by David Selby
That was the scuttlebutt at the time, so my contract was signed and I was permitted to work. It was Andy Clores, the union business agent, who had insisted on the enforcement of the rerun clause. I thank you, Andy!
As the fans know, Dark Shadows played in more languages and countries than you can shake a stick at. It was because of Andy’s tenacity that I became, to my knowledge, the first scenic designer in broadcast history to receive residuals from a soap opera. The show that would never be rerun has been playing in some country or another almost all the time for the past 30 years.
However, when I first discovered that my contract committed me to five years I went ballistic! I had agreed to do the show for one year. I complained and Bob assured me that I was not going to be railroaded. Oddly enough, I couldn’t imagine ever leaving once the show was rolling and actually stayed for its entire run.
We had too much fun. It was easily the most creative project I’d ever been associated with. So much for the guy who said, “I don’t do soaps.”
Dark Shadows was to be the second project for which I would be creating the designs from scratch. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me then, but I soon realized that I had the opportunity to do a television project using all the knowledge and expertise that I had gained from the film medium. I had learned that real materials, such as wall paper and architectural moldings, had to be used rather than the simulated painted detail generally used in set construction that provided a flat two-dimensional surface.
In 1966, I wanted to explore sophisticated techniques using textures and materials thatwould look more convincing. Damask wall coverings would be actual damask rather than a painted substitute with a stenciled pattern. Wood would be real wood instead of painted canvas using a spatter drag technique. Even stone or brick walls would be conveyed with fiberglass or vacuform molds rather than a scenic artist’s rendering of these materials. As fabulous as the scenic crafts were, these techniques were created for the stage and cannot stand up to the scrutiny of a camera closeup on screen. I felt that the textures we used should be capable of creating moods with shades, shadows and highlights. I was determined that I could improve the look of television, certainly on the soaps. The show originated from ABC’s modestly-sized Studio 2 on 67th Street, premiering in June 1966 in glorious black and white. Among the first things we had to do was locate a house that would serve as the exterior for the Collinwood Mansion and a seaport village that would evoke the town of Collinsport. Where would we find such a town? I was elected to be the scout on this mission. It was decided that the best way to explore the Atlantic coastline would be in a Piper Cub, which I soon discovered was a very tiny two-passenger plane from which I could take photographs. That suited me fine.
Don Briscoe, Bobbi Ann Woronko and Sy Tomashoff on the set.
My wife Naomi, who was pregnant with our third child Elizabeth, did not see it quite the same way. She thought it less than prudent for an expectant father to go flying in a wash tub under less than ideal conditions. “Sure,” she said. “You can go up in a plane, but only if Mr. Curtis takes out a life insurance policy on you. Suppose something happens to you in the plane?”
I told Dan that I needed the protection of an insurance policy to give Naomi security. “No problem,” said Dan, and so I was able to proceed on our adventure. (I never did find out how much I was insured for. I trust it was a goodly sum.)
“This seems to fit the bill,” I remember thinking as we discovered the infamous seaport town of Essex—or should I say “Collinsport.” We had spotted the village from the air at just the moment when I felt that our journey had been fruitless. I managed to lean out far enough to snap a roll of film which—to my surprise—turned out to be the pictures that transformed the town of Essex into the legend that it is today. Mission accomplished. Essex became the Collinsport location of the Collinsport Inn that housed the coffee shop where Maggie (Kathryn Leigh Scott) worked and where she befriended Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke) in the first episode.
“Here are the pictures of Essex from the air,” I told Dan. “You will probably want to scout it by car to see if it satisfies all your needs.”
Never happened. No survey. Dan and Bob took a camera crew up to Essex and filmed the scenes that were needed. A couple of weeks earlier, Dan, Bob and I had driven up to Newport, Rhode, Island, where we found the Gothic estate that would be used to portray Collinwood mansion, and I took pictures so that I would be able to match the set to our exterior.
As beautiful as the Newport estate was, the design of its interiors was totally inappropriate. Ultimately the only thing we matched was the front door, an intricate design consisting of multi-shaped paneled double doors. It was not an easy job, but copy them we did and no one ever doubted for one moment that those doors were the doors of the Newport estate.
How do you create a foreboding mood for a Gothic piece? We began with a staircase and a second floor landing where we could play some dramatic scenes and provide smooth transitions between scenes. We wanted a big fireplace in the drawing room. We built a secret panel in the rear wall of the drawing room not knowing at the time where it went or who would use it or even if it would be used at all. As it turned out the secret panel got more use than a subway turnstile! The piece d’resistance was the Gothic stained glass windows on the top stair landing in the entranceway. Those impressive windows gave the crowning touch to the foyer.
After a few weeks of designing most of the sets that would start the show, our director was brought into the scene. I remember sitting in Dan Curtis’ office with Bob Costello when Lela Swift was introduced to me. She was a pioneering female director and had recently won an Emmy Award for her distinguished work.
