The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection

by Kathryn Leigh Scott

  Video engineer Nick Besink recalls an episode when the chain on the lid of Barnabas’ coffin broke, nearly causing the casket—with Jonathan in it—to crash from its pedestal to the floor.

  “On television, you have to be dead on cue,” Frid says. “You can’t just fool around with lines. We often did, but it makes it hell for the musical cues and—the camera operators rely on word cues. One day I had to say to Grayson, ‘I’m going to kill you, Julia.’ ’Julia’, was the word cue for the ‘B-O-N-G’. I reversed it and said, ‘Julia - ’ and then there was the ‘B-O-N-G!’, which covered up the rest of the sentence.”

  “It’s not telling tales out of school to say that Jonathan used to read the Teleprompter all the time,” Grayson remembered. “Jonathan always had a problem about learning lines. Some people do it easily and some don’t. I guess it’s really nothing that can be learned. It’s very upsetting, very tension-making. Jonathan used to read, and our theory was that everybody in America thought they were looking at him. He was really looking at the Teleprompter. Dear Jonathan used to read my lines off the Teleprompter. Then I would go, ‘Oh, Jesus, what do I do now? I’ve got to cross over there and say that and then he’s going to come in and I’ve got to be over there...’—And your mind’s racing at moments like that. And I would say, ‘Well, as you were saying, Barnabas...’ And Jonathan would stop, knowing he’d done something wrong.”

  But no matter how extreme the blooper incident, the Dark Shadows cameras kept rolling. Actors got the giggles, stagehands were seen in the background of a scene and once the studio caught fire. But the show went on because stopping tape was expensive. On one occasion, the incidental noise in the studio had gotten out of hand and Jonathan Frid asked to “stop tape.” His polite request was just as politely ignored.

  In the words of Robert Rodan (Adam), “The criteria used to determine whether or not to stop the tape was simple. If the stagehand stumbling behind the set still has his pants up, they kept the camera going.”

  Terry Crawford (Beth Chavez) remembers her demise as Beth. “I was running away from Quentin—because I thought wrongly that he was possessed by Petofi —and he was running after me. I’m out in the woods and the stage direction said that I was to turn my back away from Quentin at the edge of the cliff on Widows’ Hill. I’m supposed to teeter - almost fall - but not fall before the commericial break. During the break, the tension mounts and I was to fall off the cliff, screaming, onto the mattresses below. Well, during taping I ran to the edge and I was very excited and I fell before the commercial break - and if that wasn’t bad enough, when I fell down on the mattresses, I bounced back up.”

  Mistakes happened, but they only served to endear the program to the viewers. The most threatening situation never actually occurred, though it was often imminent. Frid remembers, “I know we got very close to having to do the program live—not live-on-tape-but live, period, one time. It was during a labor strike; all the crew had walked, and I think we were right down to a day’s cushion between us and the broadcast day. We were filming one day ahead of telecast. When I first went on the show, it was like two weeks ahead. Then it got closer and closer, and I think we were even going in and taping on Saturdays and Sundays for a couple of weeks to get ahead again. That was the really frightening experience.”

  Jonathan Frid didn’t want to be seen getting into his casket due to the fact it was a few inches too short for him. Once curled up in the casket, Jonathan (at that time a smoker) liked to sneak a cigarette between scenes. Every once in a while, puffs of smoke would be seen coming out of the casket.

  “That casket was unbearable,” Jonathan recalls. “Just awful. I’d have to climb in kind of sideways and bend my knees and turn my head and then they could close it. You will notice that in the scenes where they have me climbing from my casket, they either had me just standing up or they would pause a moment before they gave me a close-up, because they had to wait for me to straighten myself out.”

