Tag: incompetent writing

Episode 1081: Tell me what I said

This script badly needed another trip through the typewriter before it fell into the hands of the cast and production staff.

We start in a mysterious room that intermittently materializes in a disused corner of the great house of Collinwood. It is stocked with toys appropriate for small children, and is known to teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes as “The Playroom.” Hallie sees a boy in clothing from the nineteenth century who appears to be David making vigorous use of the rocking horse in the room. He will not respond to her in any way, so she leaves the room and goes to the hallway. There, she is shocked to find David wearing his usual clothes and smiling at her.

This bit is video copied and inserted from the end of #1080. After the opening title, Hallie explains to David that she saw him in the room studying a model ship that is there. This is not remotely true. We saw the room throughout Hallie’s whole time there, and at no point did the boy whom she took to be David look at the model ship. Nor did we see the ship, for that matter. This episode was taped four days before #1080, so they may have forgotten about Hallie’s lines until they spliced in the opening, at which point it was too late. In view of the pressures of time and budget to which the makers of the show were subject that may be understandable, but it can hardly be considered a good start.

There is a lot more business involving Hallie and David. They keep taking turns being possessed by ghosts and then returning to themselves, not knowing what they said or did. David Henesy is a good enough comic actor to get laughs each time this happens to David Collins, but it does not advance the story or deepen our understanding of the characters. Since it is a repeat of a story we saw a year and a half ago when other ghosts took possession of David and his friend Amy, it doesn’t even come as a surprise.

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins learns that his distant cousin, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes, has had a disappointment. Carolyn asked an astrologer named Sebastian Shaw to draw up her horoscope. Sebastian has abandoned the task partway through and refuses to finish it. Barnabas recently took a trip to the year 1995, Collinwood was still in ruins as the result of an unexplained disaster that will take place later in this current year, 1970. In 1995, a crazed Carolyn wrote a note with six cryptic phrases which Barnabas took to be clues as to the events that would precede the disaster. One of those phrases was “The unfinished horoscope.” When Barnabas hears what Sebastian has done, he decides that by persuading him to finish the horoscope he might be able to prevent the disaster.

We cut to Sebastian’s place, where we see that Sam Hall was not the only person having difficulty writing today. We zoom in on a folder labeled “CAROLYN STODRARD HAWKES.” The camera lingers over the big block letters for so long that you could have read them even on a 1970 television picking up the low-quality signal typical of ABC affiliates:

Stodrard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas is unable to persuade Sebastian to finish the horoscope. Sebastian declares that “The only Schumann that tells me what I must do is me!” and walks out of his own parlor, leaving Barnabas alone there. Barnabas looks bewildered, perhaps wondering why Sebastian thinks his name is Schumann.

The door opens, and a woman enters. When Carolyn telephoned Sebastian yesterday, someone other than him answered, so we might suspect someone else lives there. But there was no hint as to who that might be. In fact, it is someone whose name Barnabas knows very well. She is Roxanne Drew. They have never met, and she doesn’t know him from Schumann. But before his trip to 1995, Barnabas was staying in an alternate universe and he got to know Roxanne’s counterpart there. He somehow fell in love with her and has been pining for her ever since. He greets this Doppelgänger by name, with a triumphant smile.

I should mention that a copy of the book Astrology by Louis MacNeice figures prominently in these episodes. I’ve never read that book myself, but I have an acquaintance in common with MacNeice. I was a graduate student in Classics at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s, and one of my professors was Peter Green. As a young poet in England in the years after the Second World War, Peter had been something of a protege of MacNeice’s. Since astrology is a way of inscribing the passage of time with meaning, and since Dark Shadows is so much about time travel that it insisted on calling the alternate universe where Barnabas met the first Roxanne “Parallel Time,” I think it would be apt to quote MacNeice’s “Meeting Point“:

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):

Time was away and somewhere else.

And they were neither up nor down;

The stream’s music did not stop

Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

Although they sat in a coffee shop

And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air

Holding its inverted poise—

Between the clang and clang a flower,

A brazen calyx of no noise:

The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates;

The desert was their own, they planned

To portion out the stars and dates:

The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.

