DARK SHADOWS audiodrama wins SCRIBE Award

The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers named DARK SHADOWS: THE ETERNAL ACTRESS the "best audio"story in this year's SCRIBE AWARDS, announced last weekend during Comic-Con International in San Diego, Calif.

This year's Scribe winners are:

• In the Original Novel category: Robert Jeschonek for Rising Sun, Falling Shadows, a Tannhäuser book.
• In the Adapted Novel category: Clockwork Angels by Kevin Anderson, based on the album by Rush.
• In the Audio category: THE ETERNAL ACTRESS by Nev Fountain, a DARK SHADOWS story.

THE ETERNAL ACTRESS stars Tony Award winner DONNA McKECHNIE in the role of Amanda Harris, who she first played on DARK SHADOWS in 1969. Interestingly, the episode was competing against another DARK SHADOWS audiodrama, DRESS ME IN DARK DREAMS by Marty Ross, and DOCTOR WHO COMPANION CHRONICLES: PROJECT NIRVANA by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright.

(Note: Thanks to MARK PASSMORE for the heads up!)

Review: Dress Me in Dark Dreams

(To read our exclusive interview with Marty Ross, the writer of Dress Me in Dark Dreams, click HERE.)

Audio dramas pose very specific kinds of storytelling challenges. I’ve tended to think of these challenges in terms of writing, because the script is the first line of defense (and possibly offense) when it comes to solving storytelling issues. As with music, audio dramas have to convey their intention using only sound, and I imagine a script for a Big Finish story not only includes dialogue, but sound and music cues, as well. A Big Finish production probably looks orchestral on paper.

While listening to the latest Big Finish release, Dress Mein Dark Dreams, I realized that the medium also presents a challenge for the actors, as well. Tim Curry was reportedly crestfallen when director Ridley Scott asked him to wear contact lenses in the movie Legend, because his eyes were the only parts of the actor’s body not covered my make-up appliances. Curry was worried that he’d lost his last connection to the audience, and that the make-up turned him into a glorified puppeteer whose job was to essentially manipulate a costume offscreen.

The actors in audio dramas have no visual connection with their audience, not even a proxy connection like Curry’s heavy make-up, forcing them to dig a little deeper into their bag of tricks. When I’ve told people about the Dark Shadows audio dramas, I’ve taken on a very apologetic tone and have asked people to forgive their seemingly anachronistic qualities. After listening to Dress Me in Dark Dreams, though, I think it’s time to acknowledge how goddamn difficult it is to tell an effective story using only dialogue and sound effects. There’s a very specific skill set involved with creating these stories, and they are skills that would confound the Michael Bays of the world.

Creating an audio drama has its challenges, but so does writing about them. The Dark Shadows series are mysteries, which makes discussing their twists and turns incredibly difficult without spoiling the experience for new listeners. If you’re trying to avoid spoilers, it’s safe to proceed further.

Dress Me in Dark Dreams is set roughly 25 years before the 1897 television story and stars Amber Benson as a young Judith Trask, a role played in the original series by Joan Bennett. Resentful of the freedoms and attentions granted to her brothers, Judith spends much of her days with her grandmother, Edith, who does her best to discourage Judith’s rebellious spirit. Judith is cast very much from the Disney Princess mold in this story, and her arc plays out a little like a gothic version of The Little Mermaid. Judith is slowly seduced by specter in a rarely visited area of Collinwood, a man who is probably not the figment of her imagination that she initially believes, and it becomes steadily apparent that Edith knows more about the situation than she wants to reveal. 

Appearing with Benson is Terry Crawford, reprising her role as Edith Collins. I’ve seen the entire run of the original Dark Shadows twice, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I never realized that Edith Collins of 1840 and grandmother Edith in 1897 are the same person. It’s possible that continuity errors in the original show contributed to my confusion but, either way, Crawford is a welcome presence here.

Dress Me in Dark Dreams isn’t the fastest paced Dark Shadows story produced by Big Finish, and it suffers from some of the same problems of formula shared by previous installments (the antagonists in a lot of these stories tend to be phantom voices) but the writing has a lot of vivid, effective imagery. There's a sexuality in this story rarely seen in Dark Shadows and, though it is mostly symbolic, it underlines the tale's theme of innocence lost. While many of the story’s conflicts could have been quickly resolved in Edith has just explained the situation to Judith, the episode does a fine job of connecting two chapters in the Dark Shadows mythos while also embellishing characters that were originally a little underwritten.

