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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 389559" data-attributes="member: 57984">BBG was in the uncomfortable position of having to re-negotiate her contract at the same time she was requesting a reduced workweek (apparently, a temporary one, until she'd fully recovered from the heart surgery, she'd had a year before).Lorimar executives apparently balked and threatened to bring in a new actress. BBG's agent seemed to think it was a ploy, so once Barbara realized they were serious, she got on the phone herself and tried to fix it. But it was too late -- a new actress had been hired.So Bel Geddes was, in fact, fired.Reportedly, Katzman loved the dithery, unthreatening Donna Reed. But Katzman and Paulsen quickly realized that Reed had been miscast. And you see that they quickly began cutting back her scenes almost immediately, because they weren't working. But there must have been miscommunication somewhere at Lorimar, because someone then extended Reed's contract from 1 year to 3 years.Producers quietly approached Bel Geddes near the end of that season, presumably gave her the raise she'd requested, and now that another year had passed, BBG had recovered enough to commit to a full workload.Donna Reed found out about her own firing on an airport tarmac in France. She sued, and although she likely would have lost (depending on the judge) Lorimar paid her a settlement to get the story out of the press.Reed said that "she wasn't privy to" the idea that she'd been brought in as a temporary replacement for Miss Ellie, and I'm sure she wasn't, and that wasn't the original plan. Her assertions that Larry wasn't very nice to her are utterly believable (as were Dack Rambo's) because he wanted her gone. Her claims that she was deliberately given "monster lighting," because the cinematographer was told to by the producers, is nowhere in evidence.Later, after Reed and her surviving relatives began making resentful comments about Barbara, the executives -- trying to avoid insulting Reed as she was already seen as their victim -- eventually gently piled on BBG and insisted that the former queen of Broadway had left DALLAS in a snooty misstep and then called and demanded her role back after "jealously watching another actress" in her part of Miss Ellie (even though Barbara hadn't watched the show that season, requesting tapes of it so she could catch up on the action before returning).Both actresses were victimized. I</blockquote>

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