“How can you design sets without the director being in on it? she asked, feeling a little exasperated. After I showed her the drawings and gave her a chance to study them, she felt more comfortable with them and we started a working relationship that would remain close and exciting. We always seemed to be in synch and shared a mutual admiration, personally and professionally. Lela, who went on to win further Emmys for her work after Dark Shadows, would say, ”I don’t ever want to work with any other designer but you.” I did not win any Emmys for the show, but it wasn’t that I didn’t deserve one! It was simply that the Daytime Emmy Awards had not yet been established. Too bad, because I thought Dark Shadows looked wonderful. I have made up for it by garnering seven Emmys for daytime drama scenic design, beginning in 1981 for Ryan’s Hope, followed by Capitol in 1986, and then five wins for The Bold and the Beautiful to date.
In the fall of 1966, while Dark Shadows’ storyline still concerned the governess hired by the weird family in the spooky house, the show was moved from TV-2 on 66th Street to TV-16, a brand new studio on West 53rd Street. ABC had bought a lumber yard and renovated it to become the new home for Dark Shadows.
“You are going to have to cut two feet off the top of the foyer,” I was told just as we were preparing to make the move. “The lighting pipes are too low to accommodate the height of the back wall.”
“You’re telling me I have to slice off part of the stained glass window at the top of the stairs?” I belched. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“What?”
“You have to raise the pipes in that part of the studio.”
Ta da! They did. And so we were all happy. The stained glass window remained intact.
A few months later, Dan Curtis decided that our story needed to move at a more dramatic pace and that perhaps it needed, well, maybe something darker. A dead ancestor or maybe a vampire! The appearance of the ancestor would follow the discovery of a portrait in the Foyer. I remember this sequence well because I was told we needed to see the portrait of Barnabas Collins before we were introduced to him. However, the role of Barnabas had not yet been cast! Bob Costello suggested that we better have the portrait artist start the picture with the appropriate period costume, the finger ring and the silver wolf head cane. His thought was that we could photo
graph anyone with the necessary accouterments and insert the face of the actor when he was cast. No one volunteered to sit for the picture so it was Bob who drew the short straw. I was assigned to be the photographer. As a vampire, Bob looked great! I wonder where that painting is today.
Finally our vampire was found in the person of Jonathan Frid and the rest is history. Jonathan’s face was installed onto the painting for time immemorial.
Then, of course, there was the task of revealing the vampire and for those of you who don’t know the circumstances of that horrendous event, the scenario went this way. Willie Loomis (John Karlen) was in search of the reported wealth of jewels that could be found in the Collins family mausoleum. In the studio, Dan dubbed me the “master builder of mausoleums.”
When Willie discovered the mausoleum—and you can be sure it was a dark and foggy night—he saw three stone sarcophagi in a row inside the crypt. Certainly the jewels must be in one of these boxes, he figured. The lids were much too heavy for him to remove but he noticed that on the wall behind each of the sarcophagi was a tablet with the deceased’s name on it and above each tablet was a decorative lion’s head with a ring through its nose. This ring, Willie figured, could serve as a pulley system to help raise the lid. When Willie fastened the rope to the lid and through the ring in the lion’s nose—you guessed it! The tug on the ring’s spring device triggered the secret slab door to open into the inner chamber that housed a single wooden coffin. The coffin contained the vampire—the one and only, the infamous and lovable, the immortal Barnabas! Willie, of course, had been sure that in this coffin was the treasure he was seeking. Not quite! As Willie slowly raised the lid, a hand appeared and reached for Willie’s throat in what appeared to be a death grip. End of episode! Shortly thereafter, there is a knock on the door at the Collins estate. Elizabeth Collins (Joan Bennett) answers the door to none other than Bamabas Collins, who presents himself as a long-lost cousin from England. From this point on, the storyline of Dark Shadows focused primarily on the reluctant vampire.
And where would our reluctant vampire live but at the Old House, with Elizabeth’s blessings. We set about fixing up the old place a bit. We had the newly-painted portrait of Barnabas placed over the mantle. We put in curtains and drapes and provided enough candles to light up Transylvania at midnight.
ABC soon announced that our show was to be converted to color. It was inevitable. We couldn’t stand in the way of technology; nor did we want to.
“What will you do now?” came the curious cry from many of the actors and crew. “You’re going to have to redo everything.” In those days color was a mystical thing.
“You know,” I said, “maybe, just maybe, I designed it for color in the first place.”
The fact is we did not have to modify a thing other than the lighting. What fascinated me was that while I had always thought of mystery being best photographed in black and white, color did enhance the imagery. The show still kept its suspenseful mood by virtue of Mel Handelsman‘s—and later John Connelly’s—eloquent lighting. Our transition to color was truly glorious.
