Facts You Might NOT Know About Soap
In another thread we wondered about the original actress to play Mary and about Jessica's declaration that she had four kids when we only saw three. This got me started on some research, reading old newspaper and magazine articles from the 70s, and buying a history of Soap that was published last year. For all of you diehard, rabid Soap fans, I'm sharing below some facts that I've found out about the show that y'all might not know.
1. Susan Harris didn't create Soap as a parody of daytime soaps, and it wasn't meant to be ABC's ripoff of Mary Hartman. Harris had written for traditional sitcoms and created one of her own called "Fay". She said it was really hard to write a complete story and resolve it in 22 minutes. She wanted to do a sitcom where the characters could grow and change and stories could arc over multiple episodes. Her ex husband Berkeley Harris was on Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and Susan realized that the soap opera format would be the perfect form for her to tell stories the way she wanted to. She wasn't making fun of soaps at all but adapted that style and conventions of soaps to the sitcom genre. She called Soap a "comedic melodrama". She didn't see it as a parody or a satire.
2. When Soap went to air and became an immediate hit, ABC considered running it in the same format they had used for Peyton Place in the 1960s: twice weekly running year round with no breaks. Harris resisted this because she wrote all the episodes herself in the beginning and didn't think she could keep up with that pace and maintain the quality.
3. The original actress playing Mary was Salome Jens who coincidentally had played Mae Olinski on Mary Hartman. Katherine Helmond said that Jens was a very lovely person and excellent actress, but everyone thought that she was too ethereal, in a style similar to Helmond herself, and also too soft to play Mary. Harris decided that there was more humor in Mary and Jessica being completely dissimilar, and that the central relationship of the story was the two sisters so their casting was the most important.
Katherine Helmond was the first actor cast, but strangely the producers initially didn't want her to read for the part because she was known primarily as a dramatic actress. She found the audition difficult because she wasn't given any direction about the character or how they wanted it played. She based her portrayal of Jessica on a real life friend of her mother from Katherine's childhood. This lady was someone who never let anything in life bother her and always seemed to have an innocent almost childlike fascination with life that made her more of a playmate than an adult. Susan Harris didn't laugh or smile at all during the audition but told Helmond in a very serious tone, "that was funny...very funny."
The hardest parts to cast were Chuck, Corinne, and Benson. Jennifer Salt was actually submitted for Corinne, but during the audition they asked her to read Eunice, too. With Chuck, they couldn't find an actor who could do ventriloquism adequately, so they almost cast one actor to play Chuck and then an offstage voice actor to read Bob's lines. The last two actors cast were Diana Canova and Robert Guillaume in that order. All of actors auditioning for Benson had played the part with either too much militance or too stereotypically obsequious. Diana got the part of Corinne because she dressed conservatively and didn't play Corinne as being sexy. Susan Harris thought that was perfect for Corinne because it made her seem like a nice girl the audience could like without thinking of her as being a slut.
4. Before the pilot was written and shot, Susan Harris wrote a series bible that detailed the story lines and characters over five seasons. Soap was sold to ABC with the general agreement that it would run for five years. Many of the stories and characters in the bible are we what we actually saw, including Danny being Chester's son, which wasn't even revealed until the last season.
5. Some stories and characters either changed or never made it to air. For example, Jessica and Chester's eldest child was actually a son named David. David Tate had gone MIA five years before the action on Soap began. In Vietnam, David had been having an affair with an Asian girl named Noyen Nu. He went missing without knowing she was pregnant. She gave birth to his son Joey Nu Tate. Noyen and Joey were to have gone to Dunn's River to find the Tates. Eventually David would have made it back alive too. It would've turned out that Noyen's father was an opium baron. Meanwhile, Burt had a middle son named Michael who was a smuggler. He was to have kidnapped Joey Nu Tate and held him ransom in exchange for drugs from Noyen's father. David would've searched for them similar to Jody searching for Wendy after she was kidnapped by Carol.
6. Chester had three sisters: Meta, Hezza, and Adja (LOL!) - I'm not making this up.
7. Benson had previously lived in New Orleans where he produced a daughter named Ruby with a light-skinned black woman. She raised Ruby without telling Benson he had a daughter because she wanted Ruby to think that they were white! Ruby would've gone to Dunn's River and was slated to fall in love with Chief of Police Tinkler's son. It would've also been revealed that Tinkler was a segregationist. When Robert Guillaume left for his own sitcom, Harris reworked that plot with Danny and Polly.
