(He spoke very quickly and his sentences tended to run together, but his talk was transcribed as best I could. Thanks for the tape, Bette!)
Part 1 - Thingus Interruptus
Hi. My name is Matt Hall. Coming on after Jonathan Frid makes me feel a little like someone coming on after Jimi Hendrix at [?]. The reason I'm here is because my mother was Grayson Hall and my father is Sam Hall. [Applause] That's really nice of you, thank you. And they're good people. And I've been in touch with the people who organized this from the start, and they were kind enough to invite me because I hung out at the studio endlessly as a child and they thought that that might be interesting.
The one story I
love of what it was like in the DS studio was that at one point Vinnie Loscalzo was the makeup man and he made me up... he had to be there for hours and hours as they taped and stuff, but he didn't have much to do, and one day I was just hanging out after school in the studio and Vinnie sat me down in the chair and made me up, like an hour and a half, into this wolf creature with long ears and a long nose and eyebrows and he aged me and made my hands all weird and then I got to wander around like that terrorizing school children. It was SO much fun. That's kind of what
Dark Shadows meant to me because I was there endlessly and it was a great deal of fun, but... there ARE some decent stories.
I sorta feel like everybody knows more about this show than I do except that... because you guys have all been studying it and, you know, plot points and things like that, but you may not know the story of how my mother and my father both got onto
Shadows. The real, true, unhidden, unvarnished story is that Mom had had some success as an actress going... they had married in 1953, and as I like to say it, they spent the 50s going to places that had free hors d'oeuvres, and what is now called networking was once called social climbing. And they basically were attempting to have careers as an actress and a writer in Manhattan and in New York, and it's difficult to do. They had me in '58 and I'm an only kid-- I'm a child of only children. Then, things began to break for them and Dad got onto a show called
Brighter Days as a writer and Mom eventually got
Night of the Iguana, her first film, [Applause] an Academy Award nomination in 1963, and I was down there for the shooting of that in Mexico and I'll tell one story, which is that Richard Burton had such deep pits in his face from acne that they had to put putty in them for closeups. But he was a really nice man the one time I met him. Anyway, so I was there for that. Then after
Iguana, Mom did a Disney film and a few other things and then came a little bit of a bleak period in her career. Then around '65 or '66 there wasn't a heck of a lot of money coming in and they had both rebelled from their parents-- my mother and father both had rebelled from their parents-- and they didn't relish the thought of going back into the situations that they had rebelled from. My father was from an Ohio factory-- a small town in Ohio factory town, uh, farm/factory town, and Mom was from Philadelphia, and they didn't relish the thought of returning to those worlds but nonetheless at some point they had a kid to raise now and they sincerely... My father went back to Ohio to check out whether or not it would be feasible for him emotionally to return to Ohio and give up all the dreams of being writers and actors and all that stuff. And while Dad was in Ohio looking at houses, my mother one day came home, and I wasn't there, and she went to take a shower and she put on the shower water and she stuck one leg in the shower and the phone rang. And she stood there on one foot and she thought, "Do I answer the phone; do I take the shower?" She got out of the shower, and she answered the phone and it was her agent saying did she want to do a soap called
Dark Shadows? And she said, "Hot damn, we don't have to move to Ohio!" And that was the beginning of it.
Dad got onto the show several months later. I think Mom got in, like, May or June of '67, and Dad got it by the end of that summer. And the way it worked was there was a party that eventually ended up as parties tended to do at my parents' house, and Dan Curtis was there and my father was being host to all of these actors, right?, and he was just, like, being Mr. Grayson Hall and running around, like, making sure their drinks were filled and that they weren't, you know, spilling them onto the carpet and things like that, and eventually, very late, Dan Curtis and he got into a long conversation in the kitchen, and Dan Curtis by the end of the conversation said, "Look, I want you to write for my show." And my father said, "Don't say this. I mean, it's 1 in the morning, we're both drinking-- don't. This is not the time to talk business." And Dan said okay and called the next day and said, "I don't say those things to people unless I mean them. Be at my office." So my father went in and got a job, which was like awkwardness for us. And, you know, that we didn't-- we really didn't have to go to Ohio and become factory workers. [Laughter]
So, anyway, what I would do is I would come home from... school would let out... By the way, I was really pleased to get the 3:30 to 4 spot because it holds a great deal of sentiment in my heart... But I would come home and if there was no one home, I would go into the studio and, I remember the studio was... I was really welcome there because the only other kid was David Henesy, and honestly, like, after a while, I liked David a lot because he was a little bit older than me, and he was a really nice guy but, in all honesty, I always felt slightly envious of David Henesy because my mom was on the show, my father wrote the show, all of our friends came back afterwards from the show and hung out in our kitchen forever and ever and ever. David Henesy was on the show and I was David Henesy's age and why couldn't
I do that? [He laughs] And years later I actually acted in high school and, you know, my parents were gratified to find out that I could not act. That's why I couldn't do that, but I didn't know that at the time. It was just like, wait a minute, something is massively unfair here!
