121591
Current Talk '04 I / Re:Other then DC, who created Barnabas?
« on: April 21, 2004, 06:51:13 AM »Since Wallace *apparently* had left the show before anything supernatural happened, I would question the idea that he suggested, planned, or outlined the Barnabas storyline, although it would be interesting to see evidence to the contrary.
Excerpt from Art Wallace's interview for the DS Files book series:
GROSS: DO YOU THINK IT WAS ACTUALLY CREATED BY CURTIS' DREAM?
WALLACE: It wasn't created by him. What came to him in the dream, if it was a dream, was the idea of doing a gothic show, but he had no show. He just had the idea of doing a daytime serial which would be different. He had no characters, no story, no nothing. The idea of doing a gothic show is what interested the network. Now if Dan Curtis dreamed that, then it's fine with me. I wrote the show, creating the actual details. For the first thirteen weeks of the show I wrote the whole thing, sixty-five scripts. Part of the situation -- which might or might not interest you -- in negotiating the contract I had with Dan Curtis, he insisted that he wanted to be called the creator of the show, and he and I went head to head on that because he didn't create the show, I did. He was totally adamant so we finally arrived at the conclusion that the credits would read "Series created by Dan Curtis, story created and developed by Art Wallace." I think that's the way the credits have read all the time. That was just in order to get the contract completed because he just refused to give up that credit. I would say that his credit should have said, "Concept by Dan Curtis," but he wanted that. So I wrote the first thirteen weeks of the show, after I had done that I found myself getting slap happy. We brought in other writers, and I just kind of supervised.
GROSS: HOW LONG WERE YOU INVOLVED WITH THE SHOW?
WALLACE: Actually, closely involved not much longer than one year.
GROSS: SO YOU WERE GONE BEFORE JONATHAN FRID ARRIVED.
WALLACE: No, I was there at the beginning of Jonathan Frid. I created Barnabas. It was just about near the end of the first thirteen weeks when we began to talk about where to go next, and by then the show had changed from being gothic/mystery/melodrama to being supernatural, which it wasn't in the beginning. At the outset, it was very much like the Gothic Romance novels.
GROSS: DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT THOSE EARLY EPISODES WERE LIKE?
WALLACE: The basic plotline was the typical Gothic novels. The girl comes to the house to be governess to the kid, and the house was very mysterious. There was a Heathcliff character, a creepy brother and a little boy, and creaky doors. But it wasn't supernatural. It became supernatural during the tenth or eleventh week on the air. I give total credit to that change to Dan Curtis. Dan insisted that it had to become supernatural and not be that it "might be supernatural." I think he was absolutely right, and that's when we had our first ghost. After the first ghost, the vampire idea came up. It was after Barnabas was introduced that I began to have less and less to do with the show. Then I just maintained my credit and royalty.
GROSS: WHY DID YOU LEAVE THE SHOW?
WALLACE: I was just tired of it. It was a grind and I had other things to do rather than write a show every day.