The Wonderful World of TV Soap Operas by Robert LaGuardia. Ballantine Books: New York. Copyright @ 1974 by Random House, Inc.
The authors of the daytime serials have the largest audiences in the world. Every week an estimated fifty million viewers are exposed to the wares of a select handful of daytime scribes. Nighttime television writers don't have anywhere near the same kind of exposure; their scripts are only aired once a week, and many more nighttime writers are hired to work on a single series. The daytime writer, however, must pay dearly for the prestige of having such an enormous following. "It's sort of a cross between being an F. Scott Fitzgerald and an Olympic athlete," says Agnes Nixon, who has had nearly twenty-five years' experience writing serials and currently heads "All My Children." "It's grueling work. You know you have to finish a certain amount of writing every day, so you must always be in tip-top physical shape. You can't stay up late or let yourself get run-down. I remember during the fifties there was a period when I was only doing one-shot live TV plays, like "Philco", and I could force the creativity by abusing my body -- drinking a lot of black coffee, working till all hours of the night. But when you write a daytime serial you don't dare do that; you wouldn't be in any kind of condition to write tomorrow's show." Since soap writers must produce their shows on a daily basis -- and so much of their time becomes absorbed in the creative process -- it is not uncommon for some of them to use their own lives as models for their stories. George Reinholt said very recently, "You know, I always had the strangest feeling that the story of Steve Frame has something to do with Philadelphia, where I grew up. Maybe it's Frame's misguided sense of class status." What Reinholt didn't realize was that Agnes Nixon, who created his story on "Another World," is a native of Philadelphia herself. Today, Steven Frame is being handled by Harding Lemay with subtle touches and changes that derive from Mr. Lemay's background. "When I was seventeen," says Mr. Lemay, "I ran away from home. I came from a poor family. When I started writing "Another World" two years ago, I discovered that Steven had almost no background at all -- he was sort of a mystery. I started giving him a past very much like my own. I decided he had run away from his home on a farm when he was just a boy and that many of his difficulties today arise from having never been properly understood when he was younger." Interestingly enough, Alice (Jacquie Courtney) now talks a great deal about needing to understand Steven better. Just before her recent death, Irna Phillips gave a rare insight in the the development of a certain character on "As the World Turns." In her characteristically raspy voice, Miss Phillips said, "Everyone asks me how I got the idea for Kim Reynolds on the show, because she certainly is an unusual character. She's really me -- at a much younger age. She's fiercely independent, as I was, and she won't settle for second best. She looks in the mirror and refers to herself as 'The lady in the mirror.' Well, that was her other self, which no one knows about: the true me, the person that I always hid from the world. She's having a child out of wedlock, which will only be hers. I adopted two children -- Kathy and Tommy -- without having a husband. We're both the same. And she's going to have that child to prove that a woman can do it alone." (Unfortunately, Kim never did. During the character's pregnancy, so many viewers wrote in disapproving of what she was doing that the producers decided to have Kim lose the baby. Even so, the character of Kim, played by beautiful Kathryn Hays, is probably the most poignant one Miss Phillips ever created for her daytime audiences.) For genuine impact on their audiences, writers of daytime serials must take seriously the parallels between real life and the fictional stories they are creating. Otherwise, with the mounting pressure of having to create episodes week after week, daytime stories become unbelievable, full of worn-out cliches'. However, one woman who has been writing serials for many years carries her concern for realism on her shows perhaps a bit too far. She calls her friends constantly to find out the intimate details of their lives -- all the ins and outs of how they felt while they were bedridden with an illness, the pain of childbirth, what might have caused the depression they were going through. This woman's characteristic line: "Oh, isn't life so like the serials?" Soap writing is by its very nature highly specialized. A typical head writer not only must invent story situations that should keep the audience enthralled, he must also worry about actors' guarantees and vacation periods. "It often becomes a problem of sheer logistics," says Henry Slesar, who writes "The Edge of Night". For example, in the middle of a heated quarrel between two rivals in a story, one of the actresses might suddenly decide to exercise an "out" option in her contract in order to do stock in Buffalo. Then the poor writer has to lose sleep in figuring out a logical way of sending one of the rivals out of town without interrupting story continuity. "As the World Turns" writers were always thinking of new places to send Penny while Rosemary Prinz was in and out of the show. But a greater difficulty is a purely creative one: maintaining the realism of day-to-day living in a soap town without (1) boring the viewer with realism in a soap that is too slow and uninteresting or (2) attempting to alleviate all the boredom of everyday life by becoming so melodramatic that the realism itself is shattered. The latter often happens, for instance, when writers, responding to their producers' please to geg the ratings up with more story interest, start making all the available females in their stories pregnant, or decide to threaten the female heroine with a murder rap. But these tactics would never be employed by the best soap writers. There are other things that superior soap writers just won't do. They do not brush off the arduous but necessary process of recap work by just inserting excerpts of speeches used in the preceding episode. ("Recap" is when David Stewart on Tuesday must tell Bob Hughes that Ellen got angry with Lisa on Monday, for the benefit of viewers who missed the show.) "You have to get around recap," says Henry Slesar. "It should always be given a new dramatic form so that you're not throwing it in the audience's face that a