Robert Costello was an associate producer on Dark Shadows. Â In this 1984 DS Festival appearance, Costello talks about the nuts and bolts of making Dark Shadows.
Robert Costello, Newark, New Jersey Dark Shadows Festival 1984
Transcribed by Julie Illescas
EMCEE:  The DARK SHADOWS FESTIVAL is very pleased and very proud to welcome  for the first time, Robert Costello.
Robert Costello:  Well, here we are. This is my first experience with the DS  group only because over these many, many years we just never met in terms of  my availability and your availability and I'm very pleased to be invited here it's really marvelous. I mean because it brings back the live days of DS. We  did a very modest amount of editing in these days. (Laughter). I didn't think  you'd notice. It was very primitive. It was like one step up from razor cuts,  and any of you that are quarter inch audio fans probably know that you can  cut and patch and that was just about maybe a hair beyond that kind of  editing. We didn't have the sophistication of going back and doing a fast  pickup and laying it in and money played a tremendous part in our budget. But  we knew that mistakes were made. I don't think we were aware of the mistakes  as isolating them and then stringing them together like a bunch of beads and  laying them out. God knows we did have a lot of chuckles about the fact that  some of our actors could go up in the middle of words and others paraphrased  them like they' not met the rest of the cast. It had its excitement. Really,  I think, it was probably the most interesting show. Certainly not  intellectually the most stimulating, on the one hand. On the other hand, it  was a tremendously stimulating show in that we never kidded it. We laughed a  lot about it but I think that was probably what made it good. We laughed  because we enjoyed it end all the things were our friends end we created them  for enjoyment. We didn't create them to he ridiculed or made fun of by us or  anybody else, and I think the other plus in the ..... and at the time we  realized this.. ..it was a show for people, for everybody, you could make it  whatever you wanted to make it. If it was camp, then it was camp. That was your privilege. If you liked the kind of show that had a little spook, a  little tingle, and you were willing to suspend disbelief a whole lot, then  you had it. If you wanted a laugh, you had it. So I think the fun of the show  and the popularity of the show was that it had a very, very general and  tremendous audience.
We had some marvelous people writing the show. Some wonderfully stimulated  people, stimulated by their own imagination and as I said before, by their  own sense of fun and fair play because we did not want to cheat in any way by  making it ridiculous or making our audience ridiculous by watching it or  making our performers ridiculous by performing it. Gordon Russell was there  first as a writer. A wonderfully funny man. He died a couple of years ago,  unfortunately. He had gone on - he' continued to write soaps. Tremendously  creative. San Hall still writes soaps in New York with ABC. a  wonderfully inventive fellow. Dan Curtis who created it obviously had some  sort of quirk to even think of this. The idea of the spooks really came from  all of us.  My contribution is that I'm very good line producer. A line producer had  originality but he also has other things to contribute.. He can be part scene  designer, part director. I'm member of the Directors Guild of America. I  have been a scene designer. You're pretty much a technician. You know what  you can do with the equipment that you have and some of the effects-ghosts  appearing and disappearing - so that's the contribution. If they say, "Hey,  Bob, if we want Josette's portrait to come alive", which was our first  venture into the world of ectoplasmic manifestations, "Can we do that?" So.  "Yes", I said, "We can't. We can do that by keying her in, putting her all  in black, creating a second set in another area of the studio and then  matching the two cameras. Her set would he entirely black and there would be  a staircase coning down where she drifted down out of the portrait, seeming  to walk out of the portrait down. She would be walking downs jet black  velour-covered flight of stairs. We would key that into the room in which her  portrait was. She would just materialize out of which you've matched her and  placed her into the portrait as the dimensional figure--the black ate up the  light, you see--so she was just inserted there. You' dissolve her through  and she would then seem to materialize and slowly turn and then Just step out  and you' try to have a sensation of her gliding gracefully down into the  room. You' then cut away to the amazement of whoever had seen this sort of  thing and she runs like mad, gets over into the set, and when you cone hack  she's in the same room with her portrait again. As I said before, we had  editing problems. We didn't have the time. We didn't have the equipment--the  electronic equipment wasn't even developed at that stage of the game.
ABC was the impoverished network at that time. It had no money. The class  acts were NBC and CBS so DS contributed to the class effect of ABC. It had a  great deal to do at that time with putting it on the map in daytime, of  making it a special, different network. It was bringing new things into the  world in terms of daytime programming. Rut they still didn't have a lot of  money to invest in the show. That plus the other things I mentioned, so we  were still doing it more live than we were doing an edited version s we do  today. Today we do shoot them like film. If you're doing a soap opera  today--I did ANOTHER WORLD.  I did RYAN's HOPE for five years--but today we  shoot those shows in the manner that you shoot in film and that is, if you  take all the scenes in the barroom, you shoot those scenes in the bedroom.  Then you'll go to the living room. You shoot all the scenes in the living  room and the, you go to the bedroom or wherever the subsequent sets are. If  you have done say location shooting on tape you'll then log that in as time.  You will have timed all these segments and all these pieces of scenes. You  then take them to the editing roam that night or the following day and either  the Associate Producer or a producer or director will go in and they string  it together in the proper order, timing as they go, keep tabs on the time,  snipping here and snipping there and then music is laid in there.  ¢â‚¬Ëœ  really a motion picture thing now. ¢â‚¬Ëœcompressed. ¢â‚¬Ëœmotion picture in  design. Really it is. We still do a multi-camera rather than a single camera  shooting. You can do a pickup and you can insert the pickup in the particular  shot. If you need a reverse shot and you can' it without moving a lot of  scenery, when the scene is over, you'll come around behind somebody, and if  they've been reading a note or writing a check, you'll just get the camera  in behind which would have been caught in the other shots since you're  multiple camera shooting, then bring the camera around the person who is  writing the check and you see him read the check--bang, that's it. You go  away. So when they edit the next day they just pop this in. I'm going into a  little bit of detail so just when I say we do it live, then all our effects  were on the spot. We didn't edit effects. We may go back and try and do them  if we could, but as you saw, we didn't do a lot of going back and doing then  again. No matter how embarrassing it seem to be today.  No editing at all, as  a matter of fact.  I guess we brought a lot of suspension of disbelief too,  along with the audience.  So that's why a lot of these things you do see . .  . all the effects of pushing into the blue, blue eyes of Lara Parker an then  chromakeying it.  We started in black and white and then went so color. Once  we get to color, we could chromakey into her blue eyes. So we' go right into  her blue eyes and create a scene, start to come out and dissolve through from  her blue eyes or create flame in her eyes, and we' do that all in the first  crack. We might go back and do the whole scene again, but really not very  often. We had one shot at it. We really dealt with it hit we had one shot at  it.  Unless it was a total disaster we never went back.