The waiter did not come, the clock

Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash

That bloomed again in tropic trees:

Not caring if the markets crash

When they had forests such as these,

Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good

Be praised that time can stop like this,

That what the heart has understood

Can verify in the body’s peace

God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here

And life no longer what it was,

The bell was silent in the air

And all the room one glow because

Time was away and she was here.

(Louis MacNeice, “Meeting Point,” 1939, as reprinted in The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice [Oxford University Press, 1967])

Episode 644: Well that was a waste of time

There is some reason to believe that writer Ron Sproat was disaffected from the rest of the production staff at this time. Today’s script is so unbelievably bad that it is tempting to think he wrote it as an act of protest.

Children Amy and David have gone looking for the ghost of Quentin Collins and are now trapped in a room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. David’s father Roger, his aunt Liz, and his cousin Carolyn are moving about the house in a conga line trying to find them.

Quentin’s ghost is keeping the children locked up; the ghost of someone named Magda is trying to lead the adults to rescue them. At one point the adults watch a mirror while letters appear on it spelling out “Jamison,” the name of Liz and Roger’s father. This is plainly a supernatural manifestation, but it advances neither Magda’s goal nor Quentin’s. Perhaps Jamison’s ghost can’t rest with all the racket Quentin and Magda are making, and he just wants to say hello.

Hi, kids, it’s grandpa! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the locked room, David bangs on a wall, finds it is hollow, and speculates about what is on the other side. Amy protests “We can’t go through a wall!” In response, he again bangs on the wall, again finds it hollow, again speculates about what’s on the other side, and Amy again protests “We can’t go through a wall!” Later in the episode, they start this scene a third time, but they stop before Amy has another chance to say “We can’t go through a wall!” It’s just as well she does stop short of saying this a third time. By the end of the episode, they’ve found a crowbar, which enables them to pry the paneling open and go through the wall quite easily.

Meanwhile, the adults have progressed to the drawing room, where they argue about whether to search the west wing. They troop upstairs and find the door to that part of the house locked. This leads them to conclude that David and Amy can’t have gone in there, and the parade goes back to the drawing room. There, they again argue about whether to search the west wing. They again troop upstairs, this time unlocking the door and conducting the search. After they fail to find the children, they return to the drawing room again, where Roger speaks for all of us when he says “Well, that was a waste of time.”

When the adults were shuffling around huddled in their little clump, I found it hard not to look at Liz’ face and see Joan Bennett thinking that she used to be a big movie star and now she’s reduced to this stage business that would have embarrassed the Three Stooges. This week’s episodes were directed by a mysterious figure billed as “Penberry Jones”; whoever Jones was, I don’t think s/he was to blame for the weird little parade the adult characters keep making through the house. The script calls for the actors to talk with each other constantly while walking together through narrow, awkward spaces such as stairways, darkened corridors, and a cluttered store-room, and so it would have taken more time than they had to choreograph a more fluid set of movements.

David and Amy hear a waltz. It has a creaky sound to it, as though it were being played on an old gramophone. This is introduced as a special effect. Unfortunately, Dark Shadows introduces special effects by ramping up the background music, so when the children first talk about the waltz we can barely hear it. After a commercial break, the background music calms down and the waltz is more audible. We will hear it a great many times over the next several months, so often that it will be ironic to think that there was a time when we wanted to hear it but could not. I suppose Penberry Jones probably did have the discretion to tone down the accompaniment, so that would be one strike against him or her.

Longtime viewers will notice a small deviation from continuity when David tells Amy that ghosts come out only at night. In the first year of the show, David often saw the ghost of the gracious Josette in the Old House of Collinwood during the day, and from June to November 1967 he and the ghost of nine year old Sarah played together in the sunlight several times.

Episode 219: One look at the man

This teleplay badly needed another trip through the typewriter.

In the opening scenes, seagoing con man Jason McGuire demands his friend and former henchman, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis, leave the estate of Collinwood and the town of Collinsport. He mentions that he saw Willie’s car the night before at the cemetery. He then orders Willie to get on a bus and leave town. Then he starts talking about Willie’s car again. Does Willie have a car or not? They’ve gone back and forth on this from one episode to another, but today they can’t keep it straight from one line of dialogue to the next.

