An Interview with Lighting Director, Dennis Size, Part 3: 1982-86
1982 began on a good note for you when the show received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Scenic Design and you were eligible for the award this year. In my book, I guessed that the show was chosen for the Egyptian Ball sequences.
Dennis Size: That is 100% correct. It was crazy doing those episodes and that Ball went on for days. We unfortunately did not win, and if I remember correctly a few years after that, the Emmy rules changed. It was no longer a single design award, and they broke them out into individual awards for scenic design, lighting design, and costume design.
There was a little gimmick that went on when the Emmy Awards nominations were submitted back then. It does not go on anymore because the Academy has changed the rules and regulations so many times. When you were a voting member of the Academy you had to vote for three different shows in the category or categories that you were eligible to vote in. Obviously, you are going to vote for yourself. To neutralize that, you had to also vote for 2 others. If you didn’t, your vote was disqualified. They figured that this was a fair way of doing it. The more people from your show that become members of the Academy is what guarantees the nomination. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee winning the award, but it will certainly get you nominated because it is how many people voted.
At ABC, the network used to buy memberships for the staff who worked on their soaps. For instance, if 150 people worked on Ryan’s Hope, they could have 150 voting members, if the staff were eligible. Producers would also suggest to you what two other shows you should vote for in your category. They would find out what shows had the most members voting and would suggest voting for the shows that had the least number of members. That way the vote would be nullified because no other votes came in to match what you voted for.
I have been nominated for Emmy Awards many times and won several, but it is such a scam. I no longer submit myself—haven’t for about 15 years – and let whomever I’m working for take care of that task if they feel the project was award worthy. NBC SPORTS submitted me for my work on the Super Bowl three years ago and I won.
Ryan’s Hope was infamous for its constant recasting of major roles, which hurt the show, and it happened once again. Blonde Ann Gillespie was out as Sioban Ryan after only a year and fiery, redheaded newcomer Marg Helgenberger stepped in. Any particular memories about Ann?
Dennis: I remember a scene in the Ryan kitchen between Annie and Helen Gallagher. Ann leaned back a little too far against the stove and the tera cloth bathrobe that she was wearing caught fire. As is the New York City law about special effects and all that, stoves have to have emergency measures. There has to be a stagehand right there with a fire extinguisher. There is a lot of protection that goes on especially from what I heard about Dark Shadows where they were burning things all of the time. So, after the bathrobe catches fire, the prop man ran right over and ripped it off of her. All she has on underneath is a pair of panties. We are all standing there with our mouths hanging on the floor. Annie just tossed it off and said, “Oh, well. That will teach me not to come to the set almost naked anymore.”
What was your impression of Marg?
Dennis: Marg was part an ABC talent initiative where they would hire young actors right out of school and give them jobs. It was essentially like the old studio system where there were contract players and then move on. Marg was stellar and had the chops to stand up to and work with the actresses on the show who were seasoned veterans.
[One of] her first days in the studio was quite a thing. She was in the shower. Roscoe Born played Joe, who I also loved, discovered someone in his home and didn’t know who it was. He enters the bathroom and you see this beautiful silhouette of a woman behind the shower. At that time Standards and Practices was very strong. Marg, of course, was in a body suit but they said you cannot have a naked woman on the show. They told them that she wasn’t naked and that you couldn’t see anything other than form through the steam and heavily frosted glass. One of the electricians on my crew, who also did special effects, was in the shower with her operating a fogger. It became such a big deal and they still insisted that it could not be shown that way because you saw her whole body. We said, “Why would anybody be in the shower with clothes on? Everybody knows she is naked.” I think Lela Swift directed the episode and they ended up doing closeups of her feet, then her legs, then her arms, then the back of her, etc. They didn’t want to reveal her until she came out of the shower.
Marg, though, would go out partying all night long and come into the studio the next day where you can tell she just rolled in from some dance club. She wasn’t the only one.
In March of 1982, the show introduced veteran actor Peter Haskell as powerful, real estate developer Hollis Kirkland. Then in July came Hollis’s fragile daughter Amanda (Mary Page Keller) followed by his pissed-off wife Catsy (Christine Jones). Some in the cast began dubbing the show “Kirkland’s Hope” because they felt the Ryan’s were now backburner (they were not!). Do you recall any cast resentment at the time?
