The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Foreword

  OUT OF ANGÉLIQUE’S SHADOW

  DARK SHADOWS AND ME

  A WORD FROM ME

  THE DARK SHADOWS HISTORY

  THE JOURNEY BEGINS

  PICTURE GALLERY

  THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

  The cousin from England: The Arrival of Barnabas Collins

  When Every Day Was Opening Night: The Technical &Creative Conjuring of Shadows

  That Year of Insanity: 1968

  A Werewolf with a PhD, A Vampire in the Whitehouse& A Count Without His ...

  Rain, Snow, and a Drafty, Old House: The Making of The Dark Shadows Movies

  The Last Days at Collinwood

  EPISODE GUIDE

  UPDATE

  DARDK SHADOWS COLLECTIBLES

  IN MEMORIAM

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  We wish to thank a great number of individuals and concerns indispensable to the writing of this book. Among them are: Dan Curtis, Dark Shadows Festival, Ruth Kennedy, Nancy Kersey, Mary O’Leary, MGM/UA, MPI Home Video, Larry and Ben Clark, Dan Resch, Clunes Associates.

  Jo Ann Christy, Janet Meehan, Caren Parnes, Dale Clark, Lil Robin, Randy Besch, Marie Bidlack, Smae Davis, Tim Ferrante, Gwen Fields, Robert Finocchio, Jean Graham, Linda Gray, Guy Haines, Matthew Hall, Joan Jordan, Liz Kaul, Beth Klapper, Debbie Kreuter, Pat Lammerts, Gloria Lillibridge, Ben Martin, Alan Mat-lick, Jay Nass, Kristi Nelson, Mary Overstreet, Mary Phipps, Dan and Marilyn Ross, Jeff Thompson, James Van Hise, Dan Whitley, Scott Young, Mrs. Jay Newbert and the late Ken Newbert.

  And also, a great deal of gratitude to the entire cast and crew of Dark Shadows, with special thanks to Jonathan Frid, Joan Bennett, Lara Parker, Sam Hall, Nick Besink, Robert Cobert, Robert Costello, Terry Crawford, Roger Davis, George DiCenzo, Louis Edmonds, Timothy Gordon, John Karlen, Jerry Lacy, J.J. Lupatkin, Ken McEwen, Mary McKinley-Haas, Diana Millay, Ramse Mostoller, Chris Pennock, Lisa Richards, Harriet Rohr, Ross Skipper, Sharon Smyth, Ron Sproat, Jack Sullivan, Edith Tilles, Sy Tomashoff, Marie Wallace, Donna Wandrey, Violet Welles.

  A unique television series will remain in its viewers’ memories for years after its original broadcast. Dark Shadows is no exception. While fan clubs have been around as long as there have been film stars, today’s fandoms are far more sophisticated. Fans express their interest creatively with clubs, publications, and conventions. Dark Shadows fandom should be given a good share of the credit for keeping interest in Dark Shadows alive for nearly a quarter of a century. Thanks to people like Maria Barbosa (founder of the Dark Shadows Festival and the Dark Shadows current events newsletter, Shadowgram), Jim Pierson (Chairman of the Dark Shadows Festival), Kathleen Resch (Editor of The World of Dark Shadows fan magazine), and Marcy Robin (Editor of Shadowgram), Dark Shadows lives on.

  To

  DAN CURTIS

  And in loving memory of

  JOAN BENNETT

  1910-1990

  And to all the friends and fans of Dark Shadows.

  AN INTRODUCTION

  By Kathryn Leigh Scott

  “I don’t know why I’m doin’ it, Katy...I’m doin’ it.”

  “Well, I’m doing another book, Dan”

  “...cheez.”

  He grinned and shook his head.

  “It had been nearly 25 years since I first met Dan Curtis on a cold, blustery day in New York to audition for the role of Maggie Evans. Now we were sitting in his office at MGM Studios in Culver City, California and, once again, Dan was casting Dark Shadows. He was too busy for lunch. He had a pilot and a six-episode committment from NBC for the new series—and he had to find his Barnabas. That day.”

  Clearly I need not apply for my old job as the hash-slinging waitress—nor the role of Josette, the dewy, doomed bride of the vampire. The new Dark Shadows would sport an entirely new cast—and that was fine with me. Dan, however, rattled off the names of a number of the original cast members (including mine) that he eventually wanted to bring back in the new series. That, too, was fine with me.

  I’d landed the role of Maggie Evans shortly after graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the ABC-TV soap opera became my first on-camera job. It was one thing to have an enormous audience of daytime viewers watch me learn my craft and lose my baby fat back then, but it was appalling to realize I’d got a job on the one soap that went into perpetual rerun! Talk about mixed feelings... talk about rerun Hell. Forever and ever—no matter whatever else I did in my career—I would be the skinny ingenue with the chubby cheeks and the indecently short miniskirts wandering through endless cobwebby secret passages wailing, “Barnabas, where are you?”

