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Written by: Robert LaGuardia
 

Imagine that you are a magazine reporter and that you have just been invited to spend a day on your favorite daytime serial, The Edge of Night , to observe how a soap day goes.

It's 7:30 A.M., but it still seems like the middle of the night by the time you've stumbled out of a taxi in front of the E.U.E. building on Manhattan's East Side. On the sixth floor there's a puzzlement of crisscrossing corridors, workmen chatting while they carry props. Various signs announce studios with numbers. After flipping a mental coin, you enter one of them and, relieved, find that you're at The Edge of Night . But your passage is blocked by a primordial sludge of props: the chairs, clocks, paintings, glasses, pitchers, and other artifacts, huge and small, that the denizens of Monticello need to live out their busy televised lives. You make your way through this maze. In front of it stand a few semipermanent set walls. Then the great expanse of the studio proper stretches before your amazed eyes. Youthful stagehands with beards or mustaches (and/or fashionably lengthy hair) dicker with other men laboring on ladders or negotiating heavy cables and booms from one big area to another. Slowly you perceive the tiny sets on the periphery of the vast studio.

Ah! (you say to yourself). Isn't that the living room of the Barn where those mysterious assassins have made numerous attempts on Nicole's life, pushing poor Nicole to the brink of a nervous breakdown? The actual room appears miniscule compared with the way you remember it on TV. Most of the others sets are also small simulated living rooms and offices with only three walls; the fourth side is for camera access. This is Monticello, you realize---nothing more than pockets of three-walled rooms, some chairs and couches, and a few props. But the surrounding movement, this most obvious swirl of technical activity, you never see on television.

Scattered in the little sets are a half dozen people who appear to be sitting in a quiet trance, oblivious to the screech around them. Who are these sleepy ones, all gulping coffee to get their hearts started? Theoretically---as you discover---they are the residents of The Edge of Night's Monticello, who come into millions of homes each afternoon, bringing with them their bizarre involvements with crime and romance, and their dazzling personalities. At the moment, however, they look more like Out of Body Projections. This couldn't be brashly handsome Johnny Dallas. JohnLaGioa looks much too tired to fight the Mob with Johnny's characteristic bravado, and greets you with: "Hello. . . excuse me if I look at you with one eye but I only had five hours of sleep last night." Half comatose, Dixie Carter buries her head in a recipe book, something her sarcastic, undomesticated Brandy Henderson would never do. That Dynamic Duo, Don May and Forrest Compton, as crime-stopper Adam Drake and Mike Karr, look wan. They are in the set of Mike's office, speaking softly so as not to wake themselves up. They don't look capable of apprehending an interloping fly. And Maeve McGuire in her Barn set, is fussing somewhat mechanically, like a sleepwalker, with her props---no smiles, a blank expression, nothing like the problem-plagued Nicole.

And yet you know that these adroit actors, untimely ripped from their beds, within hours will become characters instantly recognizable to millions across the land---when, as if by magic, another well-planned, well-produced, and well-executed episode emerges from what appears to be sleepy studio confusion.
 
 