8. In the first season, Senator McCallum was going to plot to murder his wife Marilyn to be with Eunice, but there would've been a twist that she was secretly dying. Also, Eunice had been molested by a family member as a young girl and that accounted for her standoffish behavior.
9. The Major's real name was Seymour Gatling. His delusion about the war came about after he went to the front in WWI and flipped out when he discovered that the combat soldiers were using real bullets.
10. Along with Peter and Chuck, Burt's ex-wife Jewel had been scheduled to appear in the first season and make trouble for Burt and Mary.
11. PETER CAMPBELL'S MURDER. There were several changes to what we actually saw. Corinne was supposed to actually catch Jessica and Peter in bed together. Ingrid was to have arrived before Peter's murder, and the revelation that she was Corinne's mother was what drove her to go back to Peter despite him having had an affair with Jessica. Peter's body was to have been discovered by Corinne instead of Burt. In the bible, he wasn't stabbed, shot, strangled, suffocated, and bludgeoned. He was garroted to death on a racquet stringing machine!
The REAL killer was ... NOT CHESTER.
Yes, in the Soap bible, the murderers were Chuck and Bob!!! Susan Harris wanted Chuck to be a psycho similar to the popular novel and subsequent movie Magic. Chuck would've killed Peter but attempted to blame it on Bob, who would've been propped up in the courtroom and pleading the fifth! In another stroke of genius, Bob was to have taken the witness stand and confessed, getting a reduced prison sentence by turning state's evidence against Chuck! The story of Dutch and the prison break was planned, but with Chuck and Bob. All of this was changed because audience reaction was so positive to the characters' comedic timing that Susan Harris decided they couldn't afford to lose them. This created a need to make another character the killer, so it became Chester instead.
The original first season finale as scripted ended with the jury foreman reading Jessica's verdict. Although the producers thought it was obvious that she wasn't guilty, the network was receiving a lot of mail from viewers who thought that she was. ABC asked Susan Harris to change the ending to the freeze frame of Jessica being led away with Rod Roddy's announcement that she was in fact innocent. At that time the writers hadn't made up their mind which of the five characters shown as suspects had actually committed the crime.
12. Richard Mulligan and Cathryn Damon were the most difficult actors to work with according to the directors. Everyone conceded that Mulligan was a comedic genius, but when Burt went nuts in the story, Mulligan apparently identified with the character too much and had a challenging personality onstage. Katherine Helmond said that most of the cast were very close offscreen too, except for Damon. Damon was a New Yorker and living on the West Coast was miserable for her. She had no friends or family there and would fly home on the weekends after taping, so although everyone liked her, she was somewhat aloof and hard to know beyond a professional level. Mulligan's improvisations also drove her crazy because she never knew what he might do on camera. The directors called the Campbell set DCLR for Dreadful Campbell Living Room because they always knew those scenes would be hard with Damon and Mulligan in them.
13. Susan Harris hated the baby possession plot and later regretted doing it. If the show had gone to a 5th season, many of the minor cast would've been cut and the plots refocused back in Dunn's River and centering around the story of two sisters theme from the first season. Writer Stu Silver said that ABC cancelled Soap at the last minute without warning. They'd been led to believe there'd be a 5th and final season which is why Soap went out on a cliffhanger. The writers didn't have a resolution for how Jessica would've been saved. Silver said that most likely the shots we heard weren't from the firing squad but would've turned out to be from El Puerco's men shooting the bad guys.
14. Soap itself was shot using four cameras, and they had a thin fabric draped in front of the lenses to give the picture a softer focus than you would've seen on another taped series from that time. They also used a very elaborate key lighting so that visually it wouldn't be as bright and harsh as regular videotape lightIng. Soap's editing was quite unusual for that era. Both the dress rehearsal and official taping before the live audience were recorded. Later, the editors would utilize the very best takes from each and assemble them together for the final product. For instance, in a two character scene one actor's lines might be from the official taping, and the other character's reaction might have come from a dress rehearsal earlier in the day. For the first three seasons, Soap taped scenes in the order of the script. But, in the final season, episodes were taped out of script order by set, sometimes with scenes from future episodes being taped at the same time.