Turning No More

April 2, 1956 - September 17, 2010

The elder statesman of the daytime soaps will have its plug pulled tomorrow, after a 54 year run. It became the longest running fictional program on television after its sister soap, Guiding Light, left the air last year (I wrote about that demise here). It is the last survivor of the Proctor and Gamble Company, which was once the premier provider of daytime drama, having given the genre its name and having produced more than 20 series, but which has systematically divested itself of its productions over the past decade and more. Well, who could blame them? It costs about 50 million dollars a year to produce a one-hour daytime soap, with no rerun or DVD sales potential to offset costs; a game show or talk show is budgeted at half that amount. The soaps have seen a steady decline of their audiences for decades, beginning with the movement of housewives out of the home and into the workforce. It's also thought that the audience erosion was hastened by, believe it or not, the O.J. Simpson trial in the early 90s. The trial was carried live by all the broadcast networks and preempted daytime programming for weeks on end. Once the trial was over, the viewers never returned to their old viewing habits.

But back to As The World Turns, or ATWT, as we soap scum call it. The series was widely considered the most old-fashioned of the current soaps, and with some reason. It made its reputation during the period when all the daytime dramas were filled with endless talk and very little action, with melodrama-soaked organ music, and actors who were far from starry. But ATWT deserves some respect, and it's going to get some in these pages.

The show can claim a number of important firsts, beginning with its debut on April 2, 1956. It was the first soap opera to run a full 30 minutes, beating another P&G production, The Edge of Night, to the punch; the latter show also ran 30 minutes, but premiered 3 hours later, the same afternoon. Why is any of this important? Well, at the time, the daytime dramas were all patterned after the radio soaps, and ran only 15 minutes. The doubling of airtime meant that the stories told on these programs could involve a greater number of characters, rather than the single, usually heroic character around which the earlier, 15 minute shows revolved.

ATWT was a ratings grabber, and within 2 years, had risen to the top of a very crowded field. It remained the #1 soap opera for a whopping 20 years, a record which has since been broken by The Young and the Restless. But considering the sheer numbers of viewers who were watching soap operas during the 60s and 70s, as opposed to the smaller numbers during the 80s and 90s, ATWT must be considered the most watched soap of all time. The show was so successful that, in 1965, it created a prime-time spinoff series, Our Private World, the only daytime soap in history to do so.

At the center of that short-lived evening soap was Eileen Fulton's performance as Lisa Miller Hughes, a character which was also a trend-setter. (She is on the right in the above picture; the woman on the left is Geraldine Fitzgerald). Eileen's role was the first "supervixen," a man-hungry homewrecker who would stop at nothing to achieve her goals. That archetype created by ATWT is the antecedent to Dynasty's Alexis Carrington and All My Children's Erica Kane, and a host of other rich bitches. Fulton has played the iconic role for 50 years.

In 1988, ATWT defied its conservative reputation by presenting the first gay male character in daytime.

The writers were pretty brave to introduce Hank Elliot as a fashion designer whose off-screen lover was dying of AIDS. Other soaps were addressing the AIDS crisis by giving the disease to a heterosexual (usually a woman), so ATWT should be commended for their attempts to depict the disease in more realistic terms (at least as they were observed in the 1980s). The show also tackled the issues of rape and Alzheimer's in a pretty brutal fashion. ATWT can be credited with the first gay male kiss, the result of allowing one of their legacy characters to be revealed as gay (a legacy character is one which has substantial history on the show's canvas; in this case, the gay teen in question was a character who had grown up on the series, and was part of one of the show's core families).

As most soaps can boast, ATWT provided a training ground and a launching pad for a host of well-known stars. Meg Ryan spent three years on the show in the early 80s, an experience she has expunged from her resume. But Julianne Moore, who spent the late 80s playing twins on the show (and winning an Emmy for her efforts), is so proud of her association with ATWT that she made a one-day return to the show this spring. Martin Sheen spent five years with the soap in the late 60s, and Richard Thomas, Parker Posey, James Earl Jones, Marisa Tomei, Ming-Na, Lea Solanga, Mary McDonnell, Thomas Gibson, Dana Delaney, Jason Biggs, Tamara Tunie, Steven Webber, James Van Der Beek, and Courtney Cox all spent time in ATWT's Oakdale.

