[Dark Shadows] Episode 818: The Green Light

[Ubiquitous]

“When I saw myself rising from the dead — with those fangs!”

There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
are, in order of appearance:

?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.

Here we are in mid-August 1969, and we’ve reached that final turning
point — the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.

The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.

Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who weren’t part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldn’t have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.

That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. It’s also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.

So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which we’ll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isn’t the only one in the
lineup, but it’s a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.

Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I don’t know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how far that
gets us.

Let’s start with Dan Curtis — the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. He’d managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering he’d never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.

In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadows’ Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadows’ use.
This was an early example of Dan’s loyalty to the people that he’s
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out there’s a downside.

Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Dan’s
restless ambitions.

So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. We’ll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.

And then, guess what. Dan’s also been working on his — I want to say
“most ambitious project”, but I’ve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, let’s go with that.

Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.

So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.

But here we are, on August 13th, 1969, with an announcement in Variety:
ABC ‘Dark’ Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. “Dark Shadows,” it says, “will be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, show’s
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.”

Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?

Well, there’s another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGM’s Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.

Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the world’s
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the world’s largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.

Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagram’s. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis “Bo” Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didn’t work out that well.

In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorian’s plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.

By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.

Anyway, the reason why I’m telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That “ABC Dark Soaper”
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasn’t clear who
was actually running the studio.

I don’t know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.

Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubrey’s going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.

In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Dan’s vision. Here’s how it’s described in the
1990 book The Dark Shadows Companion:

It took two long, persistent years to find a backer — the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, “Let’s go — what the devil
are we waiting for?” Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.

Yeah. Okay. About that.

James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and he’s
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, “In the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.”

Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called “the soft underbelly of America.”
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator — Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.

He was also the most hated person in the entertainment industry. Like,
really, really hated. I’ve never seen anything like it; I can’t find a
single person willing to say a nice word about him. Even his New York
Times obituary calls him “the smiling cobra”. He was a demanding
workaholic, ruthless and treacherous and impossible to please.

His personal life was apparently notorious, although it’s hard to find
people talking about it in detail. In Time magazine, he said, “I don’t
pretend to be any saint. If anyone wants to indict me for liking pretty
girls, I’m guilty.” So just imagine what you had to do in the early
1960s, for people to criticize what you did with pretty girls. Yikes.

Aubrey was finally deposed in 1965, after the FCC investigated him and
determined that he was taking kickbacks from producers in exchange for
favorable treatment. Apparently, his apartment was paid for by the head
of Filmways, the production company that made The Beverly Hillbillies
and Mister Ed. Another producer with Mafia connections provided Aubrey
with a second chauffeur-driven car, so that he could pursue his after-
hours entertainment without CBS knowing about it. Also, Aubrey’s picks
for the 64-65 season all tanked, so that was the end of him and CBS.

So with that kind of reputation, why would Kerkorian put Aubrey in
charge of MGM? Well, that’s another funny story.

Kirk Kerkorian wasn’t a movie buff; he was a real estate developer. And
MGM had some assets Kerkorian wanted — namely, big expensive movie
studios sitting on prime real estate in Los Angeles and London.
Kerkorian hired Aubrey to close down MGM’s studios, cancel projects,
fire people and sell off the valuable assets.

And it was more than just the real estate. A few months after Aubrey
started, MGM sold off its huge inventory of props, sets and costumes to
a liquidation company. They even leased the stock footage library. They
might as well have posted signs in the windows: Lost Our Lease,
Everything Must Go.

For the next four years, Aubrey produced a slate of lowbrow, low-budget
movies that would keep the company afloat, while it was being carved up
and sold. Under his tenure, MGM withdrew from the MPAA over
disagreements about ratings and “exorbitant dues charges.” Then in
1971, they announced that they were going to build hotels in Las Vegas.
Remember Kerkorian building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand?
They did that instead of making movies.

In 1973, MGM shut down theatrical distribution, and Aubrey resigned,
saying “The job I agreed to undertake has been accomplished.” So that’s
James Aubrey.

Okay, back to Dark Shadows. On February 11th, 1970 — six months after
the first announcement — there was another short piece in Variety:
Theatricalize ABC-TV ‘Dark Shadows’ for MGM. “Previously foreshadowed
plans to make a feature pic version of ABC-TV’s fangy soaper Dark
Shadows have been finalized for release by MGM,” it said. “Production
is scheduled to start in New York in April.”

So this would be the moment that Aubrey looked at the plans and said,
“Let’s go — what the devil are we waiting for?” But it wasn’t because
he believed in Dan’s vision, or “understood the power of the small
screen.” He gave the green light to Dark Shadows because it was cheap,
lowbrow, and filmed entirely on location in upstate New York.

The Lyndhurst mansion in Tarrytown was a beautiful old ruin, which made
a perfect Collinwood. More importantly for Kerkorian and Aubrey, it
wasn’t occupying any valuable Los Angeles real estate.

It’s true that House of Dark Shadows did pretty well at the box office,
which helped MGM turn a profit that year. But the movie didn’t “save”
MGM, as people sometimes say. House of Dark Shadows was part of the
four-year process that turned a movie studio into the world’s biggest
hotel.

Oh, and James Aubrey was the guy who told Dan in 1971 that Night of
Dark Shadows was too long, and he had 24 hours to cut 35 minutes out of
the picture. So much for the power of the small screen.

Now, as I said, I don’t actually know very much about what the Dark
Shadows writers, producers and actors did between the first
announcement in August and the “finalized” plans in February.

Here’s what I know: The shooting script reproduced in The Dark Shadows
Movie Book says “Second Draft Screenplay”, and it’s dated February 24,
1970. Shooting on the film started on March 23rd — not April, as the
Variety article said.

In order to accommodate the cast filming the movie, Dan and the writers
created Parallel Time, an alternate universe where they could clear out
all the characters they needed in Tarrytown. So they moved Barnabas,
Julia, Liz, Roger, Carolyn, Maggie, Willie and David off the canvas for
six weeks, and handed the show to Quentin, Angelique, Cyrus, Sabrina,
Bruno, Amy and a team of short-term fill-in characters. When the
shooting was over, everybody came back to ABC Studio 16, and kept on
making Dark Shadows.

But that’s half a year away, so why am I talking about this now?

Well, there’s a big mystery coming up in the next few months: the
transition from 1897 to the Leviathan storyline.

Right now, here in mid-August, Dark Shadows is about to reach its
absolute peak, both in the ratings and creatively. The 1897 storyline
is almost universally regarded as the best period of the show’s run —
especially in its last few months, when Barnabas, Quentin, Angelique,
Julia, Reverend Trask and Count Petofi are all running circles around
each other, scheming and making plans and being utterly preposterous.
This is a team — these writers, these actors, these producers — who
have finally figured out how to make Dark Shadows.

And then the show falls apart.

In an episode taped on October 29th — the month that the Dark Shadows
film was originally skedded for shooting — Barnabas Collins runs across
two strangers in the woods, who paralyze him and lay him out on an
altar. They perform a curious ritual and hand him a spooky box, and now
Barnabas is evil, and super interested in antiques.

And suddenly there’s this abrupt drop in the quality of the show. You
can actually see it happen in the middle of an episode. Things are
super thrilling and funny and heartbreaking, and then the Leviathans
appear, and everything goes downhill.

A bunch of new characters are introduced who aren’t very appealing. The
amazing kaiju team that made 1897 soar — Barnabas, Julia, Quentin and
Angelique — are split up, distant and suspicious of each other. The
best period of the show suddenly becomes one of the worst periods of
the show.

What could possibly have happened in the fall of 1969 to knock the Dark
Shadows creative team off their game like that?

Oh, right — in the middle of August, they suddenly have to write a
feature film screenplay, plus they have to figure out how they’re going
to get half of the cast off the show by October. Then things get weird
with MGM, and nobody’s sure who’s running the place. The movie gets
delayed, and now the writers have to figure out what to do if half the
cast isn’t leaving for six weeks in October. You can imagine how that
might be kind of a distraction.

There are only three people on the Dark Shadows writing team — Sam
Hall, Gordon Russell and Violet Welles — and they’re doing an insanely
hard job, writing half an hour of witty, action-packed, character-led,
plot-twisty melodrama every day, from now until the foreseeable future.
And finally, this team has clicked — they like each other, and they’re
all heading in the same direction, and they’re producing really good
work. That’s why the show is doing so well.

But then you ask them to write the Dead of Night pilot, and a movie
treatment, and a plan for splitting the cast in two, and then a full
screenplay right away, because we’re skedded for October.

This is why, six months later, they came up with the concept of
Parallel Time. The fantasy of Parallel Time is that everybody has a
double, who can do half of your work.

The upside of Dan’s loyalty is that he gets to work with the people
that he knows and trusts. The downside is that he will run these people
into the ground, and that is exactly what happens.

In a few months, when we leave 1897 and return to the present day, what
we find is a wounded show. It’s the kind of storyline that you get when
everyone is tired and distracted and pulled in several directions. The
Leviathans bring Barnabas to their sacred altar, and everything after
that is an exhausted shrug.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen, so it’s impossible to make plans.
Dark Shadows doesn’t go in much for plans anyway — they’ve gotten this
far by falling downstairs once a day, and coming back up with a script
— but there is a limit, and it is called “when do we have to write half
the cast off the show.” The Dark Shadows that we see in November is
much less sure of itself, and they haven’t even met James Aubrey yet.