  Not all of the original cast members felt as I did, but there were other young actors with fledgling careers who were dismayed that despite their success in other roles, they would always be associated with the show everyone “used to run home from school to watch.” Indeed, many of the 1,225 original episodes we had taped from June 1966 through April 1971 had been playing in endless syndication cycles on PBS and independent stations throughout the country since we’d gone off the air in April 1971. The two MGM feature films based on Dark Shadows were regularly seen on late-night television. A library of Dark Shadows episodes were available on home videocassette, and plans to air the entire series nationwide on a new cable network had been announced. Dark Shadows had become an institution.

  Just as one eventually forgives one’s parents for everything—including a happy childhood—I began to make my peace with Dark Shadows. It was, after all, the most fun I’ve ever had as an actress. Imagine playing everything from slice-of-life melodrama to wig-and-whaleboned restoration comedy in a daily half-hour program. While other soap actors trod through mundane, molasses-thick plots, we soared into fanciful tales involving a vampire, a witch and a werewolf—and got to play an assortment of roles in stories based on classics from Henry James to Nathanial Hawthorne. At about the same time that I was going through my period of reckoning, I heard David Selby singing Quentin’s Theme on Joan Rivers’ show. Another evening, I saw John Karlen telling Joan about Willie. Kate Jackson even mentioned Dark Shadows in a TV Guide interview. I don’t know what their personal feelings may have been throughout the intervening years, but Dark Shadows was being acknowledged by them in much the same manner that I was now talking about the show. Affectionately, like summer camp. Fondly, like a first lover. And graciously, because it was a long time ago.

  When I wrote a book about those feelings, I wrote in pencil on yellow legal pads and rarely used an eraser. That book, My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows, introduced me to a second career as a publisher and enabled me to establish Pomegranate Press, Ltd. It provided the family of friends and fans of Dark Shadows with a much-deserved 20th anniversary souvenir. Its success and the publicity it generated contributed to the renewed popularity of the show and surely helped awaken the interest in producing a new Dark Shadows series. Shortly before last Christmas, Ruth Kennedy, Dan’s longstanding personal assistant, arrived at my house to pick up a case of My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows for the production staff of the new series to use for research. Few things in my life have given me as much pleasure as writing up that invoice.

  Writing the book is simply one of the best things I ever did with my time. It resolved my own ambiguous feelings about the show and released me from any time-warp sentiment. I also realized how many of the actors from the original company remain my friends 20-odd years la
ter—and that we rarely talk about the show, unless we’ve been specifically gathered together to do so at one of the Dark Shadows Festivals. How refreshing it is that the fans, too, are more interested in the present, what we’re doing with our lives and careers today.

  Even in Dan’s office—with Dan facing the mighty task of finding a new Barnabas—Dark Shadows is not the sole subject of our conversation. In fact, I’d hoped to lure him out to lunch so I could talk to him about evil and suggest to him that such a discussion would be good subject matter for the book. It had occurred to me that the man who brought us not only Dark Shadows, but such fine television films as Turn of the Screw, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, When Every Day Was the Fourth of July, and the two magnificent miniseries, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, might have some interesting things to say about the existence of evil. That chat will have to wait for another day.

  I certainly didn’t plan to do another book about the series. I knew when I published My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows that I had written all I would ever have to say about the show. It was finished, I was glad and I put it behind me. But then I came across the text Melody, Marcy and Kathy—longtime fans of Dark Shadows—had written and I was very impressed with it. I had often heard Lara and Jonathan speak eloquently at the Dark Shadows Festivals about their experiences on the show and I encouraged them to write pieces. I discovered photographs that hadn’t been available when I did the first book. Then, Dan hired the father/son team, Sam and Matthew Hall, to work on the new Dark Shadows series. When Sam, who had written many of the original episodes, and Matthew, a youngster who had visited his parents at the studio, arrived in town to write the pilot, I jumped at the chance to bring the story full-circle for our 25th anniversary. Jim Pierson, who has probably done more than anyone else to keep the Dark Shadows flame burning, offered to help me pull it all together.

  The Dark Shadows Companion goes to press as Dan begins directing the new series. The NBC nighttime show will have a life of its own and be popular—or not—on its own terms while the original ABC daytime series continues in reruns. However, there’s certainly a receptive audience for the new show. In the world of Dark Shadows we’re used to re-incarnation—and embrace it. I wish them well. And I hope more than anything that the new company of actors has as much fun together as we’re still having.

  A FOREWORD

  By Jonathan Frid

  “It has been difficult for me as an actor to understand or attempt to

  explain the peculiar attachment of so many people to Dark Shadows.

  I was simply too close to it—too busy and too self-critical to comment

  on its overall attraction. During my four years on the show I did,

  however, come to realize a curious but simple guideline for acting, a

  notion purely my own—and that is to say the lines intelligibly and

  with as much basic common sense as possible and the viewers will do

  the rest. They will embellish it with ‘such stuff dreams are made on.”’

  The story of Dark Shadows began as a nostalgic Gothic romance that gained momentum by delving into the occult. Was it any wonder then that the tales about the show itself became the stuff of legend? Each viewer, or fan, if you will, brought to this phenomenon his or her own thoughts, feelings and imagination thus blending myth and reality into whatever he or she wanted to believe.

