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A new soap is born
(1982)
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| They all attended a special dinner to pay tribute to John Conboy for different reasons. For some it was to pay homage to a man who had given them their first job. For Jeanne Cooper (Kay, ”The Young and the Restless”), it was to thank a man who has given her the opportunity to show what she could really do as an actress. It was a tape featuring her in four of the five acts of the half-hour version of ”The Young and the Restless” that resulted in the only Emmy Award for best daytime drama the show ever received, To others, such as Michael Damian (Danny), it represented a chance to appreciate the man who gave him his first break; and to Soap Opera Digest publisher Fred Klein, it was the opportunity to present John Conboy with the Soap Opera Digest editors’ and publisher’s Soapy Award. |
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Nine
years ago
John changed the face of daytime by casting his show with beautiful people
and lighting them as no soap had ever done before. He eliminated the
standard organ music and underscored ”Young and Restless” with the
precision of a high-budget movie. Among the stars whose careers he has
launched are Tom Selleck, who is now ”Magnum P.l.,” Brian Erwin, who
went on to do ”Sheriff Lobo,” Donna Mills of ”Knots Landing,” who
worked for him on his previous soap, ”Love Is A Many Splendora Thing,”
as did ”General Hospital” star Leslie Charleston, and current daytime
superstar Tony Geary, who played a rapist in Y&R’s early years. John
has currently embarked on a major project that will give him the chance to
show what he’s learned in the last nine years he worked on Y&R. You
can be sure his new Washington D.C.-themed daytime drama, ”Capitol,” is
going to change the face of daytime again. After all the excitement of the award ceremony was over, John Conboy and I looked into his future and back at his recent past. ”I’ve been working on ’Capitol’ for a year and a half now,” he revealed. ”When the order for the show came, we started seeing people right away. In the month before we went into production, I’d say we saw over a thousand people. I myself looked at about two hundred actors and actresses before we were able to narrow it down further for screen-tests. On March 5th we started shooting in Washington D.C. and we didn’t have our entire cast signed until the week preceding our location shoot.” |
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Since
John worked on an hour show the last few years, how does he feel about doing
a half hour again? ”I think everyone knows how I felt about taking the
half-hour show and going to an hour. I resisted it and resisted it and
resisted it. I think a half-hour format is the perfect amount of time for
putting a new show on the air. I was a little ambivalent, but I think
’Young and Restless’ is probably the prototype of what has happened to
daytime and I think with Bill Bell’s (the show’s head writer) help, we
made that show into something we all can be proud of. The show is solid,
it’s on its feet, it will stay on the air without me. If I had felt my
leaving would have jeopardized the product, I probably would have thought
long and hard about leaving, because there’s so much of me in the show.” |
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’Capitol’
is a very different show in that it has an upwardly mobile young
cast.
I have just cast 20 roles and will be casting 16 more in the long haul of
the first year. They’re young and they’re beautiful, but my canvas is
a little bigger on this one. It’s a bigger scope that has mom edges. It’s
not just a love story, as I’ve said for years that Y&R is. There is
a little more intrigue involved in ’Capitol.’ Washington, D.C. is the
backdrop for the show, which is the story of two political families, one
having been ruined by the other during the McCarthy era. We’re able to
talk about things like that and weave through the personal struggles of
these people, which are not that different from the struggles of anybody
else except that it’s the political arena they’re struggling in. It
gives me a broader canvas to paint on, so that if I really want to do
something that parallels an event of national significance, I can have a
little fun with it and do it on ’Capitol.’” |
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John
Conboy insists that any resemblance his show bears to Shakespeare’s
”Romeo and Juliet” is purely a coincidence. ”We created the brothers
of the McCandless family first and then the Clegg family and arrived with
our ingenue. In the McCandless family, we had already created possibly the
next president 10 to 15 years down the line and had them fall in love.
It’s a forbidden love because of the two feuding families. It just
happened that way – we’re not trying to tell ’Romeo and Juliet.’”
The Soapy Award was bestowed on John Conboy because the editors and the
publisher of this magazine felt he changed the look and image of daytime
television when ”Young and Restless” premiered. They felt he, more
than anyone else, was originally responsible for precipitating the current
”youth movement” in soaps, and for the addition of so many
”beautiful people” to daytime drama. We wish John the greatest success
with ”Capitol,” because never before in his distinguished career in
daytime, has he gambled more of himself than with this new brainchild. CBS
knew that if anybody can catapult a soap to the top, John Conboy is the
man for the job. |
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1. Deborah Adair (Jill Abbott, Y&R) and Michael
Damian (Danny Romalotti, Y&R) 2. Constance Towers (Clarissa McCandless, CAPITOL) 3. Towers and Y&R's Executive Producer John Conboy 4. Conboy and Jamie Lyn Bauer (Laurie Brooks, Y&R) 5. Conboy with his friend Donna Mills (Abby Fairgate, KL) 6. Fred Klein, publisher of Soap Opera Digest, presents Conboy with the Soapy Award for his outstanding contributions to daytime television 7. Conboy with Towers, Carolyn Jones and Ed Nelson (Myrna Clegg and Mark Denning, CAPITOL) 8. Damian and his pal Kin Shriner (Scott Baldwin, GENERAL HOSPITAL) 9. Y&R's producer Wes Kenney, Bauer and Conboy 10. Liberace, Catherine Hickland (Dr. Courtney Marshall, TEXAS) and David Hasselhoff (Dr. Snapper Foster, Y&R) |
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