In any event, we all soon found ourselves regretting that the writers had not taken greater care with the synopses. (Fans of the show familiar with the synopses may be interested to learn that most of the time you can tell the ones my father wrote by the telltale words: “In which” at the start of every scene, that add a touch of grandeur to the dry recounting of the doings of ghosts and vampires.) Most of the time, we had to return to the scripts—and sometimes they were missing. We often plugged into the fan network to get copies of things we needed—we always could trust that someone, somewhere, had exactly the pages we were missing.
I think doing Dark Shadows was a real homecoming for Dan.
It was not his first success—he had revolutionized the television coverage of golf, a game about which he is still passionate, in the early-60s—but it afforded him the chance to direct for the first time. At heart Dan regards himself as a director above everything else—and after Winds of War and War and Remembrance, the world regards Dan as a director as well. House of Dark Shadows—the first of the two Dark Shadows movies—was his first feature, and he directed it after practicing the craft by directing more than a few episodes of the show. Perhaps because it was his first major directorial feat, he returned to it now as a touchstone, a guidepost. He knew, because he had done it himself, that he could trust the movie, that it had worked once for him, and would work again. He watched it repeatedly. My office was next to his, and while I was working, I continually heard the tone of my mother’s voice issuing through the connecting wall—a not unspooky experience, especially when reading my mother’s dialogue in a script my father had written at the same time.
The first Dark Shadows movie differs from the show in one hugely significant detail—at the end of the two hours, the vampire is staked. Thus, Barnabas, in the course of the film, could give vent to all his instincts towards evil. In the show, a much finer line was treaded—Barnabas was much more the reluctant vampire. It took him three months, after his release by Willie, to bite his first on-screen victim, an exposed and denounced baddie named Jason McGuire who was left over from another plot. I think Dan looked at that wall of over 100 large purple three-ring notebooks filled with scripts, and became cowed at the idea of reading them all in preparation for the new show. Dan is not the most patient of men, and given a choice between reading hundreds of hours of scripts, and watching a two hour movie, the movie would win. Dark Shadows is Dan’s vehicle—not only does he own it, but in many ways, it is filled with his thoughts, his feelings, his emotions, phobias and obsessions. In fact, any student of the filmed works of Mr Curtis will be familiar with his trademark low camera angles. This looking up at the world in most Dan Curtis productions is emblematic, in a way, of a child’s eye view of his surroundings.
Much of the horror of Dark Shadows can, in my estimation, be traced to Dan’s mother’s untimely demise when he was a child. Dark Shadows may be seen to represent a world Dan created in which death is not final; in which love and hope are locked in a perpetual battle with evil and despair.
I’ve often thought that Dan was a combination of Barnabas, Willie and David. Dan has all the strengths of Barnabas—a formidable and intelligent presence with a sure knowledge of what he wants and a reservoir of tragedy in his soul. That’s Dan. In Willie, Dan allows himself to give vent to that tragedy, coupled with a powerlessness never seen in Barnabas. Certainly, Willie means a lot to Dan—in story conferences, Dan loves acting out ideas for Willie, and he does Willie better than Johnny Karlen or Jim Fyfe could ever hope to.
David is a more special case. David is a boy trapped in a household with a distant father and an absent mother. On the original show, David’s mother is Laura the Phoenix. I wonder if Laura represents Dan’s wish that his mother would come back, coupled with the knowledge that such a return would be unnatural, and might have dire consequences. David is also an innocent who knows the truth of the world around him, and who nobody ever believes. In that regard, I think, he is like all children—trying to explain facts, feelings and emotions to a world that cannot be made to understand their importance.
Much time was spent by my father and me trying to update the Phoenix story so that it could be used in the current Dark Shadows, but Dan finally decided to drop the Phoenix plot. Part of the problem was that, as my father pointed out, the Phoenix was virtually a test run of all the ideas that would subsequently reach fruition in the character of Angélique. Thus: Laura’s ability to cast spells that set fire to distant things is but one of Angélique’s large arsenal of tricks. Of course, on the original show, advantage was taken of how evenly matched these two characters were: they fought viciously during one episode.