I was initially concerned about Benson’s casting when it was announced, but I was also interested to see if Benson would affect an overt impression of Bennett in the story. She does not, which is probably the best possible decision. Considering their age difference, it makes more sense for Judith to be less formal and more impulsive, and she is not yet the repressive spinster we see in the original series. What’s interesting is that this story actually transforms her 1897 arc into a tragedy because, as a young woman, she was resentful and terrified of the loneliness that Collinwood bred.  It also goes a long way toward explaining the cruel, violent manner in which she responds to her later heartbreak.

Dress Me in Dark Dreams isn’t my favorite of the Big Finish audio dramas (The Skin Walkers is still reigning champion) but anyone who loves the 1897 story arc will probably enjoy what Dress Me in Dark Dreams brings to the table. I say check it out.

Exclusive interview with "Dress Me in Dark Dreams" writer Marty Ross

Marty Ross is no stranger to audio drama. Having written a number of scripts for Big Finish and the BBC, it was only a matter of time before he was drafted to write an episode of Dark Shadows.

His first professional visit to Collinwood, Dress Me in Dark Dreams, will be available for sale as CD and digital download from Big Finish on April 30. It's not only Marty's first trip to Collinsport, but Amber Benson's, as well. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer alumnus plays a young Judith Collins, starring alongside Dark Shadows veteran Terry Crawford. You can listen to a trailer for the episode HERE.

When Marty agreed to do an interview for this site, I immediately packed my bags and hopped on The Collinsport Historical Society's private jet for his home in Great Britain. The flight attendants and some guy identifying himself as a federal marshal politely informed me that the airplane belonged to British Airways, and that spray painting the words "Collinsport Historical Society" on the fuselage does not qualify as a legal transfer of property in any country.

Robbed on my transportation across the Atlantic, I decided to e-mail my questions to Marty. You can read his responses below.

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Thanks to time traveling, astral projection and the occasional holes in reality, the original television show and previous Big Finish stories have left few unexplored settings. How did you settle on this particular time period for your story?

Marty Ross

     Big Finish gave a whole list of characters and eras they were interested in dealing with. I saw they were interested in a Judith/Edith story and I pitched for that, in part because I like writing for strong female characters, but also because I wanted to write a real grand-style gothic romance and a 19th. century setting seemed ideal for that. I'm a big devotee of the 19th. century gothic tale, of the Bronte sisters and Sheridan LeFanu and so on, as well as the reinvention of that kind of gothic in things like the Dark Shadows 1890s sequence, the Hammer films and the 'gaslight' melodramas of 40s Hollywood. Precisely because people - certainly people of the social rank of the Collins family - were much more strait-laced in that era, it gives a whole extra frisson to the idea of a young woman brought up that way casting caution to the winds and having a passionate, sensuous affair - with a phantom lover, at that. The tensions between what a respectable young woman is and isn't supposed to do are all the more extreme and tension, of course, makes for drama.

From a storytelling point of view, what is the appeal of Judith Collins?

     Well, one obvious appeal for me, and this is a thing that runs through a lot of my work, is that I'm happiest as a writer writing strong female characters - and Judith is nothing if not that. The biggest influence on my life was my maternal grandmother, who had been born in 1909 as part of a family of seven sisters and when as a kid I'd go visiting these great-aunts it was almost like Collinwood, with these grand old ladies living in Victorian tenements chock-a-block with old-fashioned decor - and if there was any family business outstanding, these great-aunties would creep off into shadowy back rooms to discuss it all in whispers. So that kind of pre-modern world of female experience is less distant to me than to most people of my generation! And my grandmother was basically a Bronteesque romantic disguised as a rather conservative older lady, so I know from first hand that dichotomy between an almost Victorian respectablity and a more passionate inner nature - maybe in part I'm paying tribute to her: she'd have loved Dark Shadows if it had only been on British TV.

