Ryan’s Hope 50th Anniversary Special:

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An Interview with Lighting Director, Dennis Size, Part 2: 1980-81

©Tom Lisanti

How was it working as the official Lighting Director on Ryan’s Hope?

Dennis Size: I am doing the job in John Connolly’s absence for a couple of weeks when ABC’s human resources department called me and said, “You need to come up and apply for this job.” I replied, “What are you talking about?” She then told me that I had to apply for the position so they could hire me. Meanwhile, I have been doing the show every day for weeks. John took a number of months off to get his head together. I think he returned sometime in the spring of 1981. It was long enough that the Emmy Awards happened and Ryan’s Hope won the Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Design Excellence for a Drama Series.

In my book, Ryan’s Hope: An Oral History of Daytime’s Groundbreaking Soap from Citadel Press/Kensington Books, I presumed the show won the Emmy Award for the Crystal Palace opening and scenes?

Dennis: Yes, that is correct. The reason I know this is because I was not eligible for the Emmy. At that time, the Academy rules stipulated that you had to be on any soap or series for 40% of the season. I was not there that long. At that time, there was no individual awards for scenic design or lighting design or costume design. It was the design Emmy and all three divisions were all considered as one award. And it was all based on one episode. The one that was submitted, which was one of the Crystal Palace episodes, happened to be one that I lit while John was gone.

After coordinating the lighting for a set in the studio, what did you do during taping?

Dennis: First, where Ryan’s Hope taped wasn’t even a studio. It was a lumber yard with a paint store next door that ABC had converted into a temporary studio for Dark Shadows. When that show went away, they put Ryan’s in there. It was always an interim, thrown together studio. During the taping, I would be in this very small, beat-up, old control room. In the front row you had five people: assistant directors Suellen Goldstein or Laura Rakowitz, only one was there at the same time; Lela Swift or Jerry Evans, depending who was directing; George Whitaker, the technical director; Sy Tomashoff, the scenic designer; and me. In the back row was Nancy Horwich, Ellen Barrett, and whoever the unit manager was at the time. It was very cramped.

They all talked about things they did together in the past. Ellen would say, “This isn’t the way Bob Costello would have done it.” It was always that sort of—I don’t want to say snarky—but it was snarky with love, if that makes sense. Although, sometimes Lela Swift could be a nasty person. She would something like: “I know Claire did not write this! Who wrote this?”

Does anything from the control booth early on stand out for you?

Dennis: I don’t know what the deal was with Lela Swift and Kate Mulgrew but Kate, when referred to, was a little bit above the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was astonishing in regard to the respect and the acclaim the higher echelon had for her. During a break or something, Lela would go on and on about how wonderful Kate Mulgrew was and that they don’t have actresses like her anymore. One day, I turned around to one of my electricians on the floor who worked there for years and say, “Wow, Kate Mulgrew must have been something.” He replied, “Nah, she was a b*#ch!”

What did you think of Claire Labine and Paul Mayer? Were they on set for tapings?

Dennis: I very seldom had any contact with them. By the time I started on the show, Paul and Claire were not a presence in the control room. They were always a presence in the building. The only times I met them were when we were doing auditions. By that, I mean when they got to having screentests for the final 5 actors for a role. That is the only instance when I really saw them in the studio. And it was never the two of them. It was usually just Claire. But I would see them together at the annual Christmas party.

Do any early episodes that you worked on standout for you?

Dennis: Yes, it was when Delia framed the drunk Faith for running over Barry Ryan out in the street. The challenge for me was that we did this maybe during my first or second month there. I had never done an exterior scene before. All of the car scenes when Delia is driving was done in the studio with a green screen set. I had to light the green screen—actually this was 1981 technology and it was chromakey. They bring the car into the studio and they jam it into the corner. It was a small studio and there was no room. The green screen is probably 3 feet away from the car and they were boxed together, as opposed to green screens that we do these days are on film sets where the car could be 10 or 20 feet away from the screen. The car they brought in was silver with chrome all over it. The silver and the chrome was picking up the green and bouncing it all over the windows and the car. I’m having no end of problems trying to key the car because the car is accepting all the green from the screen.

Then Randall Edwards comes down to do the scene in the studio and she is wearing a blue-green dress! I was like, “What the hell is going on here!?” They ultimately called the film studio next door and asked for some green screen guidance. It wasn’t so much a lighting issue, but we had to key out the color and the switcher in the control room didn’t have the ability. They wound up renting an Altermat, which is a finer version of green screen technology and they were able to tweak out all of the green pollution that was all over the car. This took forever to shoot.

What was it like shooting the exterior portion of the scene?

