Trump takes Miss Ellie’s name in vain

[Kenny Coyote]

It's tricky. An actor may know their character backwards, but be less aware of the bigger picture, of the purpose they serve as one small cog in the overall story-telling machine.

Also, on a long-running series, there's the potential pitfall of an actor being so closely identified with their character that they don't wish to be seen saying or doing something on screen that could lose them the audience's sympathy. The cliched argument, "My character wouldn't do something like that" might really mean, "I don't want to be seen doing something like that."

There is no pitfall because the producer or showrunner, whatever they're naming the top person in charge, still has control of the final product.

Notice I said: "I'm in favor of the cast having some creative input over their characters. Sometimes the actors know their character better than the writers do."

Creative input is good, particularly with the actors who know their character very well and are also highly creative because you never know when they may have a good idea. Allowing them input has at worst, an end result of the producer rejecting a suggestion the actor makes.

I didn't say to give them creative control. There's a distinct difference between allowing them to contribute ideas that may or may not be used and giving them the power to use their own ideas whenever they want.

The counter-argument is that it's the actor's job to find a way to make what they're saying believable. When we interviewed David Jacobs (clang), he said that while he welcomed input from the cast of Knots Landing, Julie Harris, the most experienced actor on the show, only questioned one line of dialogue in seven years. He happily changed it for her, but then she went with the line as originally written anyway -- because (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here) she believed that the text was sacred and that it was the actor's job to breathe life into it.

I suppose that works if the writers know the character better than the actor does.

In Larry Hagman's case he actually was a Texan, born 60 miles outside of Dallas. He knew how people there speak. Suppose a writer from New York gave him a script and Hagman said: "JR would never say that line that way." Would you tell him to just use the New Yorker's words and somehow "make it believable"? Or would you rather have him say it in a way that the style and the terminology are authentic to his character?

 

[James from London]

There is no pitfall because the producer or showrunner, whatever they're naming the top person in charge, still has control of the final product.

The network ultimately has control of the final product. If an actor is considered sufficiently important to a series, the network might well overrule the producer in any conflict between the two. David Jacobs has said that one of the advantages of Knots Landing being less successful than Dallas was it wasn't subject to the same interference from the network; it was able to fly under the radar and was generally left to its own devices. How that interference in Dallas from the network manifested itself I don't know -- these things are rarely made public -- but it's one of the reasons I've never been very comfortable with the "everything that [allegedly] went wrong with Dallas is automatically Leonard Katzman's fault" line of thinking. I know from British television that the producer does not necessarily have control of every decision, whatever the tabloids would have people believe.

Suppose a writer from New York gave him a script and Hagman said: "JR would never say that line that way." Would you tell him to just use the New Yorker's words and somehow "make it believable"? Or would you rather have him say it in a way that the style and the terminology are authentic to his character?

When I interviewed David Paulsen [clang], he said that he and/or Katzman would take a pass at any script commissioned from an outside writer to the extent of rewriting the whole episode if necessary (uncredited), before it was put in front of the actors, so such an instance probably wouldn't have arisen. From what I understand, that's pretty much standard practice.

 

[Seaviewer]

Dallas would have been my first awareness of Donna, but I'm struggling to remember details of the surrounding publicity in UK papers and how they summarised her. I do seem to remember her housewife image being mentioned, but that's could simply be a case of a bio being lifted from one place and pasted into another.

The Donna Reed Show was on here for a long time with afternoon reruns continuing into the 70s, as with a lot of classic sitcoms only the arrival of colour television finally putting an end to them. The initial reaction to her casting on Dallas was one of excited anticipation, at least from my point of view.

 

[Brian Kinney]

Problem with her wasn't the acting (no one can shade that), it was the elegance she brought along. She looked like a sane sister of Lady Jessica Farlow-Montford - and that wasn't a typical Dallas casting either. Alexis Smith had a similar style.
The Donna Reed Show is, according to my mother, a show where a housewife is happy to clean the house in high-heels while thinking the whole day about what to cook. In Germany it was broadcast with the title Mutter ist die allerbeste (The best mother of all) for a few years in the Sixties, it was never re-run and I haven't seen a single episode (my memories start with early 1970's TV). It was popular enough to win two awards as most popular TV-Series in 1964 and 1965 by Germany's largest magazine for teenagers (*). What I've seen of Donna Reed before Dallas were both her classics, It's a Wonderful Life and From Here to Eternity.

Trump wants women stuck in his version of the 1950's. Women in the kitchen. And Blacks or Latinos only to knock at a backdoor to bring food.

 

[Toni]

Problem with her wasn't the acting (no one can shade that), it was the elegance she brought along...

"...Can´t we? Really...?"​

 

[Mustard]

As a teen I didn't know too much about US politics when watching Dallas's early seasons. But somehow I thought (and still think) that Cliff and Donna (Culver then) seemed to be Democrats and J.R. and Jock Republicans. Wrong? I know it was only hinted but I assumed that was another reason why Cliff and Donna didn't get along with J.R. ?

