We had an amusing, talented playwright, Joe Caldwell, who would come work with us until he had enough money to work on his new play or his novel. Incidentally, he is a very rare man. Of all the writers who purported to be working on serious projects of his own, he kept at it, and has written (more important, published) four good novels. This year when I was consulting on the new Dark Shadows, Dan asked me to call Joe and see if he would be interested in working it. He was not. He was spending the summer at Yaddo, the Saratoga Springs writers colony. I admire him very much.
The writers who stayed with us longest, always had a built-in craziness. Normal people just couldn’t write the show. Violet Welles, our only woman writer, was the bravest. She was married to a very good actor. She had been a successful publicity agent, collecting the oddest friends (all of whose eccentricities were discussed for the series). Though the audience often thought the show camp, the writing was totally serious. The audience had to empathize with, be interested in the characters as in any other soap. We were simply substituting werewolves for naive, young heroes, a vampire for a leading man. We had unwittingly discovered (but we were not the first) that obsession held an audience longer than love. And Barnabas’ obsession for Josette, Angelique and Julia was the core of the show.
I never thought the network particularly liked the show. It broke too many daytime rules. They felt that it was a cult show; a fad, with no staying power. (Who’s doing a nighttime version of Secret Storm, now?)
Of course, the ratings did decline as the plots became more bizarre, less easy to understand. Even the writers were having trouble figuring them out. The constant search for the new made all of us read every horror writer in public domain. (Dan actually had a speed reader making outlines of the dullest of classics). I remember the indignity (at least I regarded it as that) of poring through a book of movie plot summaries. No material was too banal for us to steal and put the Dark Shadows pallor on it. Dan, easily bored, wanted more, more, more—the train was running senselessly ahead of us all and it crashed.
Now I remember the warmth of those years. I’ve been fascinated by actors since I first saw one live on stage. I’ve never known a more gallant breed, deliberately limiting their vision to this show, or the next. Tomorrow remained for many of them as unpredictable as it does for a vacationing child. Dark Shadows certainly had the most attractive, the most talented, and often the most neurotic, assembled company outside of a Hollywood studio. I once, in my innocence asked Joan Bennett, one of the most glamorous and artful of the Hollywood veterans, if all this wasn’t like being at MGM, or Warner’s. She let me know—forcefully—that it was not. On location, during a bad day of filming one of the Dark Shadows movies, I walked Miss Bennett to her waiting limousine. A polite middle-aged fan approached her, “Excuse me, aren’t you Miss Joan Bennett?” She smiled. “I used to be.” The car sped away.
Among the neurotic was the too-handsome, too-intellectual actor, who arrived at work one day, went directly to the producer’s office, and sat in a wastebasket refusing to move—a bad LSD trip. There were the ambitious hustlers—and a one-time TV star, who had to use this job to get back to the world he had once known. After the show was over most of the actors went on to other work, of course, and several have enjoyed quite successful careers. But, as one of them said to me recently, “I thought it was the beginning—Now I know it was the only real success I ever had.” A statement said without regret, but with amusement.
Several months ago, I stood on the newly-built and far grander Collinwood staircase. I looked down watching the new Barnabas, Julia and Elizabeth rehearse a scene familiar from the original series. I felt a sense of rightness.
The new Dark Shadows is a reinterpretation, not a redoing, of all of the stories we made up—joyfully, sadly, bitterly, more often ineptly than brilliantly. But there is one constant. It was Dan’s show then. It is Dan’s show again.
Dark Shadows is a time capsule for me. Hopefully, it will be a future for all those working on it now.
THE DARK SHADOWS HISTORY
By Melody Clark Kathleen Resch, Marcy Robin
Housewives stopped their ironing, businesspeople hung out the “do not disturb” sign, a convent of Dominican nuns tuned in and children “ran home from school” to watch Dark Shadows. It seemed like everyone watched the show and, from 1966 through 1971, Barnabas Collins was truly a household name.
Just as so many Dark Shadows excursions would begin, we entreat you now to return to a different time, the summer of 1966. It is two years after the Beatles’ North American welcome and three years before America will land on the moon. Vietnam is on the nightly news and LBJ is in the White House. Soon a young woman will introduce herself to American daytime television with the words:
“My name is Victoria Winters. My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me and link my past with my future. A journey that will bring me to a strange and dark place, to the edge of the sea...high atop Widows’ Hill...to a house called Collinwood. A world I’ve never known, with people I’ve never met. People who tonight are still only shadows in my mind but who will soon fill the days and nights of my tomorrows.”
THE JOURNEY BEGINS
Television of the mid-1960s was caught somewhere between the past and the future. Some of the older nighttime series were as innocent as the past decade; some of the newer ones suggested a new maturity. At this time, a talented young television producer named Dan Curtis wanted to make a change of his own. A former salesman for an entertainment conglomerate, he had parlayed his love for golf (and the innovative device of putting throat microphones on the golfers during tournaments that now and again picked up their obscenities when they missed) into a reliable though unchallenging position of producer for CBS Golf Classics. It brought him a good $100,000 a year and an Emmy but “sick of selling other people’s garbage,” as he put it, he was thinking of making the leap to dramatic television. Curtis was seeking a good series idea for daytime programming. Soap operas made the most money, and were open to new talent. He had “always been a scrapper,” as he says, but first he needed something to fight for.