It’s not all gloom from here, of course — there are lots of bright
spots in the Leviathan storyline, and when everyone comes back from
shooting the movie, they manage to rally and do some good work. But
we’re going to see what happens when you take an under-resourced team
of lunatics, and push them beyond their limits.

This is the final turning point in the story. Starting this week, Dark
Shadows will never be the same, not that it was ever the same to begin
with.

Tomorrow: War and Peace.


Footnote:

Some of the material about James Aubrey and CBS came from The Columbia
History of American Television, a 2009 book that I highly recommend.
It’s a really smart, well-written account of how television was
invented, how it became popular, and all the sudden leaps and false
starts as it basically took over America and the world. If you’re
interested in how television got to be the way that it is, you should
read this book.


Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:

The boom mic dips into frame as Petofi enters Tate’s cottage.

There’s a lot of studio noise at the beginning of Charity and Beth’s
scene in the drawing room — loud creaks, then a series of dull thuds.

When Tate approaches his door, there’s another loud noise from the
studio.

Something’s wrong with the lights when Petofi talks to Tate about
Quentin’s secret; they perform the scene in shadow.

The first five seconds of Act 3 are silent, then the music cuts in.

When Quentin stands up to answer the door, the camera catches a bit of
the overhead studio lights, and then corrects.

Charity barks, “Don’t you dare to be polite to me, Mr. Fenn-Gibbons!”


Behind the Scenes:

The colorful afghan shows up again today, this time on the couch in
Tate’s cottage. We last saw it early last week, wrapped around Lenore’s
crib at Mrs. Fillmore’s house.

Tomorrow: War and Peace.

[Bill Steele]

There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.

the introduction of Angelique is more than just a new character. What
makes it a turning point is that it marks the "redeeming" of Barnabas,
to make him into a hero -- or at least an antihero. This in response to
female fans falling for him.

[Suzanne Martinez]

Post by Ubiquitous
“When I saw myself rising from the dead — with those fangs!”
There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.
Here we are in mid-August 1969, and we’ve reached that final turning
point — the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.
The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.
Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who weren’t part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldn’t have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.
That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. It’s also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.
So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which we’ll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isn’t the only one in the
lineup, but it’s a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.
Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I don’t know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how far that
gets us.
Let’s start with Dan Curtis — the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. He’d managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering he’d never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.
In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadows’ Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadows’ use.
This was an early example of Dan’s loyalty to the people that he’s
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out there’s a downside.
Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Dan’s
restless ambitions.
So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. We’ll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.
And then, guess what. Dan’s also been working on his — I want to say
“most ambitious project”, but I’ve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, let’s go with that.
Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.
So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.
ABC ‘Dark’ Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. “Dark Shadows,” it says, “will be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, show’s
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.”
Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?
Well, there’s another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGM’s Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.
Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the world’s
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the world’s largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.
Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagram’s. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis “Bo” Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didn’t work out that well.
In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorian’s plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.
By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.
Anyway, the reason why I’m telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That “ABC Dark Soaper”
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasn’t clear who
was actually running the studio.
I don’t know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.
Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubrey’s going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.
In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Dan’s vision. Here’s how it’s described in the
It took two long, persistent years to find a backer — the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, “Let’s go — what the devil
are we waiting for?” Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.
Yeah. Okay. About that.
James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and he’s
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, “In the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.”
Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called “the soft underbelly of America.”
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator — Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.

I’m actually a fan of “The Andy Griffith Show,” at least until it went
to color and did an episode where Andy is bigoted towards gypsies (yes,
“Dark Shadows” was actually a step up from how popular prime-time series
depicted gypsies). But of the lowest common denominator shows you list,
the only one I feel needs some defense is “Green Acres.”

Despite sharing a bloodline with “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Petticoat
Junction,” it was the best of the bunch (a completely different writer,
Jay Sommers, was co-creator, which helped a lot). It was surreal,
sometimes satiric, and often just plain bonkers. Yes, Arnold had lowest
common denominator appeal ala Mr. Ed or the Hillbilly critters. But you
also had people climbing a pole to make phone calls, a plot in which the
citizens of Hooterville revolt and declare Oliver their king (really), a
lead who wears a three piece suit while riding his tractor, and frequent
gags about the credits, which at the time was practically unheard of.
(Two old farmers argue during the opening. One says, “Hold it, we may as
well sit down. Nobody’ll pay attention to until those names stop comin’
down.” Other times the credits would be on the roof and Oliver would
complain about vandals.) And similar madness.

[German Valdez"]

Post by Suzanne Martinez

Post by Ubiquitous
“When I saw myself rising from the dead — with those fangs!”
There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.
Here we are in mid-August 1969, and we’ve reached that final turning
point — the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.
The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.
Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who weren’t part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldn’t have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.
That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. It’s also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.
So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which we’ll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isn’t the only one in the
lineup, but it’s a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.
Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I don’t know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how far that
gets us.
Let’s start with Dan Curtis — the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. He’d managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering he’d never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.
In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadows’ Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadows’ use.
This was an early example of Dan’s loyalty to the people that he’s
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out there’s a downside.
Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Dan’s
restless ambitions.
So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. We’ll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.
And then, guess what. Dan’s also been working on his — I want to say
“most ambitious project”, but I’ve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, let’s go with that.
Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.
So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.
ABC ‘Dark’ Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. “Dark Shadows,” it says, “will be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, show’s
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.”
Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?
Well, there’s another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGM’s Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.
Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the world’s
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the world’s largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.
Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagram’s. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis “Bo” Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didn’t work out that well.
In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorian’s plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.
By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.
Anyway, the reason why I’m telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That “ABC Dark Soaper”
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasn’t clear who
was actually running the studio.
I don’t know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.
Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubrey’s going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.
In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Dan’s vision. Here’s how it’s described in the
It took two long, persistent years to find a backer — the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, “Let’s go — what the devil
are we waiting for?” Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.
Yeah. Okay. About that.
James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and he’s
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, “In the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.”
Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called “the soft underbelly of America.”
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator — Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.

I’m actually a fan of “The Andy Griffith Show,” at least until it went
to color and did an episode where Andy is bigoted towards gypsies (yes,
“Dark Shadows” was actually a step up from how popular prime-time series
depicted gypsies). But of the lowest common denominator shows you list,
the only one I feel needs some defense is “Green Acres.”
Despite sharing a bloodline with “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Petticoat
Junction,” it was the best of the bunch (a completely different writer,
Jay Sommers, was co-creator, which helped a lot). It was surreal,
sometimes satiric, and often just plain bonkers. Yes, Arnold had lowest
common denominator appeal ala Mr. Ed or the Hillbilly critters. But you
also had people climbing a pole to make phone calls, a plot in which the
citizens of Hooterville revolt and declare Oliver their king (really), a
lead who wears a three piece suit while riding his tractor, and frequent
gags about the credits, which at the time was practically unheard of.
(Two old farmers argue during the opening. One says, “Hold it, we may as
well sit down. Nobody’ll pay attention to until those names stop comin’
down.” Other times the credits would be on the roof and Oliver would
complain about vandals.) And similar madness.

Yeah, Green Acres was special. Sweet lunacy.

And let us not forget that Gilligan’s Island has become a cultural icon.
Who has not heard about “a three hour tour”? Or the question “Ginger or
Mary Ann?”

Plus the possibility that we are seeing a sitcom remake of the Sartre
play “Huis Clos”, that they are dead, but they do not know it, and that
Gilligan is the devil that does not allow them to leave the island…

[Angel Bosch]

Post by Suzanne Martinez

Post by Ubiquitous
“When I saw myself rising from the dead — with those fangs!”
There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.
Here we are in mid-August 1969, and we’ve reached that final turning
point — the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.
The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.
Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who weren’t part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldn’t have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.
That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. It’s also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.
So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which we’ll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isn’t the only one in the
lineup, but it’s a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.
Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I don’t know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how far that
gets us.
Let’s start with Dan Curtis — the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. He’d managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering he’d never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.
In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadows’ Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadows’ use.
This was an early example of Dan’s loyalty to the people that he’s
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out there’s a downside.
Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Dan’s
restless ambitions.
So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. We’ll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.
And then, guess what. Dan’s also been working on his — I want to say
“most ambitious project”, but I’ve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, let’s go with that.
Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.
So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.
ABC ‘Dark’ Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. “Dark Shadows,” it says, “will be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, show’s
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.”
Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?
Well, there’s another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGM’s Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.
Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the world’s
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the world’s largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.
Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagram’s. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis “Bo” Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didn’t work out that well.
In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorian’s plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.
By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.
Anyway, the reason why I’m telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That “ABC Dark Soaper”
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasn’t clear who
was actually running the studio.
I don’t know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.
Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubrey’s going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.
In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Dan’s vision. Here’s how it’s described in the
It took two long, persistent years to find a backer — the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, “Let’s go — what the devil
are we waiting for?” Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.
Yeah. Okay. About that.
James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and he’s
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, “In the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.”
Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called “the soft underbelly of America.”
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator — Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.