About this time, a new face appeared in the office—Steve Feke, a writer-producer under contract to MGM Television who would essentially serve as Dan’s production right-hand-man. Steve is a funny, energetic, talkative man of Hungarian lineage, youngish for a Hollywood veteran, who knows everything there is to know about the Hollywood power structure. Steve brought in writer Jon Boorstin, son of the noted Historian Daniel, and a well-educated man who expresses his opinions with quick, dry humor. Although both were familiar with Dark Shadows, neither watched the show during its original run.
Casting the new show was a fascinating process. From the start, the question of using the old cast was firmly resolved in Dan’s mind. He loved them all, and still has personal relationships with several of them, but he needed to make the show new for himself in order to redo it, and that meant new actors. He wanted to sprinkle members of the original cast in over time, as a treat to the audience. When I came aboard, I was delighted to find that, entirely by coincidence, the head of Casting at MGM was my old friend Mary Jo Slater, a sharp, attractive, humorous and energetic woman who had been the casting director at One Life To Live while I was there. For a long time, the only part cast was Willie. Dan was instantly enamored of the broad-stroked appeal Jim Fyfe displays. His training is that of a New York stage actor, and it comes through in his performance. His work is very physical; he plays to the rafters. Dan appreciates that, being someone who plays to the rafters himself. Jean Simmons was then cast, a real coup for the role that Joan Bennett had played. Like Bennett, Simmons is also an established film star. Ben Cross, who plays Barnabas, is an actor’s actor. Of all the excellent actors who tested for Barnabas, his audition tape was truly remarkable. In the audition scene Julia, holding a cross, confront Barnabas in the coffin room for the first time. His first three words are: “Put that down.” Ben entered the scene at a fever pitch: tortured to the point of rage, anguished and in pain and proud all at once. It took him a solid twenty seconds to rip those three words out of this maelstrom of emotions, and by the time he’d finished the sentence, as far as I was concerned, he had the job.
Barbara Steele, who plays Julia, has appeared in Fellini films and made innumerable horror films over the years. Dad and I both think she’s a great lady, and a fine Julia, though a darker presence than my Mom was. Dan intends to capitalize on this difference in the plot of the new show.
One of the things that carried the original series, I think, was the dynamic between Barnabas and Julia. They had an odd sort of platonic friendship, always rife with the tension of unfulfilled love. They were like one of those unrequited love duos so romantically appealing in soap operas—the audience wanted them to get together because they’d be perfect for each other. That subtle interplay between Julia and Barnabas made them believable as equals caught in a horrifying dilemma. There is, perhaps, a quality in Ben Cross’s portrayal of Barnabas that will not admit to having an equal—it is one of the things that makes his Barnabas intriguing.
From the start, Dan had an office full of people designing new sets for Dark Shadows. Their drawings are beautiful and the sets are amazing—and amazingly expensive. The Collinwood hallway and drawing room is three stories high, sporting a vestibule with its own glass cupola so that actors have interesting shadows on their faces as they enter the house. The stairway,
made entirely of hand-carved wood, is large enough for two people and a camera to move abreast of each other. In fact, the entire entrance and drawing room of the old show could fit into the entranceway of this one.
The mausoleum (with its secret room) is equally grand. One Saturday, Steve Feke called me at home to tell me he had just received a phone call from the set-painter who needed to know the names of various deceased Collins family members in the mausoleum. Steve and I sat on the phone remembering various names used on the show, and then augmenting them with a few choice biblical names. After a few minutes, we figured he had more than enough. Three minutes later, Steve called back: there is space in the mausoleum for forty names. We went back to work making up Civil War Collinses, Spanish American War Collinses, World War One Collinses, and everything in between.
