work on ATWT was because while the show had a community based element to it, it never had the humor nor passion that GL and SB had.  

 

For me, I think the Dobson's would have worked well on Search for Tomorrow (community based with a unique sense of whimsy) and All My Children.

[MichaelGL]

I would have loved to have seen what the Dobsons would have done with Search for Tomorrow. 

[danfling]

I am in the minority, but I feel that Mr. and Mrs. Dobson ruined The Guiding LIght.   (I wonder if they had been hired by Luci Rittenburg Feri to write this show?   I suspect that they were not.)

 

Too many new characters were introduced at one time.   Also (and I could be wrong), weren't they the writers who killed off the show's major character Leslie?

Edited December 16, 2018 by danfling

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I still get notifications and still read some of the threads. I stopped contributing in any significant way because I didn't feel my style meshed with others on this site, I didn't feel very welcome and I didn't like what seemed like a lot of negativity. I wanted to have more meaningful conversations with others on the site, and I value the community for how it keeps information about soaps "alive" and going forward. But I made the decision to pull away and not be actively involved. It wasn't an easy decision but I think it was the right decision. There would have been too many fights which I have now avoided. I enjoy using my posting time more productively in other areas. I will keep reading the threads when I feel compelled to visit this site. I especially love it when people talk about soap writers. Best regards.

[Vee]

K

[danfling]

I just learned that Wayne Greenhaw wrote Hidden Faces (along with the show's creator, Irving Vendig).

 

from the Encyclopedia of Alabama:

 

Wayne Greenhaw

 

 

 

 

 

Barry M. Cole, University of Montevallo

Writer and poet Wayne Greenhaw (1940-2011) produced a broad spectrum of fiction and nonfiction books, two plays, poetry, travel guides, and scripts for film and television. Greenhaw's writing reflects strong advocacy of the civil rights movement, expressed vividly through personal reflections. As a journalist in the 1960s, Greenhaw directly witnessed the civil rights movement as it unfolded through his personal association with movement leader E. D. Nixon during the Selma to Montgomery March. Since that time, many of his works have focused on civil rights. Greenhaw's writing is not limited to any one style or genre, although he has named Harper Lee as his primary influence, as well as individuals he met during the civil rights movement.

Wayne Greenhaw in Montgomery

Harold Wayne Greenhaw was born in Sheffield, Colbert County, into a troubled family; he grew up in Trussville and Tuscaloosa. Greenhaw contracted polio as an infant, causing health problems, including a curvature of the spine, that persisted through his teen years. At the age of 14, he underwent major surgery to correct his spine and was confined to a body cast for six months. During that time, he read extensively and learned to love literature. After graduating from high school in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, Greenhaw moved to Mexico at the age of 18 to study creative writing at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in the summer of 1959. He returned to Tuscaloosa and entered the University of Alabama to study writing under English professor Hudson Strode. In 1958, Greenhaw gained part-time employment as a sports reporter for the Tuscaloosa News. He served as sports columnist for the Graphics Weekly from 1963 to 1964 and worked as a writer assigned to an educational project at Draper Correctional Center from 1964 to 1965. He then took a position as a general assignment reporter for the Alabama Journal newspaper in 1965 and completed a B.S. in education at the University of Alabama in 1966. His first novel, The Golfer, was published shortly thereafter in 1967.

In 1971, Greenhaw published an article on the My Lai massacre (the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians by members of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War) that earned him a Nieman Fellowship to study journalism at Harvard University in 1972. He became Jimmy Carter's press secretary in Alabama during the 1976 presidential campaign. That same year, Greenhaw penned an editorial in the New York Times exposing Alabamian white supremacist Asa Carter as the author of The Education of Little Tree, a supposed biography that Carter had written under the pseudonym Forrest Carter. In 1982, he published Elephant in the Cotton Fields: Ronald Reagan and the New Republican South and two years later published Flying High: Inside Big-Time Drug Smuggling. From 1984 to 1988, he was editor and publisher of Alabama Magazine.