I’m actually a fan of “The Andy Griffith Show,” at least until it went
to color and did an episode where Andy is bigoted towards gypsies (yes,
“Dark Shadows” was actually a step up from how popular prime-time series
depicted gypsies). But of the lowest common denominator shows you list,
the only one I feel needs some defense is “Green Acres.”
Despite sharing a bloodline with “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Petticoat
Junction,” it was the best of the bunch (a completely different writer,
Jay Sommers, was co-creator, which helped a lot). It was surreal,
sometimes satiric, and often just plain bonkers. Yes, Arnold had lowest
common denominator appeal ala Mr. Ed or the Hillbilly critters. But you
also had people climbing a pole to make phone calls, a plot in which the
citizens of Hooterville revolt and declare Oliver their king (really), a
lead who wears a three piece suit while riding his tractor, and frequent
gags about the credits, which at the time was practically unheard of.
(Two old farmers argue during the opening. One says, “Hold it, we may as
well sit down. Nobody’ll pay attention to until those names stop comin’
down.” Other times the credits would be on the roof and Oliver would
complain about vandals.) And similar madness.

I don’t think I’ve seen Green Acres since I was a little kid, and I didn’t
watch it very much even then. I basically remember the theme song. So I
apologize if I’ve slandered the secretly avant-garde rural sitcom.

I’ve just been reading an excellent book called The Columbia History of
American Television, which I realize now I should have mentioned in a
footnote above. One of the many interesting things that I’ve learned is that
a new head of CBS decided in 1970 that they needed to go for a more urban,
upscale demographic. They cancelled all of the hayseed shows — Mayberry RFD,
The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Gomer Pyle, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction
and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. The B.Hillbillies was actually in 18th
place when the show was cancelled. To replace those shows, they commissioned
All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Sonny and Cher Comedy
Hour.

Meanwhile, NBC was cancelling The Andy Williams Show and The High Chapparal,
and replaced them with Emergency! and Sanford and Son.

Basically, over about two years, the whole TV schedule moved north and east.
No more farms, no more Westerns. Suddenly, everybody was living in
apartments. It’s a remarkable transition.

[Mattew Henry]

Post by Ubiquitous
“When I saw myself rising from the dead — with those fangs!”
There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.
Here we are in mid-August 1969, and we’ve reached that final turning
point — the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.
The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.
Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who weren’t part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldn’t have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.
That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. It’s also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.
So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which we’ll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isn’t the only one in the
lineup, but it’s a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.
Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I don’t know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how far that
gets us.
Let’s start with Dan Curtis — the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. He’d managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering he’d never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.
In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadows’ Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadows’ use.
This was an early example of Dan’s loyalty to the people that he’s
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out there’s a downside.
Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Dan’s
restless ambitions.
So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. We’ll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.
And then, guess what. Dan’s also been working on his — I want to say
“most ambitious project”, but I’ve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, let’s go with that.
Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.
So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.
ABC ‘Dark’ Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. “Dark Shadows,” it says, “will be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, show’s
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.”
Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?
Well, there’s another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGM’s Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.
Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the world’s
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the world’s largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.
Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagram’s. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis “Bo” Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didn’t work out that well.
In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorian’s plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.
By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.
Anyway, the reason why I’m telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That “ABC Dark Soaper”
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasn’t clear who
was actually running the studio.
I don’t know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.
Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubrey’s going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.
In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Dan’s vision. Here’s how it’s described in the
It took two long, persistent years to find a backer — the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, “Let’s go — what the devil
are we waiting for?” Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.
Yeah. Okay. About that.
James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and he’s
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, “In the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.”
Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called “the soft underbelly of America.”
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator — Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.
He was also the most hated person in the entertainment industry. Like,
really, really hated. I’ve never seen anything like it; I can’t find a
single person willing to say a nice word about him. Even his New York
Times obituary calls him “the smiling cobra”. He was a demanding
workaholic, ruthless and treacherous and impossible to please.
His personal life was apparently notorious, although it’s hard to find
people talking about it in detail. In Time magazine, he said, “I don’t
pretend to be any saint. If anyone wants to indict me for liking pretty
girls, I’m guilty.” So just imagine what you had to do in the early
1960s, for people to criticize what you did with pretty girls. Yikes.
Aubrey was finally deposed in 1965, after the FCC investigated him and
determined that he was taking kickbacks from producers in exchange for
favorable treatment. Apparently, his apartment was paid for by the head
of Filmways, the production company that made The Beverly Hillbillies
and Mister Ed. Another producer with Mafia connections provided Aubrey
with a second chauffeur-driven car, so that he could pursue his after-
hours entertainment without CBS knowing about it. Also, Aubrey’s picks
for the 64-65 season all tanked, so that was the end of him and CBS.
So with that kind of reputation, why would Kerkorian put Aubrey in
charge of MGM? Well, that’s another funny story.
Kirk Kerkorian wasn’t a movie buff; he was a real estate developer. And
MGM had some assets Kerkorian wanted — namely, big expensive movie
studios sitting on prime real estate in Los Angeles and London.
Kerkorian hired Aubrey to close down MGM’s studios, cancel projects,
fire people and sell off the valuable assets.
And it was more than just the real estate. A few months after Aubrey
started, MGM sold off its huge inventory of props, sets and costumes to
a liquidation company. They even leased the stock footage library. They
might as well have posted signs in the windows: Lost Our Lease,
Everything Must Go.
For the next four years, Aubrey produced a slate of lowbrow, low-budget
movies that would keep the company afloat, while it was being carved up
and sold. Under his tenure, MGM withdrew from the MPAA over
disagreements about ratings and “exorbitant dues charges.” Then in
1971, they announced that they were going to build hotels in Las Vegas.
Remember Kerkorian building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand?
They did that instead of making movies.
In 1973, MGM shut down theatrical distribution, and Aubrey resigned,
saying “The job I agreed to undertake has been accomplished.” So that’s
James Aubrey.
Okay, back to Dark Shadows. On February 11th, 1970 — six months after
Theatricalize ABC-TV ‘Dark Shadows’ for MGM. “Previously foreshadowed
plans to make a feature pic version of ABC-TV’s fangy soaper Dark
Shadows have been finalized for release by MGM,” it said. “Production
is scheduled to start in New York in April.”
So this would be the moment that Aubrey looked at the plans and said,
“Let’s go — what the devil are we waiting for?” But it wasn’t because
he believed in Dan’s vision, or “understood the power of the small
screen.” He gave the green light to Dark Shadows because it was cheap,
lowbrow, and filmed entirely on location in upstate New York.
The Lyndhurst mansion in Tarrytown was a beautiful old ruin, which made
a perfect Collinwood. More importantly for Kerkorian and Aubrey, it
wasn’t occupying any valuable Los Angeles real estate.
It’s true that House of Dark Shadows did pretty well at the box office,
which helped MGM turn a profit that year. But the movie didn’t “save”
MGM, as people sometimes say. House of Dark Shadows was part of the
four-year process that turned a movie studio into the world’s biggest
hotel.
Oh, and James Aubrey was the guy who told Dan in 1971 that Night of
Dark Shadows was too long, and he had 24 hours to cut 35 minutes out of
the picture. So much for the power of the small screen.
Now, as I said, I don’t actually know very much about what the Dark
Shadows writers, producers and actors did between the first
announcement in August and the “finalized” plans in February.
Here’s what I know: The shooting script reproduced in The Dark Shadows
Movie Book says “Second Draft Screenplay”, and it’s dated February 24,
1970. Shooting on the film started on March 23rd — not April, as the
Variety article said.
In order to accommodate the cast filming the movie, Dan and the writers
created Parallel Time, an alternate universe where they could clear out
all the characters they needed in Tarrytown. So they moved Barnabas,
Julia, Liz, Roger, Carolyn, Maggie, Willie and David off the canvas for
six weeks, and handed the show to Quentin, Angelique, Cyrus, Sabrina,
Bruno, Amy and a team of short-term fill-in characters. When the
shooting was over, everybody came back to ABC Studio 16, and kept on
making Dark Shadows.
But that’s half a year away, so why am I talking about this now?
Well, there’s a big mystery coming up in the next few months: the
transition from 1897 to the Leviathan storyline.
Right now, here in mid-August, Dark Shadows is about to reach its
absolute peak, both in the ratings and creatively. The 1897 storyline
is almost universally regarded as the best period of the show’s run —
especially in its last few months, when Barnabas, Quentin, Angelique,
Julia, Reverend Trask and Count Petofi are all running circles around
each other, scheming and making plans and being utterly preposterous.
This is a team — these writers, these actors, these producers — who
have finally figured out how to make Dark Shadows.
And then the show falls apart.
In an episode taped on October 29th — the month that the Dark Shadows
film was originally skedded for shooting — Barnabas Collins runs across
two strangers in the woods, who paralyze him and lay him out on an
altar. They perform a curious ritual and hand him a spooky box, and now
Barnabas is evil, and super interested in antiques.
And suddenly there’s this abrupt drop in the quality of the show. You
can actually see it happen in the middle of an episode. Things are
super thrilling and funny and heartbreaking, and then the Leviathans
appear, and everything goes downhill.
A bunch of new characters are introduced who aren’t very appealing. The
amazing kaiju team that made 1897 soar — Barnabas, Julia, Quentin and
Angelique — are split up, distant and suspicious of each other. The
best period of the show suddenly becomes one of the worst periods of
the show.
What could possibly have happened in the fall of 1969 to knock the Dark
Shadows creative team off their game like that?
Oh, right — in the middle of August, they suddenly have to write a
feature film screenplay, plus they have to figure out how they’re going
to get half of the cast off the show by October. Then things get weird
with MGM, and nobody’s sure who’s running the place. The movie gets
delayed, and now the writers have to figure out what to do if half the
cast isn’t leaving for six weeks in October. You can imagine how that
might be kind of a distraction.
There are only three people on the Dark Shadows writing team — Sam
Hall, Gordon Russell and Violet Welles — and they’re doing an insanely
hard job, writing half an hour of witty, action-packed, character-led,
plot-twisty melodrama every day, from now until the foreseeable future.
And finally, this team has clicked — they like each other, and they’re
all heading in the same direction, and they’re producing really good
work. That’s why the show is doing so well.
But then you ask them to write the Dead of Night pilot, and a movie
treatment, and a plan for splitting the cast in two, and then a full
screenplay right away, because we’re skedded for October.
This is why, six months later, they came up with the concept of
Parallel Time. The fantasy of Parallel Time is that everybody has a
double, who can do half of your work.
The upside of Dan’s loyalty is that he gets to work with the people
that he knows and trusts. The downside is that he will run these people
into the ground, and that is exactly what happens.
In a few months, when we leave 1897 and return to the present day, what
we find is a wounded show. It’s the kind of storyline that you get when
everyone is tired and distracted and pulled in several directions. The
Leviathans bring Barnabas to their sacred altar, and everything after
that is an exhausted shrug.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen, so it’s impossible to make plans.
Dark Shadows doesn’t go in much for plans anyway — they’ve gotten this
far by falling downstairs once a day, and coming back up with a script
— but there is a limit, and it is called “when do we have to write half
the cast off the show.” The Dark Shadows that we see in November is
much less sure of itself, and they haven’t even met James Aubrey yet.
It’s not all gloom from here, of course — there are lots of bright
spots in the Leviathan storyline, and when everyone comes back from
shooting the movie, they manage to rally and do some good work. But
we’re going to see what happens when you take an under-resourced team
of lunatics, and push them beyond their limits.
This is the final turning point in the story. Starting this week, Dark
Shadows will never be the same, not that it was ever the same to begin
with.
Tomorrow: War and Peace.
Some of the material about James Aubrey and CBS came from The Columbia
History of American Television, a 2009 book that I highly recommend.
It’s a really smart, well-written account of how television was
invented, how it became popular, and all the sudden leaps and false
starts as it basically took over America and the world. If you’re
interested in how television got to be the way that it is, you should
read this book.