  According to Grayson Hall, “We were getting ready to do the show. And the stage manager said 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 - and when he got to about the 2 count, Jonathan lifted the lid of the coffin, sat up and said, ‘Now wait a minute - before we start I just wanted to say this coffin has always been too short for me! I am sick of lying here with my knees on the side! When am I going to get a coffin I can fit into!’ Well, I died laughing. We just collapsed. We almost couldn’t shoot the scene because I couldn’t stop chuckling. When I think of Dark Shadows, I picture that moment - Jonathan complaining because his casket was too small. I mean, where else?”

  After taping there would be a read-through of the next day’s script for those performers in the episode. Scripts for the following day had already been distributed, with the producer’s changes attached. Scripts were given to the performers as far in advance as two weeks or as close to the wire as the day before. Usually, the script was presented to them three or four days ahead of the tape date.

  By 6:30 PM, the cast left the studio, pausing to speak with fans and sign autographs. Some of the actors would head up the street en masse to the Brittany du Soir for an after-show drink and get-together.

  “I would watch John Karlen drive off and realize I really should be an actor,” said George DiCenzo, assistant to the producer (who would, indeed, change his profession and become an actor.) “I mean, he was on his way home and I was still working.”

  Of course, the last technical step was editing. Although electronic editing was available later on, in the early days of Dark Shadows, the two-inch wide tape was viewed through a microscope to determine the edits and then the tape was cut, spliced and reassembled. A final step was to run it through the machine and view it on the monitor.

  Occasionally, more would have to be edited out. “For instance, say we had the two reels—a take-up and a playback, 17-inches between the two, which represents one second of time,” recalls Ken McEwen. “So someone said to us that we needed to take out eight seconds. You’d quickly go between the reels—you wouldn’t even measure it—you’d just make a guess about how much to trim. There was so little time available to do all the editing and sometimes they ran out of tables. They needed seven or eight—they only had two.

  “So the engineers would place the machines with the microscope device on chairs, and then edit this tremendous amount of tape with razors and glue. And many times, an engineer would glue the tape together and wind up trying to play it back only to discover that he’d glued it to the chair.”

  “The editing machine,” assistant director director Jack Sullivan adds, “cost the network $200,000. There was the editing device with the microscope in it, which cost around $1200 at the time, and then the wooden table on which you would rest it. Without this wooden table, which cost about $40, you couldn’t use the $1200 editing device, which was necessary to work with the $200,000 machine. At the time, we had about twenty or thirty of the $200,000 machines, and six or seven of the $1200 machines, and two or three of the $40 tables. To me it seems a remarkable example of mismanagement at its worst.”

  Ramse Mostoller, wardrobe designer, remembers another reason why Dark Shadows was such a unique experience for so many of the technical crew. “All of us played a little game. We would try to compose pictures in the style of Degas or perhaps in imitation of a Rembrandt. When we had several characters in a scene, one would be in red, one would be in pink—the colors would accommodate each other to create a particular effect. It rarely happened, but at the close of the scene, before the camera went to black, we would have composed a color picture—an impressionist, a modernist, whatever. That was just one of the little touches we used to contribute to Dark Shadows in our own way.”

  Because of these touches, Dark Shadows would set a unique visual style for daytime television.

  That Year of Insanity: 1968

  By early 1968, Dark Shadows had become one of the most talked-about series on TV. For one reason, the parade of occult characters was steadily increasing—among them the Jennings t
wins, two young men apparently born under a very dark star. Tom Jennings (Don Briscoe) was the evil twin, cursed with vampirism. Even Julia would nearly become a vampire, when Vampire Tom took a liking to her.

  After Tom is staked through the heart, his twin brother Chris Jennings (also played by Don Briscoe) appears in town searching for his brother. Eventually, the audience will discover that Chris and Tom are the great-great-grandsons of Quentin Collins, who had been cursed with the mark of the werewolf in the year 1897. That imprecation not only damned poor Quentin but all of his male heirs as well. Consequently, not only did Chris Jennings have a vampire for a brother, but Chris himself was a werewolf. This would surely have to qualify as television’s most dysfunctional family, although why Chris was a werewolf when Tom wasn’t is a question that was never explored. But though Collinwood seemed literally crawling with all manner of contemporary beasts in 1968, it was a phantom from the past who would stir up the greatest furor.

