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Soap Life: The Docu-film

"The wife of our executive producer, John Grossman, who owns the production company NYPS, is a big fan of GENERAL HOSPITAL, and her whole thing was, 'You have the ability, so let's do something to save the soaps,'" explains producer Matthew D'Amato of how it all began. "We started doing research, and we sat down with a few actors, producers and directors, and said, 'Is this is a good idea? Could this work? Should we pursue it?' And we looked it up online and didn't see anything like this, so we thought it would be important to get started."

And the main goal of the film, D'Amato explains, is to generate enough buzz about the possible end of soaps to possibly prevent it from happening. "Hopefully this will get enough attention to help the genre, because we don't want to see it fade away," he says, adding that it's tentatively scheduled for a June 2012 release date at film festivals and possibly on networks such as Showtime. "We do want to see it at festivals, and we do want to see it on networks [so] people who aren't soap fans can watch the film and kind of relate to it, hear the stories and maybe want to pick them up or maybe do something about the genre. We have contacts we can send it to in order to get it out there, so hopefully it will get bigger and bigger!"

For more information on the project, visit www.facebook.com/soaplifedoc. To see a video about the project, visit www.youtube.com/user/SoapLifeDoc.

Blue Bloods' Amy Carlson: It's Getting Harder for Linda to Be a Cop's Wife

Actually, it is slightly different, if you ask Amy Carlson (ex-Josie, Another World).

"I think in a lot of shows it's just the cop in danger, but here, we have his whole family in danger, which I thought was a little unusual," she tells TVGuide.com. "It's definitely more powerful that way. And it all goes so much further than just nearly being killed."

On Friday's episode, Danny (Donnie Wahlberg), Linda (Carlson) and their sons, Sean (Andrew Terraciano) and Jack (Tony Terraciano), get caught in the crossfire when Danny hits a man with his car. The man was being pursued by a gunman, who then takes aim at Danny. "It's a pretty intense scene, mostly because it's so random," Carlson says. "You go from happy time with the family and all of the sudden you're in the middle of this crazy situation."

The skirmish not only sends Danny on a manhunt for the shooter, but raises serious questions for Linda as a wife and a mother. Aside from a few minor tiffs, Linda has so far been the poster child for the loving and endlessly supportive wife of a cop. This time, though, she asks Danny to go off the case for their family's sake.

"Linda has one very big problem that I don't know how she's going to overcome and that is that she is totally in love with her husband. She supports him no matter what, but this is such a delicate territory now," Carlson says. "I think they've always been 'agree to disagree.' We agree to disagree that this is really not great and yet it's who you are. She believes in what he does and she has to again come to terms with the fact that her husband is in an incredibly dangerous profession. But I think as time goes on, it's getting harder for her to be a cop's wife."

Making things even more difficult is the fact that their kids were involved, forcing them to deal with gun safety earlier than they had anticipated. It's another case of "agree to disagree" between Danny and Linda over when and how to broach the subject with their boys.

"One of our technical advisers said the same thing happened in his home. Cop families have guns in their houses," she says. "It's a bigger question for mothers. When is the right time to introduce to your children the things that could hurt them? But not having the knowledge could hurt them. It's such a major dilemma. I love that scene. There is no easy answer and yet you do have to be responsible and teach your kids. I think in that moment, she knows a choice has to be made, but it just plain stinks. In an ideal world, it could've been, like, four more years before he had to know what this world was about."

This incident is only the beginning in what will be a bigger look at Linda and Danny's relationship the rest of the season. In an upcoming episode, Danny's friend is murdered and his job once again becomes a hot topic that is "going to be a struggle," Carlson says.

But despite all their issues over his job, Carlson doesn't foresee Danny ever giving up his badge.

"He's the least likely to give up his career out of all the Reagans, and honestly, even if she asks him to, I don't think she ultimately wants him to. She will always support him and this will just always be part of who they are. I always liken them to Coach Taylor and Tami [from Friday Night Lights]. I dream of being like Coach and Tami! They had their issues too, but that didn't split them up. [This episode] is just the beginning of you seeing the strength of their relationship."

Blue Bloods airs Fridays at 10/9c on CBS.

Amy Carlson moves up a grade as Donnie Wahlberg’s wife in police drama ‘Blue Bloods’

Not this season, though. Thanks to her elevation to series regular, she’s getting meatier stuff as Linda Reagan, the wife of Danny (played by Donnie Wahlberg).

“I’m a full part of the family dinners,” says Carlson. “Now, about every third episode, they focus on Danny and Linda’s relationship.”

