It is the Friday before Labor Day, and I am crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to get from Manhattan to the Brooklyn Marriott, site of what is billed as the very last Dark Shadows Festival. As I explained last time, Dark Shadows was one of the groundbreaking fantasy shows of the 1960s; those of you who read Dark Horse’s Buffy and Angel comics should realize that it was Dark Shadows that first ventured into the territory they have now settled. The Dark Shadows Festivals have gone on for twenty years, on both the East and West Coasts. But now, it seems, the Festival is drawing to an end, and there is no adequate explanation why. Will the Dark Shadows Festival go the way of the Marvel booth at the San Diego Con – into oblivion (and for similar reasons)?
In contrast with my San Diego reports, I will spotlight only one event for each of the three days of this year’s Festival. Those of you who have not yet read my previous column, take heed. Last time I outlined the history of the series and described a number of its most important characters. I can’t take the time or space here to reestablish all of this, so, go back and read that column first, and then rejoin us here.
FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE FEST
Some of you may be asking, what does this have to do with comics? Well, as I alluded to above, Dark Shadows has influenced other comics series, directly or indirectly. There were also comic books and a comic strip based on the original Dark Shadows; Innovation did a comic book series based on the 1991 NBC revival of Dark Shadows, even employing Comic Buyer’s Guide editor Maggie Thompson as one of the writers.
Moreover, there is an ongoing comic book series right now that is directly inspired by Dark Shadows, or, more specifically, by one man’s involvement with the show. For the last several years, Christopher Pennock, a member of the original cast, has been writing and drawing comics about his life during the years he was performing on the show.
There’s usually been a new book every year since 1998, and Pennock even performs dramatic readings of his comics at the Festivals.
This makes them sound very serious and somber. And they are anything but.
One of the other Dark Shadows actors, Roger Davis, introduced Pennock on Friday night by comparing him to American Splendor‘s Harvey Pekar. That’s apt, and both Pekar and Pennock are doing autobiographical material in an underground comics style. But Pekar is very much the realist, depicting the mundane events of life in a far from glamorous milieu. We see it all from Pekar’s point of view, and yet Pekar is open enough about his own character flaws to ensure the reader’s sense that Pekar is being honest with him. If, in telling his stories, Pekar is altering what really happened for his own artistic reasons, he does it so well that the reader probably will not notice. Pekar’s American Splendor conveys the sense that what Pekar tells and shows us is the undisguised truth, for good or for ill, for the reader to judge.
Pennock’s autobiographical comics take the opposite approach. They are phantasmagorias, founded in the actual events of his life, but using them as springboards for wild, funny and evocative flights of fantasy.
The first of the comics was titled Fear and Loathing in Dark Shadows, in an homage to Hunter Thompson’s LSD-inspired book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Ralph Steadman’s surreal illustrations for it. Pennock’s subsequent comics all have titles that are variants on the Fear and Loathing theme: the latest is Fear of Losing Dark Shadows, in which he finds himself temporarily written out of the show.
Steadman might be one of Pennock’s inspirations, but one should not expect the drawing to be on a comparable level. Again, Davis’s comparison to Pekar was apt. Pekar can draw only stick figures in basic layouts for his stories; then he hires Robert Crumb and other artists to do the real drawing from him. Pennock is better at drawing than Pekar, but his art (and lettering) is still really crude. Still, it gets the job of storytelling done, and sometimes can even startle the reader: some of his likenesses of other cast members are surprisingly good.
And really, the fact that no one is going to hire Pennock to draw the X-Men is irrelevant. The fact that Pennock performs his comics at the Festivals, speaking the dialogue aloud to an audience that does not see the pictures, shows that the artwork is secondary. In person, Pennock performs the comics as a nonstop rush of excitement, as if he is being swept along, unstoppably, by his own emotions amid the insane twists and turns of life. The artwork conveys a similar sensation: that the author was writing and drawing at a fevered pitch, propelled by the force of re-experiencing the emotions of that time, moving too fast to dwell on refinements of line. Yet, in contrast, there are also still, somber images like his brooding self-portrait on the cover of Fear of Losing, the calm before the storm that bursts on page one.
Pekar and Pennock each demonstrate just how accessible the comics medium is. You don’t need to buy expensive video equipment, or to submit manuscripts to editors at major publishing companies. All you need is a story, an interesting point of view, and a pencil and paper. In Pennock’s case, he does not even need a professional artist’s help. He draws it himself, and it works for his purposes. Comics are Everyman’s medium.
Except for one book recounting his misadventures in a New York City marathon, Pennock’s comics all deal with the period of his life when he was acting on Dark Shadows. He recognizes that the core audience for his books is composed of people who know him from the series, which has been rerunning for three decades.