Perhaps a more impressive item, though, is the woman who remained with the show throughout its 54 year run. I wrote about actress Helen Wagner when she died a few months ago; she achieved a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records as having played the same role longer than any other performer in television history. She uttered the first words spoken on ATWT ("good morning, dear"), and she was performing live on the show when Walter Cronkite cut into the program to announce the assassination of JFK.

It was a tragedy that her death came so close to the ending of ATWT, as the plan was to have her character, matriarch Nancy Hughes, utter the final words of the series.

As The World Turns is going out with a little bit of glory. Though its final episode will air tomorrow, production actually ceased months ago, on Wednesday, June 23rd. Four days after the final scenes were shot, and the sets were dismantled, and the show was officially history, the cast of ATWT swept the Daytime Emmys, winning HALF of the drama performance awards. Obviously, the show was not cancelled for artistic reasons. At the Emmys, there was a very brief salute to the show, but because production had ceased, Proctor & Gamble did not foot the bill to fly their full cast and crew to Vegas to attend the ceremony. As far as they were concerned, this 54-year chapter of their corporate life was over.

The final Emmy tally for As The World Turns can not yet be counted. The past several months of the show will be eligible for Emmy consideration at next year's awards, and it's entirely possible that, though the show will have been long gone, the dynamic writing, directing, and acting the company has delivered in its final months will be recognized with more awards. I would not be surprised if one of those nominations will be for Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction/Set Decoration/Scenic Design, as the production designer for the series (the guy responsible for the "look" of the show) is my college buddy Pat Howe. Pat joined ATWT in time to be nominated for the Emmy in 2000, and has been nominated every year but one ever since (hey Patrick, what did you do wrong in 2003?). He has won the Emmy six out of the past 10 years, a spectacular achievement which, I hope, leads him to bigger and better gigs.

If you've made it this far, you must be wondering what kind of lunatic goes on and on about a soap opera. Well, you're kind of right. But I have an emotional attachment to this particular show which can be traced back to my mother's womb.

My mother was a life-long soap-opera hater; though she spent most of her adult life as a housewife (oops, I mean "domestic engineer"), the last thing she would ever want to do was spend time during the day watching these silly programs. When I became aware of soap operas, in my teens, she would roll her eyes and wonder how an otherwise intelligent kid could be so interested in such claptrap.

But she confessed to me that, for three months, she was a regular viewer of As The World Turns. In April of 1956, she had a toddler at home and a baby on the way, and back then, pregnant ladies were not expected to do much. So, in the later months of her pregnancy, she turned on the TV out of boredom, and watched As The World Turns during its first months on the air. She may even have witnessed Helen Wagner's early morning greeting on the very first episode. In July, once I was born, she flicked off the TV and, figuratively speaking, never turned it on again. But maybe that introduction to soap operas in utero is one of the reasons I will be mourning the death of As The World Turns. Its final episode, #13,858, airs tomorrow.

Wimoweh - Wimobits

Here are a few dead people who fell by the wayside. Time to pick 'em up and give 'em a proper send-off.

Harold Gould

1923-2010

He was certainly one of the most academically educated actors in the field, having earned both a Masters and a PhD in Theatre from Cornell. After his graduation in the early 50s, he taught for a time in Virginia, before relocated to California to teach at UC-Riverside. He took that opportunity to become a professional actor. By the 1960s, his career was up and running, with appearances on the big and small screen. He worked often on television, but had some poor luck with two sitcom pilots. He appeared as Marlo Thomas's father in the 1965 pilot That Girl, but was replaced by Lew Parker when the series was picked up. In 1972, he appeared as Howard Cunningham in the pilot for Happy Days. Initially, ABC did not pick up the series, but the unexpected success of the feature film American Graffiti (starring Ron Howard, who also starred in Happy Days) encouraged the network to run the pilot as an episode of their comedy anthology series, Love, American Style. The show played well, and Happy Days went to series, but Gould had by then made other commitments, and the role was recast with Tom Bosley.

Harold earned five Emmy nominations in his career, several for his work as Rhoda's father on the sitcom of the same name.

He played opposite Katherine Hepburn in the television film Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry, and had a recurring role on Golden Girls for a time. He played Louis B. Meyer in Moviola, for which he was again nominated, and appeared in countless TV episodics over the years. The big screen saw him in The Sting, Silent Movie, Stuart Little, Patch Adams and many others. His Broadway career including plays by Neil Simon, Tom Stoppard, and Jules Feiffer, and he won the Obie for his Off-Broadway performance in Vaclav Havel's The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. He died last Saturday at the age of 86, after a long battle with prostate cancer.