I think this is the first thing I’ve read about DARK SHADOWS that really
puts a solid answer to the collapse of DS that occurred around the time
of the Leviathan storyline. Only the external pressures mentioned could
explain such an immediate decline in quality and questionable
storytelling choices.

I’m not a fan of HODS — though I enjoy it more as a “curiosity” than I
do the 1991 revival. But if the movie had to exist, we can only dream of
a scenario where 1897 didn’t end in October of 1969 and Frid, Hall, and
co. went off to make HODS. The timing was perfect, as Barnabas was
believed dead (and his miraculous return was somewhat anticlimactic),
and Selby was carrying the show brilliantly. Judith could have remained
in the off-screen sanitarium, and so on.

If HODS hadn’t happened, I wager DS would have still flamed out — maybe
a year later at best.

[Roberto Marco]

Post by Mattew Henry

Post by Ubiquitous
“When I saw myself rising from the dead — with those fangs!”
There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.
Here we are in mid-August 1969, and we’ve reached that final turning
point — the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.
The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.
Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who weren’t part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldn’t have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.
That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. It’s also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.
So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which we’ll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isn’t the only one in the
lineup, but it’s a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.
Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I don’t know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how far that
gets us.
Let’s start with Dan Curtis — the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. He’d managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering he’d never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.
In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadows’ Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadows’ use.
This was an early example of Dan’s loyalty to the people that he’s
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out there’s a downside.
Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Dan’s
restless ambitions.
So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. We’ll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.
And then, guess what. Dan’s also been working on his — I want to say
“most ambitious project”, but I’ve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, let’s go with that.
Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.
So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.
ABC ‘Dark’ Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. “Dark Shadows,” it says, “will be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, show’s
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.”
Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?
Well, there’s another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGM’s Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.
Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the world’s
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the world’s largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.
Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagram’s. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis “Bo” Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didn’t work out that well.
In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorian’s plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.
By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.
Anyway, the reason why I’m telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That “ABC Dark Soaper”
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasn’t clear who
was actually running the studio.
I don’t know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.
Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubrey’s going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.
In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Dan’s vision. Here’s how it’s described in the
It took two long, persistent years to find a backer — the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, “Let’s go — what the devil
are we waiting for?” Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.
Yeah. Okay. About that.
James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and he’s
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, “In the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.”
Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called “the soft underbelly of America.”
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator — Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.
He was also the most hated person in the entertainment industry. Like,
really, really hated. I’ve never seen anything like it; I can’t find a
single person willing to say a nice word about him. Even his New York
Times obituary calls him “the smiling cobra”. He was a demanding
workaholic, ruthless and treacherous and impossible to please.
His personal life was apparently notorious, although it’s hard to find
people talking about it in detail. In Time magazine, he said, “I don’t
pretend to be any saint. If anyone wants to indict me for liking pretty
girls, I’m guilty.” So just imagine what you had to do in the early
1960s, for people to criticize what you did with pretty girls. Yikes.
Aubrey was finally deposed in 1965, after the FCC investigated him and
determined that he was taking kickbacks from producers in exchange for
favorable treatment. Apparently, his apartment was paid for by the head
of Filmways, the production company that made The Beverly Hillbillies
and Mister Ed. Another producer with Mafia connections provided Aubrey
with a second chauffeur-driven car, so that he could pursue his after-
hours entertainment without CBS knowing about it. Also, Aubrey’s picks
for the 64-65 season all tanked, so that was the end of him and CBS.
So with that kind of reputation, why would Kerkorian put Aubrey in
charge of MGM? Well, that’s another funny story.
Kirk Kerkorian wasn’t a movie buff; he was a real estate developer. And
MGM had some assets Kerkorian wanted — namely, big expensive movie
studios sitting on prime real estate in Los Angeles and London.
Kerkorian hired Aubrey to close down MGM’s studios, cancel projects,
fire people and sell off the valuable assets.
And it was more than just the real estate. A few months after Aubrey
started, MGM sold off its huge inventory of props, sets and costumes to
a liquidation company. They even leased the stock footage library. They
might as well have posted signs in the windows: Lost Our Lease,
Everything Must Go.
For the next four years, Aubrey produced a slate of lowbrow, low-budget
movies that would keep the company afloat, while it was being carved up
and sold. Under his tenure, MGM withdrew from the MPAA over
disagreements about ratings and “exorbitant dues charges.” Then in
1971, they announced that they were going to build hotels in Las Vegas.
Remember Kerkorian building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand?
They did that instead of making movies.
In 1973, MGM shut down theatrical distribution, and Aubrey resigned,
saying “The job I agreed to undertake has been accomplished.” So that’s
James Aubrey.
Okay, back to Dark Shadows. On February 11th, 1970 — six months after
Theatricalize ABC-TV ‘Dark Shadows’ for MGM. “Previously foreshadowed
plans to make a feature pic version of ABC-TV’s fangy soaper Dark
Shadows have been finalized for release by MGM,” it said. “Production
is scheduled to start in New York in April.”
So this would be the moment that Aubrey looked at the plans and said,
“Let’s go — what the devil are we waiting for?” But it wasn’t because
he believed in Dan’s vision, or “understood the power of the small
screen.” He gave the green light to Dark Shadows because it was cheap,
lowbrow, and filmed entirely on location in upstate New York.
The Lyndhurst mansion in Tarrytown was a beautiful old ruin, which made
a perfect Collinwood. More importantly for Kerkorian and Aubrey, it
wasn’t occupying any valuable Los Angeles real estate.
It’s true that House of Dark Shadows did pretty well at the box office,
which helped MGM turn a profit that year. But the movie didn’t “save”
MGM, as people sometimes say. House of Dark Shadows was part of the
four-year process that turned a movie studio into the world’s biggest
hotel.
Oh, and James Aubrey was the guy who told Dan in 1971 that Night of
Dark Shadows was too long, and he had 24 hours to cut 35 minutes out of
the picture. So much for the power of the small screen.
Now, as I said, I don’t actually know very much about what the Dark
Shadows writers, producers and actors did between the first
announcement in August and the “finalized” plans in February.
Here’s what I know: The shooting script reproduced in The Dark Shadows
Movie Book says “Second Draft Screenplay”, and it’s dated February 24,
1970. Shooting on the film started on March 23rd — not April, as the
Variety article said.
In order to accommodate the cast filming the movie, Dan and the writers
created Parallel Time, an alternate universe where they could clear out
all the characters they needed in Tarrytown. So they moved Barnabas,
Julia, Liz, Roger, Carolyn, Maggie, Willie and David off the canvas for
six weeks, and handed the show to Quentin, Angelique, Cyrus, Sabrina,
Bruno, Amy and a team of short-term fill-in characters. When the
shooting was over, everybody came back to ABC Studio 16, and kept on
making Dark Shadows.
But that’s half a year away, so why am I talking about this now?
Well, there’s a big mystery coming up in the next few months: the
transition from 1897 to the Leviathan storyline.
Right now, here in mid-August, Dark Shadows is about to reach its
absolute peak, both in the ratings and creatively. The 1897 storyline
is almost universally regarded as the best period of the show’s run —
especially in its last few months, when Barnabas, Quentin, Angelique,
Julia, Reverend Trask and Count Petofi are all running circles around
each other, scheming and making plans and being utterly preposterous.
This is a team — these writers, these actors, these producers — who
have finally figured out how to make Dark Shadows.
And then the show falls apart.
In an episode taped on October 29th — the month that the Dark Shadows
film was originally skedded for shooting — Barnabas Collins runs across
two strangers in the woods, who paralyze him and lay him out on an
altar. They perform a curious ritual and hand him a spooky box, and now
Barnabas is evil, and super interested in antiques.
And suddenly there’s this abrupt drop in the quality of the show. You
can actually see it happen in the middle of an episode. Things are
super thrilling and funny and heartbreaking, and then the Leviathans
appear, and everything goes downhill.
A bunch of new characters are introduced who aren’t very appealing. The
amazing kaiju team that made 1897 soar — Barnabas, Julia, Quentin and
Angelique — are split up, distant and suspicious of each other. The
best period of the show suddenly becomes one of the worst periods of
the show.
What could possibly have happened in the fall of 1969 to knock the Dark
Shadows creative team off their game like that?
Oh, right — in the middle of August, they suddenly have to write a
feature film screenplay, plus they have to figure out how they’re going
to get half of the cast off the show by October. Then things get weird
with MGM, and nobody’s sure who’s running the place. The movie gets
delayed, and now the writers have to figure out what to do if half the
cast isn’t leaving for six weeks in October. You can imagine how that
might be kind of a distraction.
There are only three people on the Dark Shadows writing team — Sam
Hall, Gordon Russell and Violet Welles — and they’re doing an insanely
hard job, writing half an hour of witty, action-packed, character-led,
plot-twisty melodrama every day, from now until the foreseeable future.
And finally, this team has clicked — they like each other, and they’re
all heading in the same direction, and they’re producing really good
work. That’s why the show is doing so well.
But then you ask them to write the Dead of Night pilot, and a movie
treatment, and a plan for splitting the cast in two, and then a full
screenplay right away, because we’re skedded for October.
This is why, six months later, they came up with the concept of
Parallel Time. The fantasy of Parallel Time is that everybody has a
double, who can do half of your work.
The upside of Dan’s loyalty is that he gets to work with the people
that he knows and trusts. The downside is that he will run these people
into the ground, and that is exactly what happens.
In a few months, when we leave 1897 and return to the present day, what
we find is a wounded show. It’s the kind of storyline that you get when
everyone is tired and distracted and pulled in several directions. The
Leviathans bring Barnabas to their sacred altar, and everything after
that is an exhausted shrug.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen, so it’s impossible to make plans.
Dark Shadows doesn’t go in much for plans anyway — they’ve gotten this
far by falling downstairs once a day, and coming back up with a script
— but there is a limit, and it is called “when do we have to write half
the cast off the show.” The Dark Shadows that we see in November is
much less sure of itself, and they haven’t even met James Aubrey yet.
It’s not all gloom from here, of course — there are lots of bright
spots in the Leviathan storyline, and when everyone comes back from
shooting the movie, they manage to rally and do some good work. But
we’re going to see what happens when you take an under-resourced team
of lunatics, and push them beyond their limits.
This is the final turning point in the story. Starting this week, Dark
Shadows will never be the same, not that it was ever the same to begin
with.
Tomorrow: War and Peace.
Some of the material about James Aubrey and CBS came from The Columbia
History of American Television, a 2009 book that I highly recommend.
It’s a really smart, well-written account of how television was
invented, how it became popular, and all the sudden leaps and false
starts as it basically took over America and the world. If you’re
interested in how television got to be the way that it is, you should
read this book.

