Part
Three:
After
leaving Dark Shadows,Nancy Barrett worked on other soap operas,
including The Doctors and One Life to Live, but she
said the relationship between the cast members of Dark Shadows
was unique in her experience. "I thought at the time it was very close," she said. "One of the reasons for that must have to do with how the show was produced as opposed to the way shows are produced today. The way it was done, we literally spent the entire day together," Nancy said. "It wasn't that you rehearsed and did your scene and then you were gone. As I recall, they were limited to five actors per show. That means that you're with a very limited number of people for very long periods of time. And also the scenes probably tended to be longer than they are today."
Being constantly together made the
cast of Dark Shadows like a family, for better or worse.
"That sort of breeds a camaraderie or terrific enmity,"
Nancy said with a laugh. "The fact is, you're stuck with these
people. There's nothing you can do about it. It's not like you go
in and do your thing in an hour and just leave." In the 1970s, Joe Dante (later a successful
horror movie director) was a reviewer for Castle of Frankenstein
magazine. He wrote about his affection for Dark Shadows:
"The budget apparently doesn't allow for re-taping, so every
fluff, camera misdirection, visible crew-member and production error
is left in, endowing the show with some of the excitement and human
interest which made live TV so much fun back in the dear, dead Fifties.
Nothing arouses audience empathy more than the sight of a harried
actor groping for forgotten lines while trying to steal a discreet
glimpse of the cue card. Despite the occasional mistakes, or maybe
because of them, DS is highly enjoyable." Dante was right. These "spectacular
lapses" -- also known as "bloopers" -- are one element
that makes watching Dark Shadows so much fun. Props fell
apart, actors went up on their lines, Jonathan Frid had a habit
of reading his co-stars' lines from the teleprompter, and sometimes
a stagehand would even wander into a scene. But the show went on.
NEXT:
More Monsters
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When
I interviewed Louis Edmonds (pictured, left) in 1996, he described
what his typical day had been like during the taping of Dark
Shadows: "My pattern was so crazy. I would do Dark Shadows
all day, then rehearse the following day's show, leave the studio,
go do my bit at the gym -- the steam room, the pool, whatever --
then go upstairs [to the bar] and have three martinis, on probably
a very empty stomach. Then I would go to [my lover] Bryce's and
somehow get some kind of sustenance in me and then go to sleep.
This would be 8 o'clock at night. I'd sleep like death and then
because I hadn't learned my lines for the next day and because I
was a responsible actor, I'd wake up at three in the morning, and
it was just awful. I look at those shows now and I think, 'I didn't
do bad, considering that I lived the way I did.'"
Kate
Jackson (pictured left) described an on-set mishap to People
magazine in 1991: "I had to say this long speech explaining
why I was back from the dead," she said. "I was standing
in an 1800s dress, with candles all around, and the back of the
dress caught fire. I was already messing up the lines and all I
could think was, "Why is David Henesy dancing around back there?'
He kept me from having to scream, 'Aaaaaaah! My dress is on fire!'"
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