This sounds like fun!
http://www.mainecoastnow.com/articles/2007...5d827350307.txtBy Charles Wilder Oakes
Wrangling Johnny Depp and Barnabas Collins as a 2Fer
By Charles Wilder Oakes
(Created: Friday, October 26, 2007 2:11 PM EDT) More Port Clyde America
So listen-up, this up-coming Tuesday, the 30th, at 8 pm, I'm going to be on WRFR 93.3 Rockland, ME, 99.3 Camden, ME, with Jo and Cheech on the "Jo and Cheech Radio Hour"again. This time I'm all about doing a Hallowe'en themed program, based to some degree at least on that old-soap-opera-sudser, "Dark Shadows", that creepy-crawly over the top tv show from the 1960's that was chock-a-block full of just about every plot twist and creatures of the night imaginable. Hell, some of those shows inspired some really great nightmares.
Venerable Shakespearean stage actor Jonathan Frid, (top) became TVs moody and brooding "vampire with a heart," Barnabas Collins, in the 1960s supernatural cult classic, "Dark Shadows." Now internationally acclaimed super star actor Johnny Depp (below) is going to don Barnabas’ cape and perchance to reprise the mystique, magic, and romance yet one more time again, from out of the dredges of the misty lanes of ol' Collinsport, Maine.
The last time I was on was on with "Jo and Cheech" was in mid-July when I did the Neil Diamond reflections. That bit of tribute was also meant to highlight my finishing up the self-portrait I did, "being" a teen-age Neil Diamond back in the early mid-1970's when Neil and I were both much younger men.
It's been a long week boys and girls. Between making the whole upstairs be entirely studio space now, and all that entailed, and building a easel. . .no make that a CRADLE for the 7 x 8 foot panels on which will go the "Angel painting", corresponding with Britt the documentary writer from Salt Institute for Documentary studies, and then doing my own writing as well as fitting in some painting, I'm ready for the weekend.
Today wraps up the landscaping end of it where my landscaping contractor Nate from Granite Gardens has been working his magic with the back hoe, and we've been hard at it planting these great looking trees back in. Big treees, too, some of them 7 footers or more. What a difference. They create such a sense of "anchor" for eyes to look at.
So about Dark Shadows.
In my recent re-arranging of my upstairs studio, I found that old Phillips album that came out in 1969 with all the original Dark Shadows music. I dusted it off and put it on my turntable and found a groove I'd pretty much if not laid away, then certainly laid back on. All those old memories came flooding back though, and so it's inspired some writing and I dug out a bunch of old drawings I did several years ago, for a Stephen King, Barnabas Collins painting I wanted to do. I don't know if I'll ever do it, I got plenty on my plate as it is, but it was sure timely, and gave me a lot to think about. Amazing I'd managed to hang onto that album all this time and my mother didn't heave it or something during one of her rabid heave stuff out spells she used to go into. I had Alice Cushman pick it up for me sometime in 1969 when W.T. Grants was still in business in Rockland. My folks never had a car, so that's what I had to do to make things happen. She was nice enough to do it for me.
So Dark Shadows. . .we'll have to go back to a time before Maine's horrormeister Stephen King and his book "Carrie" came along. Dark Shadows turned out to be quite the rage at the time. It was a popular Gothic daytime soap opera drama on ABC (channel 8, around these parts). It premiered on June 27th, 1966 and ran through to it's "staking off" on April 2 , of 1971.
Although it has been highly syndicated through video and book formats, for those of us who may remember, Dark Shadows was planted right here in our dear ol' pine tree state, in the fishing village of "Collinsport, Maine" and centered mainly around the spooky estate of "Collinwood", and the even creepier "Old House". Collinsport and the Collins family and estate comprised a truly wonky town. One more than half-filled with hosts of shiftless ungrateful undead, that just wouldn't do the R.I.P. thing right, and "stay put", six feet in under them headstones.