In a moment the first rehearsal of the day starts. This two-hour session finds the performers lounging in their respective sets, running lines, chatting, studying scripts, while waiting for the arrival of the director, young and eager Andy Weyman. Andy will listen, in turn, to the short vignettes (or scenes) that the actors studied the night before. The sets aren't completely assembled yet, and many of the props are missing. Andy enters Dixie's set. Tony Craig, as Draper Scott, has to enter brusquely, only to find a drunken Dixie as Brandy (no pun intended!). Dixie removes her shades to look at a script she can barely see, gives Tony a blurred answer, then suddenly seems to wake up. She looks up at Andy, who's dropping to his haunches at several points to study possible camera angles. Says Dixie, "I'd like to have champagne instead of liquor. It's the kind of thing a woman would do." No sooner has she said it, and the director acquiesced, than one of E.U.E.'s spectacularly alert prop men, standing behind Andy, says he'll have a champagne setup brought out in a jiffy. Tony gives her the line, "I want your hand in marriage..." and Dixie brings her hand to eye level to study it. "Yeah! Yeah!" blurts Andy, who loves the improvisation. He's satisfied with the scene and moves on. Dixie, about to leave the show, grumbles some speculation at Tony, whose character has been in love with hers for more than a year: "I know how I'm going to be written out. I come to say, finally, 'Yes, I'll marry you,' and then find you in the arms of Raven--- how boring! Well, they've got to do something. I've only got four more shows." In another set, representing Nancuy's new apartment during her temporary estrangement from Mike, Andy listens to David Gale (the new heavy, Beau Richardson) menace Ann Flood with swaggering sexuality. David, sporting a lush nineteenth-century mustache, moves reptilianly toward Ann and corners her in front of some cabinets. He begins: "Here's what I came to talk to you about. . . and I can't remember it!" David puts his hand to his forehead and sighs. "Yessss?" Andy says, laughing. David and Ann wind up finishing the sexy scene with Ann holding the script up at chest level so David can read it and menace her at the same time. Meanwhile, in Nicole's barn living room, Maeve McGuire is obsessed with a prop trick she must sccomplish by tape time---the knocking over of a champagne glass on a smooth table, a further sign of Nicole's fast-approaching breakdown. The glass refuses to tip over properly, and Maeve looks frustrated. A prop man comforts her. Later, the director also offers help.

During this inhumanly early first rehearsal, most of the actors stumble over their lines or read directly from scripts, for, despite the study of the night before, the words aren't yet committed to memory. The movements and stage business with the props are awkward and choppy. At this juncture it seems that only an act of God could help the actors get all the words and motions smoothly assembled by tape time, some five hours later.

While the rehearsal continues, the equipment lacking in the sets is furiously hoisted about the huge auditoriumlike studio. Tables and chairs and liquor bottles (holding colored water) are being carried into Brandy's apartment and Nicole's barn by property men, who do all the work physically assembling the serial homes, according to the instructions of the director and the scenic designer. Movement---the carrying of objects, snapping of cables, and setting up of booms and cameras---is always hysterically quick, because everyone knows that the actors must rehearse their lines again in the finished sets at 10:30 A.M., when the camera angles are first set up, a step called camera- blocking or FAX (a rehearsal with "facilities"). Delays of mere minutes in setting up the next rehearsal with completed facilities can cost the sponsor plenty. And so the actors try to recall and repeat the words they studied the night before amidst this ever-increasing bustle of prop assemblage.

Although most soap days begin in much the same way, there are striking differences in the details of production from one soap to another. On the the trips to other studios you learn, for instance, that The Edge of Night is unique in that the actors have their first rehearsal right in the sets as they are being assembled. The actors on The Edge of Night say they prefer their way better, because they have a sense of their respective sets from the very start of the soap day. Yet actors on other soaps would be aghast at the noisy distractions Edge's actors have to endure during the first rehearsal.
 
 

BLOCKING
 

Back on The Edge of Night, the three television cameras-- those Cyclops eyes which bring millions upon millions of soap-opera addicts into various homes and offices in Monticello-- are finally put into place. Each of these twentieth-century miracles is operated by a genius inelegantly known as a cameraman; he should more properly be known as a photographer ne plus ultra. Everything the viewer sees is framed and focused by him, according to the instructions of the director. What could happen to the most ardent scenes of a Maeve McGuire or an Ann Flood without good camera work was shown a few years ago when CBS cameramen went on strike and the most poignant soap opera scenes were wrecked by exposed booms and haywire focus.

Now comes the part of the soap-opera-- 10:30 A.M.-- when all the little vignettes, lackadaisically rehearsed, must suddenly come together for the first time. It's called the "blocking." You follow the director to the control booth, a small, dark room from where he watches the set on three TV screens, each with a different angle. He communicates with the actors and crew members directly over an intercom system, and with the mike, boom, and camera operators via earphones. One of the director's most important jobs at this stage is to make sure the actors coordinate their words and movements with camera movements. Sitting next to the director is his assistant, who notes the camera angles he selects. Since set phones and bells don't actually ring, the sound effects are prerecorded on cassettes, along with the music, and inserted into the videotaping system during the first blocking rehearsal by an audioman, who sits near the director in an isolated booth and listens for his intercom instructions. In every way it's much like a Cape Kennedy rocket-launch space-communications setup.