I think this is the first thing I’ve read about DARK SHADOWS that really
puts a solid answer to the collapse of DS that occurred around the time
of the Leviathan storyline. Only the external pressures mentioned could
explain such an immediate decline in quality and questionable
storytelling choices.
I’m not a fan of HODS — though I enjoy it more as a “curiosity” than I
do the 1991 revival. But if the movie had to exist, we can only dream of
a scenario where 1897 didn’t end in October of 1969 and Frid, Hall, and
co. went off to make HODS. The timing was perfect, as Barnabas was
believed dead (and his miraculous return was somewhat anticlimactic),
and Selby was carrying the show brilliantly. Judith could have remained
in the off-screen sanitarium, and so on.
If HODS hadn’t happened, I wager DS would have still flamed out — maybe
a year later at best.

I agree Matt, DS was running out of stories to mash up and I think DS
would have gone about a year more if HODS hadn’t interrupted the flow. I
also agree that working the cast requirements into the 1897 storyline
would have been far less jarring. OTOH, this is not the only time good
writers think ‘OOO, Leviathans, that will make a great storyline!” and
then had it tank the show. (I’m looking at you Supernatural).

From a personal POV, I left for college in September of 1971, and I would
not have been able to continue watching. The timing worked and kept DS as
a special part of my fanish life.

Thank you for explaining why DS fell off so badly during the Leviathan
storyline. The pressure on the writers would have mad it virtually
impossible for them to do a good job on both.

[Paul Benton]