He went to sleep one evening in 1965 with only fragmented ideas of what he wanted to attempt. He needed a vision: a fully realized concept that would sell itself despite Curtis’ then-few credentials.
In describing that particular evening, he says, “I awoke suddenly in the middle of a strange dream. The bedroom was pitch- black, but I could see the figure in my dream clearly -as though I were watching a motion picture. I saw a girl with long dark hair. She was about 19 and she was reading a letter aboard a train and occasionally staring wistfully out the window.”
A voice-over in the dream informed him that this dark-haired girl had been hired as a governess at the “Old House” somewhere along the New England seacoast. “Then the train stopped in this dark, isolated town. The girl got off the train and started walking. Finally, she came to a huge, forbidding house. At the door, she lifted a huge brass knocker and gently tapped it three times. I heard a dog howl and then - just as the door creaked open - I woke up....”
“The next morning, I wasn’t so sure. At breakfast, I told my wife about the dream. When I finished, sure enough, Norma looked at me with a wide-eyed enthusiasm and said, ‘Dan, that’s a great idea for a TV show!’” She pointed out that the dream had a Gothic flavor, something eerie and threatening.”
Curtis approached the head of daytime television at ABC. Everyone who knows Curtis comments that he is nothing if not driven when an idea gets to him. ABC was interested, but wanted something more concrete than dream images and a few ideas.
Art Wallace had worked in several facets of show business, everything from professional singing to writing. He had written steadily for live television for several years, especially for half-hour suspense anthologies. One of the episodes he had written was entitled The House and dealt with a woman who had not left her house in twenty years (this plotline would later grow into
events in the life of Dark Shadows character Elizabeth Collins Stoddard).
Curtis approached his long-time acquaintance Art Wallace with the idea of producing this Gothic daytime drama. Wallace declined the producing aspect, but did say he would be interested in writing for it.
“I decided to use my Studio One script as a kind of template for Curtis’ new show. I used it as the basis for developing the characters that were on Dark Shadows in the beginning. I wrote a story bible, and ABC decided to go ahead with the program. For the first thirteen weeks, I wrote every episode - sixty-five scripts.”
Art Wallace’s working title was Shadows on the Wall, the title of the series’ story bible (the catalog of character biographies and story outlines which the writers use in devising scripts). Curtis and Wallace also considered Castle of Darkness, The House on Widows’ Hill, and Terror at Collinwood. As the legend goes, Curtis reputedly remarked to a technical adviser when help was needed with the overall lighting effect: they should “go out to a museum and film some dark shadows...”
And Dark Shadows it became. The “Dark Shadow” would be the family curse itself. From that basic premise grew a television phenomenon.
The production staff next went in search of a typical Gothic- style logo, combing bookstores’ romance shelves -“a gang of men in trenchcoats, looking suspicious”—and studying the variety of lettering. The distinctive Gothic lettering that they chose augured the plot changes to come. As it rolled in through five years of ocean waves, solidifying into the words Dark Shadows, it would come to signify to a generation of children everything mysterious.
Dan Curtis’ title would be Series Creator and Executive Producer. He then assembled the rest of the production staff, finding in Art Wallace’s old friend Robert Costello, someone with the television production background that Dan lacked. Costello, who had earned an MFA at Yale and had hoped to direct live theater—“Little realizing that television was waiting for me,” became Dark Shadows’ Line Producer.
Costello enlisted Lela Swift, one of the few female directors then working in television. Swift was the daughter of Russian immigrants; her father was both a poet and musician. In order to support his family in the United States, he worked as a factory foreman. His daughter, however, would have a more hospitable climate in which to express her artistic nature, though it would take the war years to bring that about. “They hired me because all the men were away,” she puts it bluntly. She began her career as a script writer and assistant manager, then directed her first telecast in 1951. She went on to win not only an Edgar, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America, but also an Emmy.
Swift - who eventually dubbed Dark Shadows “The Impossible Dream” (because “every day was opening night”)—would be alternate director with John Sedwick, then making his living as a top-flight dramatic television associate director for ABC. Sy Tomashoff, a talented visual artist who had graduated from Carnegie Tech with a BA in architecture, was to be the scenic designer. Robert Cobert signed on as composer. All these disparate talents converged to create the distinctive Dark Shadows visual style and sound.
Now Curtis had to find his cast.
The heroine - the dark-haired girl who had appeared in his dream - would be the most difficult to cast. She should be ephemeral, not quite helpless, but young and innocent enough to seem both threatened and chaste - therefore, sympathetic to all.