  I recall an incident during a read-through of a script one afternoon in the rehearsal hall prior to the next day’s taping. We were all stumped by a discrepancy in the script’s plot as it related to a particular event that had been aired many months before. Something was out of line but none of us around the table could remember just what. We called the writers and they couldn’t come up with a solution. We called the production office; still no help. At last someone had the bright idea to go down to the sidewalk outside the studio where fans gathered every day to watch our comings and goings. At once they had the answer. For me, there was acting! A total commitment to the existence of Collinsport, Maine. As a professional actor, I was too busy in the actuality, trying not to trip over cables or my lines, to become involved in the viewers’ fantasy of the world in which we moved.

  My first year in front of ABC-TV’s cameras was a living hell. I have always been a “slow-study,” so getting those long speeches down day after day was a strain. The glazed look of mystery and tortured solitude that became, I guess, my trademark was born of the mere wonderment of what comes next.

  And the cameras—how they intimidated me! I saw them as symbols of a corporate giant where millions of dollars were at stake downtown on Wall Street with every roll of the eyes we made uptown in the studio.

  Gradually these fears subsided. My biggest discovery, was to realize that the writers had actually created for me a character of remarkable range (although they were at times predisposed to think that vampires could utter with ease sentences of sixty words or more). Nevertheless they gave me scenes to play that over the years ran the entire gamut of emotions, resulting in a very real character that was unpredictably dangerous, loving, cruel, vulnerable, stupid, wise, et al.

  The media, of course, saw Barnabas as a vampire with fangs pure and simple. This view was aided and abetted by ABC-TV’s very own publicity department.

  What made all this so very funny to me, however, was the media people’s unwitting confession of their own misrepresentation of the show in their oft-repeated query to me: “Aren’t you afraid of being typed in this role?”

  . With the Dark Shadows experience, as with any experiences in life, there were more valleys than peaks. But when those peaks were made manifest, there were moments of which anyone connected with the show could be proud. Yes, there were the botched lines, the jiggling ghosts, and bats and the less-than-credible feats of strength. Even so, the fans forgave us our sins; in fact, they relished them and, indeed, they cherish them to this day as an integral part of the phenomenon that was and is Dark Shadows.

  If an answer is to be found to explain the longevity of this Gothic tale with its strange creatures, such as Barnabas, it lies with the loyal fans. For it is they who were there in the beginning and continue to be today. That is the legend.

  OUT OF ANGÉLIQUE’S SHADOW

  By Lara Parker

  “We respond to these myth-imbued tales with our hearts, and we are caught up in the whirlwind of the life force. We experience the eternal conflicts of desire and repulsion, jealousy and longing, love and death. We feel a connection with all humanity throughout time, and we are enriched by that connection.”

  During the winter of 1967, I was living with my artist husband and two small children on a farm outside of Whitewater, Wisconsin. When the blizzards came, the farmhouse sailed in a white sea of frozen furrows and shriveled stalks of corn. On the morning after a snow-fall, we would hitch a quarter-horse named Applehead to an old one-horse sleigh, and with all of us bundled under a blanket and singing Jingle Bells at the top of our lungs, we would drive the pony down the road and bump, bump, bump over the corn rows.

  Every evening I trudged through snow drifts piled as high as the eaves, alongside barren fields etched with barbed wire, out to the barn to feed thirteen cows and four horses waiting patiently in the gloom. Some nights it was 10-degrees below zero, and the wind howled around the silo setting the windmill rattling.

  Although a fire burned in my heart, any possibility of my pursuing the acting career I had planned seemed as remote as that farmhouse out on Route Five. How could I have dreamed that less than a year later, I would be at a television studio in New York City, on the set of an elegant mansion, sitting on a velvet couch, and auditioning for a daytime soap opera called Dark Shadows?

  In the intervening summer, I had snagged a job with a stock theatre in Connecticut, and when the five plays I had the lead in were finished, I decided, on a whim, to go to New York. I must have thought, “I’ll never be this close to Broadway again!” Needless to say, I was overwhelmed by th
e possibilities of the moment, and paralyzed with fear.

  The audition was a love scene with Barnabas in which he told Angélique rather harshly that even though he had “dallied” with her in Martinique, he was nevertheless in love with, and betrothed to, her mistress, Josette. The scene required Angélique to plead with Barnabas not to abandon her, to pledge her undying love, and to embrace him with heartrending passion. Luckily, I was able to audition with Jonathan Frid, and he sensed that I was tense and inexperienced. He tried to put me at ease and even whispered a few words of encouragement before the cameras went on. He said, “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but I hope you get it.”

  I had been told that Angélique was a witch, and I felt I had to do something demonic, but there was no mention of witchcraft in the scene. Then, at the very end of the audition, I had an inspiration. I turned to the camera and looked deeply into the lens. I knew Angélique was a woman scorned. I smiled a wicked little smile, and thought to myself, “Hell hath no fury greater than mine!”

  I was very lucky. The camera man zoomed into my eyes, and I got the part.