This first blocking is nip and tuck, and this is perhaps the one process that makes serial performing the roughest of all media. For not only are the actors required to commit to memory pages of dialogue in one day, but they must also immediately learn on which line, and often which word, they are to make specific movements-- such as crossing a room, picking up a cup, or walking around a sofa. On these particular words or lines, the cameramen are cued to come in for a closeup or move back for a long shot, or perhaps another camera will pick up the scene from a different angle. It can ruin a scene if an actor forgets a cue line, or faces the wrong way when he says it. Should that happen, the camera might be forced to shoot out into the studio.

At this point in the day, the actors seem to be a pack of rats on a treadmill, trying to get somewhere they're never going to reach. They don't seem to know their lines on their movements, and in just three hours everything must be perfect! Yet no one is tearing his hair out-- not yet. Now that the sleepiness has vanished, there appears to be a kind of self-destructive slapstick mood pervading the difficult proceedings.

On his TV screens, Andy Weyman watches Ann Flood and David Gale start their scene. Ann opens the door for David, who can be seen by the camera taking the shot. "Show your face, David," says Andy over the intercom. Kidding, Ann closes the door abruptly on his face, and when she opens it again he's holding his nose as if injured. After "mean" David wheedles his way into "innocent" Ann's abode, he says the line: "Lets be honest-- paaaainfully honest." Ann cringes, with a slight smirk. David continues, hoking it up: "You're leaving this dreary, dingy hole and you're going back to your comfy little home in the suburbs... back to your flowered wallpaper and cute little kitchen and adoring little husband... Do you understand, my angel?" Ann spurts, her eyes wide with mock horror: "You're incredible! You're not even human!" The control room breaks up. Today David is the chief comic. During a scene in which Adam and Nicole are toasting her not having been shot to death the day before, the phone rings. Adam answers it, and instead of hearing a drunken Brandy he hears "Hello, schweetheart" from David on the other end. "We seem to be having a bit of a problem with gender," says Andy. "On some days," an assistant says, "they're just insane."

Incidentally, Ann loves this new story about her virtue being threatened by a handsome villain. Of course, the writers are have put Nancy in some awful predicaments over the last fourteen years; she's been kidnapped, faced sudden death, endured misunderstandings with friends. But she has never been put in a story which both tempted and threatened her sexually. Ann later says, "Nancy was never that real. For years she has just served the purpose of a listener, a supporter. Now she gets emotional; she can make mistakes. I've been waiting a long time for this to happen to her character." But viewers weren't waiting. Right after Mike and Nancy separated, the producer's office received phone calls from fifty fans complaining about the split-up. Later, Frances Nonenmacher, the show's loyal fan club president, comforted Ann with "Don't worry, Nancy couldn't carry on with a priest." David Gale's previous role on daytime television was that of Father Mark Reddin on The Secret Storm.

Although the director plotted all of his camera angles last night, he is fishing for better ones at this point. He encourages the cameramen to experiment as they follow his general plan. At one point a cameraman is inspired and shows Andy an opening pan shot for Ann and David's scene, and the director is hysterically happy at the effect: "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Mean! Son of a gun!" He also encourages the actors to deviate. Don May goes up (forgets) a line and sighs instead. Andy says, "Good. Let's keep the sigh."
 
 

THE DIRECTORS
 

Such are the goings -on during the propless first rehearsals of the day. The attitude of the actors and the director toward the serious story material may be less than reverant, but all that cutting up is strictly on the surface. The actors are indulging in some comic relief before their professional stamina as actors on a continuing serial is strained nearly to the breaking point. Behind all the silly jokes is the fear, the absolute dread, that their performances will be less than perfect while millions of people watch-- the fear that whole speeches will be forgotten, or a cue or a movement will be missed, while the videotape machine mercilessly grinds away.

The director knows that his power to guide his actors through five hours of preparation for a finished performance on the same day is strictly limited. He can set the tone for the style of the scenes, correct details, tell an actor that he's overplaying something, but he cannot tell an actor how to learn to do a performance in a matter of hours. Besides, he has other things to worry about-- so many things, in fact, that most shows have at least two directors to handle the burden. On The Edge of Night, directors Andy Weyman and John Sedwick alternate days. But, like any other director of a daytime serial, they must have the patience of a lion tamer, the endurance of an Olympic runner, the creativity of a Mike Nichols, and the tact of a politician.

