Robert Costello was an associate producer on Dark Shadows. 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.