So, there are a couple of really nifty stories. I was just talking to Lara Parker in the other room and there's a very funny story about her pug and my pug. See, for one thing that was weird about the growing up-- most people here probably, like, had two parents that were working, and it's kind of interesting, you know-- you're sort of on your own a lot-- but it's kind of interesting when your mom is doing a soap opera. I mean, you know, people would stop us on the street and ask for her autograph, and at first I was really really bashful about that, because it was, like,
my mother that they were interrupting. And eventually one got used to it because as the
Shadows phenomenon rolled on, it became big. But I remember at one point when I was still, like, on the shy side because I was a pretty bashful kid, somebody coming up, when I was with her, to my mother on Fifth Ave. and saying, "Could I have your autograph?" And she signed something and he said, "You know, you're one of the most valuable autographs I have." And she said, "Oh thank you" and whatever. That stuck in my 8 year old or 9 year old head, and it was like "most valuable autograph," right? And about 30 feet later I turned to my mother and said, "What's he going to do with it?" and she was like, "What do you mean?" and I said, "He said, 'it was valuable'." And Mom thought about it and said, "That and 30 cents will get him on the subway." But there was... that's not the story with pugs. Eventually the fans were always [?] and I got to the point where I really liked it, but at first I was, like, this is [
] territory.
The story with pugs is, we had this small dog named Thing. If any of you remember, Mom always mentioned Thing in interviews and stuff at the time. And it was a nice pug. There's now [?] and somebody which has a pug in it. It was a pug. Pugs are kind of ugly little runts. They're sweet animals. They're like weird bulldogs. Anyway, Thing was a virgin. And Thing... [looking into the audience] This man has a picture of my childhood dog! Alright! Could I see it? Thing!! Thank you. It's your picture. This is him. Thing-- boy, he was ugly. I named him Thing from the childhood Dr Seuss books-- there was Thing 1 and Thing 2. And I was 4 years old when I got him and he was Thing 4. Thing was a virgin. Thing was a small New York apartment dog and he hadn't had much experience with members of the opposite sex and it came time.. we decided at some point to mate him because we wanted smaller Things, and Lara Parker had a pug named Rosie. Okay? So the
Dark Shadows main cast being the way it was, Rosie was brought to our house for an extended visit, you know? And we were going "maybe sparks would happen and we would get little Things." So Rosie gets there, and Thing does not understand. Thing is slow. He doesn't get it, and Rosie hadn't quite gotten into heat yet but Thing was not really there for it. He wasn't terribly curious about her until one day, my mother was walking them both the 2nd or 3rd day she was there, and she was in front of the New York Hilton Hotel, right?, with these two small dogs, and she's standing in the New York Hilton Hotel and this bus pulls up, right?, and starts to unload passengers, and it's a cheerleading convention, all right, and two of the cheerleaders see my mother and recognize her and come over. And Mom watches them and she's, you know, doing the
Dark Shadows thing with these two cheerleaders, and all the other cheerleaders are coming out of the bus and they're all beginning to riff on to the fact that my mother is my mother and standing there with two pugs. And at that moment, Thing mounts Rosie. And my mother looks at this, and my mother is talking to these two very sweet little cheerleaders who are asking for her autograph, and my mother remembers that when pugs make love, it takes 45 minutes. And then, the last thing my mother wants to do is stand in front of the New York Hilton with two dogs engaged in coitus for 45 minutes while cheerleading conventions ask her for her autograph. [excitedly] So she rips the dogs apart and runs back to the apartment and slams the elevator and gets them upstairs and takes the leads off, and they both sit down. And Thing remained a virgin. And it's really... it shows you what trauma at the wrong moment can do. My dog was a virgin-- didn't have puppies because of
Dark Shadows.
Will continue in Part 2
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