Post by Roberto Marco

Post by Mattew Henry

Post by Ubiquitous
“When I saw myself rising from the dead — with those fangs!”
There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows — moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Julia’s offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Frid’s ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.
Here we are in mid-August 1969, and we’ve reached that final turning
point — the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.
The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.
Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who weren’t part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldn’t have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.
That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. It’s also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.
So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which we’ll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isn’t the only one in the
lineup, but it’s a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.
Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I don’t know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how far that
gets us.
Let’s start with Dan Curtis — the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. He’d managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering he’d never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.
In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadows’ Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadows’ use.
This was an early example of Dan’s loyalty to the people that he’s
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out there’s a downside.
Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Dan’s
restless ambitions.
So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. We’ll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.
And then, guess what. Dan’s also been working on his — I want to say
“most ambitious project”, but I’ve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, let’s go with that.
Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.
So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.
ABC ‘Dark’ Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. “Dark Shadows,” it says, “will be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, show’s
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.”
Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?
Well, there’s another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGM’s Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.
Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the world’s
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the world’s largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.
Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagram’s. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis “Bo” Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didn’t work out that well.
In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorian’s plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.
By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.
Anyway, the reason why I’m telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That “ABC Dark Soaper”
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasn’t clear who
was actually running the studio.
I don’t know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.
Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubrey’s going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.
In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Dan’s vision. Here’s how it’s described in the
It took two long, persistent years to find a backer — the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, “Let’s go — what the devil
are we waiting for?” Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.
Yeah. Okay. About that.
James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and he’s
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, “In the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.”
Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called “the soft underbelly of America.”
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator — Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.
He was also the most hated person in the entertainment industry. Like,
really, really hated. I’ve never seen anything like it; I can’t find a
single person willing to say a nice word about him. Even his New York
Times obituary calls him “the smiling cobra”. He was a demanding
workaholic, ruthless and treacherous and impossible to please.
His personal life was apparently notorious, although it’s hard to find
people talking about it in detail. In Time magazine, he said, “I don’t
pretend to be any saint. If anyone wants to indict me for liking pretty
girls, I’m guilty.” So just imagine what you had to do in the early
1960s, for people to criticize what you did with pretty girls. Yikes.
Aubrey was finally deposed in 1965, after the FCC investigated him and
determined that he was taking kickbacks from producers in exchange for
favorable treatment. Apparently, his apartment was paid for by the head
of Filmways, the production company that made The Beverly Hillbillies
and Mister Ed. Another producer with Mafia connections provided Aubrey
with a second chauffeur-driven car, so that he could pursue his after-
hours entertainment without CBS knowing about it. Also, Aubrey’s picks
for the 64-65 season all tanked, so that was the end of him and CBS.
So with that kind of reputation, why would Kerkorian put Aubrey in
charge of MGM? Well, that’s another funny story.
Kirk Kerkorian wasn’t a movie buff; he was a real estate developer. And
MGM had some assets Kerkorian wanted — namely, big expensive movie
studios sitting on prime real estate in Los Angeles and London.
Kerkorian hired Aubrey to close down MGM’s studios, cancel projects,
fire people and sell off the valuable assets.
And it was more than just the real estate. A few months after Aubrey
started, MGM sold off its huge inventory of props, sets and costumes to
a liquidation company. They even leased the stock footage library. They
might as well have posted signs in the windows: Lost Our Lease,
Everything Must Go.
For the next four years, Aubrey produced a slate of lowbrow, low-budget
movies that would keep the company afloat, while it was being carved up
and sold. Under his tenure, MGM withdrew from the MPAA over
disagreements about ratings and “exorbitant dues charges.” Then in
1971, they announced that they were going to build hotels in Las Vegas.
Remember Kerkorian building the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand?
They did that instead of making movies.
In 1973, MGM shut down theatrical distribution, and Aubrey resigned,
saying “The job I agreed to undertake has been accomplished.” So that’s
James Aubrey.
Okay, back to Dark Shadows. On February 11th, 1970 — six months after
Theatricalize ABC-TV ‘Dark Shadows’ for MGM. “Previously foreshadowed
plans to make a feature pic version of ABC-TV’s fangy soaper Dark
Shadows have been finalized for release by MGM,” it said. “Production
is scheduled to start in New York in April.”
So this would be the moment that Aubrey looked at the plans and said,
“Let’s go — what the devil are we waiting for?” But it wasn’t because
he believed in Dan’s vision, or “understood the power of the small
screen.” He gave the green light to Dark Shadows because it was cheap,
lowbrow, and filmed entirely on location in upstate New York.
The Lyndhurst mansion in Tarrytown was a beautiful old ruin, which made
a perfect Collinwood. More importantly for Kerkorian and Aubrey, it
wasn’t occupying any valuable Los Angeles real estate.
It’s true that House of Dark Shadows did pretty well at the box office,
which helped MGM turn a profit that year. But the movie didn’t “save”
MGM, as people sometimes say. House of Dark Shadows was part of the
four-year process that turned a movie studio into the world’s biggest
hotel.
Oh, and James Aubrey was the guy who told Dan in 1971 that Night of
Dark Shadows was too long, and he had 24 hours to cut 35 minutes out of
the picture. So much for the power of the small screen.
Now, as I said, I don’t actually know very much about what the Dark
Shadows writers, producers and actors did between the first
announcement in August and the “finalized” plans in February.
Here’s what I know: The shooting script reproduced in The Dark Shadows
Movie Book says “Second Draft Screenplay”, and it’s dated February 24,
1970. Shooting on the film started on March 23rd — not April, as the
Variety article said.
In order to accommodate the cast filming the movie, Dan and the writers
created Parallel Time, an alternate universe where they could clear out
all the characters they needed in Tarrytown. So they moved Barnabas,
Julia, Liz, Roger, Carolyn, Maggie, Willie and David off the canvas for
six weeks, and handed the show to Quentin, Angelique, Cyrus, Sabrina,
Bruno, Amy and a team of short-term fill-in characters. When the
shooting was over, everybody came back to ABC Studio 16, and kept on
making Dark Shadows.
But that’s half a year away, so why am I talking about this now?
Well, there’s a big mystery coming up in the next few months: the
transition from 1897 to the Leviathan storyline.
Right now, here in mid-August, Dark Shadows is about to reach its
absolute peak, both in the ratings and creatively. The 1897 storyline
is almost universally regarded as the best period of the show’s run —
especially in its last few months, when Barnabas, Quentin, Angelique,
Julia, Reverend Trask and Count Petofi are all running circles around
each other, scheming and making plans and being utterly preposterous.
This is a team — these writers, these actors, these producers — who
have finally figured out how to make Dark Shadows.
And then the show falls apart.
In an episode taped on October 29th — the month that the Dark Shadows
film was originally skedded for shooting — Barnabas Collins runs across
two strangers in the woods, who paralyze him and lay him out on an
altar. They perform a curious ritual and hand him a spooky box, and now
Barnabas is evil, and super interested in antiques.
And suddenly there’s this abrupt drop in the quality of the show. You
can actually see it happen in the middle of an episode. Things are
super thrilling and funny and heartbreaking, and then the Leviathans
appear, and everything goes downhill.
A bunch of new characters are introduced who aren’t very appealing. The
amazing kaiju team that made 1897 soar — Barnabas, Julia, Quentin and
Angelique — are split up, distant and suspicious of each other. The
best period of the show suddenly becomes one of the worst periods of
the show.
What could possibly have happened in the fall of 1969 to knock the Dark
Shadows creative team off their game like that?
Oh, right — in the middle of August, they suddenly have to write a
feature film screenplay, plus they have to figure out how they’re going
to get half of the cast off the show by October. Then things get weird
with MGM, and nobody’s sure who’s running the place. The movie gets
delayed, and now the writers have to figure out what to do if half the
cast isn’t leaving for six weeks in October. You can imagine how that
might be kind of a distraction.
There are only three people on the Dark Shadows writing team — Sam
Hall, Gordon Russell and Violet Welles — and they’re doing an insanely
hard job, writing half an hour of witty, action-packed, character-led,
plot-twisty melodrama every day, from now until the foreseeable future.
And finally, this team has clicked — they like each other, and they’re
all heading in the same direction, and they’re producing really good
work. That’s why the show is doing so well.
But then you ask them to write the Dead of Night pilot, and a movie
treatment, and a plan for splitting the cast in two, and then a full
screenplay right away, because we’re skedded for October.
This is why, six months later, they came up with the concept of
Parallel Time. The fantasy of Parallel Time is that everybody has a
double, who can do half of your work.
The upside of Dan’s loyalty is that he gets to work with the people
that he knows and trusts. The downside is that he will run these people
into the ground, and that is exactly what happens.
In a few months, when we leave 1897 and return to the present day, what
we find is a wounded show. It’s the kind of storyline that you get when
everyone is tired and distracted and pulled in several directions. The
Leviathans bring Barnabas to their sacred altar, and everything after
that is an exhausted shrug.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen, so it’s impossible to make plans.
Dark Shadows doesn’t go in much for plans anyway — they’ve gotten this
far by falling downstairs once a day, and coming back up with a script
— but there is a limit, and it is called “when do we have to write half
the cast off the show.” The Dark Shadows that we see in November is
much less sure of itself, and they haven’t even met James Aubrey yet.
It’s not all gloom from here, of course — there are lots of bright
spots in the Leviathan storyline, and when everyone comes back from
shooting the movie, they manage to rally and do some good work. But
we’re going to see what happens when you take an under-resourced team
of lunatics, and push them beyond their limits.
This is the final turning point in the story. Starting this week, Dark
Shadows will never be the same, not that it was ever the same to begin
with.
Tomorrow: War and Peace.
Some of the material about James Aubrey and CBS came from The Columbia
History of American Television, a 2009 book that I highly recommend.
It’s a really smart, well-written account of how television was
invented, how it became popular, and all the sudden leaps and false
starts as it basically took over America and the world. If you’re
interested in how television got to be the way that it is, you should
read this book.

I think this is the first thing I’ve read about DARK SHADOWS that really
puts a solid answer to the collapse of DS that occurred around the time
of the Leviathan storyline. Only the external pressures mentioned could
explain such an immediate decline in quality and questionable
storytelling choices.
I’m not a fan of HODS — though I enjoy it more as a “curiosity” than I
do the 1991 revival. But if the movie had to exist, we can only dream of
a scenario where 1897 didn’t end in October of 1969 and Frid, Hall, and
co. went off to make HODS. The timing was perfect, as Barnabas was
believed dead (and his miraculous return was somewhat anticlimactic),
and Selby was carrying the show brilliantly. Judith could have remained
in the off-screen sanitarium, and so on.
If HODS hadn’t happened, I wager DS would have still flamed out — maybe
a year later at best.

I agree Matt, DS was running out of stories to mash up and I think DS
would have gone about a year more if HODS hadn’t interrupted the flow. I
also agree that working the cast requirements into the 1897 storyline
would have been far less jarring. OTOH, this is not the only time good
writers think ‘OOO, Leviathans, that will make a great storyline!” and
then had it tank the show. (I’m looking at you Supernatural).
From a personal POV, I left for college in September of 1971, and I would
not have been able to continue watching. The timing worked and kept DS as
a special part of my fanish life.
Thank you for explaining why DS fell off so badly during the Leviathan
storyline. The pressure on the writers would have mad it virtually
impossible for them to do a good job on both.

I think practically any storyline based on Lovecraft is doomed to failure. How
do you create ineffable characters for the screen? It would have to be all
atmosphere; a bad-smelling, heavy-breathing monster is just not going to cut
it.

[Tulip Rose]

HODS was a good movie. Dan got his evil vampire. Barnabas wiped out most
of the Collins family without blinking an eye and he almost killed Roger
Davis.

My favorite lines are when Barnabas was walking with Maggie in the woods
after he was cured (kind of). He�s admiring the sunlight glinting off
the trees. Maggie says the other night you couldn�t take your eyes off
of me but this morning you�ve hardly noticed me.

Barnabas says, �You�ve dominated my thoughts all days. I can�t tell you
how exciting it is to be with you. Look at those trees, how beautiful
they look in the sunlight.�

Maggie, �I love being with you, you have a way of seeing things like
you�re looking at them for the first time.�

Barnabas takes her hand and says, �I�ve never seen them the way I do
when I�m with you.� He was so happy he didn�t cane Willie that day.

The second best line is from Professor Stokes, �Julia, vampirism isn�t a
disease. Vampires are the living dead.�

[anim8rfsk]

Post by Tulip Rose
HODS was a good movie. Dan got his evil vampire. Barnabas wiped out most
of the Collins family without blinking an eye and he almost killed Roger
Davis.
My favorite lines are when Barnabas was walking with Maggie in the woods
after he was cured (kind of). He?s admiring the sunlight glinting off
the trees. Maggie says the other night you couldn?t take your eyes off
of me but this morning you?ve hardly noticed me.
Barnabas says, ?You?ve dominated my thoughts all days. I can?t tell you
how exciting it is to be with you. Look at those trees, how beautiful
they look in the sunlight.?

Oh, yeah, both of them are just wonderful there.

Post by Tulip Rose
Maggie, ?I love being with you, you have a way of seeing things like
you?re looking at them for the first time.?
Barnabas takes her hand and says, ?I?ve never seen them the way I do
when I?m with you.? He was so happy he didn?t cane Willie that day.

Heh. One of my favorite parts is when Willie asks about Maggie and
Jeff, and Barnabas says she won't be seeing him for a few days, and a
terrified Willie asks if he's done something to Jeff, and Barnabas
offhandedly says "on the contrary, I've done something FOR him" and ...
that's all we ever hear about it. No need to go into details. And it
shows that Barnabas has got stuff going on in the world beyond
Collinwood, and can accomplish it without Willie even knowing. Like the
movie does with the TV show, it really expands horizons.

Post by Tulip Rose
The second best line is from Professor Stokes, ?Julia, vampirism isn?t a
disease. Vampires are the living dead.?