Curtis wanted his heroine heading toward her future, but also into her past. The door of the great house at which she was knocking was her way to the truth about herself. He decided that she would be an orphan, just released from a foundling home. Her name? The dream came to him late in the year, in winter. Winters, then. And her first name? Though the name Sheila was considered, that idea was cast off as too modern. The name had to be strong, evocative, but reminiscent of another time. Victoria, it was decided.
Victoria Winters. The last name, according to the plotline, was bestowed upon young Victoria - appropriately - for the season in which she was found. And Victoria strongly suspects that the people who have hired her as governess for their young child have some essential link to her past, to her own self. As in all the heroic myths of old, Victoria’s journey is a symbol: the voyage into the self.
Count Carl Adam Moltke of Klampenborg, Denmark, was an underground resistance fighter in 1945, fighting against Nazi occupation. In mid-May of that year, Moltke was tipped off that the Nazis were on his trail. His wife Mab and he hid their 3-month-old daughter Alexandra in a laundry basket, climbed aboard a U.S. bomber, and were given safe passage to New York City.
Her father, by then the Special Assistant to the Ambassador from Denmark, had sent her to the well-respected Chapin School. By 1966, the teenage Alexandra was a year out of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
And she resembled very closely the dream child from Curtis’ vision. Alexandra Moltke, aged 19, had never before faced a television camera. Yet she became the first of the dark-haired ingenues whom Curtis would give their first big break on Dark Shadows.
Alexandra was later told that she had gotten the part because she was “the only innocent-looking actress in New York.” She is also said to have won the role due to another lucky resemblance she bore. Since Joan Bennett had already been cast in the role of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, it was a most important resemblance.
“I tested for the role four times. Then there was a screen test and I am told that, in it, I resembled Joan Bennett,” Moltke explains. “That added a whole new element to the story, which they never resolved later on: that I was supposed to be Elizabeth’s illegitimate daughter.”
At the same time, Curtis searched for the actors and actresses who would bring to life the strange family in the dark house “atop Widows’ Hill.” Each one would have a secret as dark as Collinwood, the house in which they lived. They would be the Collins Family: Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the matriarch who had not left the house since her husband’s disappearance 18 years before; her brother Roger Collins, a tormented soul and an indifferent father; Elizabeth’s teenage daughter Carolyn, the “lost little rich girl” in search of herself; and Roger’s son David, who brought new meaning to the word mischievous.
Elizabeth Stoddard was the matronly lady with the odd, proprietary concern for Victoria and certain secrets to hide regarding her husband. Curtis chose legendary actress Joan Bennett for the role, seeking to give his new series class and a sophisticated air. Scion of a large and talented thespian family, including her sisters Constance and Barbara, the actress made her acting debut with her father, actor Richard Bennett, in the Broadway production of Jarnegan. By 1966 she was a legend of both stage and screen and had appeared in more than seventy motion pictures. She was respected in show business as a consummate professional who arrived on time, learned her lines and marks, and delivered an expert performance.
Among other things, Dark Shadows would become “the daytime series that Joan Bennett is on” for a few weeks. No one had any idea that Dark Shadows would mark a second high point of Miss Bennett’s career. As she freely admits, she “hated the job at first - all that getting up early and eating soup in a paper cup for lunch.” But she was tempted by a chance to work in something interesting, usually involving only two working days out of the five-day shooting week. The lucrative contract was also appealing.
Joel Crothers, whose father George produced the long-running CBS Sunday morning religious program Lamp Unto My Feet, had been a “circus brat.” “It’s like any family business,” he explained, circa 1967, “If my dad had been a fertilizer salesman, I’d have fallen into that, too. You think everyone does that sort of thing, so you just sort of step into it.”
The younger Crothers earned his stripes early, appearing at the age of 9 on his father’s TV show. He went on to the rigors of live dramatic TV and the Broadway stage in the late 1950s. Joel was featured in everything from an episode of Dobie Gillis to a somber offering from Goodyear Theater.
In 1966 when Curtis was casting Dark Shado
ws, Crothers was a well-trained professional and a very talented actor. The role of Joe Haskell fit Joel perfectly and he would serve it well. Too well, some have said. Crothers defined the character more than the original scripts did. “I was always frustrated watching Joel in that role,” one Dark Shadows actor remembered on the occasion of Joel’s untimely death in 1985. “You knew all that he could do. The potential just sparked in his eyes...all that youth and talent. I felt the same way about Katie (Kathryn Leigh Scott). And they just didn’t get the damn material to live up to their talents, to my feeling. I think they got it later though.”
Kathryn and Joel would eventually become one of daytime’s favorite couples. And that on-screen affair culminated a warm off- screen friendship, which was to last until Joel’s death. But whereas Joel was a showbiz kid from New York, Kathryn Leigh Scott was born Kathryn Kringstad in the small town of Robbinsdale, Minnesota. Her early training included playing dress-up in the cast-off finery from her aunt’s bridal shop. As Kathryn put it, “I was well on my way to playing Josette when I was seven.”
The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection Page 6