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| 80's GH | |
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| Topic Started: July 23, 2011, 11:52 am (4,707 Views) | |
| Guest | August 15, 2011, 11:19 am Post #201 |
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Please do!! |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 2:57 pm Post #202 |
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Bad news According to an ABC representative, the “classic episodes” that are set to air between 3:00 AM and 6:00 AM on SOAPnet will be episodes from “the last five years.” |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 3:20 pm Post #203 |
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I knew it. "Classic" my a#s. |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 3:29 pm Post #204 |
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I knew those "classic" weren't going to be real classic. No, worry I won't be staying up to watch them. |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 4:26 pm Post #205 |
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Luke and Laura were the king and queen of GH. It's no disputing that. They were the lead hero and heroine and most if not all stories centered around them individually or together. Did the other super couples fit that criteria? |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 4:29 pm Post #206 |
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Other than Frisco & Felicia, yes. |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 5:08 pm Post #207 |
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Here's a piece on Anna and Duke and the other super couples are mentioned. In Search of Duke Lavery... Wanted: Thirties Type With Style and a Rough Edge for Lonely Soap Heroine By Robert Rorke (SOD 7/28/87) On soaps, as in life, a good man is hard to find. That was Anna Devane’s basic predicament. After the GH's heroine’s romance with Robert Scorpio ended she just couldn’t meet the right guy. Dates in town with dullards like Buzz Stryker were dismal. Where was the excitement, the mystery, the romance that were her due as a soap opera heroine? To look at her, you’d think she’d attract men in droves. Anna was simply too beautiful to languish alone. Devane’s manlessness puzzled the audience. What was the problem? Was Anna that fussy or was she a self-styled celibate? More to the point, why couldn’t the producers of this top-rated program, renowned for matching up Luke and Laura, Robert and Holly, Frisco and Felicia- couples the audience loved- find the right man for Anna? The fussy one was not Anna Devane, but her creator, the former executive producer of GH, Gloria Monty. She acknowledges the difficulty of finding the proper suitor for Anna. “I know Anna needed something a little bigger than life,” Monty says. “Whoever we found had to be on par if not a step better than Scorpio, played by Tristan Rogers, because Anna had been in love with him.” With the Australian-born Rogers still casting a giant shadow on the program, Monty wanted an actor who didn’t have an accent. What she wanted was based, in part, on movie stars of the thirties and forties whom she admired, like James Cagney and Robert Montgomery. “I was looking for a very rough edge to him. Someone who was physically attractive and someone who had style.” Gloria’s sister, Norma, GH co-head writer, assisted in the development of Duke’s character. “Duke was always supposed to be a nightclub person, on the edge of the old times,” she says. “A thirties type.” Aside from the audition scene Duke-hopefuls played with Finola Hughes, Gloria Monty claims that the role was not written until the actor was cast. After seeing twenty-five to one hundred actors, she was still not sold on anyone. Then she heard about an actor in New York named Ian Buchanan. While Monty’s contact didn’t think he was right for the part because of his lack of acting experience (Buchanan had previously modeled), they sent her a tape anyway of Ian telling a story, for future reference. “When we looked at the tape,” Monty recalls, “I just thought, there’s a terrific amount of magnetism in it. We sent for him and he auditioned for the part. Of course, we all voted unanimously to have him and then we wrote the part.” The story Buchanan told on tape was the story of Christ and the fat lady from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. And his reading was not all Buchanan had working in his favor. Nobody knew him, and that certainly appealed to Monty. “I have always believed in never bringing someone on who has been on before,” she says. Although actors Judith Chapman (ex-Ginny), Leslie Charleson (Monica) and John Reilly (Sean) had television and, specifically, soap opera careers before they worked on GH, Monty has “always tried to find new people... I try very hard to get people who are not identified with another show. If you remember them doing something else, a part of it remains with them.” While Monty and Monty waited to see if Finola Hughes and Ian Buchanan could make magic together on screen, the writers carefully matched each character’s qualities. “Neither one of them is a flat person or a black-and-white person,” says Norma