But you don’t have to know Dark Shadows to appreciate these books. Aficionados of the show will find added pleasures in the walk-on cameos of actors from the show and references to the characters that Pennock played. But all the reader really has to know about Dark Shadows is that it was an immensely popular hit when it was first telecast, and thus provides a catalyst for the wild highs and lows of Pennock’s youth. Through being cast in Dark Shadows, Pennock quickly went from the obscure, impoverished life of the struggling young New York actor to a certain level of nationwide fame. In actuality Hollywood took little if any notice of Dark Shadows or its actors at the time: the days when a horror show like Buffy could make movie stars out of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan and Eliza Dushku are over a quarter century in the future. But Pennock got a fan following, an income enabling him to honeymoon in spectacular locales, and entree into such famous settings as the United Nations, and (if we can believe this) Andy Warhol’s Factory, and even the White House. It must have been a heady experience to have all this happen within less than a year, and, it appears, Pennock’s good fortune led him to the same mistake I’ve now observed time and again in my own creative community: we get to think it will last forever, unaware at how ephemeral roles in a creative industry can be. In fact, when Pennock was hired on Dark Shadows, the show had recently hit its summit of popularity, but less than a year and a half later it would be off the air. Even as Pennock glories in his newfound fame and success, he is standing on the precipice, as he discovered.
Fear of Losing Dark Shadows starts out by evoking the September 11 attacks and then daringly launches into a black comedy variation on a related theme. In the story’s framing sequence, CNN covers what seems at first that typical California news story, the high-speed chase by the police of a malefactor’s car along the highways. But this chase is not typical: the driver of the car being pursued is a one-man terrorist, attacking symbols of the power of the entertainment industry. No, it remains a comedy, and no one gets hurt, but the terrorist does provoke the rage of the movie industry by making an obscene gesture at the Hollywood sign.
To the surprise of none of his regular readers, the terrorist turns out to be Pennock himself, identified by CNN as a “failure,” and soon President George W. Bush addresses the nation to declare war against “failures,” “unemployed actors,” and Pennock in particular.
Now what more dramatic start to a comic could one want than this?
The hyperbole of it all is funny, but at the same time it aptly captures the way in which one’s entire world seems to be simultaneously turning against him and falling apart in bad times. Not only that, but even though Pennock is dealing in comedic exaggerations, he’s also making the point that the terrorist mindset, the nihilistic attempt to lash out at imagined enemies out of a sense of failure and frustration, is not as alien to our psychology as we might like to think.
From the framing sequence Pennock shifts into the main body of the book, an extended flashback to 1970, beginning on the day of his wedding.
Looking back ironically from the perspective of middle age, Pennock depicts himself consumed by his own egotism, so dazzled by his own minor claim to fame as a Dark Shadows cast member that he imperiously orders bystanders out of his way (“I am Christopher Pennock and you’re not!”).
And this is typical of the young Pennock that the comic depicts: he is swept away by the emotions of the moment, whatever they may be. Arriving at his wedding (late) at the United Nations chapel, he is so dazzled by love (and the hearts flying all around him) that he ignores all the warning sign that the marriage is doomed. He even looks blissfully happy as he recites an amazing encomium to the dark side of love, oblivious to the desperation in his own words.
It is 1970, and Fear of Losing is also a reminder of various aspects of 1960s young Boomer culture: not only does Andy Warhol show up (Did he really?), and not only does the young Pennock fancy himself a political subversive (albeit a Republican one), but drugs are omnipresent. Pennock even portrays himself on acid at his own wedding. The drugs seem to magnify the Pennock character’s willingness to be carried away by his own emotions. The drug use is also a key to the comic’s style: the leaps into fantasy have a hallucinogenic quality.
Once on their honeymoon in the Caribbean, the young Pennock is lost in self-absorption, having great fun while ignoring his new wife’s growing unhappiness and distance from him. “High on mescaline,” Pennock climbs a volcano that suddenly erupts; his wife understandably panics, but Pennock thinks the imminent danger is cool. He is oblivious to another approaching disaster, too. Pennock and the Mrs. return to New York, where he is happily reunited with his buddies, the cockroaches infesting his apartment (who talk, and in Spanish). Reaching the end of her patience, Pennock’s wife tells him directly that she may leave him; merrily on his way to the Dark Shadows studio, Pennock seems not to register a thing she has said.
And then the rug gets pulled out from under him. Blind to his failing marriage, he is also blind to his own vulnerability in his career. Now that Pennock thinks he is on top of the world, he gets called into the boss’s office, and told, guess what, while you were on your honeymoon we wrote you out of the show (as, indeed, he was at this point).
Since the flashback’s start, Pennock has done a running gag, inexplicable up till now, about his fear that his wife will run off with a midget. Fired without warning, Pennock. “I have nothing. All I have is my endless anxiety attack.” Pennock draws his midget self to look gnomish, even reptilian. Originally on Dark Shadows Pennock played a Leviathan, a monster that could take on human form. I wonder if he is playing with that idea here: newly failed in career and in marriage, he has transformed from humanity not into a fearsome monster but into a helpless, infant-sized talking animal.
The comic goes on from here, as Pennock’s life continues to take abrupt swings up and down, his emotions ride a manic depressive roller coaster, and he metamorphoses back and forth between successful human and pathetic beast-child.
Much of the fun in reading Pennock’s comics is in trying to separate reality from fantasy. Many things are obviously outright fictions, like Pennock’s terrorist spree at the beginning of Fear of Losing, not to mention his abduction by aliens at the end of his New York Marathon book. Some things are clearly true. The inside front cover of Fear of Losing reproduces part of a newspaper report on Pennock’s actual first wedding, complete with photographs.