Several of Greenhaw's books center on the state of Alabama and Montgomery in particular. Examples include Alabama on My Mind: Politics, People, History, and Ghost Stories (1988), Montgomery: Center Stage in the South: A Contemporary Portrait (1990) and Montgomery: The Biography of a City (1994). In 1993, Gov. Jim Folsom appointed Greenhaw as director of the Alabama Bureau of Tourism (now the Alabama Tourism Department). In 1995, Pres. Bill Clinton appointed him as a representative to the White House Conference on Travel and Tourism. That same year, the Southeast Tourism Society named Greenhaw Travel Writer of the Year. Greenhaw continued to write, publishing Alabama: Portrait of a State in 1998

Fighting the Devil in Dixie

and Beyond the Night: A Remembrance the following year. The latter work is a poignant telling of a young boy's near-death experience. In 2000, Greenhaw was appointed to the board of directors of the Alabama Humanities Foundation by Gov. Don Siegelman. In 2006, he co-authored with Donnie Williams The Thunder of Angels, which details the struggle for racial equality in Alabama. His writing was augmented by frequent lectures and seminars.

Greenhaw was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Harper Lee Award from the Alabama Writers Conclave and the Hackney Literary Award from Birmingham-Southern College. Greenhaw published several hundred articles in publications ranging from Reader's Digest to Music City News. Residing in both Alabama and Mexico, he produced works in English and Spanish and found common ground in both places in his writing.

Greenhaw died on May 31, 2011, in Birmingham from complications related to heart surgery.

Selected Works by Wayne Greenhaw

The Golfer (1967)

"Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure" (1976)

King of Country (1994)

Beyond the Night (1999)

My Heart is in the Earth (2001)

The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow (2006)

Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama (2011)

Additional Resources 

Best, Ricky, and Jason Kneip. Guide to the Papers of Wayne Greenhaw. Montgomery, Ala.: AUM Library, Archives & Special Collections, 2005.

Dixon, Joyce. "My Heart Is In The Earth: An Interview with Author Wayne Greenhaw." Southern Scribe, 2001. [See Related Links]

[Paul Raven]

Gene H. Ellis: 

Actress Turned Writer

Gene Ellis was talented on the stage, on the ice and on the typewriter. The former actress was for many years a writer of several of the most popular “soap operas” on television.

Born Gene M. Hufeisen in Seattle, Wash., in 1933,  she spent much of her childhood in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her father had a construction company. She began ice skating as a grammar school student. She also studied dance with a young man named Donald Saddler, who at the time was serving in the U.S. Army in Alaska, but who later became a Tony Award-winning choreographer for both Broadway and Hollywood.

She returned to Seattle to complete her high school education, and continued to study both skating and dance, but ultimately decided to pursue the latter. She majored in drama at the University of Washington, but quit after a year to move to Europe to work on her acting and dancing. She dubbed films in Rome and studied dance in Paris.

Ellis moved to New York City in 1953 to pursue her theatrical career. After winning dancing roles in summer stock, she made her Broadway debut in the Josh Logan production of “Wish You Were Here.”

Her husband, Ralph, noted that the production was “complete with onstage swimming pool — she lied about not being able to swim so she wouldn’t have to get wet eight performances a week.”

She then joined the national tour of the musical “The Boy Friend.”  She danced many major roles in summer stock, “always to critical acclaim,” said Ralph, who had been a fellow actor; they met and married in 1961.

Returning to New York City, she acted in several off-Broadway shows, including a   revival of Shaw’s “Buoyant Billions” and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and became a featured performer in both winter and summer stock, appearing with such actors as John Raitt and Howard Keel. 

She also appeared on television in the 1957 musical special of “Pinocchio” with Mickey Rooney and Walter Slezak, and a year later she used her skating talents in the TV musical special, “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates” with Tab Hunter and Dick Button.

In 1963, she retired from  acting and dancing — in her final performance, in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of “West Side Story,” she was two months pregnant.

By 1964 Ralph had also stopped acting and had turned instead to a career as a full-time writer of daytime television dramas. After the birth of their third child, the Ellises moved to Ridgefield in 1972 where their fourth  child — Ridgefielder Catherine Ellis Dulecki — was born. 

That same year, her husband persuaded Gene to try writing scripts.

