Last Sunday night, after spending hours in the kitchen cooking up a lot of vegetables, I sat down and re-watched one of my favorite DS spinoffs, "A Darkness at Blaisedon." This was Dan Curtis's attempt to launch a regular weekly evening series that would be "a version of DS at night." The proposed series was called DEAD AT NIGHT. I think that Roger Davis hints that this was in the works in the Ron Barry radio interview from 1968 (August or September of that year, I believe?).
It's been a few years since my previous viewing of "Blaisedon." The main thing that stuck out for me this time was how it was almost like a montage of several "fan favorite moments" from the daytime show. We have a spooky old mansion with a fab spiral staircase (I was surprised to see that Sy Tomashoff did not get the credit for the sets), a half-mad caretaker played by Thayer David, Marj Dusay foreshadowing Kate Jackson's performance as the ingenue heroine, a psychic investigator (Kerwin Mathews) and his assistant (Cal Bellini in a role very reminiscent of Michael Stroka), a sobbing ghost in a white dress, a swag portrait of Louis Edmonds, a seance, an exhumation, lots of dry ice and Bob Cobert's lovely cues that make us all feel so much at home.
I was fascinated to see that the Roman bust that nearly killed Julia in 1995 showed up here, and I presume that this was its first appearance onscreen. MB happened to notice recently that the bust also showed up in hoDS--I am not sure that that post is still available.
The script was by Sam Hall. Although the series wasn't picked up (and I have no idea what studio politics were at work in that decision), I realized at the end of this viewing that the script did have an interesting kind of afterlife. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd call this I kind of preliminary draft of some of the ideas that eventually coalesced in the feature script for NIGHT OF DS.
G.
