Marc Masse’s Dark Shadows from the Beginning is in one of its accessible phases now, and his discussion of episode 2 includes some interesting comparisons between the finished episode and Art Wallace’s story bible for the series, Shadows on the Wall. For example:
Here is Art Wallace’s introductory description of Joe in Shadows on the Wall: “Joe Haskell is twenty-one. A rugged New Englander with a deep love of the sea, Joe is a young man of natural dignity and quiet ambition.”
But the viewer’s first impression of Joe Haskell is that of a sap, cuckolded into brooding over a mug of beer while his date plays the field before his very eyes.
And:
During the scene with Elizabeth and Carolyn in the drawing room, episode writer Art Wallace lifts two of Carolyn’s lines directly from his story outline in Shadows on the Wall. These are: “Besides, how do you expect me to go away and leave you alone in this beautiful nuthouse?” and “All I can say for her, mother, is she must be out of her mind.” In the story outline, the lines are written as “Besides, how do you expect me to get married and go off and leave you alone in this beautiful nuthouse.” and “All I can say for her is she must be out of her mind.”
The scene at the Blue Whale and Carolyn’s mood when she arrives home and the topic of discussion with her mother coincide exactly as given by Art Wallace in Shadows on the Wall: “Carolyn’s in a vile mood. The boy she’d been with had been a dud….had started an argument in the juke joint. There’d been a free-for-all, and her evening had been ruined.”
Then:
In this episode Elizabeth is seen playing the piano in the drawing room. The reason for there being a piano in the drawing room comes from the character of a previous work by Art Wallace, which he drew on when creating the character of Elizabeth Stoddard. In The House, a one-hour production for NBC-TV’s Television Playhouse broadcast on September 8, 1957, Caroline Barnes is a wealthy recluse in a New England fishing village who occupies her time as a piano teacher.
In Art Wallace’s story outline for Shadows on the Wall, when Victoria Winters arrives at Collinwood it is the month of October.
In later posts, Masse will clarify that the 1957 version of The House was actually Wallace’s second treatment of the story that would later give rise to the characters of Elizabeth and Carolyn Stoddard. Three years before, a thirty-minute anthology series called “The Web” had broadcast his first version of it. That version, as shown at a Dark Shadows convention, has been posted on YouTube:
Acilius on Dark Shadows 