33 minutes ago, soapfan770 said:

I hate to dig deep into the memory bank and my archive for that I thought I was going crazy.

Poor SOW. While I was primarily a SOD subscriber SOW was still fun to pick up and read in the mid-late 90’s to the early 00’s. After that it was downhill following the mag getting gutted and dumbed down.

It was one thing for SOW to feature Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy on the covers, I get it to an extent; but to plaster American Idol on the cover and also declare on the cover “It’s like a soap!!!” in lieu of the actual soaps was absurd and incomprehensible. I knew the end was nigh for the mag.

 

I bought both when I could but I preferred SOW for its up to date ratings.

Towards the end it was mostly SOW that I would buy.

7 hours ago, soapfan770 said:

I’m glad to hear that he’s well, I enjoyed his work and wasn’t sure whatever happened to him after disappearing from the pages of SOW.

I believe now he is very involved in classical music. If I recall correctly, he is a cellist. Correcting myself. Stand-up bass, not cello.

7 hours ago, soapfan770 said:

If I recall from her own blog posts and her posts back in the day when she visited the SON boards that she had a very good rapport with and tremendous respect for Reilly himself. She just wanted Passions to succeed. 

Yes, she was a close friend of Reilly. Someone else who considered him a close personal friend was Kay Alden. 

I remember well that when he died, Marlena took many people to task for not having respect for the dead, at least for the moment. 

Edited July 18, 20241 yr by Contessa Donatella
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My guess is that it was Ken who tried to get her fired. 

Edited July 18, 20241 yr by VelekaCarruthers

3 minutes ago, VelekaCarruthers said:

My guess is that it was Ken who tried to get her fired. 

It was Ken who was furious with WEEKLY for offering genuine critique. If I recall correctly, he shut them out, wouldn't give them access to actors or writers or producers, to no one!!! Then, he became even more furious when they continued to cover the show like all the other shows that were giving them access. 

For rhetorical sake, there are at least two arguments against blaming Ken Corday in this instance.  First, according to my review of the story from this interview, it occurred at SOD, not SOW.  Second, when Ken Corday got mad at SOW, they published an account of the entire interaction, so there would be no need to keep his name secret many years later. 

Edited July 19, 20241 yr by j swift

I think the thing about not naming names is odd. Of course it might not be Corday. It might be someone else & Corday is the only EP we know of that went on a tear about the soap press.

Jill Farren Phelps said at one point that there was a name she could name in regard to the Murder of Frankie Frame but that she simply was not going to name names. I concluded she was thinking of the HW, Margaret De Priest. A month later I saw Jill on the Locher Room saying, "It was the writer! It wasn't me!" So much for the assumed nobility of not naming names. 

Perhaps Connie is more noble. 

I didn't get into soap magazines for the most part until the mid '90s, and it didn't take long to realize just what superior quality SPW was in every way. I do think that by the late '90s, Marlena, Mimi Torchin, etc. had probably said everything they had left to say (Torchin in particular spent more column time writing about her favorite movies and primetime shows), but Marlena could still give some great material - I remember a column tearing JFP's OLTL apart which meant something because she had often praised and defended JFP's work. Ditto for panning Guza's GH around 1999 or so. It's unfortunate the magazine was completely gutted around this point - you could tell SPW up to that point had a lot of respect for its readers. Afterward the whole thing was extremely generic and hard to believe it was the same magazine that had detailed articles on canceled soaps, painstakingly tracked down dozens of soap actors for a where are they now feature, had the greatest moments in soap history issue that taught me so much about moments I never would have known otherwise, etc. 

Frankly, I'm surprised SPW managed to scrape through another decade. 

22 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

Frankly, I'm surprised SPW managed to scrape through another decade. 

The corporate ownership of DIGEST & WEEKLY just got worse & worse & went down & down. Also publishing across the board got into more & more trouble because of problems with fulfillment houses, cost of paper, cost of postage, etc. I also thought it was less than useful for them to be owned by the same corporate entity & to have an overall editor over both.