  When the audience last saw Angélique, she was the remorseful widow of Barnabas Collins in the year 1795. Still it was difficult to pity her, given the fact she had murdered her husband—killed him and then resurrected him as, in the words of Professor Stokes, “one of the walking dead.”

  Because she was a witch, the audience might have suspected it hadn’t seen the last of her. But Barnabas Collins himself was more surprised than anyone to see the woman who had cursed him, killed his sister and summarily afflicted his family in 1795, show up at Collinwood in 1968. Angélique was just as jealous and suspicious as ever—of her “husband” Barnabas’ affiliation with Dr Hoffman, of Barnabas’ relationship with Maggie and virtually every other woman in Collinwood.

  While Angélique was making herself at home, the audience was introduced to Adam (Robert Rodan), who would inaugurate a tradition of literary homage on Dark Shadows. Having run through a vampire, a phoenix, a witch and numerous ghosts, Curtis decided the series was in need of new monster blood.

  Adam was created by Dr Eric Lang (Addison Powell), from patched-together bits of cadavers, the end result closely resembling Mary Shelley’s prototype. In her novel, Frankenstein or the Tale of a Modern Prometheus, Frankenstein’s monster had been a befuddled and guileless creature. Universal’s film metamorphosed him into one not only threatening but bloodthirsty. If a gentler subtext was suggested in any of the film versions, it was in the first version. After the monster had unwittingly killed a child, his remorse was a touching but brief moment. Then the audience was invited to identify with the vengeful villagers in hunting him down.

  Just as they had humanized Bram Stoker’s archetypical vampire into the vulnerable Byronic hero Barnabas, the Dark Shadows writers portrayed a Monster more in keeping with Shelley’s original vision.

  Through complicated plot permutations, a psychic bond between Adam and Barnabas resulted in the latter being freed again from his curse (He would “revert” less than a year later, when the writers had run out of plots for Barnabas as a human being). Later in the storyline, a female was built for Adam, a Junoesque six-footer appropriately named Eve (Marie Wallace). However, they shared about as much chemistry as the original Monster and his Bride.

  Rodan’s characterization was influenced by “my memory of that first movie. That was the direction I wanted to take but without repeating any of the Karloff mannerisms. This wasn’t the conventional, terrorizing monster. I was more interested in the subtleties of developing a person who had just been born.”

  Rodan was successful, as his fan mail testified. “A considerable number of letters were from children who identified with my character’s dilemma. Adam was growing up, just like they were.”

  In 1968 Dark Shadows produced its most controversial storyline. It dealt with the witch Angélique, her fellow black magic practitioner, Nicholas Blair (Humbert Allen Astredo), and a certain other “superior” to whom they both had to report. It also provided a unique design problem for Sy Tomashoff, who was asked to “raise Hell”-complete with gas jets to simulate fire exploding from the bowels of deepest earth-and squeeze it into the narrow sound stage where Dark Shadows was taped.

  And into Hell both Nicholas and Angélique went, to confer with the Big Man in Hades - the Prince of Darkness himself. For Angélique was about to make a pact with the devil.

  There had been controversy before about Angélique’s rituals for the Big Boss. A cameo appearance by the Old Fellow provoked a firestorm of correspondence from the show’s diverse audience. Dark Shadows had always had an odd amalgam of viewers, from housewives in Sacred Rock, Maine, to the apologia crowd at universities.

  That same diversity is reflected in the range of groups and individuals convinced that Dark Shadows was a clear and present danger to children’s minds. The anti—Dark Shadows religious tracts were followed by letter-writing campaigns, complaints by fundamentalist ministers that Dark Shadows was “leading innocent children down the rosy road to Hell.” Even noted psychologist Dr Joyce Brothers stated that Dark Shadows was “indoctrinating our young people into dissociation.”