character is simply saying something to convey information. It has to be logical for a character to be saying such-and-such a thing at such-and-such a time." But even the most talented serial authors sometimes find themselves getting more involved with words than with characters. It just happens because of the continual pressure of voluminous script writing. Cliche's slip through. Actors are given wooden dialogue. Most writers realize this tendency toward occasional lapse ("I sometimes cringe when I watch a show wrote," says Henry Slesar) and don't mind that actors often rewrite their lines to make them easier to say. If the actors didn't do this, some scenes would collapse in cardboard dialogue. On the ninety-minute opening episode of "How to Survive a Marriage," the main characters of Chris and Larry Kirby were throwing some pretty dreadful cliche's back and forth. It marred a good show and seemed strangely out of place with the general tone of dramatic creativity. Finally, the producer Allen Potter, cleared up the mystery when he said that none of the actors on "How to Survive a Marriage" were permitted to rewrite the lines of the author, Anne Howard Bailey. "She's just too fine and bright a writer," he said. How are soap writers organized? Each of the fourteen daytime serials normally has only one headwriter -- although in a few instances there are two co-headwriters -- who is responsible for the whole story on his soap: from the general directions that it takes over a long period, to all the little details of day-to-day plotting. Every three to six months he submits to the producers and sponsors a story projection, some ten to thirty pages of intensive outlines of where a story is going. This is where the fun starts. The producer, assistant producer, sponsor, and advertising-agency representatives begin to pick at the poor devil's ideas like nervous birds attacking seed. Bruce Cox, who is Procter and Gamble's representative for "The Guiding Light" for Compton Advertising, says, "When we get the writer's story projection, we lock ourselves in a hotel room for days at a time and begin to go over every little detail of the writer's story projection with the writer -- what will work, what looks questionable. If someone objects to a story-line, the writer always has a chance to defend himself because he's right there. It's exhausting for him and for us." Irna Phillips used to describe these sessions with the executives as free-for-alls. After a second or possibly third draft, a story projection is finally approved. Then the writer begins to follow the outline, according to his own creative instincts, in his daily scripts. Says Henry Slesar, "The whole process of working with story projection is like looking down a long tunnel. As you drive through the tunnel you begin to see more detail." The head writer may write the scripts himself, or employ his own dialogue writers to convert his script breakdowns (Short synopses of what characters do and say on a particular day) into actual scenes with dialogue. The normal custom is for a head writer to write some of the scripts himself, and for his dialogue writer (or writers) to do the rest. The more subwriters a head writer employs, the less money he makes himself, for he is paid a set wage and then must pay his writers out of his own pocket.
The authors of the daytime serials have the largest audiences in the world. Every week an estimated fifty million viewers are exposed to the wares of a select handful of daytime scribes. Nighttime television writers don't have anywhere near the same kind of exposure; their scripts are only aired once a week, and many more nighttime writers are hired to work on a single series. The daytime writer, however, must pay dearly for the prestige of having such an enormous following. "It's sort of a cross between being an F. Scott Fitzgerald and an Olympic athlete," says Agnes Nixon, who has had nearly twenty-five years' experience writing serials and currently heads "All My Children." "It's grueling work. You know you have to finish a certain amount of writing every day, so you must always be in tip-top physical shape. You can't stay up late or let yourself get run-down. I remember during the fifties there was a period when I was only doing one-shot live TV plays, like "Philco", and I could force the creativity by abusing my body -- drinking a lot of black coffee, working till all hours of the night. But when you write a daytime serial you don't dare do that; you wouldn't be in any kind of condition to write tomorrow's show." Since soap writers must produce their shows on a daily basis -- and so much of their time becomes absorbed in the creative process -- it is not uncommon for some of them to use their own lives as models for their stories. George Reinholt said very recently, "You know, I always had the strangest feeling that the story of Steve Frame has something to do with Philadelphia, where I grew up. Maybe it's Frame's misguided sense of class status." What Reinholt didn't realize was that Agnes Nixon, who created his story on "Another World," is a native of Philadelphia herself. Today, Steven Frame is being handled by Harding Lemay with subtle touches and changes that derive from Mr. Lemay's background. "When I was seventeen," says Mr. Lemay, "I ran away from home. I came from a poor family. When I started writing "Another World" two years ago, I discovered that Steven had almost no background at all -- he was sort of a mystery. I started giving him a past very much like my own. I decided he had run away from his home on a farm when he was just a boy and that many of his difficulties today arise from having never been properly understood when he was younger." Interestingly enough, Alice (Jacquie Courtney) now talks a great deal about needing to understand Steven better. Just before her recent death, Irna Phillips gave a rare insight in the the development of a certain character on "As the World Turns." In her characteristically raspy voice, Miss Phillips said, "Everyone asks me how I got the idea for Kim Reynolds on the show, because she certainly is an unusual character. She's really me -- at a much younger age. She's fiercely independent, as I was, and she won't settle for second best. She looks in the mirror and refers to herself as 'The lady in the mirror.' Well, that was her other self, which no one knows about: the true me, the person that I always hid from the world. She's having a child out of wedlock, which will only be hers. I adopted two children -- Kathy and Tommy -- without having a husband. We're both the same. And she's going to have that child to prove that a woman can do it alone." (Unfortunately, Kim never did. During the character's pregnancy, so many viewers wrote in disapproving of what she was doing that the producers decided to have Kim lose the baby. Even so, the character of Kim, played by beautiful Kathryn Hays, is probably the most poignant one Miss Phillips ever created for her daytime audiences.) For genuine impact on their audiences, writers of daytime serials must take seriously the parallels between real life and the fictional stories they are creating. Otherwise, with the mounting pressure of having to create episodes week after week, daytime stories become unbelievable, full of worn-out cliches'. However, one woman who has been writing serials for many years carries her concern for realism on her shows perhaps a bit too far. She calls her friends constantly to find out the intimate details of their lives -- all the ins and outs of how they felt while they were bedridden with an illness, the pain of childbirth, what might have caused the depression they were going through. This woman's characteristic line: "Oh, isn't life so like the serials?" Soap writing is by its very nature highly specialized. A typical head writer not only must invent story situations that should keep the audience enthralled, he must also worry about actors' guarantees and vacation periods. "It often becomes a problem of sheer logistics," says Henry Slesar, who writes "The Edge of Night". For example, in the middle of a heated quarrel between two rivals in a story, one of the actresses might suddenly decide to exercise an "out" option in her contract in order to do stock in Buffalo. Then the poor writer has to lose sleep in figuring out a logical way of sending one of the rivals out of town without interrupting story continuity. "As the World Turns" writers were always thinking of new places to send Penny while Rosemary Prinz was in and out of the show. But a greater difficulty is a purely creative one: maintaining the realism of day-to-day living in a soap town without (1) boring the viewer with realism in a soap that is too slow and uninteresting or (2) attempting to alleviate all the boredom of everyday life by becoming so melodramatic that the realism itself is shattered. The latter often happens, for instance, when writers, responding to their producers' please to geg the ratings up with more story interest, start making all the available females in their stories pregnant, or decide to threaten the female heroine with a murder rap. But these tactics would never be employed by the best soap writers. There are other things that superior soap writers just won't do. They do not brush off the arduous but necessary process of recap work by just inserting excerpts of speeches used in the preceding episode. ("Recap" is when David Stewart on Tuesday must tell Bob Hughes that Ellen got angry with Lisa on Monday, for the benefit of viewers who missed the show.) "You have to get around recap," says Henry Slesar. "It should always be given a new dramatic form so that you're not throwing it in the audience's face that a character is simply saying something to convey information. It has to be logical for a character to be saying such-and-such a thing at such-and-such a time." But even the most talented serial authors sometimes find themselves getting more involved with words than with characters. It just happens because of the continual pressure of voluminous script writing. Cliche's slip through. Actors are given wooden dialogue. Most writers realize this tendency toward occasional lapse ("I sometimes cringe when I watch a show wrote," says Henry Slesar) and don't mind that actors often rewrite their lines to make them easier to say. If the actors didn't do this, some scenes would collapse in cardboard dialogue. On the ninety-minute opening episode of "How to Survive a Marriage," the main characters of Chris and Larry Kirby were throwing some pretty dreadful cliche's back and forth. It marred a good show and seemed strangely out of place with the general tone of dramatic creativity. Finally, the producer Allen Potter, cleared up the mystery when he said that none of the actors on "How to Survive a Marriage" were permitted to rewrite the lines of the author, Anne Howard Bailey. "She's just too fine and bright a writer," he said. How are soap writers organized? Each of the fourteen daytime serials normally has only one headwriter -- although in a few instances there are two co-headwriters -- who is responsible for the whole story on his soap: from the general directions that it takes over a long period, to all the little details of day-to-day plotting. Every three to six months he submits to the producers and sponsors a story projection, some ten to thirty pages of intensive outlines of where a story is going. This is where the fun starts. The producer, assistant producer, sponsor, and advertising-agency representatives begin to pick at the poor devil's ideas like nervous birds attacking seed. Bruce Cox, who is Procter and Gamble's representative for "The Guiding Light" for Compton Advertising, says, "When we get the writer's story projection, we lock ourselves in a hotel room for days at a time and begin to go over every little detail of the writer's story projection with the writer -- what will work, what looks questionable. If someone objects to a story-line, the writer always has a chance to defend himself because he's right there. It's exhausting for him and for us." Irna Phillips used to describe these sessions with the executives as free-for-alls. After a second or possibly third draft, a story projection is finally approved. Then the writer begins to follow the outline, according to his own creative instincts, in his daily scripts. Says Henry Slesar, "The whole process of working with story projection is like looking down a long tunnel. As you drive through the tunnel you begin to see more detail." The head writer may write the scripts himself, or employ his own dialogue writers to convert his script breakdowns (Short synopses of what characters do and say on a particular day) into actual scenes with dialogue. The normal custom is for a head writer to write some of the scripts himself, and for his dialogue writer (or writers) to do the rest. The more subwriters a head writer employs, the less money he makes himself, for he is paid a set wage and then must pay his writers out of his own pocket.