The final script for the pilot was written by Dan Curtis and Steve Feke, though Dad and I contributed moments here and there in it. By the time shooting began, Dad and I were working on later episodes, either in outline or script form. I was so busy during that period that I was able to visit the set only a few times. Once I watched Barnabas’ arrival at the Old House, filmed on a cold night at Greystone, a mansion overlooking Los Angeles. Another day I witnessed Barnabas beating Willie, a sequence I always felt excessive. And I was there for the last day of shooting, which took place in the drawing room at Collinwood—the scene in which Barnabas introduces himself to the family. That day I ran into Kathryn Leigh Scott, who had been invited onto the set by Dan.
I saw everything else in dailies, the printed results of the previous day’s shooting, which were screened for the staff every day around noon. The scenes looked quite beautiful. Dan’s trademark shots were there—the low angles, the moody, almost sensual pacing, the use of hallways. The dailies were terrifically exciting to see—piece by piece and bit by bit, the story was coming together.
Two weeks after filming was over, the rough cut was ready for viewing. It was long, slow in places, and still had to be shaped into a more aerodynamic vehicle, but regardless of all that, I sat there astounded—the damn thing looked like Dark Shadows. Sure there were plotpoints in the story that bothered me, and seemed to stray too far afield of the original show, but the surprising thing was that, magically, a spark of the spirit of Dark Shadows had been rekindled in this film.
At this time, composer Bob Cobert had laid a temporary soundtrack, called a temp track, on the pilot. (The temp track illustrates where music will be used in the film, while the composer writes and conducts the true soundtrack.) Bob and his wife Helen are old family friends and two of the nicest people in the world. He has composed music for nearly all of Dan’s projects—from five second stings on the original Dark Shadows to thirty hours of music for War and Remembrance. Bob has been working with synthesizers a lot, lately, and the temp track contained one utterly new, haunting, dangerous, growling synthesized melody which instantly lodged itself in my head. I can’t wait to hear if it’s in the final show; as of this writing I don’t yet know.
While the future of Dark Shadows hung in the balance, Twin Peaks debuted and went through its first season; Nelson Mandela was freed; Violetta Chamorro was elected President of Nicaragua; East and West Germany were struggling towards reunification. I continued work on my second novel for Bantam by waking early every morning and grappling with my art-thief bad guy for a couple of hours before going to work to write about vampires. Around this time the offer of a writing job came for my father from General Hospital, which is taped in Los Angeles. Dad had always admired the show from a professional point of view, and for a variety of reasons made the decision to switch.
Finally, the big day came. The Dark Shadows pilot was screened for Brandon Tartikoff on a Tuesday at 10 AM. We in the office were all confident, if a little agonized, awaiting the outcome. We didn’t hear any word, that afternoon or evening.
Driving into work the following morning, I suddenly knew: they’ve turned it down. I also had the strong feeling the saga wasn’t finished. I ran into Dan in the lobby of the building—and he seemed torn, worn and defeated. He looked at me and said “Well, kid, it’s over—they’re not putting Dark Shadows on the schedule.”
Even though we’d all known this might happen, I was stunned. Every indication had been that Dark Shadows was an inevitability—but in television, nothing is inevitable. In fact, if something didn’t happen in a few days, MGM would stop paying the lease on the soundstage, and that meant the sets—those magnificent sets—would be demolished. That would have been the end of it—Dark Shadows would finally, truly be over.
I was in Dan’s office when Brandon Tartikoff called him to apologize for not putting the show on the air. The conversation was cordial; Dan called Tartikoff “Kid” and told him that he knew they’d do business again, in the future.
I thought I had finally witnessed Dan lose a battle, and I must say, I was shocked. Little did I know, he had not yet begun to fight.
I came into work the next day because I still couldn’t really believe it was finished. Dan was working on a whole new screenplay; Ruth and I talked about how close we had come, only to not get picked up. My father came in, and expressed his amazement to Dan. That evening, Dad and I commiserated over dinner, and I decided to take a minivacation to Oregon to visit an old friend, after which I would go back home and finish up the art thief novel. It sounded like a plan.
