Counting Lines

[stevea]

Over on the FOL board they are counting the number of lines each character has in each episode. Since 1/4/21 they have nine pages of posts.

Any comments on this? I'll restrain myself from opining until I hear from others...

[GentlemanJim]

I believe that the "isolate at home" aspect of our strategy for dealing with Covid 19 presents MANY consequences that few of us anticipated.

Might be just me, but personally I suspect the over zealousness of the "social justice" demonstrations we saw this past summer were at least partially fueled by "cabin fever", as well.
I'm sure some interesting books will be written analyzing mass behavior.

[RetroGuy2000]

Originally Posted by stevea

Over on the FOL board they are counting the number of lines each character has in each episode. Since 1/4/21 they have nine pages of posts.

Any comments on this? I'll restrain myself from opining until I hear from others...

Opine away!

We are counting the lines because Lisa Whelchel said they never counted their lines, while John Lawlor, Felice Schachter, and Pamela Adlon said they did. This made us wonder how many lines they actually had.

[stevea]

Ah! That's why I didn't opine yet.

Maybe I needed to read some of it. I wonder how many other actors do this, and whether they go to their friends and complain when they're shortchanged. And whether writers pore over scripts and adjust the number of lines.

[TSMIV]

Originally Posted by stevea

Ah! That's why I didn't opine yet.

Maybe I needed to read some of it. I wonder how many other actors do this, and whether they go to their friends and complain when they're shortchanged. And whether writers pore over scripts and adjust the number of lines.

Supposedly Larry Hagman did it on IDOJ.

[stevea]

Fascinating--if he did that with Barbara Eden, he probably did it on Dallas, too.

[RetroGuy2000]

Originally Posted by stevea

Ah! That's why I didn't opine yet.

Maybe I needed to read some of it.

You'd of course be most welcome over there, but there's no need. Much of it probably wouldn't even make sense to the casual viewer.

Leave it to Beaver was a family-oriented sitcom, and the cast in the opening credits stayed from beginning to end: no-one in the opening credits got bumped off the show. This is quite unlike The Facts of Life, which over the years had fifteen cast members in the opening credits... but only three actresses stayed from the beginning to the end.

Imagine, for a moment if Tony Dow did an interview where he said, "I enjoyed being on Leave it to Beaver, but during Season Five, I noticed I didn't have very many lines. As the season went along, it seemed to get worse with every episode. Sometimes, my character would even leave partway through the episode. I went to the producers, but they just told me they were 'working on it'. At the end of the season, they explained they decided the show was going in a different direction, and the character of Wally wasn't needed anymore. I went to the network and pleaded my case, but they just said the character had run its course. I was gone. Wally was no more."

So it was with many Facts of Life actors/characters.

Felice Schachter (who played the character of Nancy Olsen) has done several interviews where she talks about her declining role on the show: how she was the lead girl in the pilot, but after that, her role was "severely diminished" (around the 4:30 mark). She went to the producers, and they told her they were working on her character, but... nothing changed. They kept making excuses as to why she had no lines, no role, no part. Her character of Nancy became walking scenery: in the episode, but with almost no lines. After a while, her parts in the show were more like brief cameos. In the final two episodes of the first season, Nancy leaves the episodes early, and does not take part in the main storyline. In the final script, Nancy sadly discovers she didn't make it into the exclusive clique the other girls made it into. Over the summer hiatus, Felice learned, too, that she didn't make the cut, and she was off the show. It must have come as no surprise. Mindy Cohn has stated, and fans of the show agree, that Felice "got a bum deal".

John Lawlor, Pamela Adlon, Geri Jewell, Molly Ringwald, and George Clooney have said similar things: they originally had a big part, but then gradually they noticed they weren't getting a lot of lines or their parts were very small (Pamela talks about "redlining", Geri talks about "calculated moves"), they went to the producers, the producers promised things that never happened (Molly says the producers said she would still be on the show, but then reneged), and then... they were "made free" (John's words: "I don't want to be 'free'!"): let go from the show.

On the FOL forum, the "line situation" is a recurring topic; when a character is being phased out, but the actor/actress doesn't know it yet, they are being "Nancied".

Ironically, in the same interview where Felice talks about her declining role, Lisa Whelchel talks about how there was "never any counting of the lines" on The Facts of Life. We love Lisa, of course, but she was clearly out of touch with how other actors and actresses felt.

I wonder how many other actors do this, and whether they go to their friends and complain when they're shortchanged. And whether writers pore over scripts and adjust the number of lines.

We have many of the scripts from FOL, and there were a lot of lines cut between scripting and the actual production. Sometimes, lines were reassigned to other actors, or were just cut out entirely.

[stevea]

Fascinating! I have most of the FOL DVD seasons (plus recording what I could from the supposedly-unedited showings on Comcast On-Demand years ago) , but of course you never get these detailed backstories.

Even the casual viewer can see the changes between the first and second seasons, but certainly not all the actor grief behind them.

I would really like some original scripts from Beaver, as there are several slightly-shortened episodes from season 3. One particular mystery includes an episode which does not appear short on the DVD, but has missing lines, IMO. The episode is "June's Birthday", and I swear I have heard these lines years ago, when 16mm films were sent around station to station. I heard indirectly from a guy who assisted in the DVD production, that these possible lines were at the point where they had nearly run out of 35mm film during the scene, and it may have been cut due to being damaged near the end. It may have made it onto 16mm copies, and my guess is, if true, it probably looked lousy. So if the 35mm existed, it probably wasn't used years ago when sitcom episodes were mastered to videotape.

[RetroGuy2000]

Originally Posted by stevea

Fascinating! I have most of the FOL DVD seasons (plus recording what I could from the supposedly-unedited showings on Comcast On-Demand years ago) , but of course you never get these detailed backstories.

Even the casual viewer can see the changes between the first and second seasons, but certainly not all the actor grief behind them.

Yeah, the DVDs for Seasons 1 and 2 do have some nice interviews from the original cast, including interviews with Felice and Julie Anne Haddock, but it's definitely harder to find some other, less flattering interviews. Reelz Channel put together an amazing documentary last year which revealed many untold stories, so that was a nice surprise.

I would really like some original scripts from Beaver, as there are several slightly-shortened episodes from season 3. One particular mystery includes an episode which does not appear short on the DVD, but has missing lines, IMO. The episode is "June's Birthday", and I swear I have heard these lines years ago, when 16mm films were sent around station to station. I heard indirectly from a guy who assisted in the DVD production, that these possible lines were at the point where they had nearly run out of 35mm film during the scene, and it may have been cut due to being damaged near the end. It may have made it onto 16mm copies, and my guess is, if true, it probably looked lousy. So if the 35mm existed, it probably wasn't used years ago when sitcom episodes were mastered to videotape.

I know exactly what you mean about wanting to see if the scene got cut or what. This site does have six Leave it to Beaver scripts for sale, reasonably inexpensively, too. I have used them in the past for FOL scripts. Not sure if any of them are the "right" season, though.

[stevea]

Interesting! I think S2 is one of the sets I have.

[TSMIV]

Originally Posted by stevea

Fascinating--if he did that with Barbara Eden, he probably did it on Dallas, too.

He ad libbed a lot on Dallas.