Dennis: Once we finished with the green screen, we then go right outside onto the street—they literally pushed the car down the loading dock. It is now around 9 or 10 o’clock at night. We shot it right outside the front of the studio. They shut the street down as they want to do. It was a shitty part of town in Hell’s Kitchen. At that time, it was populated by old, dilapidated brownstones, most of which were boarded up. For the couple of buildings that were in the background of the shots Sy Tomashoff had to put in real windows with curtains to make it look legit. They also brought in trees and extra prop cars to put on the street. Basically, the stunt person who was there only drove the car no more than 10 feet at the most. We were lighting the whole setup with stand lights.

The standout moment for me is when Delia flees the scene with her high heels clickety-clacking on the pavement.

Dennis: To shoot that Sy put fake trees out there. We put lights in the trees cross lighting the street so it would look like Delia was running through the streetlights that were occasionally going up and down the street, if that makes sense.

Regarding the sound, surprisingly, there was nothing on the street and nothing going on. Because it was so empty, her running echoed all the way down the street. I still have that sound in my memory. Similarly, as I put lights down the street that she ran through, the audio department put microphones every twenty or thirsty feet. It picked up the natural echo although I am sure they sweetened it a bit in post-production.

You were about twenty-five years old and in the same age range of many of the cast. Did you become friendly with any of them?

Dennis: I did but they all kind of hung together. They were all very cliquish. But we all knew each other and had a rapport. I really liked Roscoe Born and we kept in touch for several years. I had a serious crush on Randall Edwards but, like many of them, she left the business.

Were you aware that it was alleged that some of the actors were not happy that Michael Corbett was getting too much publicity during this time? Daniel Hugh-Kelly is one name that was dropped.

Dennis: No, I wasn’t aware but that would not surprise me. I liked Danny a lot and he was one of the people I kind of hung out with. He was easy-going, talked with everybody, and always had a joke. He left to do Hardcastle and McCormick. If it was him, I would not be shocked by it.

We used to joke in the control room among the crew, and not with Ellen or any of the producers, wondering who the hell Michael Corbett knew because he went from day player for one or two shows to all of a sudden getting a contract. We kept hearing how his audience quotient was very high and that the viewers were responding very well to him. Although he was a good-looking guy, he was by no means an experienced actor then.

Another standout in 1981 was the “Midnight Murder” on Michael Pavel’s houseboat.

Dennis: I lit this set as well. If I recall, Kim shot Michael but it was a mobster [Sal Brooks] who did the kill shot, as we called it. I can’t remember exactly how we did that because they also had the Coleridge beach house on the water. We did a lot on that set. We had special effect pans made to simulate water ripples and moonlight that we would bring out when they were there or anywhere there was water. But with the Midnight Murder, I think that there may have been a green screen outside the houseboat’s windows that they just fed video footage to.

Since you were in the control room, did they ever talk about who made the boneheaded decision to kill off Michael Pavel?

Dennis: We didn’t talk about things like that in the control booth. There was never any resolution and sometimes mostly with Lela Swift who was one of the most outspoken people you could ever imagine, she would yell, “This is the dumbest thing ever! I don’t know what the hell ABC is thinking and doing about this!” With a lot of decisions, you never knew where it came from.

But I do know that even on the floor when we were doing camera blocking, in between takes the actors would be talking amongst themselves. Someone would say to me, “Do you believe this Dennis? This is the stupidest storyline ever.” It used to make me wonder how the actors themselves never even had any input on their own storylines. I could remember vividly times when Helen Gallagher would change the script. She would come right out and say, “Maeve Ryan would not say this! This is what and how she would say it.” It would turn into a big argument because script changes were look askance at. Helen always took a stand on her character. Most of the other actors really didn’t give a shit, frankly.

As 1981 ended, we have a storyline I hated the soap-within-a-soap and one about Egyptian queen Merit Kara with the hunt for her tomb highlighted by a glamorous Egyptian themed party at the Crystal Palace.

Dennis: I loved Karen Morris-Gowdy [Faith Coleridge] in this and kept in touch with her over the years. I worked for her husband Curt Gowdy a lot. I used to joke with him and say, “If you guys ever break up, please tell Karen to call me.”

To be continued…

Emmy Award winning set, Delia’s Crystal Palace ©Dennis Size/Courtesy of Dennis Size

Exterior shot of Delia (Randall Edwards) running down her ex-lover Barry Ryan (Richard Backus) outside his apartment building. ©Dennis Size/Courtesy of Dennis Size

Exterior shot of Delia (Randall Edwards) running down her ex-lover Barry Ryan (Richard Backus) outside his apartment building. ©Dennis Size/Courtesy of Dennis Size

Ryan’s Hope 50th Anniversary Special: An Interview with Lighting Director, Dennis Size, Part 1

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When I was writing my book about Ryan’s Hope, I knew I had to keep my manuscript to no more than 400 pages per my publisher, Citadel Press/Kensington Books, instructions. With that said, I concentrated on reaching out to the actors, producers, writers, and directors who worked on the show. I did not actively pursue crew members. I stumbled upon two from Facebook and several others either found me or were recommended to me to interview.