Dennis: Hollis Kirkland turned out to be Kim’s father because Rae had a teenage romance with him. It got so convoluted and was absolutely crazy. The show was really about that Irish family and they kept getting away from it. Ron Hale always had something to say—much like Danny Hugh-Kelly—and was one of the most outspoken actors on the show. Actually, Michael Levin was more outspoken and was always complaining about something or other. He had such a temper on the set. I know he threw chairs. But he was a great actor. Michael and Ron were there from the beginning. Much like any family that has been together for years and all of a sudden somebody gets married into the family, there needs to be some adjustment time.
Just like what was said in your book that Helen Gallagher would not let Maeve serve Michael Pavel at the bar, she and Bernie Barrow maintained their characters off-set at the studio all of the time. I wonder how much of it was: “We can’t get close to this guy because we have to hate him in the storyline.” That is just me conjecturing.
1983 begins with Claire Labine and Paul Mayer back as head writers. They fired many of the actors connected to the Kirkland storyline and they immediately recast the dormant role of Frank Ryan with Geoff Pierson.
Dennis: I really liked Will Patton who played Ox and who was let go. He was a great actor and an Ellen Barrett discovery.I also really liked Danny Kelly as Frank. When Geoff came in as the new Frank, I had a hard time adjusting to him, even though he was probably a much better actor. But he wasn’t the hail-fellow-well-met jokester that Danny was.
However, it was [scenic designer] Sy Tomashoff’s firing that made the biggest impression on me. He was one of the first to go during this whole transition. He was gone before Joe Hardy started and was fired by Felicia Behr. She was like the Silver Surfer and the harbinger of doom. Sy was an incredible gentleman and such a nice guy. I sat next to him for almost two years. He helped mentor me and took care of me. He was self-effacing and we never know that he had a bronze star during WWII when he served as a rifleman under General Patton. I learned that after he died a few years ago.
Labine and Mayer’s big story was the introduction of Charlote Greer and then her vengeful Irish parents.
Dennis: This is one of my favorite storylines with the Irish rebellion and bringing in Roy Poole and Kathleen Widdoes [as Neil and Una MacCurtain who held a grudge against Maeve’s family in Ireland]. Everybody in the studio started using Irish brogues. It was dumb but fun.
The biggest change was the ousting of Ellen Barrett as producer and the arrival of Joe Hardy as executive producer. How did this effect you since he said in an interview the first thing he did on the job was to “turn on the lights.”
Dennis: The way soaps work, or any TV series, is that the minute a new executive producercomes in, the first thing they do is to fire the lighting designer. We always joke about this. The lighting is the easiest and fastest thing you can change on a show. You can change the lighting cues instantly, by making something darker or brighter, or high key or low key, or softer just the next day because you handle the lights daily. How you handle them and where you place them is going to determine how much highlights and shadow exists.
How did you learn about his dislike of your lighting design?
Dennis: We had been nominated for an Emmy, had a good team, and I thought the show looked great so the first thing this guy says in a public scenario in front of the whole cast and crew is that the lighting on the show was the worst of anything on television. John Connolly and I are standing there looking at each other like, “What the hell!? Where is this coming from?”
The show did become much brighter after Joe began producing.
Dennis: The concept of the show from the very beginning was very naturalistic. There were times like the shooting on the houseboat or scenes at the Coleridge beach house or exterior scenes or the hidden tomb of Merit Kara where you wanted it dark and mysterious and dramatic, Now, all of a sudden, if looks like when you open a refrigerator door and everything is lit. There was no sense of mystery. That is why they brought Joe Hardy in from LA even though he was a New York guy and a Tony Award winning producer and director.
What was your working relationship like with Joe?
Dennis: People with little children will especially understand this. You tell them to eat their green beans or your asparagus. When they won’t, you force them to eat them and then they make faces at you and then they throw it on the floor. They do whatever they have to do to let you know they hate every minute of what you are forcing them to do. That is how almost thirty-year-old Dennis acted working with Joe. Every day when I got some note from Joe about something my response was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic.