SUZANNE GROSSMAN

1938-2010

She was born in Switzerland, and was never a household name, but she did yeoman's work on stage early in her career. She held her own opposite Robert Preston and Rosemary Harris in the original Broadway production of The Lion in Winter, playing the French princess Alais (did you know Christopher Walken played the young Prince Phillip in that original production?).

She went on to appear in Broadway revivals of Cyrano de Bergerac and Private Lives. She turned her hand to the written word, and adapted several Feydeau farces with writing partner and fellow actor Paxton Whitehead; those adaptations played Broadway, and were also seen at major regional theatres such as the Old Globe and the Mark Taper Forum. She wrote many teleplays, and penned over a hundred episodes of Ryan's Hope. Suzanne died August 19 at the age of 72.

NANCY DOLMAN

1951-2010

This Canadian actress and musical performer was probably best known to American audiences for her recurring role on the 70's sitcom Soap. And for her marriage. In her early life, she appeared in several musicals in Canada, and landed in the Toronto production of Godspell, in which she understudied Gilda Radner. It was in that production that she met Martin Short, who would become her husband in 1980.

Five years later, she retired from the business in order to raise their children. Nancy died from cancer on August 21, about a month shy of her 59th birthday.

Here's a guy whose work, I am ashamed to admit, I did not know, but he deserves a mention as the founder of one of the UK's leading theaters:

Mick Lally

1946-2010

He was one of Ireland's most recognizable natives, appearing for years on an Irish soap called Glenroe. American audiences might know him from appearances in the feature films The Secret of Roan Irish and Circle of Friends. But his biggest contribution was to the stage, where he spent most of his career. In 1975, he was a co-founder of the Druid Theatre Company in Galway, which specializes in native Irish plays. He played the title character in the theater's first production, The Playboy of the Western World, and created the role of Mick Dowd in the world premiere production of Martin McDonagh's A Skull in Connemara. He was also in the world premiere of Brian Friel's Translations. The Druid's cultivation of Irish playwrights such as McDonagh and Friel helped their work become internationally known. Lally died August 31 at the age of 64.

Enough of the actors! Here's a guy who had a hand in some of the best known standards from the mid-20th century:

George David Weiss

1921-2010

He earned a degree in music theory from Julliard before turning his attentions to songwriting back in the 1950s. He provided Elvis Presley with one of his signature tunes, "Can't Help Falling in Love," and did the same for Louis Armstrong with "What a Wonderful World." He took a South African Zulu song from the 20s, and reworked it to become "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (the opening phrase of the song, "Wimoweh, Wimoweh," is roughly translated from the Zulu to mean "I bet I can sell a million copies of this stupid song"). Weiss was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984, which meant they must have forgiven him for his Broadway scores. His biggest stage hit was Mr. Wonderful, starring Sammy Davis, Jr., and he provided the score for the Shirley Jones/Jack Cassidy flop, Maggie Flynn. Most egregiously, he hooked up with a group of folks who thought the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice would make a good musical. It didn't, and the final product, First Impressions (which was actually the novel's working title) remains a footnote in the careers of its stars, Polly Bergen and Hermione Gingold.

Weiss served as president of the Songwriters Guild of America for

almost 20 years, during which time he fought to preserve composers' copyrights in the digital age. He died last month at the age of 89.

Roots and Pods

I'm not sure there are any television impresarios these days, unless you count Dick Wolf, creator of the Law and Order franchise, which I don't. This guy, though, certainly was one:

David Wolper

1928-2010

He turned his knack for sales and chutzpah into a lengthy career as a producer of television and film. He learned early in his career to spot a niche and find product to fill it. He dropped out of college and formed a company which sold old Flash Gordon serials to TV stations in need of filling airtime. His idea to package old movies and sell them to individual television stations created what many of us think of as "the late show."

His career included every aspect of fiction and non-fiction film. In the late 50s, he bought old Russian footage of space exploration, and edited the stuff to become The Race for Space, which snagged an Oscar nomination. He turned Theodore White's Pulitzer-prize winning book The Making of the President 1960 into a TV doc, and won the Emmy. He produced Four Days in November, the first comprehensive documentary regarding the JFK assassination, and won the Oscar for The Hellstrom Chronicle, a documentary about insects. In 1966, he produced the National Geographic special, The World of Jacques-Ives Cousteau, and turned the French oceanographer into an international celebrity.