“Gene was always interested in writing,” Ralph said. “She wrote a weekly column for the Washington University paper when she was student there.  It was humorous in tone and had a large readership, including a female student, who wrote her ardent fan letters.  Needless to say, the fan was taken aback when they met and she discovered ‘Gene’ was a girl.” 

In high school, she had won first place in a Seventeen Magazine contest for a short story that was subsequently published in the magazine.

Together with Ralph, and also separately, Gene wrote under the name Eugenie Hunt.  

The Ellises wrote for many years in the 1970s and 80s for “As the World Turns,” the second longest-lived of the television soap operas — started in 1956, it ran 54 seasons until 2010 (only The Guiding Light ran longer, by three years). For several years, they were the head writers on the show, which over the years had featured such budding young actors and actresses as Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Parker Posey, Matthew Morrison, Martin Sheen and James Earl Jones.

They also wrote many episodes of  “Search for Tomorrow,” a show that ran from 1951 to 1986. In all, Gene wrote nearly 500 episodes of the program. Among the future stars who appeared on ‘Search’ were Morgan Fairchild, Susan Sarandon, Jill Clayburgh, Kevin Bacon, Lee Grant, Sandy Duncan, Kevin Kline, and Wayne Rogers.

She and her husband were also head writers for “The Doctors.”  On her own, she wrote scripts for “Loving,” “One Life to Live” and “General Hospital.”

Having both acted professionally was an advantage for the Ellises. “An acting background is a tremendous help in writing scripts,” Ralph said. “While some might be total failures at novels, which require descriptive passages, actors are very adept at improvisation and transfer that ability to creating dialogue. The best writers we ever hired were actors.”

When her daughters, Catherine Dulecki and Susan Ellis, were teenagers, their parents sometimes sought their help. “They would often ask me and my sister to read a line or two and tell them if it sounded like something a teenager would say,” Catherine recalled.

Both young women also got a chance to be a part of a show.  “In 1984, my sister and I were in an episode where Jermaine Jackson and a relatively unknown Whitney Houston performed a concert in the fictional town of Oakdale on ‘As The World Turns,’” Catherine said.

Their brothers, Steve and Tom Ellis of Ridgefield, were also on “As the World Turns.”

In 1974  the Ellises won a Writer’s Guild of America award for best daytime show, “Search for Tomorrow.” In the years that followed Gene was also nominated for the Writer’s Guild Award for her work on “One Life to Live” and “Loving.”

Gene Ellis retired from writing in 1994, but remained active locally as a member of the Caudatowa Garden Club and volunteering at the Keeler Tavern Museum.  

The couple had been married for 55 years when Gene died in October 2016 at the age of 82.

Over the years, the Ellises were often asked where they got their plot ideas. “We never used Ridgefield experiences in any direct way, although the tranquility of living here certainly provided a more comfortable creative atmosphere than our years in New York City,” Ralph said.  “Since we didn’t know any murderers, blackmailers, amnesia victims, and only a few adulterers, we made them up.” 

 

 

[danfling]

I am so glad that you posted this.  I had been wondering if the Ralph Ellis who wrote soap operas was the same actor who had a role on Our Five Daughters.

 

I did not know that Eugenie Hunt was a former actress.

 

I think that Ralph Ellis and Eugenie Hunt did their best work on The Guiding Light.   It is my understanding (although I may be corrected) that they wrote the Stanley Norris storyline.  They also did very good work on As the World Turns.   (The Stanley Norris story is my favorite murder plotline in the soap operas.)

[danfling]

What storylines on Search for Tomorrow were created by Ralph Ellis and Eugenie Hunt?

[Paul Raven]

John and Joyce Corrington

 

 

[danfling]

I am glad to see this photograph.  They were New Orleans-based writers, and I returned from New Orleans yesterday.   (The Tennessee Williams Festival is this coming Saturday, and I have enjoyed this for many years.)

[cassadine1991]

I'm surprised that Josh Griffith never tried to get Michael Malone onto Y&R and Days since they seemed to always work on projects together.

 

 

 

Have both of Malone's stints on OLTL been mentioned on here?

[amybrickwallace]

 

Hence they introduced the New Orleans-based Sentell/Tourneur family to SFT, and of course one of the show's best known romances (Liza and Travis).