Word: soaping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Years ago, when radio serials were somewhat thin, actors were told to speak in "soap count," a half-step tempo. Thus many characters slur their speech, which suggests a speech impediment or drunkenness. The latter should never be discounted; social drinking seems moderate, but alcoholism now rates as soapland's top personal problem...
There is reason, other than art, for these fates. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then soaps are contrived in a public meeting?writers, producers and the public all pitching in. At a hint of disapproval from the audience, the snappiest soap plot can collapse...
This is understandable. Soaps were originally intended to be nothing more than subliminal salesmen. Back in 1933, when their first successful soap, Oxydol's Own Ma Perkins, was aired in Chicago, Procter & Gamble's commercials were skillfully buried in the plot. Writers prided themselves on a seamless blend of message and drama. Irna Phillips, the seminal soap writer who dominated the genre for 40 years, even thought she should forgo her credit to enhance the shows' realism. It was Phillips who anchored the soap to the family and peopled it with professionals. The youngest of an Iowa grocer...
...latter three soaps are owned by Procter & Gamble, which remains convinced that Phillips' homely style requires no updating. The last big-time soap sponsor, P&G runs the shows from Cincinnati with Kremlin-like authority. P & G's six serials (which also include Edge of Night, Somerset and Search for Tomorrow) are reworkings of conventional material and have little of the dash of the newer dramas. "I guess we're awfully dull," admits Joe Willmore, who directs the writers of As the World Turns. "I hate to say it, but I don't want to preach to people about social...
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...