Why Did Philip Capice Leave Dallas?

[LMLDallas78]

Plus, Capice was surely not responsible for the unrecognizable, utter comedic crapshow Dallas turned into in its last few seasons.
The dream season was never the big problem, because that was, what came AFTER it... and AFTER Capice was gone. At that point the real desaster started, that ruined the show into the ground. Capice was nowhere to be found near Dallas by that point.

I've often wondered how much the comedy element (comedic crapshow is brilliant!) was due to Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy. I remember an interview with them (about tnt Dallas) when they say they had always wanted to do a Dallas version of "Airplane" the comedy film, but couldn't get anyone to agree to it. Maybe their antics went just too far and they knew Dallas was on a fatal nose dive and just wanted to have a complete mess about for the last few seasons. Both had enough clout for that to happen I would imagine.

 

[Chris2]

If Phil Capice hadn’t bungled the dream season so badly, there wouldn’t have been the pressure to bring back Duffy and Katzman to the show (so Katzman could ruin it later). I’m watching the dream season now. Sue Ellen screaming in the drunk tank, the Krebbs dealing with a Down syndrome pregnancy and later adopting a disabled child, Jenna’s unending depression, masquerade parties, emeralds…this is not Dallas.

 

[rkhullar]

@ rkhullar
Are you related to Katzman or is Capice a nemesis of yours... ? :eyes:

No no relation to any of them. I just State the facts. I am tired of the people here defending Philip capice and knocking Leonard katzman

 

[rkhullar]

I've often wondered how much the comedy element (comedic crapshow is brilliant!) was due to Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy. I remember an interview with them (about tnt Dallas) when they say they had always wanted to do a Dallas version of "Airplane" the comedy film, but couldn't get anyone to agree to it. Maybe their antics went just too far and they knew Dallas was on a fatal nose dive and just wanted to have a complete mess about for the last few seasons. Both had enough clout for that to happen I would imagine.

No you're absolutely dead wrong. As I have said repeated times it's not just that dream season there were a lot of writers that were leaving a lot of good actors that were leaving and blaming catsman or Larry hagman or Patrick Duffy no. When you have the main actors leaving and you have new ones that have no idea what to do story lines have to be written for those new ones particularly the younger ones because the 18 to 54 demographic was declining. My argument has been and no one has been able to disprove this if Philip capice had stayed and we had done it his way how could you guarantee that the show's ratings wouldn't have suffered. Philip capice was a moron for even coming up with that dream season to begin with. And again not everything in seasons 11 to 14 was bad. I keep saying this over and over again and I don't think you guys understand

 

[Mel O'Drama]

I keep saying this over and over again and I don't think you guys understand

Just to play Devil's Advocate, perhaps people do understand but simply offer a different viewpoint.

The strength of a discussion site like this is that there is always opportunity to see things from a different angle and even to change one's own opinion. I know over time many of my own views have developed or evolved.

For what it's worth, I think you make some valid points, but these are undermined by the way in which the points are made. If you feel so strongly about a topic that you can't discuss it without repeatedly calling someone unpleasant names like "moron" and even celebrating the fact that they're dead, the discussion isn't a healthy one and is likely to be frustrating all round.

That is, of course, in addition to such comments being out of step with our site terms regarding defamation and respectful debate.

 

[Barbara Fan]

I keep saying this over and over again and I don't think you guys understand

oh but we do - Its just that some of us think that Capice and Katzman together led to the success of the show

Katzman and Hagman = a downwards spiral to the end of a show that became Dallas in name only and people stopped watching

If you feel so strongly about a topic that you can't discuss it without repeatedly calling someone unpleasant names like "moron" and even celebrating the fact that they're dead, the discussion isn't a healthy one.

Absolutely - the thing about having a forum is that people will have different opinions, thats healthy, but thats not to say you are right and they are wrong or vice versa
It would be dull if we were all cloned and thought the same.

 

[Brian Kinney]

That is, of course, in addition to such comments being out of step with our site terms regarding defamation and respectful debate.