[Trevor Wilson]

More than the show itself, what HODS did was kill off the showís star
main character, Barnabas. Frid refused to be in the sequel, NODS,
because he claimed he was afraid of being typecast as Barnabas, which is
amusing because he already was. Perhaps the real reason was that Frid
disliked how HODS portrayed Barnabas, which was spooky and bloodless ó
exactly the way he told the writing staff in 1967 that he didnít want
for Barnabas to be written. Frid and Curtis never did see eye to eye.

The release of the movie had a detrimental effect on the showís ratings.
For the first time, parents got to see what their kids were making such
a big fuss over. Up to the fall of 1970, during the 4 oíclock hour dad
was still at work and mom was by this time in the kitchen getting things
ready for dinner. They only knew of Dark Shadows the same way as
everyone does even today who doesnít watch it ó as the ìvampire soap
operaî. And when parents back then thought of vampires, they thought of
Bela Lugosi ó and in those movies you didnít see any blood. But HODS, in
terms of blood and gore, is on a par with even the Hammer films of the
time. So when parents took their kids to the drive-in to see HODS, there
must have been some decisions made on the drive home as to what their
kids would and would not be allowed to watch on TV. In the 1968-1969
season, Dark Shadowsí ratings are at an all-time high, with a Nielsen
rating of an 8.4 percentage point share of U.S. homes viewing the show;
the next season will see a drop to 7.3 ó but this is still the same as
the 1967-1968 ratings, when the show had become a huge national hit; but
ratings for the 1970-1971 season will see a drop to 5.3 ó the lowest
numbers since the 1966-1967 season (4.3).

Perhaps the biggest reason for the show ending when it did was Dan
Curtisí declining interest. Thereís an actor interview on the DVD set
where it is mentioned that Dan didnít show up as often in the last year.
And in another one of those interviews with Curtis himself, he admits
that in the last few months he didnít want to have anything to do with
the show, that he just wanted it to end. Perhaps the making of HODS
simply fulfilled his sense of accomplishment with the original idea, and
after this he had no desire or ambition to go on with the TV show.
Because after your dream becomes a hit TV show and then a blockbuster
motion picture, where do you go from there?

