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All My Children questionaire (please help my thesis)


EricMontreal22

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Wasn't dog boy Passanante?  Have I unfairly always blamed her for that?  Rayfield's AMC was odd--it really didn't feel like AMC and was our first taste of Frons wanting it to appeal to Sex and the City fans.  In fact when McTavish returned soon after I was welcome--for a while it felt more like the old AMC again, I remember she came in with a 4th of July picnic episode and finally it felt like Pine Valley.  We also got, briefly longer scenes again--I remember one of the last ones with Anna where she and david decide they can never get over the loss of their child that actually took up the full 8 mins between commercials--and watching with my mom who never comments on the writing or acting, usually, she actually said right after what an amazing scene she thought it was.  And yes, so many one off random characters like Laurie with no connection to the town (Lysistrata the inept marriage counsellor was kinda amusing and Rayfield didn't shy away from Lena/Bianca anyway).  But I still think the Passanante period after Nixon left as co-HW (surely Passanante wasn't her choice?) was the low point for me.  In fact, amidst rumours of being fired, Passanante left to work at ATWT and for a few months the show had no HW until Culliton came on (lots of potential, but his era for whatever reason was insanely filled with dropped plots and characters)

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Gabriel and Anna/Alex was Passanante.

 

I consider her run and Rayfield/Cascio's the absolute nadir. Passanante's was terrible and the latter did not even feel like AMC. It was the height of Frons' influence early on and it felt absolutely alien and unrecognizable - weird episodes devoted to teens with veterans randomly at the movie theater, etc. Unwatchable.

 

 

We already told you they are on YouTube. That's where they landed now that Hulu and iTunes removed them.

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To be fair AMC had the guidance of Nixon (directly and later indirectly) a lot more than most soaps have under one person.  Of course her focus on the show directly came and went through the years but it doesn't seem to be until the late 90s that ABC (I think this was around when Disney bought them) started, apparently, doing things and hiring people she didn't approve of--but she still attended story meetings, etc.

In an anecdotal essay by her son-in-law who wrote dialogue for the show in 99-2001 the last time she was (co) HW, he mentions how she knew she'd be essentially retiring after that stint (Bainaca's coming out and having a gay character be connected to Erica was her big exit storyline she wanted to do) and she became less directly involved in 2001, though maintained an "Exec Story consultant" position.  She still would go to story meetings at least once a month from all reports, but of course nobody *had* to listen to her story ideas, or anything.  As mentioned it was only when Pratt came on that she was actually barred from story meetings and input (and for the final months on ABC she returned as consultant to Broderick).  Only Bill Bell really had as long a hold of his own show (though he stayed more consistently involved as HW throughout his tenure at Y&R).   

OLTL of course is another matter.  In her memoir she said she sold it to ABC in 1973 (just as she sold AMC to them kfor financial reasons five years into ITS run) though she stayed as co-HW with the great Gordon Russell who she trained from 73-75 and was overall consultant for all the ABC soaps from the late 70s to mid 80s.  But OLTL was really out of her hands by the Rauch era.  During the great Malone/Griffith early 90s to mid 90s era there's been much mention of her being consulted on stories again, and helping the novice Malone with how to write soaps, but overall it was a very different situation (which is one reason why, unfairly I think, some OLTL fans blame her and AMC for their show being "abandoned").  Of course her company did own Loving/The City throughout its run so in theory she kept the most power there, and as much as I have a soft spot for the show, that didn't really help things (although Agnes Nixon's final solo HW stint--at Loving from 93-94 was IMHO a creatively great last ditch effort to save the show and solidify it and she was official consultant on The City which, after a rough start, I thought showed a lot of promise).

I know that Prospect Park said she was a consultant on both AMC and OLTL but from all reports (interviews with the writers, etc) it sounds like again her main focus was on AMC--including writing scenes (like a funny one between Joe and Billy Clyde when Joe's actor mentioned to her that he never got any comedy scenes). 

But I really appreciated reading your experience with the show.  I suspect Nixon's soaps and AMC in particular simply appeals more to certain soap fans--as I've said elsewhere, particularly in the 1970s, much of the "old school" soap press seemed baffled by the show (especially the social storylines and even more so its humour which many of them didn't seem to understand).--though some of that seemed tobe jealousy because of the attention it was getting from the press and audiences who had not paid attention to soaps before.

I had purchased them all and they're taking up a lot of needed space on my hard drive but I can't bring myself to delete them

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  (Yeah, yeah, I should just store them on some flashdrives or something.

Thanks for clearing up that the Gabriel and Anna/Alex mess was Passanante.  I actually completely agree with you on both counts--and yes, that [!@#$%^&*] movie theatre set!!  Under Rayfield/Cascio it really felt like some light teen soap or something.

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I always suspected Evelyn was related to Kitty/Kelly but they never said so. Celia, her ward, was originally intended to be Billy Clyde's or something, but they cut all his filmed scenes talking to Evelyn about it so they were clearly in the process of rewrites. Evelyn had scenes here and there with others.

 

If you put the eps on dropbox or something please let me know. I'll download them all in an instant.

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This is the kind of negative stuff I don't care for on this site. I see KMan edited his earlier post after I had read it. So I did not see that comment about them being on YouTube. Typically I do not go back and re-read posts for edited information. At any rate, all you had to do was tell me they were on YouTube without having to telling me I'd already been told this, when I hadn't been, since I hadn't read the edited post. In the future, please don't reply directly to me if you can't be nicer. Have a little more patience, be a bit kinder, or else don't bother. Thanks.

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I actually kinda liked the actress playing Corinne and was interested when they kept her in Pine Valley and away from the voodoo nonsense--but they never did anything with her.  But yeah it was a mess, and from a certain writer's report, the writers were not happy with it either.  ABC even seems to have allowed them to continue with the Kevin/gay storyline (this was around his conversion therapy) only if they also increased the more outlandish storylines (though Broderick wasn't immune to those even without interference--I'm pretty sure she did the Myrtle/Santa Claus story, although to be fair that was meant to just be a cut Christmas diversion).  AMC has always been a show where a single episode has a lot of tones--comic stories, adventure stories, social issue stories all back to back, which is one thing that some critics disliked.  But that was especially apparent during this era when you'd go from the Kevin stuff to "On the run from Taylor in voodoo Jamaica-land"

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Eric's been a friend for many years so I'm letting it lie for him. Next time don't spend the bulk of your past posts talking down to people or trying to police the tone of a forum you have no background with. Have a fantastic night.

 

As for the topic:

 

 

It was jarring even when I was a kid. Jamaica was so goofy and the second(?) Taylor was a cartoon. Compared to what was running on GH and even the final days of Malone's OLTL I just couldn't take it seriously.

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Apparently, a good chunk of material was never used. I remember seeing a story about a location shoot involving Miranda and AJ that never aired. I believe there were scenes with Jane that were cut too. A friend who used to work in the soap industry told me in March 2013 that Miranda was slated to be a cutter but that never materialized.

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Jane was supposedly in Witness Protection, IIRC.

 

Jared Kaplan from Prospect Park used to lurk here. I've thought about trying to reach out to him or others from the 2.0 shows to get access to materials for the shows - I think OLTL may have actually filmed more as well. I would kill to see bibles if they even exist; I'm not sure they do.

 

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