But then there is a very wide gray area in between. When in the comic story, Pennock shows us Shadows cast members attending the wedding and predicting the marriage’s quick demise, did they actually say such things? If they didn’t, were they thinking them? Did they tell Pennock later that they thought the marriage was doomed? Or is Pennock just assuming this is what they thought? If so, was he right, or is he just venting (and mocking) his own youthful paranoia about what his co-workers thought?
It seems credible that Pennock was invited along with the show’s star, Jonathan Frid, to appear at the 1970 White House Halloween party. But is it true? If it happened, did Pennock actually meet Richard Nixon, and did Nixon actually confuse him with Christopher Plummer? It seems pretty damn unlikely that Pennock actually slipped LSD into Nixon’s punch. Then again, it seems a little more possible that he had earlier pulled the same stunt at his wedding on his boss, Dan Curtis.
Where the truth stops and the fantasy takes over really does not matter. Pennock makes the transitions seamless, and the entire narrative becomes a heightened version of reality, shaped by Pennock’s fears, anxieties and subversiveness, seen through the ironic perspective of his older, wiser, but still angst-ridden self.
Pennock’s comics present his life not as it really was but as it felt, a world fantastically distorted through the emotions that color his perception of it, and made funny and insightful through the perspective that comes with time. If you’re interested, you need not wait for the next Dark Shadows Festival, if there ever is another: go visit his website at www.christopherpennock.com. You’ll even see a recommendation on the website from underground comics giant Bill Griffith, so I’m in good company in liking these books.
CLASS REUNION
The high point of Saturdays at the Festivals is the annual Cast Reunion panel. Actors from the original series appear on panels throughout the Festival, singly or in small groups. But it is the big Cast Reunion panel that gathers all, or nearly all, of the attending actors onstage.
This year’s gathering comprised most of the cast members who regularly attend. There were David Selby, who played the reformed rogue Quentin Collins; Kathryn Leigh Scott, who was both the miniskirted modern ingenue Maggie Evans and Barnabas’s tragic fiancée in the 18th century, Josette; John Karlen, who, as Barnabas’s high-strung servant Willie and Quentin’s crazy brother Carl, brought comedy into the show’s somber world; and Roger Davis, who played a number of hot-tempered young men like 18th century lawyer Peter Bradford and Victorian artist Charles Delaware Tate. In addition, there were comics auteur Christopher Pennock, who portrayed Leviathan Jeb Hawkes, the Jekyll/Hyde duo of Dr. Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger, among others; Marie Wallace, who was Eve, the show’s version of the Frankenstein monster’s bride, and Quentin’s mad first wife Jenny; Donna Wandrey, who played two different versions of Roxanne Drew, one an ethereal ingenue and the other a vicious vampiress; James Storm, who was the sinister specter Gerard Stiles; Terry Crawford, the 19th century lady’s maid who was Quentin’s doomed lover; Diana Millay, who played the self-resurrecting “phoenix” Laura Collins; and Lisa Richards, who, as Sabrina Stuart, had unfortunate romances with a werewolf and the aforementioned Dr. Longworth.
A few other actors who were at the Festival were not at this particular panel. Lara Parker, who played the witch Angelique, Barnabas’s wife who cursed him to be a vampire and pursued him through the centuries, was absent, but she had already proved a delight on a panel the previous evening and would return on Sunday. Nancy Barrett, who played a wide range of roles, including the strong-willed Collins heiress Carolyn Stoddard and the charming Cockney music hall singer Pansy Faye, was likewise missing, but she is known to be shy about appearing onstage not as a performer but as herself.
I’ve always found the Cast Reunion panels interesting in demonstrating the ups and downs of life in a creative profession, and how one’s path through life may take unexpected turns. Some of the actors went on from Dark Shadows to fame and great success: Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels, David Selby on Falcon Crest, John Karlen winning an Emmy on Cagney and Lacey, Donna McKechnie becoming a legend in Broadway musicals. Others never achieved that level of celebrity, not even some of the most talented actors on the show. This is an object lesson in how it is luck as well as talent that brings about success. But even for the more fortunate, acting is a notoriously unstable profession, and most roles are designed for the young.
So, attending the Dark Shadows Festivals has become an ongoing lesson in midlife career transitions. Of the actors who attended this year, only a few still seem to be full time actors, while others keep their hands in from time to time. Most, though, have created successful careers for themselves in other fields: Kathryn Leigh Scott founded her own publishing company, Roger Davis heads large-scale construction projects and is producing movies, Marie Wallace is a professional photographer. Terry Crawford has devoted her life to organizations for aiding children around the world.
In past years I found the actors’ searches for new paths and goals in their lives intellectually interesting, but now I can emotionally relate to their stories, as well. The massive changes in the comics industry over the last decade have forced many of us comics professionals to seek out new career paths. So I find the successes of many Dark Shadows cast members in forging new careers in midlife inspiring; I hope I can follow their examples.
The Cast Reunion panels are studies in the passage of time in other respects, too. This year, Donna Wandrey started her part of the panel by looking out at the audience and commenting, “You guys haven’t aged in two years!” This was her joke on what the actors themselves hear at the Festivals. More seriously, she observed, ” I think we’ve held up pretty well,” and, in most cases, including her own, that is indeed true. That, too, is inspiring to the Boomers who have watched the show since childhood. At that time we were kids in school and they were adults in show business, but as the decades pass, one may realize that the younger cast members really weren’t that much older than we were.