I obviously was not the same person emotionally when he took over. And I did not like the work I was doing. I thought the lighting we did prior to him was better and I thought the show was better. John Connolly and I talked about it. He said, “Yea, but the money that we are making—just look the other way.” But I didn’t want to do a job just because we got paid very well. I wanted to do a job where I am proud of the work. I am not proud of this work. It’s not the theatricality I like. The years I was doing the show early on I was very happy because it was work that came from my own personal artistic sensibility—if that makes sense.
Hell, Joe Hardy even stood by and let an unsympathetic ABC fire Ilene Kristen as Delia due to weight gain due to medication she was taking.
Dennis: Yes, Ilene’s weight was up and down but who cares? I never understood that decision. What I liked about Ilene was that she was very natural as Delia and fit into that show. She was a hoot and a straight shooter. I used to be very tight with her now partner Gary Donatelli who was a cameraman at ABC. We worked a lot of events together.
This proves that the family vibe that existed for the first 7 years was now gone.
Dennis: True! Joe came in and there were a lot of people fired. Actually, Joe made the decisions and Felicia Behr was the hatchet woman who carried out everything he wanted. It became a running joke at the studio because they would always have a cake for them. Most people knew they were being fired—some people didn’t—and they would make an announcement: “Hey, everybody come down to the floor! Today is John Smith’s last day! Let’s all wish him well!” You’d stand there and everybody knows you just got fired. You’d eat a piece of cake and say, “Go to hell!” It was a very weird atmosphere and people stopped talking to each other and everybody was scared to death about their job.
Things got worse on the show when Pat Falken Smith replaced Claire and Paul as head writers in late 1983 and then she shifted the focus from Ryan’s Bar to Greenberg’s Deli populated by a bunch of uninteresting teenagers.
Dennis: I thought the whole concept of this was stupid—just stupid. Early Ryan’s Hope had extremely talented theatrical actresses like Helen Gallagher, Nancy Addison and Louise Shaffer. Later on, I remember the directors complaining it was like running school when Cali Timmins, Traci Linn, and those kids in the deli coming in with no training at all. They were merely pretty faces, as compared to a Marg Helgenberger who was brought in right out of Northwestern with a degree in acting. Sometimes we would see a really good actor like Marg come through and we would say, “Well, that person is not going to get it. They were too good!” We were serious and usually right.
Not only did they want actors who had that Hollywood look now but the sets, lighting, etc. had too as well. What made Ryan’s Hope special was that it started with a natural, realistic quality.
To add insult to injury they then blew up Ryan’s Bar!
Dennis: This was actually fun to design. We thought we would win an Emmy for those scenes as the characters roamed around the wreckage but we were not even nominated. [Guiding Light took home the prize over All My Children and General Hospital.]
What was your relationship like with the directors, Lela Swift and Jerry Evans during this period?
Dennis: On the days Lela Swift directed, they would put some special adapter on her microphone in the control room because her voice carried and she sounded liked the Wicked Witch of the West. And she never ever shut up—never. She and I never really hit it off unlike Jerry Evans. He was wonderful and just great to work with. He used to say over and over in the booth, “I am not being paid to be an acting coach here. I am here to direct a show. I am not here to tell these people how to do their job.” Actors liked that freedom.
I think my relationship with Lela really went south early on during the shooting of a hospital scene. A character (I do not recall who) was lying in a hospital bed. It went on for days and days. Lela was always trying to find interesting ways to shoot it. It is a guy in bed looking at the actress next to him. You can’t have the camera downstage because you have to shoot the guy and it has to be upstage. The actress at his bedside I think was Nancy Addison. Lela is trying to do some kind of different shot during dress rehearsal. The lights focused on Nancy—we always went out of our way to make sure the actresses looked as glamorous as possible—had to be adjusted. I am trying to set them right. I go back into the control room. Lela is yelling, “I can’t get my shot! I can’t get my shot! The lights are always in my way. I don’t know why they are in my way!”
I went back down to the floor and moved the light a little bit. I asked the stage manager, who had a direct headset link to Lela, to see if what I did was better. Lela barks back, “How do I know if it is better? You should be making it better and the lights should not be in my way!” I yelled back, “The director should know where the camera is going to go, so I know where to put the lights! If you do not know where the camera is going, how can I light it?” Dead silence in the studio and on the floor. She then comes stomping down from the booth and reads me the riot act. The only thing I remember from the final volley is Lela saying to me, “I have three Emmy Awards! How many Emmy Awards do you have?” I retorted, “Maybe you should have your credentials redone.” As that was coming out of my mouth, I thought, “Wow, I am really not long for this show.”
