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Showing posts with label Falcon Crest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Falcon Crest. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

The Dark Shadows Daybook: NOVEMBER 27



By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 639

What deadly secrets will be revealed on a simple phone when David and Amy explore the hidden recesses of Collinwood?

Amy begins her first day as a permanent guest at Collinwood, and in the process ends of exploring a sealed off wing with David. There, they begin speaking on the telephone to a mystery is presence calling himself Quentin.

For better or worse, Amy is in da house, and the change implies everything we suspected about young Roger and Elizabeth and the Collins Way (before Victoria, anyway). It gives us a great vision of what it was like to grow up at Collinwood, too. May I unpack?

Down the rabbit hole! Who’s with me?

Really? That’s all? Well, um, fine. Wait here. Have a sandwich.

It’s vital to remember that in 1968, the year of 1897 was only 71 years prior to filming. Not that long before, cosmically speaking. For us, that’s like being haunted from 1947, a year my father remembers well. This episode was shot an astounding 50 years prior to now. (That’s right, this is the 50th anniversary of the first utterance of Quentin’s name.) It’s weird to look at what 50 years can mean. Since I have your attention and just to think out loud…  50 years prior to its taping, the year was 1918. From the other direction, that’s only 21 years after 1897, making it one year after Elizabeth Collins was born. (In real life, it’s also the birth year of Dennis Patrick, making him 8 years younger than Joan Bennett, who was born in 1910, just 13 years after 1897.) For the hell of it, Jamison Collins was only 33 years old when he became a father in 1918. Dark Shadows actors who were around the age of 33 when the series was shot were Jerry Lacy, John Karlen, and Diana Millay. At the age of 33, Jamison Collins is only 6 years older than was Quentin when we met him in 1897. For a reference point, Quentin, had he been “alive,” would have been only 48 in 1918, which is just one year older than Wallace and me. David Selby was born in 1941. He wouldn’t be at Quentin’s 1918 age of 48 until 1989. Here’s what actor David Selby looked like in 1989, when he appeared in the Falcon Crest episode, “Doctor Dollars.”



Because Dark Shadows and its cast have been with us for 52 years, and because the show itself (like American Bandstand) deals with time travel, arrested aging, and a mappable dynasty, I find these finer points of chronology to be inordinately fascinating. It’s especially arresting here because the essence of the program is knit up in dealing with the past, even if that past is in recent memory. When we meet Liz, she’s torturing herself for decisions she made 18 years prior. Unlike the 171 years Barnabas was in stasis, 18 years is a span of time that’s easy to manage… more so with every passing year. I can remember 18 years prior with disturbing ease. This makes 1897 just long enough in the past to be exotic and just close enough to actually be relevant to the characters. With the elaborate clothing, unusual props, and ornate hairdos, it’s easy to forget that we’re basically dealing with Roger and Liz’s dad when he was David’s age. If you’re an adult who can remember his grandfather, you’re Roger remembering Edward.

This all begins to give Dark Shadows an immediately dynastic continuity, and with that, a sense that we are seeing slices of one, epic story rather than zipping around from the distant 1790’s to the present. Working backwards, we now have a thread from David to Roger, Roger and Liz to Jamison, Jamison to Edward, Edward to Gabriel’s son, that son to Gabriel, and from Gabriel to Daniel. At this point, it gets weird, because we don’t really know the relationship that Daniel’s father had to Joshua’s father.

This is what makes sense, and it’s kinda cool. In episode 1169, when Barnabas is cured for the last and most important time, it’s mentioned that his great uncle, Amadeus, was the prosecutor in the Judah Zachary trial. Amadeus was the brother of Collinsport founder, Isaac Collins. That works out to Isaac being Joshua’s… grandfather? Isaac got to the colonies in 1690, and he was at least twenty. Joshua wouldn’t be born until 1730, 40 years later. Unless Isaac was a very old father, that makes him Joshua’s grandfather. So, it’s from his brother, Amadeus, that we get the line that takes over Collinsport when Barnabas “dies” without an heir. It also explains why Judah Zachary largely bugs this other line and leaves Joshua and Barnabas alone; they had nothing to do with the trial. Daniel, Gabriel, Son of Gabriel, Edward, Jamison, Roger/Liz, and David are the direct descendants of that beatnik lawyer who made a hash of things for Judah at his trial. Nice going, Angelique. By ending Isaac’s line, you inadvertently led to Collinwood being in the direct line of fire rather than some row of townhouses in upstate New York.

