Post by jag11 on May 7, 2009 6:28:45 GMT -5
It was a dark and windy night. The leaves trembled on the trees, the front door mysteriously opened, spooky music filled the room, and a body lay face down in the living room, wedged between the sofa and the coffee table, bullet wound to the back.
"Uh oh! I got blood on the couch," says the pretty corpse, suddenly coming to life. CUT!
The couch cushion is flipped, the scene continues.
"Wait, wait. That's the unloaded gun, right?" asks a prop guy. CUT!
"Cue the legs," director Steven Williford yells, snapping his fingers and pointing to the extra with the hot gams.
"Cue the breasts," an actor jokes. "That's what I would say if I was in charge."
CUT!
Betrayed lovers, angry glances, "who's your daddy' dialogue - it's just part of the daily grind at "All My Children," one of New York's longest-running soap operas. The details of this murderous scene are under wraps until May sweeps, though you can probably guess the general idea. Here at the ABC Studios in Manhattan, there will be blood, pistols and sex, and that's all before lunch.
Soap operas are the great American television legacy of evil twins, disfiguring car accidents, portals to hell, secret trysts that yield even more secret children and characters who repeatedly perish but somehow always come back. Yet "All My Children' finds itself as one of the last of a dying breed. This month, "Guiding Light," a show that began on radio 72 years ago, announced its final show would air in September. Despite recent attempts to freshen the show's look, including new shaky hand-held camera taping, ratings dropped 21% between women aged 19-49.
Other soaps - "Another World" "Santa Barbara" and "Passions" - have shuttered recently as well.
"It's been happening for years," says a source on the set of "Guiding Light," which films at CBS Studios in Manhattan. "We've seen a steady decline in ratings annually. Sitting down for an hour to watch something is a real investment in time that people aren't willing to make."
The genre began as 15-minute radio spots that aired during the Great Depression as a way to sell soap to housewives. The world was a different place - 63% of women stayed home - and the programs functioned as background for a day of cooking, cleaning and child rearing.
Even as the country suffers from a new Great Recession, however, the audience isn't staying at home. These days, 60% of women (68 million over the age of twenty) work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From the soap opera peak in 1981, when 30 million people watched Luke and Laura get hitched on "General Hospital," the audience has dwindled to less than 5 million for the most popular soaps. Even those viewers at home have drifted away to talk shows and reality programming.
Still, "All My Children," which premiered 39 years ago from the fictional Philadelphia suburb of Pine Valley, continues to film at a breakneck pace, churning through 90 pages of dialogue each day. One episode, shot on any of 150 different sets, averages 20 characters and 45 different music cues. A team of 10 writers, four directors and six producers make up the show's permanent production staff, scripting and directing 250 new episodes to air five days a week year-round. The show has been a launching pad for actors from Julianne Moore to Taye Diggs, Sarah Michelle Geller to Josh Duhamel. Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos famously met working on the program.
David Zyla, a soap dressing veteran who spent a year at "General Hospital" and two at "Port Charles" before settling in to the "All My Children" closet five years ago, handles wardrobe.
"Think about what goes in to dressing yourself everyday and times it by about 30. On a good day," he says. "Uh, maybe it's 50."
The items that get the most mileage? The hospital gowns.
"Super tight fitting hospital gowns, altered within an inch of their lives," he says. "Only in Pine Valley."
As in many industries, the mood on sets is somber these days - wondering what technological changes and the economy will wrought. But while the cost of daily, daytime soaps has scared off some producers, it isn't like the genre itself is dying. There are still evening soaps like "Desperate Housewives" and "Gossip Girl," and Lynn Leahey, editorial director of Soap Opera Digest, thinks daytime programs will go back to the future - doing short episodes for the Internet and cellphones, like the old 15-minute radio shows.
Even if more shows die, meanwhile, to have run virtually non-stop for a half-century or more is an amazing accomplishment, says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
"Even a thingyensian novel ended after 1,000 pages," Thompson says. "The thing about the soap opera that nothing else did is that you could tell a story in real-time that went on, for all intents and purposes, forever."
Behind the scenes of "Children," there's a survivor's mantra, a confidence that eventually viewers will return to the soaps that are left, and things really can go on forever. That's certainly the attitude of "Children's" biggest star - probably the biggest star in all of soaps - Susan Lucci, who was in the very first episode as a selfish 15-year-old ingenue.