If you want to see what one of these Cast Reunion panels is like, keep an eye out for MPI Home Video’s upcoming release of the Dark Shadows Reunion DVD later this year. This preserves on video a Dark Shadows panel held in Los Angeles in 2001 by the Museum of Television & Radio as part of its annual William S. Paley Festival. In effect, this was just like the Cast Reunion panel from the Dark Shadows Festivals, with the same format, with the actors responding mainly to questions from the audience. In this case, however, the actors who usually attend the Festivals were joined by some who rarely or never come (like Alexandra Moltke, who played Victoria Winters) and behind-the-scenes personnel, most notably the show’s creator, Dan Curtis himself. I’d already seen the seminar on video in the Museum’s library, and it was shown on a big screen at this year’s Festival. This also happens to be, as far as I know, the only one of the Museum’s seminars on shows of the past or present to be released commercially. Otherwise, one can only see them at the Museum’s libraries at its Manhattan and Beverly Hills venues.
In my coverage of the San Diego Con, I praised various speakers as showmen who knew how to keep their audiences entertained and interested. In the case of these Dark Shadows actors, this is what they did, or still do, for a living, so, of course, they perform well on these panels.
At the San Diego Con there are certain comics pros, notably Neil Gaiman, who have fan followings who seem to be fans not just of their work but of them personally. But for the most part, comics pros are treated as the people who write and draw the real stars, the fictional characters. So fans might disparage comics pros for doing their favorite characters badly.
At the Dark Shadows Festivals, or, for that matter, any conventions celebrating TV shows, the actors aren’t people who write or draw characters; the actors embody them. There is a fan club for Agent Dana Scully of The X-Files, the O.B.S.S.E., with a self-parodic sense of humor, whose members speak of her as “St. Scully”: actress Gillian Anderson, by extension, is her “Earthly Incarnation.” This is a joke, but it also makes a point.
It is a common reaction for an audience member to assume that an actor in real life is like the familiar character he or she plays onscreen. Of course, this is a fallacy: acting is about pretending to be someone the actor is not. Yet, in a longrunning television series, some actors will acknowledge that some of their own personality enters into their roles, either through the performances or through the fact that the writers are writing specifically for these particular actors. I suppose, too, that sometimes actors are cast for certain roles because the casting director perceives a link between the character and the actor’s own personality.
So, at the San Diego Con, it was a pleasure to see the ways that Eliza Dushku shared certain personality traits with her Buffy character, the fabulous Faith. No, Dushku didn’t come off as a psycho and she didn’t kill anyone, but she had Faith’s vivaciousness and humor.
In the early Festivals I attended, when I was seeing the Dark Shadows actors on panels for the first time, I also found myself looking for overlaps between the actors and their roles. For example, the late Louis Edmonds, who played the Collins family patriarchs in each generation, did not share his characters’ stuffiness, but it was a pleasure to discover that their aristocratic elegance and wry wit were also his own.
It was also no surprise to find out that John Karlen, who did so well with comedy on the show, and Roger Davis, who played strong emotions, from love to rage, with such energy and fervor, turn out to be such entertaining loose cannons on stage. (At one point this year Davis told the audience that, knowing him, they would be amused at this: the Los Angeles Times referred to him as “the mild-mannered actor Roger Davis.”) They’ll say or do practically anything, it seems, and the audience loves it.
Karlen’s finest moment in these reunions was during the Museum of Television & Radio seminar. Surveying his many highly attractive female co-stars on stage, Karlen announced to the audience, in a tone combining great pride and utter seriousness, that he had fathered seven children with these ladies. After Karlen talked about the show, the next in line to speak was Nancy Barrett, who started out by assuming a severe demeanor and declaring she was just shocked to learn about “Johnny Karlen’s other six children.”
So here it is Saturday afternoon at the 2003 Festival, and most of the actors have been off somewhere rehearsing for tomorrow’s big event. It is Roger Davis who comes out first and launches into one of his impromptu monologues to keep us all amused while we wait for the others to arrive. Especially funny here was Davis’s digression into how all of us viewers knew that there were actors who knew their lines on the show, and others who had trouble remembering them. He admitted to being among the latter, but then, with a certain degree of daring, named two of the other culprits, the absent Jonathan Frid and the late Grayson Hall, who played Barnabas’s confidant, Dr. Julia Hoffman. Then Davis improvised a scene between Barnabas and Julia, playing both roles himself, and in both personae casting not-so-surreptitious glances in the direction where the teleprompter would have been.
Soon most of the rest of the actors were ready, and Davis, who said he was “just the warmup for the gang,” introduced them one by one, to the audience’s fervid applause.
A Festival emcee took over and started with the perennial question, “What have you been up to since we last saw you?” Everybody was enviably busy and successful: James Storm had a rock band, Marie Wallace and Diana Millay were writing books, and so forth. It even turned out that, though Christopher Pennock pictured himself as a failure in his latest comic, his fortunes were on the upswing. In what he called “a good story of perseverance,” after working a long time to bring this about, Pennock would be playing the lead, George, in a new production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in Los Angeles. “I am not hanging up my theatrical jockstrap!” he proclaimed. “Not yet!!”