That happens Friday at 10, when Danny, a detective, and Linda end up in the crossfire of a shooting. The incident puts their kids at risk and exposes the hot-button topic of kids, guns and violence.

The shooting sends Danny on a manhunt to get the gunman, while also teaching his children about gun safety.

“It was a really intense story for so many reasons,” Carlson says.

The episode of the New York-based show was shot around Christmas, when the cast and crew were weary, she says. But the story line hit home on the set.

“While we were shooting one of the most powerful scenes, about introducing a child to a gun, one of our technical advisers said the same exact thing happen in his home,” says Carlson.”

“Police officers have guns in their homes,” she adds. “It’s very touchy and very personal, but it’s a required topic.”

Another equally strong story line revolves around Frank Reagan, played by Tom Selleck, who is dealing with the imminent death of a friend he worked alongside at Ground Zero on 9/11.

“Blue Bloods” is about a family of New York City cops, led by Selleck as commissioner. It is the latest in a long list of work for Carlson on series that have crime, police or first-responder themes.

She started in daytime in 1994 on “Another World,” and eventually moved to prime time with roles in such series as “The Peacemakers,” “The Untouchables,” “Law & Order: Trial by Jury” and “Third Watch,” where she played a paramedic split in half by an explosion.

“I think I’ve always been drawn to these roles,” she says. “It comes naturally to me. It gets me excited. To play a cop’s wife — there’s so much in that world, the wives or partners of anyone who is a first responder — it’s not an easy job. It’s not an easy way to live, to say goodbye to someone in the morning and not know what’s going to happen throughout the day.”

Carlson says she’s always been drawn to roles with a little more meat, rather than being a wife or girlfriend in a sea of men, she says.

“I feel like I kinda get them,” she says of roles in shows about the uniformed services.

“For me,” she says, “it’s about inhabiting another person and to be able to tell a story that’s real and resonates.”

Robin Strasser's New Gig!

Pilot Season: Anne Heche Lands Leading Role in NBC's Save Me

The Men in Trees and Hung star will play a woman who starts to believe that she is channeling God after she has an accident. Heche will also serve as a producer on the project, which is executive-produced by John Scott Shepherd, Neal Moritz, Vivian Cannon and Scott Winant.

Save Me was green-lit in September based on the condition of who would eventually be cast and was originally developed for Showtime before moving to NBC.

Salem Joins PRIVATE PRACTICE!

Doris Belack, Judge on TV’s ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 85

Her death, which was confirmed by a family friend, Jason Watkins, came four months after the death of her husband, Philip Rose, the influential Broadway producer of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Purlie Victorious,” both considered breakthroughs for racial equality in American theater. The couple were married for 65 years.

Ms. Belack played many roles on Broadway, and worked steadily in television beginning in the early 1960s. She had parts in “The Patty Duke Show,” “The Defenders,” “Barney Miller,” “Family Ties” and “The Cosby Show,” and a recurring role in the soap opera “One Life to Live” from 1968 to 1977. She appeared as Judge Margaret Barry on “Law & Order” in the 1990s.

As the tough-minded TV producer in the 1982 film “Tootsie” (who unwittingly casts a disguised Dustin Hoffman in a woman’s role in a soap opera), Ms. Belack was praised for the comic lightness with which she reinforced the film’s feminist themes.

The authority-figure role she played in her later years tapped into one side of Ms. Belack: she expected dinner guests to arrive punctually and maintained an Old World sense of propriety that she occasionally enforced with an acerbic wit. But at her core, she once said, was the desire to act.

She considered it a calling. “You can’t act, you mustn’t act, you shouldn’t act,” she said in a 1979 interview with The New York Times, “unless it’s the only thing in the world you want to do.”

Doris Belack was born on Feb. 26, 1926, in New York City, the younger of two daughters of Isaac and Bertha Belack, Jewish immigrants from Russia. She joined a summer stock theater company immediately after graduating from high school, and within months she met Mr. Rose, then an actor and singer.

Ms. Belack and her husband shared convictions about race and civil rights that made them full partners in the unlikely success of Mr. Rose’s efforts, friends said, especially in bringing “A Raisin in the Sun” to Broadway in 1959.

Already considered a long shot for being a nonmusical drama about blacks written by a black playwright, it was the first play Mr. Rose had ever produced.

“But she not only supported the idea, she worked and supported them both while Philip went around raising money to produce ‘Raisin,’ ” said Elizabeth Perry, an actress, playwright and friend. “She was a strong liberal voice, and she had a lot of influence over his choices.”