Dark Shadows started out as a more-or-less regular kind of soap opera, although with Gothic overtones. It centered around a governess named Victoria Winters who comes to work for the Collins family, and who is searching for clues to her own past. About six months into the show a ghost was introduced to the plot line, and ratings went up, and producer Dan Curtis felt this was just the ticket to ride Dark Shadows into a whole new twist of a soap opera -- and it wasn't long after the ghost appearing that a Phoenix character was added, and some time a bit later was destroyed in a fiery conflagration in a fishing shack on the Collinsport waterfront.
And that was how Dark Shadows went from a rather benign and run-of-the mill (if atmospheric) story line and mutated into t.v.'s first soap opera-horror show (in more ways than one). It was live t.v. -- 5 days a week and with little rehearsal time, the stressed actors regularly flubbed their lines and other things were continually going awry -- "gravestones" teetered back and forth as "ghosts" walked by them, (ala those old Ed Wood movies), or sometimes whole sets wiggled when doors were slammed shut -- boom mics and stray snaking cables were regularly seen, as were cameras and cameramen in prop mirrors -- that sort of thing. But still and all, with it's compelling story lines drawn and borrowed from the likes of E. A. Poe and Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and H.P. Lovecraft, it made for a wildly popular and the genuine article must see tv. Kids and teens alike watched Dark Shadows often much to the consternation of parents and teachers, whole school boards, and even (or perhaps especially) the clergy.
Produced on a budget that pretty much resembled a loose ends shoestring, Dark Shadows evolved into an original and rather as often as not campy tour de force show; one where vampires, zombies, ghosts, ghouls, spell casting gypsies, witches, warlocks and cursed full-moon besieged werewolves and other assorted Doppelgänger denizens ruled and otherwise fled through the shadows of the night. Basically in Collinsport, Maine, it was "open season" on the town folks and all manner of supernatural creatures preyed upon the hapless living, who much like in any other horror story or movie, are all just trying to get by.
This was the original "jump off the school bus and run home to see" series to beat all -- most particularly after April 17, 1967, when Barnabas Collins was introduced into the mix, you could have heard an iconic pin drop. And it did. Barnabas turned out to be a 172 year old vampire "cousin" of the Collins family -- (he was ACTUALLY the ORIGINAL Barnabas Collins from 1795 who was cursed by the witch Angelique and later chained in a coffin in the Collins cemetery mausoleum all those years until 1967).
Jonathan Frid, who played the role of Barnabas, was as unlikely a star to ever be catapulted into the stratosphere of overnight celebrity. Frid evidentially tolerated all the fanfare, but was quickly (as he feared) typecast, and though he did ONE of the TWO Dark Shadows movies, "House of Dark Shadows" that was released in 1970 at the height of the tv shows popularity, Frid balked at the next movie altogether, and it was not long after Dark Shadows (the tv series) went off the air, that Frid left TV and movies to enter a more private life in Ontario, Canada where he still resides. Frid semi-retired from the stage altogether in the mid 1990's. In 1999, he collaborated with writer Malia Howard on a full career biography, "Jonathan Frid, an Actor's Curious Journey", which was published in 2001.
Still and all, in the aftermath of it's remaining years on the air, Dark Shadows became forever more a genuine American cultural phenomenon. One whose fan base still goes on to this day, particularly with it's yearly Dark Shadows Convention and Festival, held annually since 1983, usually in New York or Los Angeles, where a good many of the original and surviving (it's been some 36 years since Dark Shadows went off the air, let's not forget) cast members unite with fans from all over the world.
In my research about Dark Shadows I discovered in a "what is old is new again" kind of way that actor Johnny Depp has just acquired the rights this past summer from the Dan Curtis estate to revive the Jonathan Frid role of Barnabas Collins in a new movie remake of Dark Shadows. So it will evedentally not be long before Dark Shadows comes of age once again for a whole new audience and generation. Proving perhaps, you just can't keep a good story line much less a decent vampire down for too awfully long when all is said and done.