When all the actors get asked to answer an introductory question in turn, David Selby, it seems, likes to take the opportunity to address genuinely more important matters. At the Museum seminar he used his time to thank Dan Curtis for giving the cast members their first big breaks in television. On this occasion, Selby turned to a topic no one had yet directly addressed at the Festival: the destruction of the Festival’s previous New York venue at the World Trade Center. Selby asked for, and got, a moment of silence from the audience in memory of September 11.
After the pause, he reminded us “how blessed we are” to be here, and “smile at each other,” thoughts that may have come off as sentimental in other hands, but not his.
Selby then briefly mentioned a few recent projects including appearing in a movie with Ben Affleck, and observing that “J.Lo” was always there. Then he grew more serious once more, and spoke about the importance of the Festivals to the cast. Looking out at us, he said it “doesn’t have anything to do with you”; the actors, he said, come back each year “to see each other,” since this is their only opportunity to do so.
Selby said this in a not unfriendly way. He wasn’t putting down the fans; it was simply a statement of fact, as he saw it. It also provided another insight into the subject of the phases of creative people’s lives. Here they were, over thirty years since they worked together as a community, finding a means through the Festivals to stay in touch with their past and with one another. The television series that brought them together is long over, but the participants have found their own way of maintaining their connection with each other.
Next came Kathryn Leigh Scott, who spoke about her appearances in new commercials and her current Pomegranate Press projects, and the actors continued to reply in turn to the initial question.
Finally, it came to Roger Davis’s turn, since he was at the end of the line, and he spoke animatedly about his massive new building project in the Hollywood Hills (see www.viewnorth.com) and that he was producing one of Tom Cruise’s next movies. With amazement, he told us that now sixty to seventy people “work under me and listen to my nonsense.” He said he was surprised at having achieved this level of success at this time of his life.
Davis observed that everyone’s life, including his, had “ups and downs”. He has had successes in other businesses, he said, but sees his “roots” as being an actor. Davis went on that “no matter what we do,” it was still important to them “to have Dark Shadows” and “to have Dark Shadows last so long.”
Davis noted that “rumors abound” about this Festival, that “it’s the last one.” But, he told us, “You know it’s not.”
Then Kathryn Leigh Scott took the floor once again. “So this is the last one, huh?” she began. She mentioned that some of us may already know how she felt about that prospect from the comments she made on her website. The news that this would be the last Festival came as a surprise to her, she said. None of the actors, she revealed, had been consulted.
By now she was standing, microphone in hand, as if making a speech, and indeed, she was. I soon got the impression that perhaps she was speaking on behalf of the rest of the cast, that perhaps they had even selected her to be their spokeswoman on this subject, and she had planned to say what she did to the audience. A rebellion was in progress.
Scott asserted that the Festival “really is a celebration” of a television series “that we loved doing.” She reminded us that when Lara Parker asked the audience the previous evening how many of then were attending for the first time, “more than half” raised their hands. The implication was that the Festival, was still a vital institution, thanks to a continuing influx of new fans for the series.
“We would like to see this go on and on in some form,” Scott declared. “Jim Pierson,” she said, “is the one who makes this happen,” she went on, as Pierson, the Festival’s director, watched from the side of the stage. “We keep thinking Jim is sick and tired of us,” Scott said cheerily, as if joking. She turned towards Pierson, and said, “We’d like to hear him address this.”
Scott had said this, and much more, in her characteristically charming, pleasant, ingratiating way. She had not spoken a single harsh word. But, as she looked straight at Pierson, the audience clearly knew: she had put him squarely on the spot, in front of the entire Festival assemblage. The audience sounded enthusiastic, as if they were at a sporting event and their favorite player had just scored.
Pierson replied that there would indeed be more Dark Shadows events, since there was an audience for them: “The proof is before us. So fear not.” But he still had not specified what kind of events there would be.
“Let’s tell Jim what we want to have,” Scott told the audience. Then she asked Pierson if there was a way that the audience could get in touch with him to make their wishes known. Damn, I thought, she’s good at this. It’s like watching a master at work.
Pierson said they could send e-mail to one of the leading Shadows fans, who would forward it to him. The audience rumbled in protest: this wasn’t good enough.
Roger Davis piped up, merrily, “I’ve got Jim’s cell phone and home phone.”
And with that shift into humor, the discussion soon ended. Pierson said that people could send him e-mails through this indirect route, and Scott apparently felt that was as far as they could get at this time. Davis took the floor again and spoke of rumors that there might be a Dark Shadows-themed cruise one day. He suggested they go to the Arctic or Antarctic, and said it would be “amazing. . .to be stuck on a cruise with each other.” Well, that’s certainly one way to put it. And I noticed that David Selby, who had been looking uncomfortable on the panel, now was leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his head. It was as if now that Kathryn Leigh Scott had scored her touchdown, they could all relax.
The panel was turned over to questions from the audience. Now, sometimes, as on a cast panel Friday night, the question session can be excruciating; some fans, alas, match the stereotypes. But this afternoon almost all the fans in the question line were reasonably well-spoken and asked decent questions. (Still, it might be an improvement if lists of questions for the actors were drawn up beforehand, either by someone knowledgeable about the show, or from fan submissions, and they had a moderator read out the questions. This would ensure that the same questions do not get asked repeatedly, and the fans still get to speak directly to the actors in the autograph lines, after all.)
