Welcome back, Donna.  I offer you my condolences for all the losses you have had to endure in your life these past months and years.  I hope the happy memories you have of when they were with you helps ease the pain of your bereavement.

I hope somehow, somewhere, you can just kick back and enjoy a DS-a-thon one of these days.  It's one of the ways I cope with stress when the usual stuff doesn't work.

Take care,  Gothick

If you ever go to the Museum of Television, you can watch this tape of Lela Swift doing a two part interview about her career.  She does discuss Dark Shadows briefly, along with Ryan's Hope, but a lot of the time is devoted to her beginnings in the early 1950s as a floor director on Playhouse 90--or maybe it was Studio One--one of the classic 50s anthology series (and isn't it a contrast what they were doing for TV back then, and the SLOP we are stuck with today).

Anyhow, she mentions that she started having the cameras do those TIGHT close ups for what she considered psychological effect back in those Fifties days.  And she also mentioned that she'd have the camera on the person who was listening, as opposed to the person who was speaking, in a two or three character scene.  A lot of what she was saying about how she did those dramas seemed to have gotten carried over in her work on DS.

In the control room, the shots all 3 cameras were running were visible to the director and producer, and one of them--I think the director--pushed a button that switched the given shot into the feed.  There are photos of this happening in the KLS books (the best ones, I think, are in the original edition of the KLS Scrapbook Memories).

Sometimes, the director (or whoever it was) would switch just as the cameraman was moving into position, about to move, or had not quite finished moving, because of lack of rehearsal time (especially on Chromakey intensive days).   This is why you get those weird moments when it looks as if something has gone seriously wrong on set because the picture is all blurry or the camera is moving from a mole next to someone's nose over to their eyeball.

G.

The only thing that would have made this puppy happier is if that zombie had made Chris take his shirt off first.  I really resent that they made Don B. stop ripping his shirts off on set after 1968!

In the episodes I've seen from the original 1967 Laura storyline, Vicki visits the Stockbridge tomb with Frank, I believe.  There's also a scene, I believe, where Joe and Frank (or is it Burke?) go there.

G.

He was the star of NoDS (Night of Dark Shadows) and played a dual role--Quentin Collins, who inherits the house in the present (1971), and Charles Collins, an adulterous painter who lives ca. 1810 and whose affair with the mysterious Angelique is the seed of the whole story.

I do vastly prefer Night of Dark Shadows of the two films.  If Darren is ever successful in his efforts to restore the missing footage, the story will actually make sense, and maybe others will realize what an unusual gem it really is.  As Grayson pointed out long ago in an interview, there was something really special there before the studio forced them to hack it to bits and pieces.

Gothick

Patti, I live in the Boston, Mass. greater urban area.  I heard this ad in a restaurant right in Somerville's Davis Square.

I really wish I had been able to hear the whole thing.  I *think* the Sci Fi channel was mentioned, but as Raineypark mentioned, I've yet to see any advertising coverage for the show, apart from the spots for the Festival they've run in some years, and those always seem to air during the show.

Worldvision could send them the old ad spots that we used to see in days gone by. During the Eighties syndication, a spot that featured a clip from 1795 with Barn vamping Millicent was used, with a stinger and the series logo coming up (if memory serves) at the end of the clip.

Gothick

Forgot to mention that Irene Hamalain did the hair on DS until sometime in 1970, and she did sometimes get a mention in the credits.  There are some funny pictures of her in the various PomPress books.  Darling Marie Wallace charitably described Irene as a rather "fussy" woman.

I'm blocking on the name of the gracious lady who took over after Irene left, but she came to one of Jonathan's readings in Long Island, and reminded him of that "Madison Avenue haircut" she used to give him, netting a big smile from him in response.  I think there is a photo of her on the Dee Kearney's pages in Mr. Juggins' DS FAQ site.

Gothick

Hi Julia, she may have gotten caught up in the planning frenzy around the movie, which was about to go into production at this time.  Sam and Gordon wrote it and councils-of-war tended to happen at the Halls apt because it was convenient and, of course, huge.

I think she grew her hair out longer to accommodate the layered-hairpiece look they gave her for the movie, which then continued on for the show.

Steve