ìWhen I saw myself rising from the dead ó with those fangs!î
There are eight turning points in the story of Dark Shadows ó moments
when the focus and direction of the show changed forever. Four of them
are character introductions, and four are backstage events. Here they
?the introduction of Barnabas,
?Juliaís offer to cure Barnabas,
?writer Sam Hall joins the show,
?the introduction of Angelique,
?Jonathan Fridís ten-city publicity tour,
?writer Ron Sproat leaves the show,
?the introduction of Quentin,
?and MGM greenlights House of Dark Shadows.
Here we are in mid-August 1969, and weíve reached that final turning
point ó the moment when a grown-up movie studio agreed to distribute a
feature film about a daytime soap opera, using the same cast and crew,
while the TV show is still in production. Everything that happens over
the next year and a half of the show will be affected by that deeply
peculiar decision.
The story that people tell about House of Dark Shadows is that creator
Dan Curtis, like all artistic visionaries, was deeply misunderstood. He
had a burning ambition to turn his vampire soap opera into a feature
film, and nobody at the studios would believe in his dream. Finally,
Dan found a kindred spirit in James Aubrey, the president of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, who recognized the value of a Dark Shadows movie and
eagerly gave it the green light.
Once the film was greenlighted, the only headache to figure out was how
to get the cast off the show for six weeks, while they filmed the
movie. Dan and the writers came up with a way to focus on the actors
who werenít part of the movie cast, until the shooting was over. That
way, the movie wouldnít have a negative impact on the show, and when
shooting wrapped, everything went back to normal. On release, the movie
was such a success that it saved MGM from closing down.
That story is almost entirely false. This is actually the story of the
destruction of Dark Shadows. Itís also the story of the destruction of
MGM. And like all Dark Shadows stories, the line between hero and
villain is not necessarily clear.
So this is the official starting point for the Who Killed Dark Shadows
murder mystery game, which weíll be playing on and off for the next
year and a half. House of Dark Shadows isnít the only one in the
lineup, but itís a major suspect, and the first one on the scene.
Now, there are a lot of details about this story that I donít know. The
thing that I would most like to know is how far in advance the writers
knew they were going to write a screenplay, in addition to their
regular five-episodes-a-week schedule. But details about the pre-
history of HODS are hard to find, because I guess nobody really cares
except me. So Iíll tell you what I know, and weíll see how far that
gets us.
Letís start with Dan Curtis ó the creator of Dark Shadows, who had
twice the ambition of a normal man, and half the sense. Heíd managed to
nurture a tame, low-rated soap opera into a monster hit, which is
impressive considering heíd never produced scripted television before.
Once the vampire was on the show and the ratings were climbing, Dan
started looking around for his next challenge.
In 1967, he produced a TV-movie adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which aired on ABC in America and CBC in Canada in
January 1968. The movie was scored with music by Dark Shadowsí Robert
Cobert, and those music cues were then adapted for Dark Shadowsí use.
This was an early example of Danís loyalty to the people that heís
worked with before. You should keep an eye on that characteristic,
because it turns out thereís a downside.
Returning from the Jekyll and Hyde shoot, Dan decided that he wanted to
try his hand at directing, so he cut his teeth on some Dark Shadows
episodes, taking a somewhat experimental approach to the final week of
the 1795 storyline. Then Jekyll and Hyde received six Emmy nominations,
including Outstanding Dramatic Program, which continued to feed Danís
restless ambitions.
So Dan produced a pilot for a prime-time show, Dead of Night, working
with some of the Dark Shadows team, including writer Sam Hall, director
Lela Swift, actors Louis Edmonds and Thayer David, and stunt
coordinator Alex Stevens. Weíll talk about this program in a couple
weeks, because it airs in late August. For now, the important thing is
that Dan was starting to raid the cupboard of his already overworked
Dark Shadows family.
And then, guess what. Danís also been working on his ó I want to say
ìmost ambitious projectî, but Iíve already used the word ambitious
three times in the last nine paragraphs, so I probably need to come up
with another word for it. How about insane? Yeah, letís go with that.
Dan was working on his most insane project, which was to turn his
blockbuster hit daytime soap opera into a blockbuster hit movie, while
the show was still in production. The feature-length film would be
written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell, directed by Dan himself, and
produced by Dan and Trevor Williams, who was the art director on Jekyll
and Hyde. None of these people had ever made a movie before.
So when Dan pitched the idea of a Dark Shadows film to various movie
studios, the studios made the obvious and correct decision, and
declined.
ABC ëDarkí Soaper To Be Made Into A Feature Film. In classic Variety
style, the piece is only 54 words long, using abbreviations and cutting
all of the articles. ìDark Shadows,î it says, ìwill be turned into
feature film with screenplay by Gordon Russell and Sam Hall, showís
regular writers. Feature, with Joan Bennett and Jonathan Frid starring,
is skedded to begin in Oct. in N.Y.î
Couple interesting things about announcement, incl: no mention of
studio, and skedded in Oct. Feature actually lensed late March. So what
that about?
Well, thereís another relevant article in Variety on August 13th, with
the headline: MGMís Tenderest Hour: Fighting Now vs Compromise. And
then a sub-heading: Kerkorian Acquires 24% at $35; May Go for 30% of
MGM Shares; Lawyer Sees Control Already Had.
Investor Kirk Kerkorian was known as one of the architects of the
mega-casino resort industry in Las Vegas. In 1969, he built the worldís
largest hotel, the International Hotel, and he followed this up in
1973 by building the worldís largest hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel and
Casino. Twenty years later, he built the worldís largest hotel, which
was also called the MGM Grand. Dude liked his big hotels.
Now, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been in trouble for a while, losing money
at a fast clip. In 1966, MGM was taken over by Edgar Bronfman, the head
of Canadian distillery Seagramís. Bronfman booted the MGM president,
and replaced him with Louis ìBoî Polk Jr, an executive from General
Mills. It didnít work out that well.
In summer 1969, Kerkorian turned his attention to MGM, and he bought up
enough stock to get a controlling interest. During August and
September, there was a lot of confusion about Kerkorianís plans for the
studio, and whether he would continue working with Bronfman and Polk.
By the beginning of October, Kerkorian made a definite move, announcing
that he would replace Polk as MGM president with Herb Jaffee, a VP from
United Artists. Then it turned out that Jaffee said no, so Kerkorian
had to find someone else.
Anyway, the reason why Iím telling you all of this is that this is the
period when MGM inked a deal for Dark Shadows. That ìABC Dark Soaperî
announcement appeared in Variety just as the Bronfman/Kerkorian
situation exploded. The article said that Dark Shadows was skedded to
begin in Oct., but when Oct. rolled around, it still wasnít clear who
was actually running the studio.
I donít know what Dark Shadows would have done in Oct. anyway, even if
they went with that plan. In Oct., the show was still deep in the
Quentin/Petofi storyline. Oct. was not optimal.
Then on October 21st, Kerkorian installed James Aubrey as the new
president of MGM. Aubreyís going to be an important figure in Dark
Shadows history, and everybody gets him wrong.
In the traditional story about House of Dark Shadows, Aubrey is a hero,
the guy who believed in Danís vision. Hereís how itís described in the
It took two long, persistent years to find a backer ó the
newly-installed president of MGM James Aubrey, who took a
look at the attractive, minimally projected costs and the
strong identity from TV and said, ìLetís go ó what the devil
are we waiting for?î Former head of CBS, Aubrey understood
the power of the small screen and had no problem with
translating that power to the big screen.
Yeah. Okay. About that.
James Aubrey was the head of CBS Network from 1959 to 1965, and heís
credited with making CBS not just the top television network in
America, but the top entertainment provider in the world at that time.
A Life magazine article said, ìIn the long history of human
communications, from tom-tom to Telstar, no one man had a lock on such
enormous audiences as James Thomas Aubrey, Jr.î
Aubrey accomplished this by going as lowbrow as he possibly could. His
biggest hit was The Beverly Hillbillies, a No. 1 hit sitcom about a
family of country rubes who move to Los Angeles after striking oil on
their farm. It was an incredibly stupid and incredibly popular show,
aimed directly at what Aubrey called ìthe soft underbelly of America.î
He wanted simple-minded sitcoms with rural and fantasy themes, aimed at
the lowest common denominator ó Mister Ed, Gilliganís Island, My
Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show,
Petticoat Junction, and a revived Candid Camera.
He was also the most hated person in the entertainment industry. Like,
really, really hated. Iíve never seen anything like it; I canít find a
single person willing to say a nice word about him. Even his New York
Times obituary calls him ìthe smiling cobraî. He was a demanding
workaholic, ruthless and treacherous and impossible to please.
His personal life was apparently notorious, although itís hard to find
people talking about it in detail. In Time magazine, he said, ìI donít
pretend to be any saint. If anyone wants to indict me for liking pretty
girls, Iím guilty.î So just imagine what you had to do in the early
1960s, for people to criticize what you did with pretty girls. Yikes.
Aubrey was finally deposed in 1965, after the FCC investigated him and
determined that he was taking kickbacks from producers in exchange for
favorable treatment. Apparently, his apartment was paid for by the head
of Filmways, the production company that made The Beverly Hillbillies
and Mister Ed. Another producer with Mafia connections provided Aubrey
with a second chauffeur-driven car, so that he could pursue his after-
hours entertainment without CBS knowing about it. Also, Aubreyís picks
for the 64-65 season all tanked, so that was the end of him and CBS.
So with that kind of reputation, why would Kerkorian put Aubrey in
charge of MGM? Well, thatís another funny story.
Kirk Kerkorian wasnít a movie buff; he was a real estate developer. And
MGM had some assets Kerkorian wanted ó namely, big expensive movie
studios sitting on prime real estate in Los Angeles and London.
Kerkorian hired Aubrey to close down MGMís studios, cancel projects,
fire people and sell off the valuable assets.
And it was more than just the real estate. A few months after Aubrey
started, MGM sold off its huge inventory of props, sets and costumes to
a liquidation company. They even leased the stock footage library. They
might as well have posted signs in the windows: Lost Our Lease,
Everything Must Go.
For the next four years, Aubrey produced a slate of lowbrow, low-budget
movies that would keep the company afloat, while it was being carved up
and sold. Under his tenure, MGM withdrew from the MPAA over
disagreements about ratings and ìexorbitant dues charges.î Then in
1971, they announced that they were going to build hotels in Las Vegas.
Remember Kerkorian building the worldís largest hotel, the MGM Grand?
They did that instead of making movies.
In 1973, MGM shut down theatrical distribution, and Aubrey resigned,
saying ìThe job I agreed to undertake has been accomplished.î So thatís
James Aubrey.
Okay, back to Dark Shadows. On February 11th, 1970 ó six months after
Theatricalize ABC-TV ëDark Shadowsí for MGM. ìPreviously foreshadowed
plans to make a feature pic version of ABC-TVís fangy soaper Dark
Shadows have been finalized for release by MGM,î it said. ìProduction
is scheduled to start in New York in April.î
So this would be the moment that Aubrey looked at the plans and said,
ìLetís go ó what the devil are we waiting for?î But it wasnít because
he believed in Danís vision, or ìunderstood the power of the small
screen.î He gave the green light to Dark Shadows because it was cheap,
lowbrow, and filmed entirely on location in upstate New York.
The Lyndhurst mansion in Tarrytown was a beautiful old ruin, which made
a perfect Collinwood. More importantly for Kerkorian and Aubrey, it
wasnít occupying any valuable Los Angeles real estate.
Itís true that House of Dark Shadows did pretty well at the box office,
which helped MGM turn a profit that year. But the movie didnít ìsaveî
MGM, as people sometimes say. House of Dark Shadows was part of the
four-year process that turned a movie studio into the worldís biggest
hotel.
Oh, and James Aubrey was the guy who told Dan in 1971 that Night of
Dark Shadows was too long, and he had 24 hours to cut 35 minutes out of
the picture. So much for the power of the small screen.
Now, as I said, I donít actually know very much about what the Dark
Shadows writers, producers and actors did between the first
announcement in August and the ìfinalizedî plans in February.
Hereís what I know: The shooting script reproduced in The Dark Shadows
Movie Book says ìSecond Draft Screenplayî, and itís dated February 24,
1970. Shooting on the film started on March 23rd ó not April, as the
Variety article said.
In order to accommodate the cast filming the movie, Dan and the writers
created Parallel Time, an alternate universe where they could clear out
all the characters they needed in Tarrytown. So they moved Barnabas,
Julia, Liz, Roger, Carolyn, Maggie, Willie and David off the canvas for
six weeks, and handed the show to Quentin, Angelique, Cyrus, Sabrina,
Bruno, Amy and a team of short-term fill-in characters. When the
shooting was over, everybody came back to ABC Studio 16, and kept on
making Dark Shadows.
But thatís half a year away, so why am I talking about this now?
Well, thereís a big mystery coming up in the next few months: the
transition from 1897 to the Leviathan storyline.
Right now, here in mid-August, Dark Shadows is about to reach its
absolute peak, both in the ratings and creatively. The 1897 storyline
is almost universally regarded as the best period of the showís run ó
especially in its last few months, when Barnabas, Quentin, Angelique,
Julia, Reverend Trask and Count Petofi are all running circles around
each other, scheming and making plans and being utterly preposterous.
This is a team ó these writers, these actors, these producers ó who
have finally figured out how to make Dark Shadows.
And then the show falls apart.
In an episode taped on October 29th ó the month that the Dark Shadows
film was originally skedded for shooting ó Barnabas Collins runs across
two strangers in the woods, who paralyze him and lay him out on an
altar. They perform a curious ritual and hand him a spooky box, and now
Barnabas is evil, and super interested in antiques.
And suddenly thereís this abrupt drop in the quality of the show. You
can actually see it happen in the middle of an episode. Things are
super thrilling and funny and heartbreaking, and then the Leviathans
appear, and everything goes downhill.
A bunch of new characters are introduced who arenít very appealing. The
amazing kaiju team that made 1897 soar ó Barnabas, Julia, Quentin and
Angelique ó are split up, distant and suspicious of each other. The
best period of the show suddenly becomes one of the worst periods of
the show.
What could possibly have happened in the fall of 1969 to knock the Dark
Shadows creative team off their game like that?
Oh, right ó in the middle of August, they suddenly have to write a
feature film screenplay, plus they have to figure out how theyíre going
to get half of the cast off the show by October. Then things get weird
with MGM, and nobodyís sure whoís running the place. The movie gets
delayed, and now the writers have to figure out what to do if half the
cast isnít leaving for six weeks in October. You can imagine how that
might be kind of a distraction.
There are only three people on the Dark Shadows writing team ó Sam
Hall, Gordon Russell and Violet Welles ó and theyíre doing an insanely
hard job, writing half an hour of witty, action-packed, character-led,
plot-twisty melodrama every day, from now until the foreseeable future.
And finally, this team has clicked ó they like each other, and theyíre
all heading in the same direction, and theyíre producing really good
work. Thatís why the show is doing so well.
But then you ask them to write the Dead of Night pilot, and a movie
treatment, and a plan for splitting the cast in two, and then a full
screenplay right away, because weíre skedded for October.
This is why, six months later, they came up with the concept of
Parallel Time. The fantasy of Parallel Time is that everybody has a
double, who can do half of your work.
The upside of Danís loyalty is that he gets to work with the people
that he knows and trusts. The downside is that he will run these people
into the ground, and that is exactly what happens.
In a few months, when we leave 1897 and return to the present day, what
we find is a wounded show. Itís the kind of storyline that you get when
everyone is tired and distracted and pulled in several directions. The
Leviathans bring Barnabas to their sacred altar, and everything after
that is an exhausted shrug.
Nobody knows whatís going to happen, so itís impossible to make plans.
Dark Shadows doesnít go in much for plans anyway ó theyíve gotten this
far by falling downstairs once a day, and coming back up with a script
ó but there is a limit, and it is called ìwhen do we have to write half
the cast off the show.î The Dark Shadows that we see in November is
much less sure of itself, and they havenít even met James Aubrey yet.
Itís not all gloom from here, of course ó there are lots of bright
spots in the Leviathan storyline, and when everyone comes back from
shooting the movie, they manage to rally and do some good work. But
weíre going to see what happens when you take an under-resourced team
of lunatics, and push them beyond their limits.
This is the final turning point in the story. Starting this week, Dark
Shadows will never be the same, not that it was ever the same to begin
with.
Tomorrow: War and Peace.
Some of the material about James Aubrey and CBS came from The Columbia
History of American Television, a 2009 book that I highly recommend.
Itís a really smart, well-written account of how television was
invented, how it became popular, and all the sudden leaps and false
starts as it basically took over America and the world. If youíre
interested in how television got to be the way that it is, you should
read this book.