What this means is that there’s a lot of old stuff on the show.

Exploring the closed wings is a mighty payoff for the character of Collinwood, itself, finally confessing the extent of its neglect and emotional damage. Amy seems amazed that no one has explored the house, and I am both thankful and amazed that someone is bringing it up. It just underlines a truth that we often ignore on the show, and that is… well, they’re living in a haunted house. What do you expect? And it seems to get more haunted all the time, like a perpetual motion machine of the occult. The situation with the Widows is bad enough. Now, with Quentin finally working up the ecotoplasm to reach out, Diabolos only knows what’s going to happen.

It makes me appreciate what a strange household surrounded Roger and Liz as children. Look at their dad. What is life like if you grow up with what went on in the 1897 storyline? When you’ve been possessed by Count Petofi… when not meddling with the will hidden in your great grandmother’s room-temperature coffin, days ripe? And when you have seen entirely wings of your house shut down, isolated, boarded up, and cut off, along with a good share of the domestics in the process?

The story of Collinwood isolating itself is a story that reached its conclusion with Liz’s reaction to the murder of Paul Stoddard. But again, look at her father. He knew what it meant to see a house compartmentalized after a marriage was dissolved with extreme prejudice. Jamison was around for the ugly beginning of the end of the house that was inaugurated by its matriarch’s suicide. And he was even around when the house was briefly a home, lively, with Jenny and Laura and Quentin and Carl filling it with laughter and mischief and revels not yet ended. But they would end, and we witnessed that. Over and over. How can one house be perpetually falling over the cliffs on which it’s built, but never quite go over?  That’s the most supernatural occurrence of all. The toll for Collinwood is not on the structure. Nor the actual lives of the inhabitants. As English social critic, George Alan O'Dowd, might put it were he to address those visitors, “You come and go. You come and go.” No, Collinwood’s decay is one of its strange, wooden heart. More than anything else, Collinwood is haunted by the perpetual death of joy, and the funeral has been going on for nearly 200 years. At the heart of it? A sinner with a sideburn shaped halo.

In a house haunted by Quentin, once joy incarnate, it will be Quentin’s own descendant, Amy, who will be responsible for his rescue from death and time. She is simply looking to play. In his own way, so was Quentin. It was the quest to end boredom that was the source of his curse. It is a marvelous statement about the power of the human imagination and mischief that the quest to end boredom would also be his release.

This episode was broadcast Dec. 5, 1968.

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

5 reasons I should watch FALCON CREST


By WALLACE McBRIDE

Warner Archive Instant really thinks I should watch FALCON CREST.

Promotional ads for the '80s prime time soap have been hitting my Facebook feed pretty hard in recent weeks. It's easy to figure out why: thanks to this website, I have cause to mentioned David Selby every few days. The show's antihero "Richard Channing" was Selby's second great TV badguy, following (of course) "Quentin Collins."

Weirdly, I've never seen an episode of FALCON CREST. It’s not like I lacked the opportunity, which presented itself weekly on CBS from 1981 until 1990. I had exceedingly bad taste in television in those years, though, and snubbed many good programs in favor of THE A-TEAM, KNIGHT RIDER, RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THE MASTER, MANIMAL and even (ugh) AUTOMAN. These are the viewing habits of an asshole.

Not coincidentally, these are also the viewing habits of a child. I graduated from high school the year FALCON CREST ended its run, and there weren’t many boys in my age group that were into prime time soaps. DYNASTY might have had the occasional slap fight or murder attempt, but THE A-TEAM had Mr. T firing Uzis at hillbillies on a weekly basis. It's just hard to compete with that.

