You will see here whatever you are seeking. Who I am, however, may be farther away than objects appear. Do not backup or you may sustain severe tire damage.



All that said, as a friend of mine says, Namaste, Bitches!

I'm not going to write this, but I've received a couple of nice email since the House wrap-up, probably owing to my proclivity for explaining around less-than-happy endings, and also my Hilson writing past, asking me to write one.

If I was going to write one, here's the ending I'd do -- I know all the other writers have thought of this one, but for those who don't think about such things, here you go.

I say Wilson doesn't have cancer. Never had cancer. Either House or Wilson made-up the whole thought. Who better to do that than a brilliant doctor and/or a cancer specialist?

Okay, end of thought.

First, I need to point out that I co-wrote a book on Dark Shadows called the Dark Shadows Companion. I’m a first-generation fan. I’m one of those who ran home from school to see it. I am the audience that Depp and Burton will need to reach to reboot the franchise. I have bad news for them. They just spit in the face of a big portion of the audience. I ran home from school, my friends, and I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the triangle Barnabas/Josette/Angelique storyline that Depp-Burton focused on.

The whole show, for me, was about Julia and Barnabas. It was bad enough that the film turns Julia into an alcoholic (something she NEVER was on the series), but they show her smoking a cigarette. Yes, given what Grayson died of, I find this an incredibly bad creative choice, but I suppose that’s subjective nitpicking. HBC watched enough episodes to pick up a couple of her mannerisms, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Julia’s wardrobe is Mode o’Day if their fashion buyer was Bozo the Clown.

What they did was turn Barnabas into her murderer and utterly destroy their relationship as far as their franchise is concerned. Dark Shadows, at its worst, was about all the women obsessing on the vampire. From the end of the film and its stupid Godzilla ending, it’s clear they’re wanting to bring Julia back as a vampire to be the new villain, something she was for a brief time on the series.

Burton and Depp may as well burn the script for that one. They’ve already lost most of the Julia fans. I know they lost me. Admittedly, they barely had my interest to begin with, but yeesh …

As an independent film, I found it weird as hell. Visually, it wasn’t Collinsport for me. It was sort of Disneyland Collinsport. Collinwood itself looked like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. The woodlands looked like England, not Maine, which seemed as out-of-place as Beverly Hills did when Curtis used it for Collinwood in the 1991 series. The few bits I liked (Barnabas crashing on the rocks but not dying) were quickly overtaken by a lot more bits I just hated.

I gave it a 4 over at IMDB. I’m now thinking I was too generous.

Sorry, Johnny. You killed the franchise all over again for a lot of us.

Originally published at Melody Clark. You can comment here or there.

You know one of those dreams you have where you think you're in one place and then it morphs into somewhere else? And you're surrounded by people who are supposed to be familiar people, but they look like people you don't know? And everyone is acting strangely and then the scene shifts and you're somewhere else and you really just want to wake the fuck up? Yes, that's right, I saw the Dark Shadows movie. Prepare yourself for a little spleen-venting later on. I'm sorry, my friends who have a horse in the race, I really tried to keep an open mind, but long about the obvious blow job scene, I was really having second thoughts. The murder pretty much wrapped it up for me, and not in a good way. An actual review when I have eaten something that isn't popcorn.

Yes, I’m the Melody Clark who co-wrote (along with Kathleen Resch and Marcy Robin) The Dark Shadows Companion, which was edited and published by Kathryn Leigh Scott, with forewords by Jonathan Frid, Lara Parker, Matt Hall and a cast of thousands. It’s still available on Pomegranate Press, Ltd.

Secondly, here is a mini-defense of the original TV horror soap Dark Shadows …

It was shot in real-time. In other words, no one could stop tape, outside Joan Bennett and (much later) Jonathan Frid. Whatever goofs happened, however the line came out, that’s how it was sent across the airwaves. No actor EVER got a second take. In the words of Robert Rodan, who played Adam, “If the stagehand stumbling in the background still had his pants up, they kept filming” — and he wasn’t just joking. On DS episodes, you can see multiple instances of stagehands and boom mikes, along with sets collapsing, firetrucks wailing past, people snoring, people sneezing, eyelashes dropping off, earrings being flung across the room, people reading the wrong lines off the prompter, Jonathan Frid walking with his laundry in front of the camera as it captured the end shot, and almost everything else that could possibly go wrong on TV. Dark Shadows was shot on a minuscule budget. The amount the actors made would barely qualify as middle class earnings these days, even with cost of living adjustments.

The scripts were written rapidly. The actors had to learn their lines nightly. They often forgot them. They were all directed WAY over the top. And at the end of the day, they’d all meet up at places, toss back a beer and say, “Wow, thank god no one is ever going to see THAT again!”

Little did they know.

Originally published at Melody Clark. You can comment here or there.

Last DS post until I bitch about the movie. Here is a compilation of some of the DS on-air mistakes (Kathryn taught me not to say "bloopers" by scowling at me when I said it once).

Matt was also a writer on the 1991 Ben Cross Dark Shadows revival. His father, Sam, was head writer on the original Dark Shadows. His mother, of course, played Dr. Julia Hoffman.

Here is Matt on WFMU's Thunk Tank yesterday. He talks about his memories of being on the DS set, his mom, his dad, and his own experiences writing with Curtis.

http://t.co/wmUfqYzJ

My mother was an alcoholic. That’s what they call it these days, back then she would have been a drunk. I know now she was self-medicating the effects of having been born with a tornado at the center of her brain. She was wildly bipolar. She also had just appalling taste in men — yes, including my father. I think, in his own way, my father intended to be a good person, but he was stuck in a similar polar shift that never seemed to end. Essentially, my father couldn’t feel and my mother couldn’t think. They found sanity, and eventual high madness, with each other. When they split, my mother (who had toyed with alcoholism the way she toyed with religion via the nice ladies who’d knock at her door and hand her Bible verses) careened into a tall, dour, mean Polish man who was the worst alcoholic one can imagine. My mother fell madly in love with the bottle.