I had allowed my hair to grow quite long in Los Angeles, and I decided to get it cut, sort of as a cleansing ritual before going back home. The next day I did just that, and then went to have lunch in Beverly Hills. While waiting for my mussels, I had the thought to check in at the office. I got Ruth—and was told that Dark Shadows was going on as a midseason replacement. Dan, solely by working his magic on the telephone, had managed to put everything back together.
I hung up, went back to the table and laced into the newly arrived mussels, knowing that, as far as Dark Shadows was concerned, the best thing to do was expect the unexpected.
A WORD FROM ME
By Sam Hall
I never know important days in my life until years later. During my first creative meeting in Dan Curtis’ elegant offices—first with Dan, putter in hand, the producer, Bob Costello, with whom I’d shared, if not friendship, time at Dartmouth College—Bob watched me warily, waiting to see whether I’d work out as a new writer before committing himself. As it turned out, I did.
If the elemental force that is Dan Curtis had doubts, I never knew them. (Until much later). I certainly had doubts about myself and my ability to work on a team, with actual live human writers. It was also a shame to be paid to invent a mythic horror fantasy.
Neither the genre, nor the TV medium interested me. I was a playwright with several plays optioned for (but never produced on) Broadway. Yes, I had fallen into an earlier Proctor and Gamble soap (that paid for my son Matthew’s birth, for which I will always thank them). Earlier, I had fallen into writing half-hour and hour dramas. I remember boasting (a snob even in the beginning) that I had never tried to get a television job (I stopped that nonsense not long after D.S. went off the air). Then I realized that I had always happened to fall into jobs on purpose!
Dark Shadows: as a result of my wife’s charisma, élan vital and talent, I was suddenly, after that one meeting, alone in a sleazy apartment at 45th and Ninth Avenue, a piéd-a-terre Gordon Russell kept after he deposited his wife and daughter in Brooklyn.
I had first met Gordon when he played the Harpo Marx role in Cape May, N.J. stock production of Moss Hart’s, The Man Who Came To Dinner. (Grayson played Gertrude Lawrence). He was a talented comedian then and for the rest of his life. Even after giving up acting, he remained one. Now his role was Dark Shadows writer. He and I were in and out of each other’s careers for the rest of his life. I saw him give many performances—husband, father, lover, buffoon, even for a few hours, tortured genius. (Not his best role). I never felt he was completely at home in any of them. There was a restless lostness, a self
-destructiveness to whoever the man behind the role was.
I was surprised to discover I could collaborate. (There are people alive today who will dispute that statement). In the next four years, I had no choice. Writers were added, and subtracted every few months. In our innocence, we did everything—wrote the long story, created the characters, blocked each daily script, then actually wrote the dialogue. None of us had authority over the others. Dan Curtis was the head writer. Once a week, at least, we had what seemed eighteen hour sessions with Dan Curtis. Sometimes it actually was. Dan would read our proposed outlines for each day, tear them apart. But he always put them back together with vengeful enthusiasm (and sometimes a startling amount of talent), which often left us with nothing but damaged, angry egoless wails. (Never in front of him). During a typical day/night one of the writers (an enormously correct man who didn’t want to be), excused himself into the John. After an hour, I was sent to see if he was alright. He was in his most natural state, curled up in a foetal position with his thumb in his mouth. He didn’t even acknowledge me when I told him he had to come back in Dan’s office. He couldn’t go back. Dan hated him. I assured him that Dan didn’t hate him any more than he hated the rest of us. He insisted Dan adored Grayson and me, but looked at him with contempt. I argued Dan only adored his wife, and felt contempt for all of us because we couldn’t second guess the vision he had. I finally managed to get him on his feet, propel him to Dan’s door. But with a final burst of self-will, he broke free, ran to the elevator, and disappeared into the city. I don’t remember who replaced him.
The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection Page 5