Summed up, the director's job is to decide how scenes are to be played, what sort of props are to be used, what kind of music will be played, and the most important matters of how the actors are to move about and how the cameras are to photograph them. It all looks so simple, even ridiculously easy, when you see the televised episode. But every camera shot, and every single movement, with the corresponding words in the script, has to be drawn by the director or an elaborate map of the sets that are to be used. All this blocking is given to the studio technicians-- the audiomen, the technical director, the lighting director-- as soon as the director arrives in the morning. So, in terms of homework, the director has almost as much work to do on a script as the writer.

Soap-opera directors make decent money-- anywhere from fifty thousand dollars a year to more than twice that amount-- there are probably some who sneer at their work and laugh all the way to the bank. But the truly dedicated directors do not operate this way, and on the soap circuit (which is a very "in" scene) they are widely known and respected for their creativity, involvement, and sensitive understanding of their medium.

Talk to any veteran daytime actor, for instance, and chances are that one of the first names he'll mention is that of Leonard Valenta, one of the finest of this splendid breed. Currently Len is one of the three directors on the new one-hour As the World Turns, and over the past eighteen years he has worked on all of Procter and Gamble's serials. (P&G habitually moves writers, directors, and producers from one serial to another, to increase range and flexibility.) Len gets totally caught up in the stories he directs, often, to his embarrassment, finding himself becoming a soap-addict "sob sister." "The actors on As the World Turns are so good," says Len, "that I sometimes forget that I'm directing them and sit back in the control room and just watch. Now that's dangerous-- sort of like a bus driver just letting the bus go off on its own! I'm just like the viewers when I watch Kathy Hays [Kim, the chief heroine] work: I sit back, amazed. I loved working with Gillian Spencer [Jennifer Ryan Hughes]. During the taping of the funeral for Jennifer, when Bob gave a long speech about her, I just broke down and started to cry. I was embarrassed, with everyone around me in the control room, but I couldn't help it. It was a combination of my sense of loss at Gillian's leaving the show and my grief over the death of the character." Len's technical expertise gives his actors added assurance, and his emotionality and creativity tend to inspire them.

Ira Cirker, a wiry, esthetic-looking man, has been one of the mainstays of Another World for years. His thinking is typical of that of accomplished soap directors. "I like directing serials because they're like long novels. The long drawn-out pacing makes them a great challenge."

The man who has directed one daytime serial for the longest period of time is Larry Auerbach of Love of Life. He has been with the show since it began, in 1951, and is looked upon by many of his actors as a father figure. Shortly after Audrey Peters became the third and current Vanessa, she abjectly looked up to Larry and said to him, in response to his detailed and highly supportive directions, "Yes, Daddy." Ron Tomme, who had already been on a few months as Bruce, said to Audrey: "That's exactly what our last Vanessa [Bonnie Bartlett] said to Larry." Larry, as some people believe, doesn't just work for Love of Life but IS the show. "Obviously," he says, "I wouldn't be directing one show this long unless I got pleasure out of my work. There are other things a director can do to make money."

For many years,  Allen Fristoe directed The Edge of Night and gave it much of the technical impact it has today.  He was the one who began employing a certain staccato style:  sudden blackouts before commercials, machine-gun quick action and interrogation scenes (which Edge addicts love so),  impatient delivery--a la Howard Hawks--of dialogue, and underplaying of romantic scenes.  The show's second director, John Sedwick, is said to have added to Allen's accomplishments by concentrating on (and augmenting) the details of head writer Henry Slesar's characterizations rather than pure technique.     Allen Fristoe recently moved to As the World Turns, and Andy Weyman replaced him.

