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TV
Guide - May 17th, 1986
Behind
Dynasty's breakdown and recovery
It took some dramatic moves to overcome the
show's problems with scripts, ratings, egos and The Colby's spin-off.
When Dynasty fans finished watching last
season's cliffhanger, they were left to speculate about who was shot and
who was not in the Moldavia massacre. When they tuned in this
season, they got answers. What they didn't get was Joan
Collins. That's because the drama off-screen at Dynasty had
begun to grow more interesting - with more intrigue - than the drama
on-screen.
Collins, it turned out, was in a salary
dispute with co-executive producer Aaron Spelling and had not shown up
for work, forcing last-minute rewrites to account for the absence of her
character, Alexis. George Hamilton, meanwhile, was having an
identity crisis. On of Hollywood's most elegant leading men, Hamilton
had been hired to give the glittering series even more glamour.
Unfortunately, no one knew how he should portray his character, Joel
Abrigore. Each week, Hamilton asked the producers, "Should I
play [Joel] stylish like Cary Grant or demonic like Tony Perkins in
'Psycho'?" NO one knew, so he played it both ways.
Linda Evans was having problems, too.
Her character, Krystle, is the most beloved on the show. This
season, though, Evans was given an additional role, that of a wicked
double, Rita, who became Krystle's impostor. Evans loved the
chance to play two characters - one good, one evil. But the
audience sent letters of protest. "They didn't mind the
fake Krystle," says supervising producer Eleen Pollock, "But
every time they got to the real Krystle [imprisoned] in the attic, all
she could do was cry, plead and act depressed. There was just too
much depression to hold still for."
Dynasty's ratings dropped from the top of
the charts to No. 15 by December, while its expensive new spin-off, The
Colbys, ranked in 50th pace its first week in its regular time slot.
Brandon Stoddard, the newly installed president of ABC Entertainment,
acknowledged that Dynasty was in trouble. A few days later,
Stoddard's CBS counterpart, P. Donald Grant, declared the trouble so big
as to signal the end of a genre: the era of the prime time super-soap,
Grant declared, was over.
What had happened to TV's hottest show?
The answer lies in the soap opera behind the soap opera. It is a
story of mistakes, delusions and battles for power. It is also the
story of three dominant characteristics of TV in Hollywood: panic,
excess and the art of self-preservation.
For years Dynasty was not just a TV
series, it was a way of life. The Carrington clan had reached out
to America with life style that mirrored the glamour of the Reagan era.
Audiences not only watched Dynasty, they dressed like their favorite
characters. As customers of an amazing merchandising machine, they
wore Krystle perfume ad Blake cologne. There were Dynasty dolls,
Dynasty baby clothes.
But then, at the start of this season,
Joan Collins, the vixen everyone loved to hate, wasn't there. What
was there was a storyline about a kingdom called Moldavia. Suddenly a series that had been fun to watch seemed heavy, bloated,
ridiculous, literally a prisoner in a foreign land. The audience,
judging by the mail, wasn't buying it.
"I'm responsible for Moldavia,"
says Camille Marchette, a Dynasty producer who quit the show to write
novels in London. "I sat down one day and said, 'I'm only
going to be on the show a year and I'm going to end it with a shoot-out
in Moldavia.' Then, it was up to them to figure out how to get out
of it."
That wasn't easy. "We had
wonderful ideas: Joan Collins was going to become the Queen of
Moldavia," says former producer Diana Gould. "But what
looked good on paper did not have a chance to be played out . . . We
were to shoot on Wednesday. Collins called on Monday to shay
she wasn't going to show up." Adds writer Scott Hammer:
"Everything that was to happen to Alexis in the first episode had
to happen to Krystle. Drystle ended up in a dungeon instead of
Alexis. The key motivation for Collins' character for many
of the episodes that were to follow was destroyed. I knew we were
in trouble when I saw the first episode."
John James, who had moved to The Colby's,
continued with relief: "I got off Dynasty just in time."
Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Jeff's aunt, Constance, on The Colbys,
openly criticized Dynasty: Everyone knows what people want to see is
Alexis manipulating and then everyone else fighting back. Why
don't they get back to that?" Even Charlton Heston (Jason Colby),
who calls himself "the soul of discretion," voiced
his complaint. "What they need is someone to make a good
trim," he said, moving his hands in a shopping motion as if her
were cutting hedges.
Not that The Colbys was - to be gentle -
a success itself. The decision to split Dynasty in two had been a
gamble made by a network whose fortunes were declining. If Dynasty
was the bright jewel in ABC's fading crown, Dynasty II: The Colbys
(Original title) would be the second jewel, wouldn't it? But the
spinoff was lackluster and, in its launching, almost destroyed the
original. Dynasty not only had its own plot lines to juggle, it
had to introduce the characters and conflicts of its offspring (on an
expanded two hour episode that aired a week before The Colbys debut).
That added burden only weakened the scripts, but the challenge of
launching the new show had distracted Dynasty's producers from the
problems facing their own.
