Word: restlessness
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...become more "relevant" and, sometimes, realistic. Today it is common to see such queasy subjects as abortion, incest, drug addiction and venereal disease meshing with the old, familiar workings of unhappy families. This produces the kind of intense melodrama rarely seen in the evening. Currently, The Young and the Restless is helping a woman through a mastectomy with almost excessive realism. All My Children recently took six months to describe a child-abuse case; How to Survive a Marriage (now defunct) introduced a precedent-setting seduction scene that ended up with the participants in bed discussing impotence and frigidity...
Writers are the kingpins of the soaps. William J. Bell, who writes what the trade calls the "bible"?or twelve-month outline ?for Days of Our Lives, and scripts for his own soap, The Young and the Restless, earns more than $1 million a year. Patricia Falken-Smith, Days of Our Lives head writer, takes home $250,000, plus $35,000 just for "thinking creatively." The two senior writers under her make up to $100,000 each. Bell is probably even richer than Agnes Nixon, the writer who has welded Phillips' home truths to such trendy themes...
...does one write a successful soap opera? Characterization is the key to a soap's success. When William Bell first thought of The Young and the Restless in 1973, he had in mind only the poor Foster family supported by a wrung-out mom, and the quartet of well-to-do, glamorous Brooks sisters, mired in sibling rivalry. "I look for things that touch people's lives," he explains. "I'm disappointed if my shows don't produce tears from the audience three times a week." Agnes Nixon defines the difference between daytime and prime-time drama as "the suffering...
...test popularity. Last spring Millionaire Mack Corey, the indulgent husband of Rachel on Another World, was injured in a polo match and temporarily paralyzed from the waist down so his wife would be tempted to fool around. A similar ploy was used by Bell on The Young and the Restless. When Jennifer Brooks went off with a lover, she went out of focus. Says Bell: "I knew I had to pull back. How more dramatically than to put her on center stage?" Jennifer left her lover and got breast cancer...
...that was what she earned that year. I was horrified." Now Ryan believes that the soaps subsidize Broadway: "If it weren't for them, there would be no actors left in New York." In Los Angeles, where General Hospital, Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless are made, a soap job is almost equally important. Three hundred and fifty actresses showed up recently for a Days audition...