One fan mentioned all of Selby’s kissing scenes on Shadows and asked him to tell us who was his “favorite person to kiss” on the show. Many of the contenders for the title, of course, were right on stage with him. “You’re kidding,” Selby replied. “Not in a thousand years.”
Towards the end, another fan asked, perhaps seriously, if there should be an episode of E! True Hollywood Story dealing with Dark Shadows.
The Festival emcee replied that what he really wanted to see was Survivor: Collinsport, and that seemed to amuse the actors as much as it did the audience.
The last question for the panel seemed appropriate, not just for the end of the panel but for the possible end of the Festivals. How did you react when you found out DS was being cancelled?
Apparently the end of the show, just like the end of the Festivals, took the actors by surprise. James Storm said that he was in a wardrobe fitting for a new role that he was going to play on the show when he heard the bad news. (This would seem to indicate that Dan Curtis and the writers had concocted a new story arc that we never got to see. What could it have been?)
It was also a shock. Christopher Pennock remembered having “heart palpitations. . . dizziness. . .nausea. It was not a good day. I was hoping for another year.” Instead, he had his “first anxiety attack. Thanks, Dan.”
David Selby wisely summed it up. He said Dark Shadows was “like a meteor. It really burned bright over the time it was on.. . . It burned so quick because the intensity when we were doing the show was so high.” But, he said, it ended at the right time, because the show “took a lot out of everybody.” Dark Shadows, he concluded, “burned as long as we could, as bright as we could, then it was out.”
MY SUNDAY IN COLLINSPORT
But is it out permanently? Has Dark Shadows become just a memory. Not if the project launched at this year’s Festival proves a success.
Late Sunday afternoon at the Festival is traditionally the time for a dramatic presentation. For many years that took the form of Jonathan Frid’s “reader’s theater”: his one-man show in which he performed dramatic readings of short stories, and very effectively. He had a considerable repertory of these pieces, so each year’s show was different. Even now that he is semi-retired in his seventies, he still occasionally will perform one of his one-man shows, though not at the Festivals. At one point, for reasons unknown, Frid stopped coming to the Festivals.
Other theatrical presentations took the place for his. One year David Selby, who has played Abraham Lincoln repeatedly through his life, from his school days into the present, appeared in his own play about the man, Lincoln and James. The most memorable show, though, was a cabaret act performed by Nancy Barrett. She had avoided the Festivals for years, apparently out of simple shyness. But finally, several years ago, she showed up, along with an accompanist on piano, and dazzled the audience with her program of songs. One year she even did her show in an actual cabaret in Manhattan’s theater district on one of the nights of the Festival. And in 2001 Selby and Parker performed that redoubtable two-handed theater piece, Love Letters.
This year, however, we were promised the kind of theatrical piece that longtime fans of the show probably thought we would never see. It was to be a new play, Return to Collinwood, performed by members of the show’s original cast. If this was to be the final Festival, it was certainly going out with the proverbial bang.
As soon as I first read about this play months ago, I, and probably many other Dark Shadows aficionados wondered what this show would possibly be like. Would the actors memorize their lines and perform in costume, maybe even in a set recreating Collinwood’s drawing room? The latter part was most unlikely. I worried about the possibility of bloopers: if anything went wrong, the audience would be ready to laugh affectionately, and it would be all too easy for the actors to play the material as camp. Occasionally at past Festivals pairs of actors had performed old scenes from the show and in some cases made little effort to take them seriously.
A few years ago I mentioned to friends that it would be a good idea if the Shadows cast members could record a new episode for audiotape, which would be considerably less expensive to produce than a new episode for video. I had no contact with anyone connected with Shadows, but it seems that someone else who did know the right people independently came up with the same idea and was able to bring it to fruition.
So, we learned as the Festival approached, Return to Collinwood was to be done in the style of a “radio play.” This makes sense in terms of the ongoing revival of audio drama, as recently reported in the New York Times. From the 1930s into the 1950s, before the rise of television, radio drama and comedy dominated the airwaves, with actors lined up before microphones, scripts in hand, performing live on the air for the millions listening at home, and often to a studio audience as well. Several times I have attended live broadcasts of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, which, with its comedy sketches, carries on the tradition into the 21st century. Radio drama never faded away in Britain, where it still flourishes on the BBC: Neil Gaiman has written radio plays, and there have even been radio dramatizations of certain DC comics stories on British radio. In the U. S., new radio dramas seem to be turning up on public broadcasting radio stations and webcasts (as on the Sci-Fi Channel website), and have metamorphosed into new forms as audio books that people listen to on their daily commutes.
I wondered about other questions as the Festival drew close. How would they deal with the fact that so many cast members had passed away over the last three decades, many of whom had key roles on the series? Most importantly, how would they deal with the lead character, Barnabas himself? Jonathan Frid had not attended a Festival in years, and though some fans online seemed to hope he might make a surprise appearance, this seemed doubtful.
And who would write this play? Had the Festival managed to enlist one of the show’s original writers? Would it be a fan, and hence need we worry about what kind of fan fiction he or she would write? How faithful would the writer be to the show’s continuity? Would he take the material seriously or go for a send-up?
