- Awards
- 24
I wish I'd been there to put in my 14 cents. I now recall Frankie died in the middle of August.
The buck stops with the EP. She/he is supposed to be involved in every step of the taping process, from approving the scripts to being on set to direct the director if the EP does not like how the scenes are turning out. The EP is also supposed to supervise the editing process, which can shape how the written scenes can play to the viewer. In short, nothing goes to air that she/he isn't okay with. When something goes wrong, the Boss is supposed to take responsibility. So she's the one who should take ultimate blame, since lord knows she never had trouble taking credit for the good things that happened when she was running shows. JFP's attempts to shift blame (even decades later in an interview I read) ring hollow. I'm not allowing MdP to escape criticism, since she should never have written the death scenario that was taped. She lost perspective on who her core audience was (mothers, wives) and displayed insanely bad judgment. Both Maggie DePriest and JFP deserve to have scorn heaped upon them, but JFP was the only one who could have changed the depiction of the murder as it was being staged.
In the interview I read (which might be find-able someplace, but I cannot even recall who confronted her), JFP did take blame for Maureen Bauer on GL (as if she could deny it!), but defiantly said she was not to blame for how Frankie's death was depicted. She even claimed that she had "suggested" that they stage it as a disappearance, giving the opportunity to have her "come back from the dead". Umm, babe if you really wanted that, all you had to do was order your Head Writer to write it that way. If you did not want it to be so graphic. you could have vetoed some of the acting choices AB-M made to make sure it was not a "gentle murder" (AB-M was interviewed afterward and confirmed she decided to be true to Frankie by fighting like hell). The episode did not have to be an hour of Fax stalking her like an animal and making the viewer feel like they were watching a snuff film. The fans of the show had already been battered and bruised by so many choices JFP had made that this became the final straw. It actually might not become so legendary if JFP had not "gotten away with it" (moving on to other soaps as AW died slowly from wounds she inflicted).
You correctly mention how they changed the "final victim" from Anna Stuart to Alice Barrett-Mitchell at the last minute, which had to have left Maggie DePriest furious since it meant rewriting a current plot as well as re-writing the plot trajectories of several other characters (all the Love-Hudsons, all the Frames, Cass, Felicia, etc.). I recall all the 'signs' occurring in the plots that pointed to Donna getting killed off (my blood pressure was off the charts), which spoke to MdP having laid groundwork that would now have to be scrapped. The turn to Frankie ending up with that necklace was poorly staged because it was a last-minute change, and it did not ring true because it was all so random. MdP had re-tooled her Sin Stalker plot from the late 1980s for this story. The part where some thought Donna was the killer---only to have her turn up dead---would mirror the Sin Stalker plot with Greg Houston as the suspect/victim. So once that plot point was changed, everything else afterward bore no resemblance to that long-ago plot. So dePriest loses points for not trying to write something original and instead try to retread one of her plotlines from a previous tenure.
The buck stops with the EP. She/he is supposed to be involved in every step of the taping process, from approving the scripts to being on set to direct the director if the EP does not like how the scenes are turning out. The EP is also supposed to supervise the editing process, which can shape how the written scenes can play to the viewer. In short, nothing goes to air that she/he isn't okay with. When something goes wrong, the Boss is supposed to take responsibility. So she's the one who should take ultimate blame, since lord knows she never had trouble taking credit for the good things that happened when she was running shows. JFP's attempts to shift blame (even decades later in an interview I read) ring hollow. I'm not allowing MdP to escape criticism, since she should never have written the death scenario that was taped. She lost perspective on who her core audience was (mothers, wives) and displayed insanely bad judgment. Both Maggie DePriest and JFP deserve to have scorn heaped upon them, but JFP was the only one who could have changed the depiction of the murder as it was being staged.
In the interview I read (which might be find-able someplace, but I cannot even recall who confronted her), JFP did take blame for Maureen Bauer on GL (as if she could deny it!), but defiantly said she was not to blame for how Frankie's death was depicted. She even claimed that she had "suggested" that they stage it as a disappearance, giving the opportunity to have her "come back from the dead". Umm, babe if you really wanted that, all you had to do was order your Head Writer to write it that way. If you did not want it to be so graphic. you could have vetoed some of the acting choices AB-M made to make sure it was not a "gentle murder" (AB-M was interviewed afterward and confirmed she decided to be true to Frankie by fighting like hell). The episode did not have to be an hour of Fax stalking her like an animal and making the viewer feel like they were watching a snuff film. The fans of the show had already been battered and bruised by so many choices JFP had made that this became the final straw. It actually might not become so legendary if JFP had not "gotten away with it" (moving on to other soaps as AW died slowly from wounds she inflicted).
You correctly mention how they changed the "final victim" from Anna Stuart to Alice Barrett-Mitchell at the last minute, which had to have left Maggie DePriest furious since it meant rewriting a current plot as well as re-writing the plot trajectories of several other characters (all the Love-Hudsons, all the Frames, Cass, Felicia, etc.). I recall all the 'signs' occurring in the plots that pointed to Donna getting killed off (my blood pressure was off the charts), which spoke to MdP having laid groundwork that would now have to be scrapped. The turn to Frankie ending up with that necklace was poorly staged because it was a last-minute change, and it did not ring true because it was all so random. MdP had re-tooled her Sin Stalker plot from the late 1980s for this story. The part where some thought Donna was the killer---only to have her turn up dead---would mirror the Sin Stalker plot with Greg Houston as the suspect/victim. So once that plot point was changed, everything else afterward bore no resemblance to that long-ago plot. So dePriest loses points for not trying to write something original and instead try to retread one of her plotlines from a previous tenure.
We ended up with Billy Moses from Falcon Crest and Denise Crosby from Star Trek, and the story fell flat (not because of the actors, but the lousy writing). Cass and Donna could have sold it, though. AS played a doctor on GH for many years in the 1970s, so why not?
