We’re coming to the fourth part of my interview with Bridget
Dobson. If you have missed the previous parts, you can read them by
clicking here. Finally we have come to SANTA BARBARA. As Bridget
Dobson recalls, “NBC-TV called to ask if we were
to own a show, if we were to be in complete charge of every creative aspect of
a show, from sets and costumes and hairstyles and music to every minute detail
of the production, acting and writing, would we be willing to work again?
Nobody in history had ever been asked this question. Not before and not
since. We were being offered total creative control of an hour a day television
drama five days a week.” Ms. Dobson is about to tell us how SB was born,
how they convinced Dame Judith Anderson to star on SB and everything about the
birth of a series that has made worldwide television’s history. Did you know that one
of the four SB families was not part of the Dobsons’ original idea? Reading
this interview is the only way to find out which family I’m talking about…
Enjoy!
We finally come to the “mountain to climb”. When you
and your husband conceived the idea of SB, what was your starting point – a
particular character? A certain plot? How was Santa Barbara born?
The mountain was indeed in front of us, once the
contract with NBC-TV was signed. At that
point in time, I had started to outline a novel, which Warner Books was
interested in publishing, but we knew we couldn't do both the tv serial and the
book. It was an easy decision to use the
basic structure of the book, two somewhat competitive (though quite different)
families and an ethnic (Mexican) family, in the soap. The characters seemed
indigenous to Santa Barbara: they were the people we saw in a daily way, and
they were seemingly as one with the sunshine, the ocean, the architecture, the
air. They belonged to the land as much
as the land belonged to them.
The challenge was to make the characters fascinating
(each in his own right) and the stories riveting. To strengthen our own experience in drama, we
turned to great examples of literature and theater. Day after day, little by
little, we scoured and devoured most, if not all, of Shakespeare, Greek
tragedy, early cinema, Tennessee Williams, among many others. We gradually eschewed the examples of
“typical” families we had experienced on other soaps. Relationships were never simple, always
complicated by all the rivulets of emotion that infiltrate much of classic
literature. Inundated, we made background notes on our favorite dramatic and
psychological themes. With this huge and intense spectrum of dramatic precedent
which had survived through the ages, with the further understanding (reading
Freud, Jung, and more) that these themes were still being repeated in every
modern culture on this planet (not to mention our own lives), we began to mold
our own drama around the Capwells, the Lockridges, and the Andrades.
Dame Judith Anderson, a diminutive woman of towering
...even booming...personal strength, was a small but important part of the
social fabric of our lives at the time.
We had attended a few of the same parties, barely spoken a few words to
her. She was also a neighbour. We jogged
past her house every day. Jerry and I
had seen her performances in “Medea” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, and we, like
most people, were utterly awed. Early on, before the show was fully formed, we
knew we wanted to have her be part of SB.
But how dare we? It was a dream, that's
all, a wish, a fantasy. This woman had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth for her
abilities as an actress. She was
universally revered. Not only was the thought verboten, it was presumptuous
beyond belief. Inviting her to be part of our regular cast would be like
inviting Hoover Dam to dance. And so it
began.....
I felt a similar emotion when I dared to ask you for an
interview, except that I am a humble fan. How did you manage to convince her to
accept the role?
Fearful - indeed, practically certain - of rejection,
Jerry and I flipped a coin to see who would be the unlucky one to visit “DJ”
(Dame Judith) and speak to her about being a regular on our show. I won.
Jerry had to go to her house. He
was gone a very long time. Hours and hours.
When he came home, his left hand was bleeding heavily and looked like a
ball of ground beef. He explained that
DJ's much adored little dog had spent the entire interview on Jerry's lap,
chewing on his flesh. He didn't complain
-not so much as a grimace or groan, and he didn't throw the little bitch out
the window, which may have been his inclination - because he didn't want to do
anything to irritate DJ. He was
successful. Though he had a
(temporarily) non-functioning left hand, with literally dozens of puncture
wounds, and blood stained clothes, we had our first cast member. The only thing
Jerry had to promise her, creatively, was that she could "still be
sexy" and she could carry a riding crop (she wanted a whip, but he talked
her out of it) at all times.
Next problem: her contract. DJ had no agent or lawyer. Jerry and I never negotiated contracts (other
than our own). So she negotiated on her
own behalf with our attorney in NY. (Our
attorney was very impressed that this senior citizen - she lied about her age,
said she was 74 - was tough and astute in every conversation he had with her.)
They came to terms in a few weeks. Except for one major detail, which was a
deal-breaker: she wanted the services,
in her own home, one day per week, of the Dobson's full-time maid. Take it or leave it.
In addition to the riding crop, she was allowed to
change the name of her character, from Birdie to Minx, maybe not everybody
knows that. However, casting the patriarch of the Capwells was more
complicated. Lloyd Bochner, your first choice, suffered a heart attack a few
days after the first shooting. So he was replaced by Peter M. Richman, then
briefly by Paul Burke, later by Charles
Bateman and finally by Jed Allan. Why was it so difficult to find the right CC
Capwell?