I do think that Cliff and Donna are Democrats, and Bobby too, especially when he was a Texas Senator. By Democrats here, I mean Texas Democrats of the 1980s, who would still have a lot of the conservative Dixiecrats as well as some liberals. On the presidential level, I can imagine Bobby voting Republican (like for Ford, Nixon), but Democratic at statewide level in Texas. While the Democratic "Solid South" started breaking up and often voted for Republicans to be president from about 1964 and certainly from 1980, due to nationwide Democratic presidents or candidates supporting civil rights, the Democrats still continued to mostly control or dominate the southern states at the statewide level, where Dixiecrats were still a large presence, until the 1994 "Republican Revolution" which then seriously started to shift the south towards the Republicans in the statewide elections that followed.

So yes, I think Cliff, Donna, Dave, Bobby in the 1980s are Texas Democrats. Dave was elected as a US Senator, by the voters in Texas, so no involvement by voters from outside Texas. Donna would come from a slightly more liberal wing of the Texas Democrats (even though Susan Howard in real life is more on the conservative side). I think Jock Ewing would mostly be voting Republicans for president from about 1940, representing new money in Big Oil, but it wouldn't surprise me if he remained a Texas Democrat for the rest of his life. In 1964 for example, I think Jock definitely votes for Lyndon B. Johnson the Texas Democrat to be president, whereas I think Blake Carrington over in Denver, Colorado, goes for Barry Goldwater the Arizona Republican in that same election. Miss Ellie would be strongly Democratic, with her Southworth roots in the land, representing old money.

Ray definitely voted for Gerald Ford in 1976. Donna mentioned how Jimmy Carter became president from out of nowhere when they were talking about J.R.'s political rise, and Ray responded about Carter with "and all he knew about was peanut farming". There was a famous Ford slogan during the 1976 US presidential election "Don't settle for peanuts. Vote Ford".

That's accurate. It's funny because Larry Hagman was a Democrat in real life, and Susan Howard is a Republican.

When Donna introduced Bobby to Senator Dowling, Bobby said he'd consider voting for him. Donna said "wrong party Bobby," to which Bobby replied "I remember when Reagan was a Democrat." So Bobby was a Republican too, albeit a slightly more ethical one.

I got the impression from that that Bobby was turning more Republican, being a Texas Democrat, hence Donna's comment. That process was slowly going on in the south. What was it by this point? 1986?

The ideological makeup of political parties often changes over time. These days, Republicans and Democrats are more alike than different as the Democrats have shifted towards the right.

It's more complex than that. On social issues, the Democrats and Republicans are far more apart today than in the past (culture wars, anyone?), while they are more similar today (and far less complex) than in the past on economic matters. Democrats in the past had the southern Dixiecrats, who were very right-wing on social matters and so many of them started turning against welfare as a whole when nationwide Democrats started supporting blacks getting welfare. In the past, Democrats and Republicans both had liberal, moderate and conservative wings back then. With the Democrats, you had liberals like the Kennedys in Massachusetts, Dixiecrat racists and conservatives in the south, and with the Republicans you had the "coastal elite" liberals like Rockefeller, Javits, Vermont GOP etc. and the midwest and western conservatives like Goldwater and Reagan. Ford would be a moderate Republican (his wife Betty a liberal Republican), someone like Stevenson would be a moderate Democrat. Nixon as a Republican was hard to define as anything, as he wasn't a conservative, wasn't a moderate, wasn't a liberal, but balanced between all the different wings of the Republicans to be the "strongman" at the top while being obsessed with foreign policy.

The state of Vermont has always been liberal, while Republicanism dominated in the state until the 1980s. It was a northeast liberal Republicanism, rooted in Lincoln era Yankeeism. When the Republicans nationally became more and more conservative in the 1980s, Vermont started trending Democratic, and since 1992 have always gone for the Democratic candidate to be president with a similar sort of dominance to what they used to give Republican candidates. The parties changed much more than the voters in Vermont did. Vermont people, for the most part, were and are overwhelmingly liberal on social issues. As that seemed to die out in the nationwide Republican Party in the 1980s-1990s, Vermont trended massively away from the party on nationwide matters.

 

[Frank Underwood]

I got the impression from that that Bobby was turning more Republican, being a Texas Democrat, hence Donna's comment. That process was slowly going on in the south. What was it by this point? 1986?

It was either 1986 or 1987, so that's certainly possible.

It's more complex than that. On social issues, the Democrats and Republicans are far more apart today than in the past (culture wars, anyone?), while they are more similar today (and far less complex) than in the past on economic matters.

The culture wars are more of a distraction than anything else. It keeps the people divided and fighting amongst themselves, leaving both parties to continue serving their corporate masters unimpeded. Both parties also tend to be extremely hawkish on foreign policy, although they don't always agree on which unnecessary war is the "moral" one. However, they do agree that increased defense spending trumps investing in social programs at home.

Sure, politicians in both parties may lean more left or right than others, but the parties themselves essentially function as a I described. It's been that way for at least 30 years when Bill Clinton ushered in "the new Democrats," which was the response to Republican victories. It seems the Democrats decided if they couldn't beat Republicans, they would become more like them instead. This is less true on social issues, although some are also socially conservative.