Since launching this website in 2012, The Collinsport Historical Society has led me down some strange rabbit holes. And it has changed me as a person. I never used to see the appeal of live theater until delving into the careers of the many actors to appear on DARK SHADOWS. Stage shows were “culture,” the kind of thing schools used to make children do on field trips — frequently a lame production that was guaranteed to make them hate theater. These days I walk around with the regret of not having seen Jonathan Frid in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” Mitchell Ryan and James Earl Jones in “Othello,” and David Selby and Tom “Thrill Me” Atkins in “Henry IV.” That last one especially haunts me, even though I was only two years old when the production premiered in Chicago. I have unreasonable expectations of life.

Because of Selby, FALCON CREST pops up daily in my various newsfeeds. His FALCON CREST Susan Sullivan even joined him in the DARK SHADOWS audio drama, “Panic” a few years back. Besides sharing the occasional photo from the series, though, I tend to steer clear of conversations about FALCON CREST. I already have ample opportunities to put my ignorance on public display, so why go looking for trouble? But, thanks to the availability of media in the 21st century, it’s not that difficult to fill in gaps in your viewing history … which has led me to a few reasons that I might give FALCON CREST an overdue spin.

1: My non-sexual man crush on David Selby
I was diagnosed with this condition sometime during the early ‘90s, roughly the time that "Quentin Collins" made his first speaking appearance on DARK SHADOWS during its run on The Sci-Fi Channel. Along with folks like Ian Holm, Walton Goggins, Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges, Selby’s presence is usually enough to convince me to watch anything with his name attached to it. From what I know about FALCON CREST, Selby’s character was essentially the show’s answer to Barnabas Collins, an anti-hero introduced during the second year that radically changed its narrative. Without having seen the series, I'm guessing Channing was not a vampire, though.


2: That cast!
Jane Wyman! Sarah Douglas! Robert Foxworth! Susan Sullivan! Simon “I should have been James Bond” MacCorkindale! Bryan Cranston! William Devane! Cesar Romero! John Saxon! Jonathan Banks! Rod Taylor! Roy Thinnes! Kim Novak! Paul Freeman! Carla Gugino! Taylor Negron! Jonathan Frakes! Lana Turner! Michael Dorn! E.G. Marshall! Geoffrey Lewis! Mitch Pileggi! Dana Elcar! Austin Stoker! And ... Apollonia!? Yes! Apollonia!

How is this not already my favorite show?


3: The DVD’s are pretty damn cheap
The Selby-less first season is just $7.29 on Amazon at the moment. Even at that price, the utter lack of Selby in the first season has kept me from jumping into this series with both feet. I’ve spent too much time pooh poohing people who skip the first Barnabas-free year of DARK SHADOWS to do the same with FALCON CREST.

The downside to the low price point, though, is that only the first four years of the show are available on DVD; Warner Archive Instant offers just the first three seasons.


4: It was created by Earl Hamner
Earl Hamner is a stone-cold TV legend, which is no small feat to accomplish when, as a writer, your face is never attached to your work. The guy wrote a whopping eight episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE (which isn’t shabby for someone not named Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson), the screenplay for CHARLOTTE'S WEB and created THE WALTONS. Why would anyone ever argue with a resume like that?

5: I feel less pressure now to be “cool”
The year is 1990. I'm standing in line at a grocery story with an acquaintance who has decided to go to war with the cashier over a coupon for 50 cents. He's older, married and has a kid; I'm barely 19 years old. At one point during the exchange he turns to me and says something to the effect of "This is probably embarrassing to you, but it won't be when you're my age." Turns out he was correct. In retrospect, my adolescent punk rock sensibilities were incredibly selective and kind of crap. I'd defiantly wear Samhain or Body Count t-shirts in public and dare people to start static ... while also hiding my STAR TREK novels and love for TINY TOON ADVENTURES to keep from getting ridiculed by the very same straights.

The development arc since those days has been interesting. I went from reserved to defensive to hostile within a couple of years. These days, I'm more likely to take these kinds of challenges as an opportunity to convert you. "You think the ANNIE musical sucks? Well, let me tell you all the reasons why it doesn't."

So, the idea of someone finding a stack of FALCON CREST DVDs on my living room table is not the embarrassment it once might have been. In fact, why don't you sit down and watch it with me? The NEON DEMONs and LA LA LANDs of the world will still be there when we get back.
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