I want to add the worst: total neglect of using paragraphs.

 

[bystander]

I suspect that's the gist of it: Capice allowed Katzman's strengths to flourish, but likely put the breaks on his negatives.

But it's also hard to defend the negatives of the dream season under Capice. (Katzman went off to do another show, was listed as a creative consultant and wrote the occasional script, but had no control over the direction of the plots). Capice allowed Paulsen to get away, denying him Katzman's position when he left and it was given to Peter Dunne who, although he'd done good work on KNOTS, turned his sole season of DALLAS into a rambling, unfocused sudser. The oft-alleged "strength" of the DALLAS women during the dream season was strictly pantomime, and if anything, they were made stronger once Katzman returned (except for Pam's whining about Jenna's baby, she was actually tougher in the office).

Yes, the sexist comments returned with Katzman, but I didn't have a problem with that because that was just JR's personality and the Ewings' environment. All this pseudo-respect for women during the dream season smacked of smug '80s political correctness and I'm glad they dumped it.

Were the writers "male chauvinist pigs" as even Hagman later conceded? It sounds like Katzman was, at least in certain ways. But JR Ewing himself was supposed to be a chauvinist pig... So while you may have had a pig writing for a pig, spare me an enlightened writing staff like the one Dunne/Capice offered up whose New Woman sensibility demanded that everyone be homogenized in keeping with the media and cultural trends of the era which really had little to do with life at Southfork.

JR dehumanized everybody who wasn't JR. Why wouldn't he be the same way with women? It's just who he was.

But the identity issues of the dream season, which tried to uncomfortably blend the introspection of KNOTS with the glitzy junk of DYNASTY, could have been forgiven if the narrative had held together. But it just became a mess. (Same for TNT's nuDALLAS).

And yet once Capice was gone and Katzman was in total power, it only worked for a brief time (if one could overlook the "I just had a terrible 31 episode dream, Bobby!" speech which opened the new era, and many people couldn't).

And before long, Katzman was doing exactly the same kind of crap he'd complained that Capice had done to and for the show. So perhaps that was what Jacobs meant when he said the two men had "exactly the same approach to television."

I always recall that line from JR shortly after he was shot and Bobby had taken over the company: that JR was going to cut his brother out "even if I have to destroy Ewing Oil to do it!" And that internecine mindset seemed to play out behind the camera as well as in front.

A shame Paulsen never had the chance to become DALLAS' executive producer. He seemed to have an objective sense of narrative that superceded "power" issues. Perhaps that why he's said he'd "wanted to leave DALLAS" in 1988 even before he got the offer to take over limping DYNASTY, and then Larry sniped in the press that Paulsen lacked "a sense of humor": Paulsen was likely aware that Katzman and DALLAS was headed into an intentionally facetious era, and knew it wouldn't work.

Yes, Paulsen's Season 7 tenure on KNOTS' is controversial, and even I have some issue with it, but it still worked way better than what Dunne was doing on DALLAS that same year, despite what sounds like competitive staff issues on KNOTS as well.

As David Jacobs has said, these shows can have humor and comedy under the surface, but have to be "played absolutely straight" on the face of it, otherwise you have what amounts to a satire of something that's already a satire.

But when you learn about the on-set politics of these shows, especially from what sounds like the more objective sources, it just sounds as horrible and destructive as any awful office job you've ever had and hated -- and the good guys, and the talented folks, aren't always the key beneficiaries of that dynamic. Nor are the customers.

Holy Jesus, it's amazing they ever get anything good done at all, for however long they manage to do so!

I signed up on this forum because I am intriguied by these observations. It's interesting; though I understand the point of "political correctness", how can anything be accurately portrayed in drama or comedy if there is some sort of utopian ideal that must be presented that eliminates all of one's evil or less-than-ideal personality traits? We're human! If something is truly offensive and a socially unacceptable, such characters are usually disliked anyways. And if viewers are celebrating bad behaviors, its an issue with the viewer and not the production itself. I can't stand most modern television, and I simply never watch as it is not aimed at me.

