Tag: lela swift

Episode 36: Politeness is a passing phase

The actors all go big in this one. Marc Masse calls it “The David Ford Effect” and concentrates on Louis Edmonds’ thunderous performance in Roger’s confrontation with Liz, but since the entire cast has turned up the volume, I think it is more likely a response to direction coming from the people who hired David Ford (and, to be seen in a couple of days, Thayer David) than to David Ford himself.

Masse isn’t the only commentator who tends to ignore the directors and producers as influences on the acting. Perhaps that tendency goes back to an interview John Karlen gave in which he says that he doesn’t recall ever getting any direction at all on Dark Shadows. His first day, Lela Swift said “Go!” and that was it, he just did whatever he wanted for the next four years. On the other hand, Joel Crothers said that he left the show because the directors were so busy with special effects they no longer had any time to work with actors, implying that they had worked with them at one point. Since Crothers was there from the beginning and Karlen joined the cast ten months in, I can only assume that it was during these first months that the directors told the actors what they wanted.

Why would Lela Swift and the other masterminds behind the scenes start hiring actors like David Ford and Thayer David and tell the existing cast members to start hamming it up at this point? Well, the saga of the bleeder valve has wrapped up, and there is no other story going on that wasn’t there in episode 1. Some of those stories are starting to look pretty pointless. There’s “The Revenge of Burke Devlin”- they haven’t told us what exactly he wants revenge for, but if he ever takes it we will see either the death of Roger, which would have the disastrous effect of requiring Louis Edmonds to leave the show, or Burke taking control of the Collins family assets, which will bring the equally disastrous requirements of a showing a bunch of episodes about various forms of debt and building a new set for Joan Bennett to play her scenes on. So we’re starting to suspect that Burke will just keep going in circles. Roger’s angry scene with Sam in this episode is fun to watch because Edmonds and Ford play well off each other, but as part of The Revenge of Burke Devlin story it doesn’t take us to any new ground.

There’s “Vicki Seeks Her Origin.” We might expect that one to lead somewhere, eventually, but if that happens it won’t be for a good while. In this one, Vicki tells Liz that she’s decided she can’t help David and replies to Liz’ plea with her to stay with “Why am I so important?” She doesn’t renew her inquiries into how Liz knew about her and why she hired her. Of course not- that was getting tedious. So Alexandra Moltke Isles and Joan Bennett just emote furiously while exchanging lines that don’t add up to much.

We don’t see Carolyn or Joe in this one, but their romance is another dead end. Joe is a nice guy who wants to get married, Carolyn is a rich girl who doesn’t. There aren’t that many ways to make a story out of that.

The one story that works in the first 42 weeks is the growing friendship between Vicki and David. Right now there isn’t much to do with that one, either. David has just been caught trying to murder his father- he isn’t going to be particularly reachable. Today, he openly threatens Vicki at the beginning of the episode, then comes out of hiding after Liz persuades her to stay and declares that he doesn’t want her to stay. We have to see them at rock bottom today for the gradual rise in the months ahead to grip us the way they will, but not a lot happens while you’re at rock bottom.

So, maybe the producers and directors decided to dial the acting up to 11 because they knew they didn’t have much of a story to tell. This is Art Wallace’s final week as the sole credited writer on the show; I don’t know how much help he had in those first eight weeks, how much involvement he really had in episodes attributed to him in the nine weeks after, and whether anyone is already around whose name will be printed on the screen in that period. But they don’t have a story to tell right now. So it falls to the cast to distract us while they wait for the next phase.

My usual themes: Lela Swift

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times I brought up the contribution Lela Swift made to Dark Shadows. Swift directed 595 of the show’s 1225 episodes, including the first and last installments, and she also served as line producer of the last 127 episodes. Only series creator and executive producer Dan Curtis could be said to have had more impact on Dark Shadows than did Swift, and very few people could be said to have had as much.

Danny’s background, like mine, is in literary study. I know I have a tendency to overemphasize the writer’s contribution to a dramatic work at the expense of the director and other visual artists, and I think he does too. Many of my remarks about Swift reflected my conscious effort to overcome this bias of mine, and incidentally involved my disagreeing with him.

Here’s a comment I made about episode 299. In the original post, Danny argued that the writers must by that point have intended to present mad scientist Dr Julia Hoffman as suffering from unrequited love for vampire Barnabas Collins. Some posters in the comment thread pointed out the visual similarity between the scene from which Danny draws his evidence and a scene in The Sound of Music in which a love triangle is developed. I tried to make the point that these similarities are more to do with elements under the control of the director than of the writers. So, while there is a reason to think that there was an intention to tell that story, we can’t be sure exactly whose intention that was:

THE SOUND OF MUSIC was such a big hit, so fresh in people’s minds in 1967, and the way the actors are positioned on this new set looks so much like it that I can’t believe the resonance wasn’t intentional. I don’t know if that means that the Barnabas/ Vicki/ Julia love triangle was already intentional at this point on the part of the writers, but it is strong evidence that it was on the part of director Lela Swift.

In a comment on episode 1116, I say that the new burst of energy that many in the comment threads had found at the beginning of the segment of the show set in the year 1840 came just as Swift was made producer, and suggest that she may deserve credit for it.

In a comment on episode 1166, I rebut one of her detractors:

“If Lela had been the executive producer, Dark Shadows would have been off the air after the first 13 weeks.” Perhaps so. But without her as the principal director, it’s doubtful there would have been a single episode anyone would have remembered. The endlessly ambitious visual compositions and the hyper-intense acting style originated with her, and she had as much as anyone to do with the fact that there was always an episode in the can ready to go on the air at 4 PM five days a week.

In a comment on episode 1244, I compare Swift to the only other director on Dark Shadows in its dying days, the woefully inept Henry Kaplan:

This episode and the one before also show that, even though television is famously Not A Director’s Medium, a director can have great importance from time to time. Episode 1243 was really rather good, and that is entirely to the credit of Lela Swift. The pacing is rapid, the visual composition tells as much of the story as we could want it to do, and she elicits good performances from all the actors, even Keith Prentice.

In this one, Henry Kaplan keeps moving the actors around in tight little spaces, with the result that they have to shuffle from one set of marks to another. Even worse, he indulges himself in a series of dissolves, each of which would probably have looked cluttered and been distracting under the best of circumstances, but with the camera faults in this episode it’s as if the TV screen is at the bottom of a pond. Poor Keith Prentice, finally doing a good job of acting for a second consecutive episode, winds up looking like the world’s biggest idiot when a closeup of him laughing in wicked triumph dissolves to a shot of the cobwebbed room.

Episode 299: A Human Life

A visual reference to The Sound of Music suggests that director Lela Swift had an idea about the way the show’s central relationships were going. 

Episode 299: A Human Life