A doctor shows up to examine Willie. He tells Jason that Willie is not sick at all. The reason he is so weak is that he has lost “an enormous amount of blood.” What does the doctor think the word “sick” means if it doesn’t apply to a person who is doing badly because of an “enormous” loss of blood?

Whatever meaning the doctor attaches to “sick” apparently also applies to “ailment.” High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins asks what Willie’s ailment is, and the doctor says he has no ailment. He is simply immobilized due to an enormous loss of blood.

The doctor tells first Jason, then Roger, that Willie will be fine if he gets some rest and fluids and food. The idea of a blood transfusion doesn’t cross his mind, nor do Jason or Roger bring it up. It would be one thing if the doctor, Jason, and Roger were played by the Three Stooges, but there is no sign that we are supposed to think that they are a load of idiots.

An actor who has repeatedly triumphed over bad writing reappears after an absence of sixteen weeks. This is Dana Elcar as Sheriff George Patterson. The sheriff’s activities don’t always make a great deal of sense, but Elcar’s acting choices and his zest for performance make him a pleasure to watch no matter how dire the script he has to work with.

Today, the sheriff is telling Roger that a number of cows on the farms owned by the Collins family have been destroyed. A person or persons unknown somehow sucked every drop of blood out of these cows through small punctures in their hides. Roger is deeply unsettled by this strange news, and the sheriff sympathizes with him.

Roger repeatedly asks the sheriff why he is the one telling him about the cows. He says that he would have expected the veterinarian to call him. The sheriff says that the veterinarian called his office, because he determined that the cows were killed by someone’s deliberate act. That doesn’t explain why the veterinarian, whose bill the Collinses will presumably be paying, didn’t call him. We were so glad to see these fine actors working together that the senselessness of the scene didn’t bother us while we were watching it, but as soon as it was over we were left with a feeling of confusion.

Roger and the sheriff. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Regular viewers do wonder what farms the sheriff and Roger are talking about. The only previous reference to the word “farm” in connection with the Collinses was in #64, when Sheriff Patterson told their servant Matthew Morgan to “work their farm for them” and stay out of trouble. Today’s conversation repeatedly refers to “farms,” plural, more than one of which are big enough to have cows. That’s an operation much too complicated for Matthew, who had many other duties, to have handled by himself. Besides, Matthew left his job in #112 and was scared to death by ghosts in #126, and hasn’t been replaced. Whatever farm Matthew was working must have been so small that the Collinses can take care of it themselves in whatever time they can spare from their main occupation, keeping secrets and being sarcastic.

Writer Ron Sproat specialized in inventorying disused storylines and getting them out of the way. Back when Matthew was on the show, the Collinses were heavily in debt and running out of money. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin spent the first 40 weeks of the show trying to avenge himself on the Collinses by driving them into bankruptcy. All of that has gone by the boards, and we aren’t hearing any more about troubles concerning the business. So it’s time for Dark Shadows to reconceive the family as financially secure, indeed as imposingly rich. Talking about their many farms and the herds of livestock on them helps Sproat open up space in his narrative warehouse, but it doesn’t offer much to interest the audience.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, thought up a little fanfic that might have introduced the same points more intriguingly. The trouble with the cows first came up in #215. Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell told the story of a calf belonging to his uncle that was found drained of blood. That suggested that an evil has been loosed that is spreading throughout the town and beyond. Why not stick with Joe as the point of view character in connection with the mystery of the desiccated cows? Not only would that give a badly under-utilized character something to do, but would also give us the sense that the fate of a whole community is at stake in the action.

If they needed to connect the Collinses to the cow story, they could have come up with a way to oblige them to join with Joe to figure out what’s going on. That in turn would raise the prospect of a story structured like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which one character after another joins the team opposing the malign Count. The formation of the group that resisted blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in the months leading up to #191 very much followed the pattern set in Stoker’s novel. Of course, the ending could be modified. The Laura story ended, not with the triumphant team-work that defeats Dracula, but with well-meaning governess Vicki cut off from her allies and left to confront Laura alone. But the team-work leading up to that point was full of interest, as characters shared information with each other, reconfigured their relationships, and found themselves doing things neither they nor we would have expected. Simply reintroducing the topic of the cows and leaving Joe and the Collinses siloed off from each other is easy for the writers, but it doesn’t take the story anywhere.