Michael Malone

Your identity with One Life to Live was so strong that it's extremely weird to think about you writing any other soap.

Well, it's weird to me, too. This is really like jumping on a train that's been going 100 miles an hour for 30 years. I'm frantically reading backstory and watching tapes and looking at family trees. It's a huge amount to assimilate.

One of the things that drew me to AW [is] the very strong family possibilities. You still have the Corys and the Hudsons and the Frames. Even though some of the history has gone away, it can still be brought back into focus. It's just a matter of taking the camera lens and turning it a different way. On OLTL, Viki and Dorian were certainly pivots around whom I could cluster a lot of new story, but looking back, probably 75 percent of the people now on the show are people I brought in -- Todd, Marty, Blair, Nora, Hank, R.J., all the Angel Square people. On AW, there's a new generation that's very strong -- Amanda and Matt and Vicky. Jensen Buchanan alone is a gold mine!

My first goal is to bring back people who've previously watched the show. Once you can shore that up, then you can go out and snare those new viewers -- but that's hard. As Sunset Beach shows, it's very hard. You have to have the balance. Young people don't just want to watch young people, they want family relationships, multigenerational stories, young people who are in conflict with their parents. On the other hand, you have to consistently bring in fresh blood. One of the dangers of soap operas and their continuing storytelling is that they can start to turn in on themselves so that pretty soon, any one character has murdered 10 people or married 15. They say there are only two stories, really -- a stranger comes to town and somebody leaves home. You have to bring that stranger to town to generate that "Oh, my God, what's gonna happen next?" kind of energy. That is the heart of storytelling.

That certainly was true of me at OLTL. My first day of work, I had Luna drop out of the sky -- literally. I also immediately brought in Blair. My strategy at AW will be different. At first, I'll be working with what's here -- and then bring that stranger to town.

I haven't watched. But I have to tell you, I am so happy that Claire is in Llanview. I feel that she will cherish and treasure those characters and give them room to breathe. The ones that seem to be gasping for breath, she will give them oxygen.

When you take the risk to do what seems controversial, you engage viewers. This is, after all, soap opera. And it should be like opera -- big, bold and full of desires pitched at a passionate level where there is great loss and gain. My hope is to take a great big spoon and stir up Bay City.

When they asked Elvis, "Who do you sing like?" he said, "I don't sing like nobody but me." Well, I don't write like nobody but me. To try to copy Days would be folly. Besides, when the network says, "Be more like Days," what they really mean is, "Get those ratings up!" But I think there is a lesson to be learned from Days' success. It's not its cartoonlike quality. It's that Days is a world consistent within itself. That world is large and compelling and absolutely consistent -- and when you step into that world, it's like stepping into a fairy tale. You believe a fairy tale because it is consistent. Days is Jim Reilly's fantasy. It is Jim Reilly's opera. Now, I certainly do operatic things, too -- to me, Megan's death [on OLTL] was an opera. But that's very different from Days. I hope, on AW, that you're gonna see another kind of largeness. You'll see stories in which characters are laughing a lot more and crying a lot more. And desiring a lot more. Carl and Rachel, Felicia, Grant -- these are very big characters. But we'll still have very high romance with Jake and Vicky and Bobby. And an absolutely believable, very real marriage with Paulina and Joe, and people like Sophia and Matt who are very appealing, engaging youngsters struggling with all those yearnings and hurts that young people feel. It's all about balance. The only thing that worries me about working in this field -- as opposed to writing novels -- is that [the Powers That Be] get scared. They'll say, "We can't make such and such a character that bad," or "We can't make this character see the ghost." The only way to engage the audience is to be fearless -- to let someone be that bad, to let them see that ghost, to let them be possessed. That's the sort of boldness Days has.

That's my first challenge -- to make Bobby and Vicky work. Now, keep in mind, I just started March 17 -- my stuff isn't going to show up on-air till the middle of May. But Bobby and Vicky have been treading water. Soon they're going to start splashing and swimming for various shores.

Well, we don't know that if there ain't no story!

Yes, but it won't be a lovey-dovey chemistry -- it'll be the dangerous kind.

One would never, ever throw away best friends when they're a man and a woman -- this is another gold mine.

Well, that's good, isn't it?

You can safely say that Bobby, Vicky and Jake will be intimately engaged in a very dramatic way.

