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« on: October 02, 2012, 04:22:08 PM »
The following letter was written on August 21, 1967, the day before this ep was taped and the day Ep #310 was taped - but considering Frid refers to the taping of this ep as well as the taping of Ep #312, I figured I'd post the letter here in the middle of them. (And the reason why the taping day doesn't coordinate with the airing day (as in this ep was taped on a Tuesday but originally aired on a Monday) is because a lot of the eps in August and the beginning of September of '67 were taped out of sequence.)
Monday
Dear Mother,
This will be a brief one. I have two heavy shows tomorrow and Wednesday. I had one lemon last week and I can't afford another.
Enclosed is a write-up from last week's Newsweek. I was delighted with it. As of the past few days we are the highest rated soap. I suggested to the producers today that perhaps we'll lose that rating as soon as school begins. During the summer it seems to have become very popular with the kids. Most of my mail lately has been from young teenagers. They all complain about having to go back to school and missing the show.
Curtis (producer) told me today they are going to do a story where all the characters in the family are going to "regress into the past" and become ancestral counter-parts. I will play myself in my "first existence” and the story will tell how I became a vampire. Sounds like I'll be good for four or five more months. All of this could be subject to change depending on the ratings.
Had a good day today. Both the show we taped and the one that was aired were pretty nice.
Love, John
It's fascinating that even at this point Frid was thinking that his time on the show could have ended after the end of Barnabas' origin story. But what would really be fascinating to know is if at this point they were going to go with the 1830s backstory they were currently relating in the present or if they were already thinking of throwing all that out the window and going with what we would see as the 1795/96 storyline? I suspect at this point that there's a real possibility that it still may have been the 1830s backstory and that's chiefly because I've read that one of the main reasons the origin story was set in 1795/96 was because the costumes they ended up renting for the storyline were of that period and not the 1830s. And I've said it before, but it really is so amazing how so many of the behind the scenes happenings influenced what we saw on screen.
And BTW, the show that aired on August 21, 1967 was Ep #301, which contains the infamous "dueling" scene between Barnabas and Burke.