This is twenty-four-year-old Andy's first major directorial assignment.  Like most of the youthful directors on daytime, he is a graduate of one of the many television/broadcasting schools now thriving.  In their eagerness to apply their elaborate training,  these young directors often make the mistake of overpreparing every shot and nuance before coming to the studio,  robbing both themselves and the actors of the joy of spontaneous creativity.  "I used to be like that," says Andy.  "I'd come to the studio and call every camera angle exactly as I had planned it the night before.  At the end of the day I'd feel disgusted with myself--nothing interesting was happening with my shows.  Then I loosened up and began letting the actors and camera men play around with different ideas that happened to come to them during the first few rehearsals.  My shows became more exciting.  Today, for example, one of the cameramen happened to catch Ann in the mirror while David holds the phone out to her-- and suddenly both David and I knew what the camera was suggesting.  He wanted to bring Ann into focus in the mirror, while David was seen holding the receiver, before we faded to black.  It was tricky, but a terrific idea."  (In terms of story, Beau Richardson was extending the phone to a horrified Nancy, attempting to force her to call Mike and tell him that she would move back with him.  If she didn't do what Beau asked, she realized, he could harm little Timmy, once her ward).  During your day on the show, you're quite impressed with young Andy Weyman's fine craftmanship and creativity.  He holds his own against more experienced daytime directors.
 

While director and cast have already done a great deal of work in preparing the episode of The Edge of Night now in production-- two hours of rehearsal without facilities and then an hour of blocking with cameras and booms-- they all know that these are but minor skirmishes compared with the major battles yet to be fought and won. All this loose experimenting with camera angles and joking between the lines will soon dissolve into a fearful Condition Red! The performers and director have been deliberately saving their energies for the ordeal ahead.

It's after 11 a.m. now, time for the run-through-- "the first time," as Andy says, "a rehearsal will resemble a finished show." The loud uproar of men assembling equipment in the upstairs studio, the increasing volume of cameramen, boom men, and lighting men trying to coordinate themeselves have now become a hushed hysteria. Things HAVE to start working right now, if the show is to be taped on time. And, yes, eventually-- as if by some higher guidance not visible on the immediate scene-- the clutzy ballet of monstrous cameras and booms, with one soundman sitting on each and another carrying it round, and the various utility men (coordinators), begins to look smoothly efficient.

The actors appear on the studio floor, with a glint of fear in their eyes that you didn't notice before. All the fun is gone. The men have a lost, wrinkly-browed look. The women appear top-heavy, with huge curlers in their hair. The performers are forever looking about, waiting to be told what to do next by someone in authority. And out of this muck, this chaos of half-learned lines and movements, of criss-crossing cables and too many arms and legs, must come a finished and polished half-hour dramatic episode in a matter of hours. The weight of that reality would cause anyone's brow to wrinkle.

You notice for the first time a marked irritability. Everything goes wrong in Dixie's set. First Tony Craig's knock on her door can't be heard in the audio system; then it's discovered that the marks for Dixie's chair still haven't been placed on the floor, and the lighting hasn't been adjusted properly. Andy firmly but politely reminds the crew of their mistakes. Then Tony stops on a line and says he thinks Dixie gave him the wrong cue. Dixie is visibly annoyed and asks for a readback of the lines from the control room. Andy confirms that it was Tony's mistake. Andy pushes the various shots onward by snapping his fingers and blurting to the cameraman: "Now!" or "Cue Nancy!" or "Tighten!" or "Dissolve." The lexicon of cameraman/director words seems inexhaustible, and are always spoken with frenzied passion. In Maeve and Don's scene, Don enters the Barn and Maeve says, "I woke up this morning, felt fine, calm, and... what the hell do I say?. . .oh, yes, I took a walk." Then Don and Maeve mess up a cue: He doesn't wait for her to start circling the couch before saying a line. They both look like they're about to flagellate themselves for the mistake. Don's previously improvised sigh on the telephone with Dixie becomes so elaborate now that it sounds like a man sneezing while trying to say a word. Overdone. In the control booth, the director stops everything to announce over the intercom that there's much too much noise on the studio floor, and later he dickers with the lighting man over a funny flare effect caused by Ann's standing against white cabinets. By now, your head is spinning.