Dennis Size worked on Ryan’s Hope from mid-1980 to early 1986 as a lighting director. His daughter gave him my book, Ryan’s Hope: An Oral History of Daytime’s Groundbreaking Soap, for Christmas. Afterward, he contacted me to say how much he enjoyed it. We corresponded and he shared with me a pic of his Ryan’s Hope jacket and sent me Ryan’s Hope pencils from the show. I was bummed that we did not make contact earlier, but he graciously agreed to do a post-book interview.

Dennis Size: I read your book a year ago and I was transported back forty-five years ago. I have done a lot of work in my life. I have done thousands of episodes of soaps for various people. For the past 25 years, I have done Emmy and Tony Award shows, news shows, and other similar kinds of programs. I never gave my early career much thought until I read your book. I realized that they were probably the happiest years of my career. Of course, you do not know that while you are experiencing it, especially since I was the youngest designer that ABC ever hired.

Did you go to school to become a lighting director?

Dennis: Yes, I was going for and got my BFA in scenery and lighting design at Penn State University. While I was there, I was asked to supervise a guy named Bill Tracy from the electrical engineering department who was doing his thesis on discotheques. He was told he had to take a couple of courses in the theater program so he could understand the theatricality in lighting a disco other than just the electrical engineering. We became friends. Bill had to work a couple of stage shows and as a grad assistant I supervised the shows. He graduated and I still had a year to go.

How did you begin working at ABC-TV?

Dennis: After I left Penn in 1979, I started a teaching program at the University of Scranton. I then got a phone call from Bill: “I’m on staff at ABC-TV in New York right now. I’ve been put in charge of supervising lighting, rigging, and the lighting directors at the network. They have a program here called Vacation Relief in Broadcast, Operations, and Engineering [BO&E].” This program was to train people in various jobs so they could cover sound directors, lighting directors, etc. on the soaps and other network programs when they took time off. You can’t get somebody out of left field to cover because they don’t know the show.

Knowing my background and experience working in broadcast and stage while at Penn State, Bill thought I would be perfect to be a fill-in at Ryan’s Hope because they wanted the lighting to look very natural and realistic. He said they also wanted someone young and savvy. I was always a bit of an eager beaver and an overachiever. I was hired in June of 1980 as a vacation relief lighting director [LD] for John Connolly, the only lighting director on the show. All the other soaps had two LDs who would alternate days. My plan was always to eventually move to New York and work on stage shows and redesign them for broadcast, like with what PBS was doing with some of their shows like Dance in America.

What was it like being this swing lighting director?

Dennis: I had to learn every lighting element of the show. It had to be a seamless transition so the producers and network people would not see any difference. The LD is the longest, hardest position on a soap. On All My Children, the LDs would go in at midnight and would not leave until the last scene was taped and that could be as late at 10 or 11 o’clock p.m. That was not uncommon on the hour shows. It was terrible. After working those long hours, you cannot come in the next day so your alternate day was a production prep day. You would go through your shooting script for the next day’s show. You would meet with the director and figure out all the blocking. You would rent any lighting gear you would need. You would book the crew you would need. That prep day would be four hours at the most, so you would have one short day then one long day.

What this the routine for Ryan’s Hope too?

Dennis: No, because, since it was a half-hour show, they weren’t working the long days that the one-hour shows were working. That is why John Connolly was the only LD on the show. However, it was getting tougher and tougher for him. When he started, the show was owned by Labine-Mayer. ABC took the show over in late 1979, just before I started. Once that happened all the production values changed. On the show, prior, the Ryan Bar set never came down. Also, Ryan’s kitchen and the hospital nurse’s station sets never came down. All these basic sets stayed up and only one or two swing sets came in that had to be lit each day. By the time I started on the show, they were now taking down more sets and they were even starting to put a swing set within the Ryan Bar set. The booths and the dividers would push out of the way so you could put a set within the bar. That meant the lighting in the bar had to be scrapped because you had to re-light the new set, which was usually something small like a hospital room or hotel suite, something like that. This disrupted the lighting that had never changed in the Ryan Bar. The next time the Ryan Bar came back, you had to relight the bar. So instead of going in at 5 in the morning, John Connolly was now having to go in around 3 in the morning.

