The writers are the one who ran with the idea and wanted the character to a three dimensional villain and called the actor in for discussions on that point before the actor even made one camera appearance. That was not a common thing to be done on soap at all.
I'm having a hard time making sense out of several comments. First, what does Nancy mean by "called the actor in for discussions on that point before the actor even made one camera appearance."
Can you explain what this means?
I'm equally having trouble understanding the next two posts. Murph writes:
My question is this. Why would the powers that be create this backstory for a character they thought was going to be staked after 13 weeks? It's my understanding they didn't expect the show to last through the summer. In the Dan curtis interview with DVD disc 10 he talks about how Barnabas became the relunctant vampire because tptb planned on killing him off but when the ratings shot through the roof they knew he had to live and had to come up with a reason to keep him on.
To me it sounds like Murph is saying it seems unlikely that an elaborate backstory would have been written (presumably by Art Wallace, who claimed to have done so) for a temporary character.
But then Murph says:
It doesn't make any sense to me that an elaborate backstory for Barnabas was written until the ratings shot up and they knew he had to stay which was probably sometime in May or June of '67, certainly not before the character appeared at Collinwood, which was mid April.
which seems to contradict what he said if this means it's unlikely that the backstory was written later on when the ratings shot up. So, it's unlikely the backstory was written early on, and it's unlikely the backstory was written later on?
And finally, Joeytrom writes:
They probably wanted to make the Barnabas character as interesting as possible, so they decided to do a backstory on him. The series was in danger of being cancelled so they had nothing to lose.
which makes it sound like the backstory for Barnabas was written only later on when the show was about to be cancelled. In other words, it's unlikely that Art Wallace wrote the backstory early on?
I mean, I know we'll probably never know exactly what happened, and I certainly understand how memories become fuzzy over time, but Art Wallace clearly claimed credit for the creation of Barnabas.
And Nancy says she agrees with MB that one person probably can
not take credit, yet MB has stated, if I understand correctly, that he believes that Art Wallace
does deserve the credit.