i haven't seen "the exorcist" in many years since before my DS days. who did gerringer play?

i'd watch it myself but it remains the one movie i cannot watch. it terrified me as a child and continues to do so to this day. even now when i see linda blair as a middle aged woman she scares the hell out of me.

if i may go off on something of a tangent so much of what made the show work(or not work)was the chemistry between the actors involved.

for example in this viewers opinion jonathan frid had it IN SPADES with lara parker and grayson hall. yet despite josette being barnabas' "great love" i never found him to have it with kathryn leigh scott. on the same note he didn't have it with donna wadrey as roxanne either.

but again he had it with alexandra,nancy and joan.

scott for her part had nice chemistry going not with frid but with joel crothers(obviously),david ford and john karlen. for this reason a maggie/willie romance seems to be a fan favorite even though that never quite came to fruition on the show itself even though it was suggested. those two actors played so well off each other. apart from everthing else i never bought for a second the maggie/nicholas pairing because there was zero chemistry with astredo.

the nice interplay between joan and alexandra would also play a part in the fan's favoring of the liz-as-vicki's-mother theory as much as anything else.

for what it's worth despite their being partnered up as the show's marketable "antiheros" in later years i never cared for scenes between frid and david selby either.

i thought the article was an interesting spin on things.

it's sort of a loaded thing. for actors who find themselves involved in any sort of "cult" thing while they may not achieve fame and fortune in the traditional sense(which of course can be fleeting anyways)but something else. something that takes on a life of it's own.

i guess it's sort of a trade-off. one has to make the decision to embrace it or try and distance oneself from it. interesting most of the surviving DS cast chooses to participate in it in some way. crappy,out of the way airport hotels. lousy food. the festival circuit is not glamorous but many choose to be engaged.

boy is today's slideshow loaded with moments to cherish and remember. great stuff from joan bennett from all four years.

gothick i knew you'd be impressed. love the scene with liz and mrs.johnson from 1966. i recently watched the scene with naomi,abigail and countess dupres and i'm always mesmerized by the virtuosity of that trinity. alexandra later joins joan,clarice and grayson in this episode and as lovely as she is she's totally outmatched by these thoroughbreds. she almost disappears.

of the scene during the quentin storyline one thing i love about that period is that after having handed the show over to adam and company for most of 1968 the core collins family reclaims their rightful place at the storyline's center. great stuff.

and really, what can one say about liz's leviathan dream? it defies accurate description. it truly must be seen to be believed.

a few more words on the "sad plaid" suitcase and today's slideshow...

i read somewhere that budgets were so tight for the pilot episode that for the scene where vicki meets burke at the collinsport train station alexandra moltke and mitch ryan were asked to supply their own personal luggage.

in later years vicki tends to travel with the tiny blue suitcase that all the ingenue characters carry.

on to today's slideshow funny that during the leviathan episodes the writers acknowledged that david had indeed "grown up" and was a teenager only a few months later during the summer of 1970 storyline to have him revert to a "child" with a nanny and a playroom and a dollhouse.

sarah was very tricky as a character and with a limited shelf life for one very big reason...

ghosts do not age and children,particularly at sharron smythe's age at the time,grow and change at a rapid clip.

just during the six or eight months she was on the program smythe grew alot. by the end of 1795 she looks much older than she did when her ghost first appeared in 1967. there's an early scene where sam picks her up and puts her on a stool to draw her picture and she seems tiny. by her final episodes she looks at least an inch taller.

besides by the time vicki was about to depart for 1795 she was so fed up with the lot of them that she left out of anger.

did liz ever actually WEAR that jacket or was it always over the shoulders?

funny that they just sort of drop the part of the plot that mrs.johnson hated the collins family and was just spying for burke. after the barnabas intro she becomes the devoted family servant but then nearly all the pre-barnabas plots get dropped.

i guess work is hard to find in collinsport.