In time we learned that the writer was Jamison Selby, David Selby’s son, working from a story on which he had collaborated with Festival head Jim Pierson. Here was a new way for longtime Dark Shadows fans to measure how much time had passed since the show was first on the air. Jamison Selby was born while his father was appearing in the 1897 flashback episodes, and was named after Quentin’s beloved nephew Jamison. This, also, though, made for an interesting subtext to the play: the author was writing a vehicle for his father and his father’s co-workers, a generation older than himself.
In most cases the actors returned to their familiar characters from the show: David Selby as Quentin, Kathryn Leigh Scott as Maggie Evans, Nancy Barrett as Carolyn, John Karlen as Willie Loomis, Roger Davis as Ned Stuart, and Christopher Pennock as Sebastian Shaw. (In the latter two cases, these were not the actors’ best known roles on the show, but they were the characters left alive in the present day when the series ended. And no, I don’t know what to make of the fact that there was a Dark Shadows character with the same name as the head of X-Men‘s Hellfire Club and the actor who played the unmasked Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. A double coincidence?) Lara Parker’s witch Angelique died in the concluding months of the series, but death never stopped Angelique for long, and one of Return to Collinwood’s subplots involved her magical resurrection.
The repertory company aspect of Dark Shadows reasserted itself. Those actors whose characters had been killed off at the show’s conclusion turned up in brand new roles: Donna Wandrey (formerly Roxanne) as a sinister housekeeper, Marie Wallace (Eve, Jenny) as Jessica, the wife of Willie Loomis, James Storm (Gerard) as a parapsychologist, and Terry Crawford (Beth) as the new wife of the missing David.
The passing of so many of the older cast members provided Return to Collinwood with one of its major themes: the transitions between generations.
As a radio play, Return to Collinwood could have ignored its actors’ ages and likewise been set thirty years ago. But instead its writers chose to portray the characters as they would be now, in 2003.
Not every character in Return has grown older. Quentin and Angelique are both unaging immortals. Quentin is trying to keep his immortality a secret, and Angelique points out that he puts gray dye in his hair, and pointedly asks how long he can continue to disguise his eternal youth. I expect it would take more than touching up one’s hair to make an eternal 27-year-old look like he was in his 50s, but as a radio play Return need not deal in visualizations. As for Angelique, she returns to Collinwood in her former guise as Roger’s ex-wife Cassandra, whom the family thinks is a normal human. There is no talk of Cassandra using makeup, yet no one wonders why Cassandra presumably looks as young as she did back in 1968. (Then again, since Lara Parker still looks astonishingly youthful, maybe there is no need to explain. Why Carolyn does not recognize the newly blonde Cassandra as Angelique, whom she met in the Leviathan sequence, seems an authorial faux pas.)
Return to Collinwood took as its theme the passing of the generations. We are told at the outset of the recent death of the family matriarch, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and that her brother, Roger, had passed away two years before. Barnabas and his devoted confidant Dr. Julia Hoffman, we are told, cannot be present because they are on some sort of spiritual retreat in Hong Kong. Now the other, younger characters, gather together at Collinwood for the reading of Elizabeth’s will.
I call them the “younger” characters, but in fact, they are now well into middle age (in Quentin’s case, psychologically rather than physically or chronologically). Paralleling the lives of the baby boomers today, these characters find themselves taking over roles of authority as their elders pass from the scene. Carolyn reluctantly assumes the position of head of the family, succeeding her mother. We learn that, after spending the whole series hanging around the house, complaining of the dullness of small town life, in those pre-feminist days, Carolyn finally went to college (at “the University of Boston,” which I suppose might be Boston University). A young widow at the end of the original series, she is now married to Ned Stuart, who, thankfully, seems to have considerably mellowed from his abrasive 1970 self. Maggie, who has apparently gone to medical school over the intervening decades, has taken over Julia Hoffman’s position as head of the Windcliff sanitarium; she is also now a widow but has been involved with Quentin for the last ten years. Willie Loomis, once Barnabas’s mentally unstable servant at his home, the Old House, is now that mansion’s owner, happily married, running a farm on the grounds, and reconstructing the house to suit his own desires. Barnabas, psychologically mired in the past, never installed electricity in the Old House, or, as Willie points out in the play, even plumbing. Willie gets his laughs by talking about putting in a plasma screen TV and a Jacuzzi, but the play is also making a point about Collinwood moving into a new era. (If any of these married characters have children, either it wasn’t mentioned or I missed it. It would be odd if none of them did.)
The young Collins heir, David, only fourteen when we last saw him, is now an adult, of course, and missing. Here the writers had to deal with the fact that the actor who played David has never attended the festivals, and is unlikely to do so, having become a successful entrepreneur living in South America. So, in a sort of in-joke, they work his absence into the play: described as a “wanderer,” David has become an archeologist and has become lost on an expedition in South America. (In the days of cell phones and the Internet, it is harder and harder to have a character become lost.) But there is a visible sign of his own maturity: a woman turns up at the play’s end who is David’s new wife, or at least she claims to be.
Some people, though, remain tied to the past. Considering that Angelique reformed towards the end of the original series, it does not make sense that she has turned villain again in Return, but the writers recognized that after all these years, what the audience wanted to see was Angelique in full bitch mode (and Maggie even gets to call her the b-word, to the audience’s delight). Once back, Angelique reverts to form, trying to entrap Quentin into marriage as she did way back in 1897. Moreover, she has made Sebastian Shaw her slave. Shaw has spent many years as a mental patient at Windcliff, and we learn that he is still infatuated with Maggie. He has not moved on from the past either.