Anyway, that’s all a long time ago. In this series of posts that I’ll eventually prune into a book (to be pubbed by Recoverama, my friend’s ACA press), I’ll eventually get into all that. I wanted to deal with something I hadn’t realized bugged me until this evening. This will make it into the book somewhere, if I ever get my sheets together.

I mentioned Dark Shadows here the other day, and my childhood TV hero of sorts, Dr Julia Hoffman. Tonight I sat down and made a note to a friend that they had turned Julia into an alcoholic in the new film version of Dark Shadows. I suddenly realized this really pisses me off. It has made me bitchy all day, so I’m venting it here.

My childhood nightmare was maternal alcoholism. And now they’re transforming Dr Hoffman into a drunk? This Dark Shadows is a comedy. Where have we come from if we now understand that alcoholism is a disease, but we still find it worthy of titters? The film Julia isn’t some stereotypical hard-drinking dame persona, which would be annoying anyway. She is described in advertising as an alcoholic. Grayson’s Dr. Hoffman was not an alcoholic. I guess they needed something for Helena to hang her fright wig on. I suppose it’s some character synergy with Barnabas’ lust for blood. That might be fun if this was a drama, but it doesn’t seem to be.

Female drunks die much, much faster than male drunks. Women can’t metabolize alcohol as anything other than a direct assault against their bodies. Alcoholism also demolishes families, destroys children, and does very few things that are even remotely funny.

I’ve been open-minded about liking the film, but I find myself more and more concerned with what they’ve done to Julia. I’ll post my thoughts about the film in case anyone wonders about them (other than me, I mean).

Originally published at Melody Clark. You can comment here or there.

Stuff from the Blog

Before Dana Scully and all the strong women of television, there was Dr. Julia Hoffman

With the recent passing of Jonathan Frid, who played the original Barnabas Collins on the 1960s TV series, Dark Shadows, a lot of very apt commentary has come about regarding Jonathan’s monumental contribution to that TV phenomenon. Dark Shadows was an experience that could never be duplicated now. It wasn’t just a TV show, it was the TV show. Imagine that Twilight or Harry Potter was a daily series that everyone watched. That was what the experience was like for those of us who lived through that magical time. Jonathan will always be Barnabas Collins to all of us who remember him in that role.

While I deeply respected Jonathan Frid, and had the honor of meeting and getting to know him a little, my favorite character on Dark Shadows was always Dr. Julia Hoffman, played by the late, great Grayson Hall, an actress of tremendous power and range. It is impossible to overstate the level of her importance to women of my generation and yet she receives very little mention in the media. Grayson’s main DS character impacted the lives of nearly every woman of my age group. Before Dana Scully and all the strong women of modern television, there was Dr. Julia Hoffman. Julia was a trailblazer before the path had even been marked out. She was so unique that her very invention only came about because of a typo in a script that turned a temporary character named Dr Julian Hoffman into Julia.

Dan Curtis, Dark Shadows’ creator, only ever thought of Grayson for the role. Julia was supposed to be killed off by the vampire Barnabas Collins who would then himself be staked to death in due course. The chemistry between Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid was so immediate and palpable that the audience couldn’t get enough. Not only did Grayson and Jonathan remain with the series, for many of us their characters of Julia and Barnabas became the series.

I have personally spoken to two different female physicians who were influenced to go into their professions by Julia’s persona. One of these women, Amanda, had grown up in a very small southern town. She had always thought women were nurses and men were doctors. She had been given the toy nurse case for Christmas while her brother received the toy doctor case. The gender modeling went on and on.

Then one day she discovered Dark Shadows. Dr. Julia Hoffman made Dr. Amanda Price possible. We can be sure there are countless similar cases regarding this largely unsung female hero.

When Grayson passed in 1985 at the ridiculously young age of 58, very little mention was made in the press. She was just another character actress passing on. But for many of us, she was a vital and important part of our formative years. She helped define womanhood for my own generation.

Shortly, Helena Bonham Carter will take on the role of Dr. Julia Hoffman, just as Johnny Depp will become Barnabas, in the big-screen version of Dark Shadows. This Dark Shadows will be a much lighter and funnier version. One can’t imagine there will be time enough in the plotline to let Barnabas and Julia return to their fabled partnership. But one thing is for sure, no matter how small Julia’s role in the film, Helena Bonham Carter has massive shoes to fill. For many of us, she’ll have to work very, very hard to be up to the challenge.

For more information on Grayson Hall, check out graysonhall.net

Grayson’s son Matt’s blog, http://msbhall.wordpress.com/

For more information about Dark Shadows, http://darkshadowsfestival.com

Incoming search terms:

• dark shadows (1)

Originally published at Melody Clark. You can comment here or there.

I apologize for the delay in this. I am fortunate to have some of the most gifted, exceptional people on my friend list, these folks included. I've seen you all through the deaths of family members and friends, through good days and bad. I treasure each of you and value your place in my life.

Contributions of chocolate are always encouraged (I'm joking, too many points).

Happy Birthday on the 21st, Lexin!

I'm so sorry to the following folk whose birthdays fell in my black dog days, some of whom are among my favorite pipples.

desrose
mimine
nella_malfoy
shadow_spire
jennalidster
apathys_girl
inamac
siggen1