"I know that some don't speak highly of the future of the medium," Lucci says in between love affairs, murders and double-crosses. "And I am going to quote that famous quote - 'the rumors of my demise are highly overrated.'"
www.nypost.com/seven/05032009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_audacity_of_soaps_167390.htm?&page=1
"Uh oh! I got blood on the couch," says the pretty corpse, suddenly coming to life. CUT!
The couch cushion is flipped, the scene continues.
"Wait, wait. That's the unloaded gun, right?" asks a prop guy. CUT!
"Cue the legs," director Steven Williford yells, snapping his fingers and pointing to the extra with the hot gams.
"Cue the breasts," an actor jokes. "That's what I would say if I was in charge."
CUT!
Betrayed lovers, angry glances, "who's your daddy' dialogue - it's just part of the daily grind at "All My Children," one of New York's longest-running soap operas. The details of this murderous scene are under wraps until May sweeps, though you can probably guess the general idea. Here at the ABC Studios in Manhattan, there will be blood, pistols and sex, and that's all before lunch.
Soap operas are the great American television legacy of evil twins, disfiguring car accidents, portals to hell, secret trysts that yield even more secret children and characters who repeatedly perish but somehow always come back. Yet "All My Children' finds itself as one of the last of a dying breed. This month, "Guiding Light," a show that began on radio 72 years ago, announced its final show would air in September. Despite recent attempts to freshen the show's look, including new shaky hand-held camera taping, ratings dropped 21% between women aged 19-49.
Other soaps - "Another World" "Santa Barbara" and "Passions" - have shuttered recently as well.
"It's been happening for years," says a source on the set of "Guiding Light," which films at CBS Studios in Manhattan. "We've seen a steady decline in ratings annually. Sitting down for an hour to watch something is a real investment in time that people aren't willing to make."
The genre began as 15-minute radio spots that aired during the Great Depression as a way to sell soap to housewives. The world was a different place - 63% of women stayed home - and the programs functioned as background for a day of cooking, cleaning and child rearing.
Even as the country suffers from a new Great Recession, however, the audience isn't staying at home. These days, 60% of women (68 million over the age of twenty) work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From the soap opera peak in 1981, when 30 million people watched Luke and Laura get hitched on "General Hospital," the audience has dwindled to less than 5 million for the most popular soaps. Even those viewers at home have drifted away to talk shows and reality programming.
Still, "All My Children," which premiered 39 years ago from the fictional Philadelphia suburb of Pine Valley, continues to film at a breakneck pace, churning through 90 pages of dialogue each day. One episode, shot on any of 150 different sets, averages 20 characters and 45 different music cues. A team of 10 writers, four directors and six producers make up the show's permanent production staff, scripting and directing 250 new episodes to air five days a week year-round. The show has been a launching pad for actors from Julianne Moore to Taye Diggs, Sarah Michelle Geller to Josh Duhamel. Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos famously met working on the program.
David Zyla, a soap dressing veteran who spent a year at "General Hospital" and two at "Port Charles" before settling in to the "All My Children" closet five years ago, handles wardrobe.
"Think about what goes in to dressing yourself everyday and times it by about 30. On a good day," he says. "Uh, maybe it's 50."
The items that get the most mileage? The hospital gowns.
"Super tight fitting hospital gowns, altered within an inch of their lives," he says. "Only in Pine Valley."
As in many industries, the mood on sets is somber these days - wondering what technological changes and the economy will wrought. But while the cost of daily, daytime soaps has scared off some producers, it isn't like the genre itself is dying. There are still evening soaps like "Desperate Housewives" and "Gossip Girl," and Lynn Leahey, editorial director of Soap Opera Digest, thinks daytime programs will go back to the future - doing short episodes for the Internet and cellphones, like the old 15-minute radio shows.
Even if more shows die, meanwhile, to have run virtually non-stop for a half-century or more is an amazing accomplishment, says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
"Even a thingyensian novel ended after 1,000 pages," Thompson says. "The thing about the soap opera that nothing else did is that you could tell a story in real-time that went on, for all intents and purposes, forever."
Behind the scenes of "Children," there's a survivor's mantra, a confidence that eventually viewers will return to the soaps that are left, and things really can go on forever. That's certainly the attitude of "Children's" biggest star - probably the biggest star in all of soaps - Susan Lucci, who was in the very first episode as a selfish 15-year-old ingenue.
"I know that some don't speak highly of the future of the medium," Lucci says in between love affairs, murders and double-crosses. "And I am going to quote that famous quote - 'the rumors of my demise are highly overrated.'"
www.nypost.com/seven/05032009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_audacity_of_soaps_167390.htm?&page=1