cool...

i don't have much to add yet i was there briefly last night and about to head back for the day(i live in brooklyn).

they did screen the 2004 pilot which i have never seen and with the exception of the absurd ending(which apparently dan curtis himself disliked intensely)i thought it was rather well done. at some moments actually quite chilling and certainly had alot of potential. according to craig there were to be some casting changes should it have progressed to series but he didn't say who.

i felt the casting was good with a few exceptions....blair brown as liz and kelly hu as julia were just WRONG. the actress who played carolyn(i'm blanking on her name)was very good. angelique for her very brief appearance was quite good as well. interesting that here carolyn and angelique were brunette and vicki a blond. speaking of vic marley shelton was better than i thought she'd be but even when i got past the blond thing i still thought she was too old for the part.

funny even though it's only seven years old it looked quite dated in ways i'm not sure how. again alot of wasted potential.

more to report later...

like i said "this time" her favorite character was josette.

i'm with you on maggie gothick. my favorite maggie episodes were the 1966 at-the-diner stuff. when i think of maggie evans that's what comes to mind.

she was fine in later years as collinwood's resident ingenue-in-distress but early maggie was a more fully realized character with a distinct persona.

since dr.hoffman is already ensconced at collinwood when the story begins i wonder how windcliff will factor into things?

spoilers don't freak me out as much as some...

when i first started watching DS from episode one one of the first things i did was buy KLS's 'dark shadows memories' which i promptly read from cover to cover.

it includes a complete summarization of the show's entire five year run as well as a full episode guide. so i knew from pretty much the outset that most of the original plots get dropped, that eventually a vampire, a witch and a werewolf show up, that the story starts to yo-yo back and forth in time and that it all eventually ends in a "parallel-time" with absolutely no connection to the opening plots and characters.

you know what? knowing all of that didn't diminish for a moment my enjoyment of actually watching the series. having a general outline of something and actually seeing it are two different things.
fans of the original series who then watched the 1991 version when that came on likely didn't enjoy it less even though they "knew" alot of what was going to happen because it followed the original storyline to a large extent.

so thus far the "spoilers" we've been given on the film haven't been troublesome for me. that said i do hope for some surprises and i definitely DON'T want to know the ending.

considering that she pretty much earns a living off of her "remembrances" of her time on DS you'd think that KLS might actually invest in the dvds(she could probably get a tax writeoff) so that she could avoid these lapses in accuracy.

the fact that she habitually misremembers the actual turn of events on the series at this point is extremely odd.

my last experience with DS-Star penned fiction(lara parker's abysmal "the salem branch") was not good...

but i'll give this a shot. i plan to attend a book signing in new york that KLS is doing this week. otherwise i'll pick it up at the fest.

as an aside with border's bookstores gone and several major barnes and noble locations closed i wonder how look the in-store author appearance/book signing will remain. it's fast becoming something of a dinosaur.

remember what that busybody old lady mrs.mitchell told victoria on her train ride up to collinsport...

"i've been living in this part of the country ALL my life and i've only been in collinsport once. JUST ONCE. that was MORE than enough for me!".

the poster is a very cool piece of fan artwork...

but i would think it would be obvious to just about anyone that's at least a ten year old picture of depp(even fifteen, maybe)and that it would not be used in a current production.