  Some parents were apprehensive when their children identified with Barnabas, a character who “bricked-up people” in alcoves. Some church groups were particularly offended when the person bricked-up was none other than the evil Reverend Trask of witch-hunting fame.

  The Dark Shadows writers decided to back off, calling the Devil—clad in his Apex Costume monk’s robe and hood—“Diabolos.” As Sam Hall put it, “We demoted him from the Devil to a devil, just one of Hell’s Associate Vice Presidents in Charge of Witchcraft.”

  A mild ratings sag was effectively reversed by a clever strategy targeted at the essential teenage audience. When ABC moved Dark Shadows from its 3:30 PM slot to 4 PM—the hour ABC usually allocated to local stations—the ratings climbed by 2,000,000 households during the following year.

  Even though the official reason for the move was to benefit the audience, the hidden agenda was to lure more local ABC affiliates to the show, to enlarge the market. As the usually conservative New York Times put it, the time change served to “to close the generation gap and allow students to watch the groovy new culture hero do his kinky thing.”

  Dark Shadows was getting as much press coverage as ratings that year, and the ratings were wonderful. Teen-rags like Flip magazine told such immortal tales as how “Frid Flips Out or How Barnabas Became Flip’s Groovy Ghoul.” 16 magazine was exploring such timeless topics as “DS’ers: Our Greatest Fears!” and “Jonathan Frid: Be My Secret Summer Love.” Even that old respectable bastion of main street values and mainstream journalism, The Saturday Evening Post was asking “Can A 172-Year-Old Vampire Find Love and Happiness in a Typical New England Town?”

  Jonathan Frid, a classically trained actor in his mid—40s and a gentleman of great erudition, was astounded to discover he had become a sex symbol! By mid-1968, fan mail was being trucked into a warehouse at the rate of several thousand letters a week. Personal responses were impossible. Instead, lists were made, and lucky individuals were sent a reply card with a picture of the cast.

  Letter writers ranged from kids to teenagers to senior citizens. Everyone on the staff—including makeup man Vincent Loscalzo—received fan mail. Some writers offered advice, recommending how the various characters might get out of scrapes, or warning Grayson Hall not to let anyone touch her tarot cards lest alien energy rub off on them.

  The show’s male leads, especially Jonathan Frid and David Henesy, heard from more ardent fans, usually starry-eyed 14-year-old girls. However, there was the occasional “unsettlingly passionate cry from an outwardly normal housewife in her 20s,” Jonathan recalls. Some of these more “outwardly normal” women enclosed nude photos. One woman wrote to remind Frid that they had met before—in the year 1233.

  “I suppose women see Barnabas as a romantic figure,” Frid reflected years later, “because I played him as a lonely, tormented man rather than a Bela Lugosi villain. I bit girls in the neck, but only when my uncontrollable need for blood drove
me to it. And I always felt remorseful later.”

  What about his popularity with the younger crowd? “Youngsters today are looking for a new morality. And so is Barnabas. He goes around telling people to be good, then suddenly sets out and bites somebody’s neck. He hates what he is and he’s in terrible agony. Just like the kids today, he’s confused - lost and screwed up and searching for something. I’m a lovable and pitiable vampire. All the girls want to mother me.”

  One publication pandered to its readership by releasing the arcane and dangerous information that Jonathan Frid’s telephone number was listed. He was inundated with phone calls and the number was quickly changed—and un-listed. A determined fan called Frid’s elderly mother in Canada, pretending to be “an old friend of Jon’s from England” and got his new telephone number in New York.

  Then there were the gifts that arrived for birthdays, Christmas, or no reason in particular. Some suggested genuine affection and thoughtfulness, such as the afghan that the gift-giver spent an entire year knitting. Others evinced a lack of taste, such as a gift-wrapped box of live ants labeled “Appetizer.” Another fan sent a box of cookies to actress Donna Wandrey (Roxanne Drew) carefully cut out in the shape of tombstones and painstakingly iced with all the actors’ names. No one was quite certain of—or comfortable with—what the fan was trying to say.