Wolper's feature films include the first Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and L.A. Confidential, and his sitcoms included Chico and the Man and Welcome Back Kotter. But his most lasting legacy was probably in the mini-series format. Hard to believe today, but for about 10-12 years back in the 70s and 80s, the most important, prestigious events on television were the multi-episode limited series, and Wolper was a pioneer of the genre. The Thorn Birds and North and South were produced by his company, as was the birth mother of the genre, Roots.

In 1977, Wolper turned Alex Haley's family history into a 12-hour television event. ABC was extremely nervous about the project, and had no confidence that a series which chronicled multi-generations of a black family would be a success. Wolper shrewdly peppered his cast with familiar white faces in supporting roles, so Ed Asner (winning an Emmy), Lorne Greene, Robert Reed, Sandy Duncan, and Ralph Waite, among others, were meant to entice white viewers to watch the performances of Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou, John Amos, Richard Roundtree, and Louis Gossett, Jr. (winning an Emmy). The series was a who's who of African-American talent; Leslie Uggams, until then known as a musical performer, delivered a searing dramatic turn:

And no one who saw Roots will ever forget Ben Vereen as Chicken George:

The nervous network execs programmed the series in a very unusual way. By running the entire 12 hours on 8 consecutive nights, ABC hoped to contain any ratings damage this series, dominated by black performances, might do (in a colossal miscalculation, the network scheduled the series to conclude its run before the sweeps period began).

Roots shattered the existing Nielson records, as its word of mouth spread and the ratings rose from night to night. I remember when Roots first aired, and can verify that excitement for the program built, day after day. It was the ultimate water cooler series. Roots earned 36 Emmy nominations and won 9, plus a Peabody. It provided meaty roles for dozens of African-American actors, at a time when such opportunities were non-existent. Perhaps most famously, an unknown drama student from USC was spotted in a college production of Carousel and was invited to read for the series. LeVar Burton's very first professional audition was for Roots; when David Wolper cast the kid in the pivotal role of Kunte Kinte (later called Toby), Burton won an Emmy nomination and launched his career.

Wolper's expertise with massive projects led to his producing the opening and closing ceremonies of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984, for which he won a special Emmy and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He died August 10 from congestive heart disease.

Kevin McCarthy

1914-2010

This well-known character actor got a tough start in life, losing both parents to influenza when he was four. He was separated from his sisters (one of whom, Mary McCarthy, became an influential novelist and critic) and passed around to various relatives, some of whom were abusive. He attended college in Minnesota, where he first stepped onstage in Henry IV, Part I (nervous that he did not understand the language in the play, he was advised that he did not have to make sense of it, "just talk loud"). He moved to New York and began a successful stage career, while becoming a founding member of the Actors Studio. His Broadway credits included the Pultizer-prize winning Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and the musical Winged Victory, as well as other works by Chekhov and O'Neill. He played Biff, the elder, drifter son of Willy Loman, in the original London production of Death of a Salesman, which lead to his recreating the role for the film. He earned an Oscar nomination for his performance.

He had a long career on television, including a stint as the patriarch on the nighttime soap Flamingo Road, and playing opposite Lana Turner in the long-forgotten The Survivors. His numerous film appearances included The Best Man, Mirage, and Kansas City Bomber. As a favor for his friend Montgomery Clift, he made a cameo appearance in The Misfits, opposite Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. He felt the role was too small, finally agreeing to appear if he was paid $100 per word. The role had 29 words.

But it was a single performance in a low-budget science fiction thriller for which he may be best remembered. As the doctor who discovers the secret regarding The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and attempts to warn the world, he became part of a cult phenomenon. Film enthusiasts argue that the movie was an allegory for the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s, while others believe it was meant as a statement regarding the overtaking of the modern world by giant corporations. Kevin always chuckled at such beliefs, maintaining that there were no political sentiments in the film at all, they were just trying to make a good scare film.

They succeeded, and the final moments of the piece, in which McCarthy runs through traffic trying to get people to believe him, has become a classic moment in American film:

Kevin McCarthy died Sept 11 at the age of 96.