The East Hampton Star, August 30, 1990
The Star Talks To: ‘All My Children’s’ Producer
Nancy Horwich was at a cocktail party last month with her husband, Richard, a college professor. “And what does your wife do?” someone asked Mr. Horwich. “She produces all my children.” The man shot him a puzzled look. “It would be odd if she didn’t,” he remarked dryly. “No, no, you don’t understand. I mean, she — produces ‘All My Children’!” Which, in a field that can turn nightmarish faster than you can say Nielsen ratings, is a dream job.
Being under contract to a popular, long-running soap opera (as Mrs. Horwich has been, on and off but mostly on, for some 15 years) is like writing your name in stone compared with the here-today-gone-tomorrow quicksand of, for example, a new game show. Not that new game shows haven’t been kind to Mrs. Horwich. Take the very first one she ever worked for, something called “Reach for the Stars.” She was a young production assistant then, in charge of contestants. It was her responsibility to weed out the dimbulbs from the bright lights, chiefly by means of a 20-question written test. (“What’s the only state in the union that ends in a ‘k’?” was a typical question.*) Fell In Love The unlucky show was axed after 13 weeks, during which time a hand some if penniless graduate student with an extraordinary knowledge of trivia tried out for it. The student turned out to be a shoo-in: “A perfect 20 with an exuberant personality,” said Mrs. Horwich. She slotted him in against a tough opponent, a woman from New Jersey who had won several days in a row, hoping he would leave the woman — who had a vacuum-cleaner mind but an impassive, audience-off-putting manner — in the dust. Besides answering questions the contestants had to do silly tricks. The young man was told to balance five pencils on a pie plate. “There was a closeup of him doing this,” Mrs. Horwich remembered. “He was very nervous. His hands were shaking and the pie plate was bobbing and the pencils were rolling — and everyone was laughing. I fell in love with him at this point.” The couple married two years later, in 1969. With their daughter, Danielle, they are longtime weekend residents of Springs.
Periods Of Idleness
By the early 1970s, Mrs. Horwich said, the reality of one of the profession’s glum little truths was beginning to sink in: TV production was — is — a freelance business, and a risky one. There may be enforced periods of idleness, during which one goes, resume in hand, from show to show — specials, game shows, quiz shows — hoping to catch a rising star, maybe not a rocket like “America’s Funniest Videos,” but at least something good for a year’s run. “I began to get tired of either working my head off or being out of work,” Mrs. Horwich said of those years. One day, almost as a lark, she said, she filled in on a soap opera, called “Dark Shadows.” The experience was an eye-opener. “This was a regular schedule! They taped every day, they aired every day, and they seemed to know that every Monday they were coming back to work!”
Hit The Jackpot
She had found her metier: The soaps are about as close as TV-production people can hope to come to security in the workplace. After “Dark Shadows” came “The Best of Everything” (which, despite Mrs. Horwich’s newfound faith, was canceled after a six-month run), and “How To Survive A Marriage” (canceled after 15 months). Then, in 1975, she hit the jackpot. ABC-TVs “Ryan’s Hope” was the show, a tremendous popular success and network darling that sustained its creators, casts, and crews in relative style and security until mid-1988, when it finally collapsed under the weight of a swollen budget (several hundred thousand dollars a week, she said) that could no longer be justified by the ratings. Mrs. Horwich was associated with the show from beginning to end, starting as a production assistant and eventually becoming an assistant producer.
Constant Surprises
What she likes best about her profession, she said, is its endless capacity to surprise. There was, for instance, the day the “Ryan’s” crew was on location at a West Side church near 60th Street, filming a wedding ceremony. In the story, a young man was to rush in, grab the bride at the crucial instant, and run out of the church, carrying her like a Neanderthal down Eighth Avenue. Traffic, as usual, was piled up, Mrs. Horwich recounted. “He’s wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs. She’s in a wedding gown, long train, bridal veil. He’s running in and out of cars. The cameras are hidden; no one can see it’s being filmed. She’s yelling, ‘Ben, put me down! Help! Somebody help me!’ ” “We did five takes” Mrs. Horwich concluded, “and not one person said, ‘What’s he doing to you?’ That’s New York City.”
She also has fond memories of a camel that was brought in to lend a certain pungent verisimilitude to a desert scene, but took one look at the sand all over the floor of the set and refused to budge. Back where it was born — a New Jersey animal farm, explained its embarrassed trainer — it walked on grass. No problem. They shoveled a path down the sand for the camel to walk on. “Coping with the unexpected makes it fun.”
Socially Conscious Plots
Aside from the standard liaisons, family dramas, and illnesses, “All My Children” prides itself on having socially conscious story lines. Mrs. Horwich noted that AIDS, drunken driving, and alcoholism are among the subjects woven into the plot. Currently the show is trying to make people aware they can join a national registry for bone marrow transplants. Mrs. Horwich gets a lot of letters from college students who want to be TV producers, too. She advises them not only to learn to type but also to know how to read a stopwatch. “Everything we do — acting, producing, directing — is to the second,” she said. “We live by the clock.” She spends half her workweek on controlroom duty, supervising, editing, and making sure the show is properly paced, and the other half juggling the schedules of its four directors, 40 cast members, and 100-plus sets — deciding who will work where, which backdrops will be used, and when. Usually, she said, the hourlong “All My Children” has three or four story lines going at once (which is why soap-opera synopses sound like the plots of Russian novels). The different threads, depending in part on audience response, can be pulled out to almost excruciating length or cut off mercilessly. “The audience doesn’t always like [long-drawn-out plots],” Mrs. Horwich noted. “They call and say, ‘Please let Tad and Dixie be happily married!’ ’’But, she added, “that’s not the nature of the beast.”
Soap-Opera Fans College and high school students are big soap-opera fans. But the largest segment of the audience, the one the sponsors key in on, is made up of women aged 18 to 35. The commercials on one recent episode of “All My Children” featured school supplies, diapers, self-administered pregnancy tests, American cheese, pet food, and toothbrushes (twice), as well as a lone pitch from the American Association of Retired Persons. (The show is popular with the elderly, Mrs. Horwich said, “which is nice, but this is a commercial business and we are looking for buying power.”) Before she landed her present job, Mrs. Horwich was out of work for the first time in over 12 years. She tried her hand at writing an after-school special, a wholesome tale, apparently. ABC-TV turned it down flat. The author manque laughs about it now, though the experience was clearly no fun at the time. “It was naive. I didn’t realize those shows now are about druggies and junkies and schizophrenics.” '
By
Paul Raven ·