The best thing about Dallas' earliest seasons was the level of shockingly unethical and devious behavior. For some reason I am thinking of when Ray and JR had a fun time at a motel in Waco, and then their boyfriends (one of whom was Brian Denehy) take revenge by holding the family hostage during the "hurricane" (we won't get into that impossibility). Just as Larry Hagman said about accepting the role at a point he was desperate for work, he was reading one and his wife Maj was reading the "Dallas" script. She said something along the lines of, "You gotta read this! There are no redeeming characters in here at all!" HAHA!! And that's the point. These are all characters. They have strengths and faults like all of us (well, most of us as some would have you believe). If the show was getting sexist after the dream season and departure of Phil Capice (its been a while, I can't recall that season's plotlines), it probably was returning to a closer reality. It wasn't celebrating treating women like that, but more of a cinema verite where this is how people in this situation behave, warts and all. Furthermore, the show would lack the power dynamic it had going. I am more intertested in the individual characters than supporting the men's or women's team. There were times when the women would turn the tables on JR, and that often kept things interesting. Although at the tail end as many people have commented here, JR lost his touch and although I watched it in first run, it wouldn't be water cooler talk on Monday like those early seasons must have been.

And yes, how the apparent dysfunction (which is in any group to varying degrees) involving Capice, Leonard Katzman, and Hagman was able to remain on simmer for six years is amazing. But then, money can assuage the pain of wounds.

As an aside, everyone on here must know that David Jacobs died a few days ago (August 20, 2023). Offhand I cannot remember his level of involvement with the show after the first couple of seasons, but we certainly must pay homage to a family named after a local Dallas Buick dealership at the time.....funny thing is that the dealership at some point owned a Mercedes franchise as well called, "Ewing Mercedes-Benz", now called "Mercedes-Benz Plano".

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Your comments are all good ones, but I focused in on this in particular:

revenge by holding the family hostage during the "hurricane" (we won't get into that impossibility).

Yes, not only is DALLAS 300 hundred miles inland, the episode was filmed in February/March when it's obviously winter -- not exactly hurricane weather -- but the scene in the pilot where Pam is tossed into the lake by Ray had to be filmed a second time, because the first time it was flurrying (the crew called it "remarkable"). Because the lunch-drinking network ghouls said the scene, the miniseries, was "written for heat" despite the fact that winter was vividly in the air and that in some miniseries moments, there was snow on the ground --- including during "the hurricane" (which is so stupid it defies All That is Holy).

Instead of changing the script to say "blizzard" instead of "hurricane," we're asked to play along, suspending disbelief beyond reason).
And yet there are times in the script where they do refer to the cold (as someone realized that they couldn't totally pass off the "heat" pretensions).

An early sign of how executives start mobilizing immediately to ruin everything.

I'd go so far as to set the pilot episode just after Christmas 1977, Pam on the cusp of just turning 25 (VP, of course, was 63 at the time. And I think she still is). With a small number of yuletide decorations still in evidence. But that's just me.

David Jacobs died a few days ago (August 20, 2023). Offhand I cannot remember his level of involvement with the show after the first couple of seasons,

After the first 15 or so episodes, I get the impression Jacobs wasn't involved much at all in DALLAS, although he was apparently invited as a courtesy gesture to beginning-of-the-season writers' table discussions.

 

[LMLDallas78]

Indeed, at the beginning there weren't meant to be any "nice" members of that family, but as time went on and characters got to grow, the audience grew to love them. I'm not sure if we would've loved them so much if they remained people with no redeeming qualities. Bobby and Pam were meant to be the only nice ones and even Bobby began to show his darker side before too long.

As @bystander said if things are too offensive and socially unacceptable we won't generally like that character and that's usually true, but obviously Larry Hagman turned JR into the exception.
JR was abusive, controlling and a chauvinist, but viewers still loved him. I don't recall woman getting the better of him, if it did happen it was only ever temporary and he always won in the end. As he did in business. Dallas was very un-PC yet absolutely loved by millions. It was also the forerunner for many, very copied, storylines.

