781
Current Talk '24 I / Re: Happy 50th Anniversary, Night of Dark Shadows
« on: March 08, 2024, 06:46:14 PM »
A discussion worth revisiting regarding the notes Grayson and DC made in their script:
My personal take on all this has always been that most, if not ALL, of those notes in Grayson's script represented her own thoughts on how she was going to play this out.
Grayson was a great believer in something called sub-text. In a theatrical context, this means information that an actor brings to a given scenario or action. Ordinarily, this would be augmented or perhaps changed outright by the director's notes. DC was still fairly green at this time, though, so I don't know how much he contributed to all of this. I know he was into things such as tracking shots and whip-pans. LOL.
I do remember the story of him yelling at Thayer David to hit the stake HARDER in a certain scene in hoDS. Frankly, that seems about DC's speed during this period of his life as a director.
Of course he went on to win an Emmy... which was invariably prominently displayed in every video interview he did, in later life. I always had the feeling he worked his butt off getting that thing.
Wonderful captures, MB! And wonderful job of annotating all this for us.
G.
I do remember the story of him yelling at Thayer David to hit the stake HARDER in a certain scene in hoDS. Frankly, that seems about DC's speed during this period of his life as a director.
Entirely likely!! As we've often lamented, early director DC was far more concerned with blood and gore than he was with character elements. I don't believe there's even one notation in DC's entire NoDS script (or hoDS script) that could even remotely be considered character oriented or particularly subtextural.