Monty. “They both had some things in the past that could have made them villains and bitches. But combined with this were very apright characteristics. They both had their ethics and their sense of integrity.” Here Norma Monty is clearly referring to Miss Devane’s life before she was police chief of Port Charles- a past that included working as a double agent and dealing in stolen art- and Duke’s regretted deal-making days with mobsters. That polarity between ethics and evil in both their lives provided the necessary attraction and magnetism between them. “They were sort of an off-center hero/heroine,” says Norma Monty. “We expected this sort of thing for them to go for each other. Which they did.” Anna and Duke’s story owes some of its melodramatic quality to one of Gloria Monty’s favorite old movies, A Woman’s Face, which Joan Crawford made in 1941. Monty admits Crawford’s role provided the basis for the Devane character, but the movie’s plot- a former criminal who falls in love with a master criminal- may have trickled down to the present-day story. Crawford also had a nasty scar in A Woman’s Face; Devane will always be remembered by viewers for the scar she wore when she first came on the show. By rooting their romance in melodrama, Monty made Duke and Anna a very serious- some might say grim- couple. Certainly their eyebrows are often furrowed; Monty herself says they frequently face “life-and-death” circumstances. In compairing them with one of her previous popular pairings, Robert and Holly, Monty was quick to point out how she was able to capitalize on Tristan Rogers and Emma Samms’ talent for comedy. “They both made marriage exciting- Robert and Holly did,” she says. “We were able to do a lot of improvised comedy with them- a very sophisticated vein.” By contrast, Monty thinks Anna and Duke’s relationship has an element of “forbidden love for both of them, which makes it very attractive.” Going further back to the days of Luke and Laura, Monty was able to appeal to her audience on a different leve. “Luke and Laura were so much more American,” she says. “Luke had so much street smarts, but could be debonair. He had this love for Laura and the intensity of what he wanted out of life all the time. [He] was also able to laugh at himself.” While Finola Hughes could not be reached to comment on the chemistry between Anna and Duke, Ian Buchanan was available. He, for one, doesn’t see the chemistry himself. “How could I?” he says. “I don’t think she does either.” There is, however, chemistry on the set. Buchanan adores working with Finola Hughes. “I’m very comfortable around her,” Ian says. “I find her very amusing. I used to say that it’s nothing to do with the fact that she’s British, but I think it has a lot to do with it. I will finally admit that,” he laughs. If Anna and Duke never clicked, plan B, Norma Monty reveals, was to make Duke a solid villain. “Duke would have become a very bad man,” she says. “Anna would be a heroine and put him in jail. And we would have had to work on another man for her.” The clear success of this romance has prompted the writers at GH, under Executive Producer Wes Kenney, to complicate matters by having Duke pine for Anna and Camellia, while Anna finds herself drawn to Duke and Robert Scorpio, who has returned to the show for a second time. Of these arrangements, Ian Buchanan takes a dim view. “Two triangles make a square, unfortunately,” he says, tartly. In his scenario, he would have Camellia out of this romantic muddle altogether and create a ménage a trois. “If I could write Duke and Anna, what I would like to see happen- Finola and I have discussed it- it would be a very mature, not seedy, but a mature situation... the three of us set up together. I want to be around her, he wants to be around her. She likes to be around both of us. Of course, not a case of, well, whose turn is it tonight? Nothing like it. A very mature relationship between three adults. I think it would be hysterically funny. Almost like The Odd Couple plus one.” Sounds cozy, Ian. But will it play in Peoria? |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 5:32 pm Post #208 |
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Soap mags refer to Zendall and JaSam as supercouples too. Doesn't make it true. Honestly the supercouple thing is so hackeyed anyway. It's just a label for a certain type of writing that existed in the 80's "us against the world" yada yada yada. |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 5:55 pm Post #209 |
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I don't think all the GH super couples were us against the world. Robert and Holly went down a totally different path then the others. Robert and Holly did the one thing the others couldn't seem to accomplished onscreen.Stay happily married for a few years and keep it interesting with no infidelity. |
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| Guest | August 15, 2011, 11:00 pm Post #210 |
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True. But I guess one poster was infering that L&L were GH's only supercouple. I guess I disagree. It was mentioned many times in the rags. |
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10:52 AM Jul 11