Leonard Katzman has a reputation for being a sexist so & so, I'm not sure about Phil Capice, I can only guess he must've been or at least been happy to go along with it. I'm not bleating on about being sexist or male chauvinism, because that's how JR and most of the men were meant to be and the late 70s into the 80s were completely different times.

Women on the show were reactors to their men's behaviour and never went too far being confident or in positions of power.

Although Katzman was a talented man, he was much better teamed with Capice than with Hagman.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Indeed, at the beginning there weren't meant to be any "nice" members of that family

I sometimes wonder how DALLAS would have fared had the Ewings retained their collective slime factor as Jacobs had originally conceived them in the 1978 mini-series (and KNOTS still so described them permanently). Where even Miss "I don't care if it's fair!" Ellie was a little bit of a rat.

Pretty soon, the Ewings just became nice people, as expected by audiences and executives at the time, and the guilty sins all osmositized over to ol' J.R., as if he were some strange anthraxian virus Ray brought in on his boot from the Texas prairie.

So when anybody mentioned how awful the Ewings were, you sort of wondered what they were talking about. Just assuming they're referring to JR's latest plot, Sue Ellen's latest cocktail, Jock's ancient scheme Donna just located in a diary in somebody's attic, or the family's impulse to look away and ignore the corruption (although they mostly didn't).

 

[Chris2]

I know it never would have happened, but I wish David Jacobs had come in as showrunner when Katzman left instead of Peter Dunne. He would have had a chance to fulfill his vision of Dallas. Would have been better than what we got.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

I know it never would have happened, but I wish David Jacobs had come in as showrunner when Katzman left instead of Peter Dunne. He would have had a chance to fulfill his vision of Dallas. Would have been better than what we got.

Dunne left KNOTS to do DALLAS, while Jacobs was still overseeing KNOTS.

What they should have done was have Paulsen take over the year Bobby was dead, promoting him upwards. But Lorimar and Capice probably were reluctant to risk their biggest franchise to a mere story editor like Paulsen and instead allowed him to run KNOTS that same year (where he faced another kind of political problem). However, upon his exit, Katzman allegedly said to Paulsen that "well, it's your show now" (or words to that effect) so I'm guessing Uncle Lenny sabotaged his lieutenant with the Lorimar brass to ensure that the show wouldn't improve while he was gone.

Paulsen didn't want to stay with DALLAS and be subjugated to his work being squelched by Dunne. And Paulsen rejected a similar offer from Season 6 of DYNASTY where his work would have been squelched by the idiotic Pollocks.

And whatever flaws there were in Season 7 of KNOTS under Paulsen, it was far better than Dunne's syrupy work during the dream season of DALLAS (Dunne was, not surprisingly, still enraged years later by his removal from DALLAS after only one year -- he wasn't philosophical about how the mediocrity of his soapy work got him expunged from the show).

Katzman and Paulsen, of course, returned to DALLAS in 1986. Art Lewis returned a year later. And then, for what ever reason -- either Lewis' return with his presumed seniority and/or the deliberate decision to switch the tone to a more facetious one -- Paulsen wanted to leave by 1988, and then accepted the job of show-runner for Season 9 of spiraling DYNASTY (which he finally fixed, although the audience was already gone and almost nobody saw it).

I get the impression Katzman may have asked Paulsen back to DALLAS for Seasons 13 & 14, but Paulsen refused. Instead, Leonard brought in Howard Lakin (who's a bit of a hack) and it didn't work.

Post-WSJR?, Katzman just couldn't produce DALLAS without Paulsen (though no one connected to the show ever seemed to be aware of it).

I don't think Jacobs would have ever returned to DALLAS, other than doing the 1986 prequel movie. He had his hands full with the more creatively-viable spin-off, KNOTS. And DALLAS had, for better or worse, wandered too far away from his original conception of it (Jacobs admits Katzman made it the hit it became in a way he himself wouldn't have).