However, I think it’s also important to remember the context of the times those women of broadcasting — like Lela, Jackie Babbin, Gloria Monty, etc.—worked in. The “good ole TV boys” men’s club they had to cope with didn’t make it easy for them.
You left Ryan’s Hope in early 1986.
Dennis: I was fired by Joe Hardy. He and I were actually friendly outside of Ryan’s Hope. My ex-wife and I would go to his home for supper. Then, all of a sudden, I am being let go. It was very weird to me. Even when I had my cake that day, the technical director said to me, “Here is the knife, that we just took out of your back, for you to cut the cake.”
Candice Dunn was brought in to replace me and I had to train her. It is awkward when you have to do that sort of thing. That year Ryan’s Hope won the Emmy for Outstanding Lighting Design. John Connolly was livid, and threatened to walk off the show, because Joe refused to put my name on the nomination even though I had worked on it. Then the damn show won.
My last hurrah at Ryan’s Hope was designing the lighting for the studio they moved into on 53rd Street. I believe the episodes that they won the Emmy for came from this new studio that had more space and scenic elements with a lot more technology behind them. After I finished setting up the new studio, I was off the show. I maintained friendships with everybody including Candice. John Connolly, who was like 35 years older than me, was my best friend until the day he died. I worked on a lot of shows and I watched as people turned and soured. You must have even felt that when you talked with actors and crew who were on the show for a long time. They felt the change from what was a great family atmosphere to a very sour one that Joe Hardy brought to the show.
What soap did you work on post-Ryan’s Hope?
Dennis: After I was canned from Ryan’s Hope, One Life to Live snagged me. I was there for about a year and a half to two years. I look at that period of my career as penance for everything I ever did wrong in my entire life. If you were writing about One Life to Live, I can guarantee you I don’t remember anything other than just how nasty most people on that show were and that Paul Rauch, who was the executive producer, was one of the most toxic individuals that I ever met. He was a nutjob.
Frank Valentini, I believe, got his start on soap operas there and he was a production assistant or a gopher for lack of a better term. Rauch would come into the control room and say to him, “Peel me a banana, you asshole.” He would say shit like that. Rauch would sit up in the back row, put his feet up on the counter, like most executive producers did, but would take his shoes off with his smelly socks. He would give the shoes to the kid and say, “Hey, go polish these!” People today talk about toxicity and appropriate workplace behavior. They had no idea what the soaps were like. Most of them were governed by women. But going to One Life to Live, with Rauch the madman and womanizer, was a shocker. He also used to fondle the actresses on the set. This was not a good period for this soap. There were a few nice people there, though, like Erika Slezak, who I had a friendship with for several years, and Andrea Evans, who played Tina. She was very close friends with my ex-wife so we would hang out a lot. The rest—not so nice.
Did you continue working on soaps?
Dennis: Yes. After I left One Life to Live, I went in and out of Loving for a bit covering vacations for their LD. It was such a dumb show. Then I got All My Children. I worked on it for about two years. And I won an Emmy Award there. After Ryan’s Hope went off the air [in January 1989], they brought in Felicia Behr as a producer and she fired me. I asked why. She said, “You know we have a history and I don’t’ want you around.” That is when I decided I had it with the entertainment division and I went into special events. Other than Susan Lucci, I really never established a rapport with any of the actors I worked with as compared to my early years on Ryan’s Hope.
Flash forward to [sometime in the 1990s] where I am now working for the Lighting Design Group [where is still works as an Executive VP of Design]. Our head of operations calls me and says that I have to go over to As the World Turns. They asked me to cover the show and to set up a brand-new studio for them. I was shocked because I knew that it was executive produced by Felicia Behr. The operations manager said she was the one who called me. I go out to the Brooklyn studio where they are shooting to meet with her. I said, “Felicia, you hate me. Why are you asking me to redesign your show?” She replied, “Because you are really very good at what you do. I just don’t like you personally. And after you finish, I would like you to come in and out and cover my LDs when they go on vacation but I really don’t want you around.” I thought, “This is a stupid, fucked up business.”
The end!