Behind the scenes, the drama was now at
white heat. The writers wailed, "How the hell are we going to
get that woman out of the attic?" The cast, according to
Diahann Carroll, was "shaking." Joan Collins, who had
settled her differences with producer Spellings, summoned the cast of
Dynasty to a meeting one day. She was angry over the decline of
the show that had made her a superstar. She blamed the
spinoff. She said it was a mistake for any of Dynasty's stars to
appear on The Colby's and vowed never to do so herself.
Collins was not the only one pointing
fingers. In one of the peak moments of panic, ABC officials
reportedly asked Esther Shapiro, co-creator of Dynasty and The Colbys,
to go on the air with a public apology for inflicting on America the
Moldavia plot and the two Krystles. Shapiro refused. She in
turn blamed ABC's barren prime-time schedule, with its weak lead-ins on
Wednesday and Thrusday nights, for many of her two shows' troubles.
The problems with both series continued.
Jobs were on the line. Careers were threatened. "People
so overacted," says one Dynasty staffer, "They treaded it like
it was the fall of Saigon."
For a while, it was tough to decide where
the problems were greater: on Dynasty or on its spinoff. The
launching of The Colbys had been a massive undertaking, with massive ego
problems. Set designer Toby Considine recalls the first day of
filming: "Five minutes before we were ready to shoot, one of
the bosses walked onto the set and said, 'I hate it - throw it all out.'
We had run everything by her. The set had been dressed since 7 AM.
It was all a power play. I spent one million dollars in a
week, they approved it and then threw it all out."
Barbara Stanwyk, meanwhile, was
castigation writers, actors and producers to ensure what she felt was
the proper level of professionalism. She called emergency meetings
with Esther Shapiro, John James, Charlton Heston, producer Chris Morgan
and the writers. One day, at the height of what Stanwyck
calls her "professionalism," she publicly berated actress
Tracy Scoggins (Monica Colby) for returning 15 minutes late from makeup.
"Everyone is exasperated with
Stanwyck," said one writer. "It's the first time in my
life I don't have to be the bad guy," said Heston of his
co-star. But his own demands on the producers, while less
public, were just as difficult to fulfill. Heston began to rewrite
a good part of his character's dialogue. He had demanded this kind
of creative input in his contract. "Do the producers always
pay attention?" he was asked. "If they don't, it's an
arm wrestle," said Heston.
By the end of its first month on the air,
The Colbys had climbed only to 39th in the ratings. In mid-December, with everyone blaming everyone else, the decision was made
to let the spinoff ride as best it could for a while and concentrate on
ridding Dynasty of Moldavia. After the results of an ABC research
report on Dynasty came back, "They got hysterical," says Diana
Gould.
Three episodes were immediately re-shot,
with new scenes emphasizing storylines of conflict between Alexis and
Blake. Scripts were trashed, ideas pulled apart, costly rewrites
ordered. Dynasty was being dismantled and reshaped to fit the old
style and concept. Producers and writers worked night and day and
weekends. "We took Christmas day off," says Eileen Polluck,
"but then, about 11 A.M., one of us had an idea, so I got on the
phone and called Esther. Then [their producer-husbands, Richard
Shapiro, and Robert Pollock] got on, and there we were, the four of us,
on the phone for an hour on Christmas Day, discussing Dynasty."
And now came the apology, but not on TV.
The apology came through the press, in a publicity blitz. It began
two days before New Year's. For five days, stories were leaked to
the press. First came word that the original storylines, which the
producers conceded their viewers disliked, were ending: then that new
ones were beginning and new characters being added. Finally, the
press was urged to interview Christopher Cazenove (Who signed on as
Blake's ne'er-do-well brother, Ben) and Kate O'Mara (Who turned up as
Alexis' long lost sister, Caress.)
The result of all these changes?
Well, the week that Krystle finally emerged from the attic (Jan. 29),
Dynasty rose to fourth in the ratings, its best showing since September.
The following week, it was back in 15th. Then on March 5. Moldavia
was gone and the show finished seventh that week and sixth the
next. "Tempers that were short suddenly got
longer," says Diana Gould.
Now they could concentrate on The
Colbys.
What Heston and Stanwyck wanted were tighter scripts, and they got them.
Some storylines were reshuffled. The wedding of Fallon and Jeff was
posponed to March 20, building suspense and giving the series its
highest ratings of the season. Since late February, The Colbys has
run mostly second in its time slot, but ABC executives are said to
regard it as one of their stronger new shows of the season. To
further strengthen it next season, insiders say four new characters will
be added, including a JFK-type senator, a Russian ballet defector and a
new girl friend for Miles Colby. The series may be missing Barbara
Stanwyck, however, who, according to a friend, feels her character isn't
important enough to warrant her return. At last report, Aaron
Spelling was trying to persuade her to come back for at least six
episodes.
And now, in retrospect, what had it felt
like in the midst of the problems?
"What problems?" said Esther
Shapiro. "We fixed them," What, me, worry?
"I was never really worried,"
says Aaron Spelling. "Well, let's just say that we were never at
the Wailing Wall."
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