David Jacobs: "I never stopped thinking of Dallas as mine, but toward the end, I didn’t like the ways I was thinking about it. Eventually I wasn’t even watching it anymore."

Texas Monthly -- 'Dallas" at 40:
'Dallas' 40th Anniversary: The Show That Changed Texas Forever (texasmonthly.com)

^^^
...from 5 years ago

 

[DarkVader]

No you're absolutely dead wrong. As I have said repeated times it's not just that dream season there were a lot of writers that were leaving a lot of good actors that were leaving and blaming catsman or Larry hagman or Patrick Duffy no. When you have the main actors leaving and you have new ones that have no idea what to do story lines have to be written for those new ones particularly the younger ones because the 18 to 54 demographic was declining. My argument has been and no one has been able to disprove this if Philip capice had stayed and we had done it his way how could you guarantee that the show's ratings wouldn't have suffered. Philip capice was a moron for even coming up with that dream season to begin with. And again not everything in seasons 11 to 14 was bad. I keep saying this over and over again and I don't think you guys understand

Is there any kind of punctuation in your life? And it's KATZMAN not catsman.

This is word salad.

You're exhausting.

 

[Toni]

What we´re all overseeing here is that maybe, it was something else what got Capice fired. Maybe it was his idea to make Angelica and Grace lesbians? Members of the cast confirmed they were so originally, but TPTB (who? Larry, Barbara BG?) claimed to heaven and they became just "tender partners in crime"! The same happened the next year to Jane Badler´s character, who was turned into Erin Jones' "sister" instead of what was written to be a lover.

"Nicklass darlin´, why don´t you less Grace and I alonne so
we can get into some unfinished businesss...? ευχαριστώ!​

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

What we´re all overseeing here is that maybe, it was something else what got Capice fired. Maybe it was his idea to make Angelica and Grace lesbians? Members of the cast confirmed they were so originally, but TPTB (who? Larry, Barbara BG?) claimed to heaven and they became just "tender partners in crime"! The same happened the next year to Jane Badler´s character, who was turned into Erin Jones' "sister" instead of what was written to be a lover.

View attachment 47190

"Nicklass darlin´, why don´t you less Grace and I alonne so
we can get into some unfinished businesss...? ευχαριστώ!​

My guess is that it was CBS that nixed it. There was a similar story around the same time that Jane Wyman stopped a lesbian plotline on FALCON CREST.

 

[Toni]

My guess is that it was CBS that nixed it. There was a similar story around the same time that Jane Wyman stopped a lesbian plotline on FALCON CREST.

Yeah, I forgot to mention the show´s title but I was indeed referring to FC: Jane Badler played that character.

 

[Taylor Bennett Jr.]

What we´re all overseeing here is that maybe, it was something else what got Capice fired. Maybe it was his idea to make Angelica and Grace lesbians? Members of the cast confirmed they were so originally, but TPTB (who? Larry, Barbara BG?) claimed to heaven and they became just "tender partners in crime"! The same happened the next year to Jane Badler´s character, who was turned into Erin Jones' "sister" instead of what was written to be a lover.

View attachment 47190

"Nicklass darlin´, why don´t you less Grace and I alonne so
we can get into some unfinished businesss...? ευχαριστώ!​

I’ve been told that sometimes they included Nicholas in their sessions, subjecting him to all sorts of sadistic humiliations

 

[Luke_Krebbs_Ewing]

I’ve been told that sometimes they included Nicholas in their sessions, subjecting him to all sorts of sadistic humiliations

All that S&M can be very tiring. There's an exposé of that sort of thing in volume three of The under-utilisation of the Dynamic Andy Bradley. Great volume, it makes Fifty Shades of Grey read like a Famous Five book!

 

[Taylor Bennett Jr.]

All that S&M can be very tiring. There's an exposé of that sort of thing in volume three of The under-utilisation of the Dynamic Andy Bradley. Great volume, it makes Fifty Shades of Grey read like a Famous Five book!

in that section we meet the *real* Muriel Gillis