There are frequent casting complications on daytime
dramas. Actors become sick or pregnant
or, perhaps, they aren't as good as they were first thought to be. Sometimes an actor can't handle the volume of
memorization required on a soap. It is
not unusual - certainly not unheard of - to make more than one change in the
casting. Four different actors is not what anyone wants, but considering health
problems, and the need to make rapid changes, and the outsized demands of a
daily hour-long drama, I am not surprised.
At the beginning the show consisted of a
representative microcosm – the wealthy Capwells, the eccentric Lockridges, the
Mexican Andrades and, from the middle class, the Perkins. In addition, to
balance the tension linked to the murder of Channing Junior, there were the
young players (Ted, Laken, Danny and Jade) off to Hollywood, and also the
pungent irony of Minx. Soon the Perkins, the Andrades and Minx began to appear
less often. Was that just the normal adjustment of a new show or were there
other reasons?
 |
| The Andrades |
Successfully writing a soap requires constant
adjustments. It would be a very bad idea
to plan a show in your office, not watch the show, and follow your blueprint to
the letter. Instead, you watch and listen, and you are guided by your
instincts. What's working? What isn't working? Should the emphasis be here or there? By fine tuning as you go along, you minimize
“mistakes” and maximize the stories and characters that are creating the best
drama. This may happen more often on a
new show, but it also happens, in a daily way, on an established show. The writers who are emotionally tuned to the
progress of the show, and who are most willing to adjust when the emotions are
even slightly off kilter, are the most
successful writers; they are the ones who learn as they go along. Adjustments
are normal; without them, a show will falter and fail. Having said that, television writers are in a
business, and sometimes politics seem to transcend the drama of the
moment. For example, a network executive
may plead for, even insist on, a character or a storyline being included. This
situation is also normal, and it can become a kind of wrestling match. If the writer has enough experience to know
that a “trial run” of the character or the story won't “kill” the show and will
placate the executive, then it may be included, for a short period of
time. If
it works, hooray. If it doesn't,
with luck, the executive will learn from his errors. I have yet to live long enough to see that
happen. But I advance it to you as a hypothetical theory.
And here “subtext speaks louder than text”. When you
wrote the stories, how did you decide on the right balance between drama and
humor? Are there unwritten rules?
 |
| Lane Davies |
I don't think there is a formula for the relationship
of humor to drama. We learned the “serious drama” kind of soap writing
primarily from P&G (though I don't
want to downplay the importance of studying creative writing at Stanford). It had been well-established through the
years on all the daytime shows. But it
felt a little somber, a little drab. Our
instincts were to trust our instincts: we felt the audience might be more receptive, as we were, to drama laced
with humor. And though we had
experimented with humor earlier, on GL
and on ATWT (P&G was cautious of
it at first, then accepting, then trusting), we had carte blanche to use it on SB.
Almost parenthetically, I need to say that humor is, quite
naturally, a HUGE part of Jerry’s personality, our marriage, and our lifestyle.
It is part of the air we breathe. SB, by extension, was known for its
humor. My paintings, according to more
than one critic, look like Santa Barbara.
It's something that exists within each of us. It can’t be added to or subtracted from
either one of us. We're blessed - or,
more accurately, stuck - with it.
Back to the soap opera: there can be humor both in plot and in
character. In my opinion, every
character should have humorous qualities, but it always needs to be integrated
with and intrinsic to the character. You wouldn't fall in love with each
character, know what thrills and pains each character, if the tenor of humor
were the same for each. On SB, Mason's was
the darkest, the most intellectual, the driest humor and it stemmed, in part,
from pain he carried within. Though he may have joked about it, you know by his
wry words that Mason was competitive with, or felt diminished by, CC. Humor can intensify pathos. When he was
inebriated, speaking to a fish, muttering “Alas, poor Yorick”, did you want
to laugh or cry or both? Did each
emotion intensify the other? It did for
me, both writing it and watching it, until I almost thought I'd explode. Thus, the arrogance of instinct and how it
can (with luck) blindside an audience.
Shakespeare’s Yorick, like the fish, has never had a
voice, he speaks through the voices of others. He is the fool, the voice of a
different truth: MEMENTO MORI. This leads me to the function that I believe
Mason has on the show: I believe that Mason personifies the Greek chorus. He
was a much beloved character while being evil sometimes. In the Greek tragedy
chorus has a precise function: to express the tragic poet’s feelings. But it
expresses the feelings of the people, too, of the audience, to make them feel themselves
as part of the story. I can see all of this in Mason’s character. Maybe we
forgive Mason because we are Mason. Could it be so?
The character Mason was created to function as a kind
of Greek chorus. You are quite
right. It is the term we used when the
show was first being conceptually delineated, long before his character was
developed and melded into the storyline. And though we hoped the audience identified
closely with him, we wished that the audience would also identify with each of
the other characters. I agree that Mason
had a unique perspective, sometimes tragic, sometimes ironic, sometimes
comedic. To me, he was the most
fascinating of all.
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