Quentin is recognizably the same person he was back in the original series. Jamison Selby comes up with plenty of wry comments on the goings-on which David Selby delivers with Quentin’s accustomed sardonic edge.
And yet Quentin has changed. Both Quentin and David are characterized in the play as “wanderers,” but in the play it is Quentin who returns home to Collinwood. Angelique seeks to tempt him away from Maggie, asserting that they belong together as fellow immortals. When he resists, Angelique attempts to force Quentin to marry her by stealing the Dorian Gray-style portrait that keeps him young. In the original series, it was Barnabas who usually had to bail Quentin out of trouble; this time, though, Quentin himself masterminds Angelique’s defeat. (And, significantly, like Barnabas, Quentin employs Willie to undertake some of the dirty work involved.)
It is Quentin, of all the characters, who has undergone the most impressive and dramatically important change. He may remain physically young but he has become psychologically mature. In 1897 Quentin was a wastrel and a womanizer, capable of murder; even after he reforms, he confesses in 1970 he is not known for being “dependable.” And yet, now, in 2003, in Barnabas’s absence, Quentin has taken over his role on the series. For one thing, it is now Quentin, not Barnabas, who is involved in a romantic triangle that pits Angelique against a character played by Kathryn Leigh Scott – Maggie, in this case, and not Josette. More importantly, it is Quentin who is now the protector of the family, though not its official head (who is now Carolyn). It is he who secretly combats supernatural threats of which most of the other characters remain ignorant. And Quentin, also like Barnabas, feels he must conceal his true past, that of a man over a century old who lives under a curse. Quentin is the outsider with the dark and secret past who guards his extended family of blood relatives and friends.
It seems right that a play that shows Quentin taking over as the protective father figure of the Collins clan should be written by the son of the actor who plays Quentin. In part the play seems a tribute to the older Selby as well as to the show that gave him his first great success.
I thought all the actors were in good form, but only have room to mention a few of them. There was Nancy Barrett’s continuing ability to ground Dark Shadows in real emotion, whether her screams of fright or the sadness that grips her when thinking about the long lost Victoria Winters. John Karlen and Marie Wallace made a well matched couple in providing comic relief. Lara Parker’s pleasure in returning to her signature role was infectious, and Donna Wandrey was decidedly spooky as the “Rebecca”-style housekeeper.
The day after the Festival, the actors performed Return to Collinwood again for release by MPI Home Video later this year. I have since been informed that if Return sells well, it is hoped that there will be a new Dark Shadows radio drama done every year. Jamison Selby is said to want to write more, and, indeed, Return is replete with set-ups for future stories. What will Angelique be up to, now that she is living on the estate? Just what is up with the new sinister housekeeper? Is the woman who claims to be David’s wife really who she says she is? And most intriguingly, the younger Selby lays the groundwork for a search for the show’s original heroine, Victoria Winters (whose true connection to the Collinses was revealed in the play to enthusiastic applause).
Return is not even the only official contemporary Dark Shadows sequel. Lara Parker, who plays Angelique, wrote a novel, Angelique’s Descent, several years ago: its framing sequence was set only a year after the series ended, but the main part of the novel traced Angelique’s life in the 1700s. It was extraordinarily good, capturing the many characters from the show with insight into their personalities, demonstrating fidelity to the show’s continuity while building intelligently upon it, and showing a clear grasp of what made the series work. Parker is now writing a new Dark Shadows novel, set both in the 1970s and during the Salem witch trials, for Tor Books.
I would hate to have to choose between Angelique’s Descent and Return to Collinwood as the canonical sequel to Dark Shadows. Both are so good, yet there are some discrepancies between Angelique’s Descent and Return to Collinwood, though nothing that could not be explained away. (Much could have happened in the thirty-year gap between the 1970s of Parker’s novel and the 2003 of Selby’s play.) The old Dark Shadows novels and comics that came out while the series was first on the air never fit into the show’s continuity. Still, Dan Curtis’s organization would be well advised to make sure that the new sequels to the show fit into a consistent continuity, just as Lucasfilm does with the current Star Wars novels and comics.
It is simply remarkable that after all these years there are sequels to Dark Shadows being done, and by the original cast members. Can there be any other examples of the original cast of a television series returning to the same roles, decades later, not for a one-shot reunion special or TV-movie, but for a new continuing series? The Star Trek series turned into a series of movies, but the original cast isn’t still appearing in Star Trek films or TV shows over three decades later.
So was this the last Dark Shadows Festival? I don’t know. But if the new novel and the radio play succeed, it is not the end of the ongoing Dark Shadows saga. Even if the Festival has died, Dark Shadows, true to form, has been resurrected yet again.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
Comments: 1 Comment
One Response to “Comics in Context #12: Dark Shadows Festival 2003, Part 2 – Radio Days”Leave a Reply |
July 30th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
I attended the Dark Shadows Festival from July 18th-20th, 2008 in Burbank, and it was wonderful and a huge success. Jonathan Frid WAS in attendance and I must say looks dashing as ever! He looks darn good for 83! So yes, Dark Shadows is still VERY MUCH alive.
Barnabas Lover (Rai T.)
mercurylove7@aol.com