I venture to say that in all my experience I can’t recall any time before or since when there was so much enthusiasm, creativity and innovation brought into play on a television show. We flashed forward and backward in time, creating settings and costumes from every historical time from the witch burnings in the 18th century to the apparent demise of Collinwood mansion at the end of the 20th century. We created effects with Chromakey (superimposing with the use of a blue screen). We created astral beings who could emerge from their own bodies. We created portraits that could bleed and characters who aged 100 years in a matter of days. Classic horror stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde became our playground. The actors got the opportunity to perform roles in a repertory company playing characters from various walks of life in different centuries. A character could die in one century but be reincarnated in another with a completely different look and a totally different personality.
The Collinwood drawing room.
One marvelous sequence of events was the walling up of our dear and pious Reverend Trask. Who can forget the wonderful character conceived by our writers and played to the hilt by Jerry Lacy? The reverend could really get on your nerves. Finally Barnabas couldn’t take it any longer and decided to put an end to the pious one. He escorted Trask down to the basement, chained him to the wall and ultimately sealed him up behind a new partition which he built slowly, brick by brick, not unlike the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. It was one of the show’s most delicious moments for me, to see Barnabas butter each brick until the final brick sealed out the last ray of light Reverend Trask would ever see. Poe would have been proud.
During one of our periodic seances, the lovely Victoria Winters found herself transported back in time to 1795. While she inhabited this time period she was apprehended by the citizens of Collinsport because of her strange behavior and was brought to trial for witchcraft. Was it any wonder?
She knew too much because she was a product of the 20th century. She was found guilty and sentenced to be strung up on the gallows. What a great time we had planning that sequence! Victoria ascended the ladder to where a hood was placed over her head. The hangman then placed the noose around her neck. Then, on a signal, the hangman struck the ladder from under her feet and she hung there until the life was drained from her body. When the body was cut down and the hood removed, it was discovered, to the dismay of everyone present that the body was not Victoria’s at all, but that of Phyllis Wick. Who would have known—and once again Victoria was spared.
There were many challenges we faced each week. Our production meetings became weekly think tanks. For example, we wondered how we could transform an abandoned room in Collinwood’s west wing into a resplendent drawing room right before our eyes? (This is secret formula #84.) The answer was to lock a camera in place in the empty room, turn the camera on and then turn it off. The next step was to redress the set as the fully furnished drawing room, then come back to the camera and do a cut or dissolve to the now opulent room. The audience will gasp, just as we did when we saw the resulting sequence. Our meetings were attended by the producer, director, associate director, technical director, and prop master. It was at these meetings that we could thrash out the answers to all our challenges and problems.
How could we have the ghost of Josette emerge from her portrait? Her portrait originally hung in the Old House drawing room above the mantle until Barnabas had his own portrait placed there instead. Josette’s portrait was moved upstairs to Josette’s room. How can we forget the image of Josette descending from the portrait and floating eerily in the night air on the large portico? This feat accomplished by superimposing one camera taking a shot of the portrait of Josette over the fireplace and another camera taking a shot of Kathryn Leigh Scott walking down a black velour ramp in a black draped set. Follow that with the film of Josette wafting about on the porticos of the Old House on a breezy dark night and you have the chilling sequence that haunted our audiences. Did we see the full moon that night? I’m not sure. Ah, the Old House. It was there that Bob Costello decided to take the shot of the full moon. I remember it well. When Bob asked me to go with him to the Tarrytown location of the Old House, I suggested that he come to our house for dinner and then we would go take the pictures. Naomi and I were living in Hartsdale, a hop, skip and jump from Lyndhurst, the property on which the desolate Old House stood. After a delightful supper we left for the Old House. My function, as I recall, was to count the seconds for the time exposures. This was as high tech as you could get in those days before automation in photography.
The slide that resulted became a much needed transition image for the heralding of visitations of our resident vampire, our beautiful phoenix, our werewolf or any other satanical creatures like the Leviathans or Nicholas Blair. What an assortment of demons and witches we had! What better way than the full moon to make a di
ssolve to the scene of a lurking predator, be it werewolf, witch or vampire? The Old House was indeed a tailor made image for Dark Shadows. The columns on the portico must have been three feet in diameter and soared to an intimidating height of at least three stories. Years later, and after the show had ended, I decided to visit the monumental Old House, only to discover it was gone. It had burned down and its remains cleared away like so much rubble. What a devastating disappointment.
At the time the Old House first appeared on the show, the set was used only on occasion and didn’t seem to have any great significance. I don’t think we knew that there was going to be such a thing as a vampire, or at least the writers didn’t tell us. At first it was an exciting place for little David (David Henesy) to visit when he was off hunting for adventure. The set, covered in cobwebs, was kind of spooky, the kind of place we all loved as kids—at least I did!
I remember coming back to my office late one afternoon to the news, from another designer at ABC, that the Old House set was on the way to the dumps in New Jersey.
“You’re kidding,” I retorted.
“No,” I was told. “If you’re still going to use it, you’d better call the city dump.”
Of course I made the call, but it was too late. I thought for about 20 seconds, went to the file drawer where I kept all my drawings and pulled out the original plan and elevations from which the set had been built. The shop would have to rebuild it. The story made a big splash in the newspapers and we rebuilt the Old House with all of its original decay.