Sam Hall interview on tvparty.com site

[Pansity]

How about the fact that it's a highly original blend of melodrama, gothic romance, the supernatural - with complex characters and relationships that span generations, and reinterprets those characters in interesting ways in different time periods, while still focusing on the effects of all this on a modern day family and personal relationships such as unrequited love, while frequently drawing on primeavel fears and archtypes? Those are just a few thoughts that spring to my mind.

Excellent description of why it worked, despite all the weaknesses that happened (and that we fans are usually the first to comment on).  What makes it work is very much like what made Star Wars work, despite the fact that on the surface, it's just corny space opera.  Both works swipe stuff left and right and sideways from the classics. (In DS case, novels while in the case of Lucas' movies, its old movies, etc. with strong doses of Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment) and Joseph Campbell thrown in.)  The pieces themselves are deriviative, but they tap into the same universal truths as folklore and fairy tales, which is why the source materials were classics in the first place.

Jeannie

[MagnusTrask]

I think many see it as melodrama, and not that many people would put "melodramatic" in a list of positives.   That would partly explain Hall's attitude.   With some directors (and an executrive producer?) coming close to telling actors to ham it up, maybe Hall had some trouble feeling good about the lines he'd written, after seeing some performances in some storylines.

I've been marathoning 1897 too fast, and have been noticing too much the fact that everyone could have toned the acting down, not a lot, just a bit.   Aristede, Amanda Harris, and once in a while Beth are a little overplayed, with the lines "over-enunciated".

[arashi]

I just moved (back home to Maine! Yay!) so I haven't been around at all. Stumbled on this article by accident and had to come over here and see what the word was with you good folks. I haven't seen/read much from SH concerning DS or his work on it, but this interview almost had me falling on the floor in shock. Most of what I thought has already been said so I won't repeat it. I would just like to say that I think DS is one of those things that people either "get" or they don't.

I don't like the negative tone SH used in the article (or maybe that's just me taking it that way) towards people who do enjoy it, as if it's just trash entertainment and should be dismissed as such.  Those digs were completely unnecessary.

[Pansity]

I just moved (back home to Maine! Yay!) so I haven't been around at all.

Congrats on the move back to Maine!  Glad your absence was because of a good reason, not something bad happening.

Jeannie

[Joeytrom]

http://www.tvparty.com/70-dark-shadows.html

[MagnusTrask]

Welcome back arashi!  Where were you till now?

[Joeytrom]

DC didn't spend the rest of his life trying to re-do DS.  When it left the air, he distanced himself from it and wouldn't talk about it.  I read in a fanzine in the 80's that DS was a subject they weren't to discuss in the DC Productions office.  It was only in the late 80's that he started to warm up to DS again.

Sam Hall had made similiar comments about DC (he also ripped Malcom Mamorstein)  in one of the DS Files magazines in te 80's.  Around 1986-1987 there were a few issues made, though they were poorly edited.

[D_Friedlander]

I'm like, wow, talk about biting the hand that fed you and your family.  I thought the story was that the Halls were in a financial bind and on the verge of moving back to Sam's hometown so he could take over his father's business, and Grayson getting the "Julia" role at the last minute "saved" them from that.  Not that they wouldn't have adjusted somehow, I'm sure, but it probably wouldn't have been a comfortable fit all around.

Thanks to both parties eventually being employed by Dan Curtis, the Halls were able to stay in the NYC area and do a lot of what they really wanted to do, unhampered by small-town strictures.   If Sam's still resentful because nobody saw him as a second Arthur Miller or whatever, and he had to work on TV dramas and such, well, he was still writing.  And still is and unto whenever he passes away--- how many of us can say we not only got to make a living doing what we really want to do, using our talents (whatever they may be), and almost literally right up until the day we die?   

And how many mere soap opera writers have had their work live on for decades?  At some point, one just has to make peace with one's legacy, even if it wasn't one's original intention. 

As for his commentary about other persons of his acquaintance, living and dead, it's already been said and much better by others here.

[Taeylor Collins]

Very well said DF!  I hate that Sam seems so bitter.  And I too wish that my "passion" was my job. Even if it wasn't my idea situation!  From Gray's biography that seems to be the story that DS saved their family from moving to Ohio.  I think that Matt and Sam talk about this too in The Companion! Oh well....some people are never happy!