We're turning this into a great story for Judi. This is a deeply emotional issue for a lot of people in this country. We want to explore it very honestly.

She seems to be.

Yes. That's why I'm hoping we can do this story in such a way that we can really see again what this actress can do. She's quite capable.

A real story. I also want to see the Carlinos more in that working world where everything doesn't come easily. We'll also see that with the Burrells -- Etta Mae and her daughter, Toni. I'd like to bring in more of that family.

I hadn't thought about that. It seems like an interesting idea. I wouldn't count on it. But you can expect that problems will strike Josie and Gary. Usually when people get into the relationship or the marriage, that's when the novel or the movie ends -- they live happily ever after. But in daytime, they have to walk out of the church and get hit by a car.

I see in Josie and Gary a lot of struggle, torment, ambitions and frustrations that aren't being played. I want to give them real problems.

I certainly will. I've got a very extravagant fantasy for her. [Note: John Aprea who, as Lucas, was Dano's most successful AW love interest, will return to the show Thurs., May 1. He will play Greek shipping tycoon Achilles Nikos.]

I have no plans for that, but I absolutely want to bring back [some of] the McKinnons. With a real tent-pole character like Jake, we need to have a family around him. I also want more [economic] balance on AW, more minorities, more people struggling. I want to bring in more young people and put them in a reality that makes young viewers say, "Hey, I live in that world!" -- the way we did by bringing the college campus, and Todd and Marty, to Llanview.

I haven't had any thoughts about that.

I have learned you never say never. I'm never, ever again saying that I'm not going to do something. Or that so-and-so is never coming back from the dead. Because, inevitably, it happens.

I think that he is wonderful in the torment that underlies his villainy. His passion and obsessiveness is very dramatic and I want to do more with that.

We are going to see her in all her former, unpredictable glory and there may be a new man in her life.

Out of the antagonism between me and Linda often came wonderful things. I admire her brains and her courage and her great esteem for the talent of the writer. She knows when to back off and say, "OK, do it your way."

What Bourbon Street was supposed to be and what it turned out to be were two different things. To me, the thrill of the show was that we were going to take the form that I love, which is the five-times-a-week storytelling of daytime, and do it at 11 o'clock at night. And because it was on Fox, we were going to be freer to take risks, experiment, push the envelope in ways the traditions of daytime don't allow. And we were going to have the enormous thrill of starting from page one. And it was going to be set in New Orleans, which, as a Southerner, was very appealing to me. Fox's commitment to the show by then-president John Matoian was marvelous. We proceeded ahead but then the regime changed. A new president came in with a whole new administration that didn't feel Fox was ready to take on that late-night slot.

Right. I was very concerned and disappointed. You can't take a show conceived to run five nights a week and turn it to a once a week show. In the first place, there are too many characters, and the stories are too interlaced to shrink it that way. We had way more secrets and connections between characters than a weekly show could hold. We had to get rid of several characters, we had to collapse several -- and when you start to do that, you start to lose story. And you get more cautious -- I mean, this soap had voodoo and ghosts in it. New Orleans always felt to me to be a perfect place for a soap opera -- very steamy, full of secrets and tangled pasts. Anyway, prime time doesn't interest me because, frankly, it's mostly formulaic. It suffers from tremendous network interference, and it's ultimately boring. And so, what happened was Bourbon Street kept changing and changing and becoming less and less like itself and then finally everybody just agreed it wasn't working.

Oh, yeah! The pilot. It's beautiful. Would you like to see it?

Absolutely -- and all the sets built.

Everything was in place. An entire staff -- and you know the kind of staff you need to do a five times a week show! We had Lonette McKee and John Beck as the leads, and a lot of really good young people you wouldn't know. After it died, I had some interest from prime time -- but as I said, that bores me. And movies are all about taking lunch.

Thank you for saying that.

Yes, I do. Absolutely. Today, there are so many frustrations brought on by panic over the loss of audience. I hear a great deal of contempt for this form from people who know nothing about it, who have no idea of the talent that's required. Musical comedy and daytime are the two great original forms. They're also about the last American machines that work. I have a great faith in the daytime viewers. They have incredible guts and patience and, if you are honest with them, they will go with you to far places. This notion that soap operas are all about hot tubs is ridiculous. Soap opera is about desires -- of all sorts. And so is War and Peace.