Dear fans,
A few weeks ago, I started re-watching the original 1966-67 Laura Collins storyline, beginning with the episode in which Laura first arrives at the Maggie Evans Coffee Shop (as I have come to think of it). I've really been enjoying this, in part because this is the first time in decades that I've been watching DS on a regular daily basis. My delighted discovery is that I love the show more than ever.
A few observations: First, despite what you may have read or been told, Malcolm Marmorstein was a REALLY good writer. Based on his Laura scripts, I'd rate him up there with Violet Welles and Joe Caldwell. Maybe Marmorstein's early Barnabas scripts--his final period of writing for the show--weren't up to the gold standard of his work on the Laura storyline; it's so long since I viewed those early Barnabas shows that I can't comment (but I might be able to do so eventually, if I keep watching). In an interview on one of the MPI DVDs, Marmorstein revealed that during his final month or so of writing for the series, he had gone out to LA for an extended stay. In the interview, he said that he did this because his wife told him she needed a vacation from living in NYC. Evidently, Bob Costello and others interpreted Marmorstein's month-long sojourn out on "the Coast" as his looking for another job--and that may have in fact been in the case, but Marmorstein claimed it wasn't. All that notwithstanding, nevertheless he revealed that when he was told that his association with Dark Shadows was at an end, Marmorstein immediately began working on Peyton Place. He claimed in the interview that this was a fluke which occurred thanks to a chance conversation, but it's certainly an interesting development. He actually said he didn't miss a single day of work between composing his last script for Shadows and his first one for Peyton.
In my previous viewing of the Laura saga (which I recall as having been patchy and intermittent), I'd definitely picked up that elements of Laura's storyline were re-used for the Cassandra storyline. Now that I've been watching it all properly, in a regular, orderly manner, I'm struck by how much of what was done with early Barnabas and subsequent supernatural storylines during the 1967-1969 period was established by specific plot features and structures of the Laura storyline.
We have a mysterious blonde relative who unexpectedly shows up in town with a problematic backstory. We have multiple incarnations, or are they incarnations, of the same person over a period of 200 years. We have a major character being proclaimed as "one of the Undead." We have a seance, which leads to yet another seance. We have the ghost of Josette Collins, heralded by the smell of jasmine perfume. We have the Undead character's obsession with an important family member. We have a threat to David. We have dreams of occult significance, though so far the dreams are only described, not staged. We have mysterious portraits with an evil influence. In one scene, Laura even gives David a music box, though it has not been referred to in subsequent follow-up shows.
There's more, too. But since so much of this was written by Malcolm Marmorstein, I definitely get why he felt he should receive credit for inventing the Barnabas character. So many of the elements seem to have been re-used, in a shifted or modulated form, from how he wrote Laura.
G.