What was the shooting day like?

Dennis: Ryan’s Hope did, what no other soap did. It had one extra rehearsal every day. They did a tech rehearsal before the dress rehearsal. It wasn’t a long day for the camera guys, about eight or nine hours, but if you were the LD coming in at 3 in the morning and didn’t get out to 5 in the afternoon, it wore thin.

Do you recall your introduction to working on the show?

Dennis: When I started, they had just finished that dumb King Kong storyline. I remember the crew talking about the idiocy of that. They had just launched Delia’s Crystal Palace. This set was too big to keep up all the time so it had to come down. Sy Tomashoff was brilliant in designing sets that could be separated. Delia’s office with the beaded curtain was a small set that could be put within another set. When I came on, they had also just hired Michael Corbett to play Michael Pavel. He eventually worked as a bartender at the Crystal Palace restaurant, so we would put that bar set up by itself a lot because it became a place for the characters to gather. We didn’t have to put up the two connecting sets [the dining room and the outdoor patio]. The production values got to be higher under ABC control.

John Connolly had been at ABC-TV for years so he had accumulated 7 or 8 weeks of vacation. He would take the whole month of June off and September off. I would be covering the show alone in his absence. Ryan’s was one of the only shows that would go on hiatus. We’d have three weeks off in August. We would do what was called a six-pack. We would shoot six shows a week in five days so we could have that time off in the summer. We would also do that in a year when there was a special event like the Olympics or presidential election. ABC was not going to hire new crews to work on them, so they would six-pack all of the soaps. Then the camera people and others could go off and work the other jobs.

How did you become a permanent lighting director on the show?

Dennis: I covered John Connolly’s vacations. Sometime after he came back, ABC sent me out to light the announcer booth for the series of games between the Phillies and  Padres in San Diego. When that ended, I came back and went to the scheduling department at ABC to get my paycheck. They had just gotten a call from the LD at All My Children calling in sick and they could not find the show’s other LD at all. Since I was standing there, they said, “Hey! You are a soap opera LD. Can you go over and do All My Children tomorrow?” I didn’t even know where the studio was and never even saw the show. I went over and was the lighting director. Everybody there was flabbergasted because this dumb ass kid just walked into the studio without knowing anything and lit the show. It kind of sealed my security, shall we say, in the job. I became the relief LD for Ryan’s Hope, All My Children, and One Life to Live. I was basically on a part-time deal and they would freelance me in to cover vacations. My term came to an end in November. I went off to work with a Delaware theater company. While there, I get a phone call from ABC: “John Connolly is sick and the producers want you to come back and cover him.”

They were sending in staff LDs, but Ellen Barrett, the executive producer, wanted me. Well, actually she was only the producer. She never got the official title of executive producer and we never knew why. The political machinations that went on were fascinating. When I first started there, I was sent to Ellen ‘s office and Nancy Horwich, who was the associate producer, was there. Nancy was a bit of a bitch, actually. Ellen, however, was a straight shooter. We hit it off immediately. Ellen worked previously with producer Robert Costello on The Adams Chronicles. Many in production or crew came through Bob either from Adams Chronicles or Dark Shadows. That’s what happens. These families develop and they keep hiring people who they know and liked.

On my first day back, I walked into the studio and the LD who was covering John said to me, “Thank God you are here. I’m outta here.” He gave me all the paperwork for the day and left. I thought, “Jesuse Christ, I wonder what the hell happened here?” Later on, I talked with Ellen and she said, “John Connolly had a nervous breakdown and is not coming back so that is why we hired you.” I replied, “What are you talking about?” She said, “He is tired of doing the show alone. He is worn out. He can’t handle it. And he wasn’t you to come back as his partner.” I felt honored and thought it was great. Ellen and Sy liked me. They gave the thumbs up and I wound up with a permanent job. ABC didn’t even tell me I was hired. Ellen was the one who delivered the news.

To be continued…

Recent photo of Dennis Size on set at ABC World News Tonight. Photo by Lorenzo Bevilaqua/©ABC News World Tonight/Courtesy of Dennis Size
Ryan’s Bar ©Dennis Size/Courtesy of Dennis Size
View of Delia’s Crystal Palace from outside of Delia’s office ©Dennis Size/Courtesy of Dennis Size
Delia’s Crystal Palace ©Dennis Size/Courtesy of Dennis Size

Holiday Gift Time

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Still time to get my newest book, Dueling Harlows from McFarland & Company Publishers, as a holiday gift for the film lover in your family. Includes interviews with Jean Harlow portrayers Carol Lynley and Lindsay Bloom, plus past remarks from Carroll Baker. Available directly from the publisher, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other booksellers.