Prequels are notoriously difficult to write because the audience frequently enters the story already knowing how it ends. How did you approach this issue with Judith, given that we already know there’s a dark, violent future ahead of her?

     I think the story gains extra tension from knowing what Judith's future is. We know Judith as this rather stern older woman, but I thought wouldn't it be poignant if as a younger woman she started out as someone much more romantic and open-minded, more Jane Eyre than Mrs. Danvers, and then this becomes the story of how experience forces a darker, more pessimistic vision on her, so that at the end of Dress Me you see this younger, brighter figure beginning to morph into the older Joan Bennett character. If she's simply a junior version of Joan Bennett right from the get-go, then there isn't the drama - ultimately, maybe, the tragedy - of seeing that transition begin right in front of you.

     Basically, the more you know about the character's future, the more poignant you'll find the place where she's left at the end of this story, precisely because there's a vanishing hint of how things could have been otherwise. There's one moment where Edith expresses a genuine hope for Judith's future - but the way she expresses this will set off alarm bells in the heads of listeners who know what lies ahead for Judith: it's not just an in-joke, it's more the tragic irony that Edith is trying to pass on a blessing, but the blessing will really turn out, in the fullness of time, to be a curse.  So the listener's knowledge of Judith's future is employed as a kind of dramatic element in the story: Hitchcock said that suspense was when you let the audience know well in advance there's a bomb ticking under the table where your characters are chatting happily. In a sense, Judith's future - as defined by the TV show - is the bomb ticking under the table here.


How did Amber Benson prepare for the role? Did Big Finish provide reference material to help familiarize her with the series?

     You'd have to ask James Goss and Joseph Lidster at Big Finish about the specifics of casting, and working with, Amber. I finished the script and was just told they had something fantastic in the works with the casting: I thought maybe they just meant they'd cast someone slightly dull out of Coronation Street. Then next thing I knew Amber was playing the lead. But unfortunately I didn't get a ticket to LA to hear her perform! Certainly, we writers were given access to the original TV episodes, so most likely Amber was too.

If you had the opportunity to write another Dark Shadows story, which character would you want in the lead?
     I don't want to preempt Big Finish's decision on whether I get to do another one: they seem to have liked the script, but we still need to see if it works for listeners! Certainly, I'd love to do more: my interest in the series goes right back to my childhood when the bargain bin in my local Glasgow Woolworths used to be filled with Marilyn Ross paperbacks (I even had the Barnabas Collins Joke Book!) - and I read all the US monster mags, which always had a lot of Dark Shadows material. So I feel quite at home at Collinwood.

     As far as specific characters and stories are concerned, when I was pitching this, there was one other idea that they seemed to like, centred around Maggie Collins, married to Quentin (i.e: 70s parallel time), but being trapped in a confrontation with John Yaeger/Cyrus Longworth - as a Scot, I'm very attracted to the Jekyll/Hyde theme. That would be a really great, more modern psycho-thriller, and Kathryn Leigh Scott is someone I'd love to write for.

     I also had an idea for a story about Eve, who's a great character, but Nicholas Blair was also involved and it hadn't been quite decided at the time what to do with Blair in terms of casting, etc. so the idea was sidelined. But I'd still like to do something with Eve.

     But at the end of Dress Me In Dark Dreams, I also wanted to leave open the possibility of another story or two based around this younger incarnation of Judith: we talked about her in the final scene becoming wholly like the older Judith, but as it is there's a hint that the younger, more romantic self is wounded but not quite finished off, leaving open the possibility for more adventures for this version of Judith and Edith. But, of course, I'd love to write something for Lara Parker too: I'm a romantic dramatist - nothing inspires me like a great actress - and Dark Shadows has plenty of those!

Tom Baker and Dark Shadows. How do we make this happen?
     Heaven knows, it took Big Finish long enough persuading him back into the Tardis! Certainly, he's a terrific actor and it's worth remembering how good he is at bad guys: he was a terrific Rasputin. Maybe it's 1914 and a mysterious refugee with a Russian accent turns up at the door of Collinwood on a stormy night, looking more dead than alive.... 

     But, to be serious, you'd have to pester the producers at Big Finish (way above my pay scale!) and they'd have to pester the great man himself!