Compounding the tension, each and every actor on The Edge of Night is nervously aware that he is rehearsing to perform on "live" tape-- that is, the director is not going to order the tape stopped for a retake if a line is flubbed; if he did, the show would never get off the ground. It's just too expensive to stop tape, so an actor knows that his lousy performance, or his mistake, will be heard and seen by an audience larger than any stage actor could dream of. So the soap actor, like Avis, tries harder.

No wonder daytime-serial casting directors try to hire only actors and directors skilled in this kind of rough-house work, and no wonder actors who are on heavily for a few weeks start talking quietly about seeing psychiatrists or doing Broadway plays again. There are horror stories of countless well-known Hollywood actors, like Jan Sterling and Troy Donahue, giving up their daytime roles in utter desperation.

Just before the dress rehearsal Erwin "Nick" Nicholson makes his first appearance, without fanfare or drumroll. There's not a hint of regality in this mild-mannered, mid-fortyish, black-bemustached man's behavior. Yet his special status can be detected instantly by the tension and sweep of courtly amenities that attend his entrance; handshaking, politic smiles, and courting postures from all the show's constituents. For in the adrenalin-activated minds of each actor of The Edge of Night, there is a silent orchestral introduction as he enters the taping studio for the first time. He is the wise Solomon. He is the Executive Producer. And that means he is the one man, besides the sponsor way far away in the never-never land of Cincinnati, who can say yes or no to all the pent-up requests and can deal with the urgent complaints of the actors. He'll tell Ann Flood whether she can attack her character with more obvious neuroticism, or Forrest Compton if he can have a week off in a few months to do a play, or Don May and Maeve McGuire if he'd be willing to let them junk or reword parts of a scene that they dislike. Although Nick doesn't ask for it, when he walks into the studio he enters with an invisible aura of authority emanating from his unassuming figure. He's what anthropologists like to call the Old Man (awesome tribal chief, almost a god), and all the actors instantly dart their eyes in his direction.

Soap producers are exceedingly powerful, and they come in all types and with diverse natures. Some are harsh and demanding; some are egoists, who connive for personal glory; and some are destructively interferring. Nick is in none of these categories. He is like a benign father, unpossessive, interested only in the excellence of his child-- his show. His manner with his actors is one of delicacy and tact; his attitude toward their creative temperaments is that of laissez-faire cultivation. Nick became Edge's producer more than ten years ago, succeeding Don Wallace. He has never married, and it has been said that he tends to treat the people on The Edge of Night as if they were the wife and children he's never had. After the show had been on ABC for one year (following its departure from CBS), Nick spent several evenings writing thank you letters to the whole crew on The Edge of Night for helping to make the difficult job of transition from one network to another a success. Unused to this personal attention from an important producer, utility men and other crew members one by one came over to Nick and told him emotionally and awkwardly how proud they were to get such a letter. One of them was so thrilled that he and his wife were thinking of framing it!

After telling Nick that you haven't been able to find one person in the soap world who has a disparaging word to say about him, only that he has a surprising lack of self-involvement for one with so much power, Nick tells you: "The truth is, the only thing I can think about is the good of the show. Now, our actors are terrific bunch of people. Occasionally one will come up to me and complain about his dialogue, and I'll ask him if he can sit down with me and work the problem out constructively. Maybe he can make suggestions that I can relay to the writer. The one thing I don't put up with is a destructive and negative attitude-- someone who says, 'I won't say these lines, no more discussion.' Fortunately, we rarely get actors like that on our show. " Now and then, when some person or easily avoidable mistake threatens to wreck one of Edge's episodes, mild-mannered Nick can explode and throw the whole set into a congregation of eager repenters. But any good father would do the same.

Nick spends his morning working out details of budgets and new contracts for actors, talking with Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati and Benton and Bowles (the ad agency in New York for which Nick officially works), and discussing script ideas with the show's head writer, Henry Slesar. Actually, what Nick does is what any producer of a soap does: He represents the sponsor and in so doing makes the ultimate decision on how the program will look. All the smaller parts of putting together a show-- like the writer's grinding out daily dialogue, or the director's daily struggle with camera angles and dramatic style-- do not get the producer's attention. He comes into the studio in the late morning, and the first time he sees or hears the day's show is when he watches the run-through in front of the cameras. At that time, if he doesn't like something, he tells the director.