In her last years, Ms. Belack continued working in commercials and as a voice actor. She went to auditions regularly until the week before she died. When a final bout of illness led her friends to urge her to go to the hospital a couple of Sundays ago, she brushed them off because she had an audition the next day.

She made it to the audition, and then went to the hospital.

“I saw her a few days later,” said Esther Margolis, a book publisher and longtime friend. “She told me: ‘Would you believe it? I got a callback.’ ”

Soap Opera 451

“Soap Opera 451: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama’s Greatest Moments” includes interviews with: “All My Children’s” Eden Riegel on her character Bianca coming out as a lesbian to her mother, Erica Kane; “Another World’s” Linda Dano on her character Felicia's alcohol intervention; “Dark Shadow’s” Kathryn Leigh Scott on Barnabas bringing Josette back from the dead; “One Life to Live’s” headwriter Michael Malone on Marty's gang rape; “General Hospital’s” headwriter Thom Racina on scripting Luke and Laura's wedding; “Generations” creator Sally Sussman Morina on the show’s groundbreaking racial housing discrimination story; and dozens of other stars, writers, insiders and stories from “The Young and the Restless,” “As The World Turns,” “Days of Our Lives,” “Guiding Light”, “Passions,” “Texas,”“The Bold and the Beautiful,” “The Doctors” and many more.

“Soap Opera 451: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama’s Greatest Moments” may be experienced via a tablet, iPad, cell-phone, lap-top or desk-top computer. All of the text may be read on the Kindle or Nook devices.

Get Your Copy here!.

Linda Dano Update!

Of course, if you can't wait until then, you can catch Dano live on QVC with four hours of the Linda Dano Home Collection products on sale. She'll first be on this Wednesday, August 24th from 6-7 am EST, then again at 5-6 pm EST. And on Monday, September 26, you can catch her from 9-10 am EST, and lastly on Monday, October 24, from 1-2 pm EST. That last one will be her special At Home for Christmas show, to get your ready for the holidays!

The actress also is working on a Web series called VINDICATED with fellow AMC vets Jill Larson (Opal) and Julia Barr (Brooke) that she hopes will be finding its way to your computer screens real soon!

Afternoon Delight, Indeed

Eric Roberts cast in ABC's dance pilot

Heche turned down 'Speed' role

Soap Icon Dies

Procter & Gamble moves from soap operas to tweets

Procter & Gamble Co., whose sponsorship and production of daytime TV dramas helped coin the term "soap operas," has pulled the plug after 77 years. Instead, the maker of Tide detergent, Ivory soap and Olay skincare is following its customers online with a big push on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

"The digital media has pretty much exploded," marketing chief Marc Pritchard said in an interview. "It's become very integrated with how we operate, it's become part of the way we do marketing."

The last P&G-produced soap opera, "As The World Turns," went off the air in September. The show was the leading daytime soap for decades, but had lost some two-thirds of its audience at the end.

Over the years, P&G produced 20 soap operas for radio and TV. But ratings for daytime dramas have been sinking for years, as women, their target audience, increasingly moved into the workplace, switched to talk and reality shows, and spent more time using online media and social networking sites.

P&G, the world's biggest advertiser, still buys individual commercials on daytime dramas. But the dollar amount has shrunk. P&G won't say by how much.

Dori Molitor, whose WomanWise LLC agency specializes in marketing brands to women, says big companies are realizing that social media is an efficient way to connect with customers.

"Social media has become mass media, and for women especially," she said. "I think for all marketers, these one-way, 30-second (TV) spots are very expensive, and are less effective for the way that women make decisions."

Marketing experts say the biggest companies were generally slow to adapt to the rapid rise of social networks, but that beverage rivals Coca-Cola Co. and Pepsico Inc., and P&G and fellow consumer products makers Unilever PLC and Johnson & Johnson are among those quickly making up for lost time.

In recent months, P&G began selling Pampers diapers on Facebook, offering an iPhone application for Always feminine products that allows women to track menstrual cycles and ask experts questions, and using social media to turn a campaign for the venerable Old Spice brand into a pop-culture icon.

The "Smell like a Man, Man" commercials starring hunky former football player Isaiah Mustafa became a YouTube sensation, drawing tens of millions of views and spawning parodies such as one with Sesame Street's Grover, and generated another round of attention with Twitter questions that Mustafa answered in videos — such as on ABC's Good Morning America when he suggested that President Barack Obama could improve standing with female voters by wearing only a towel and beginning speeches with "Hello, Ladies!"

The echo effect gives P&G a bigger bang for its nearly 9 billion bucks a year spent on advertising.

"It is such an effective advertising campaign that we are getting impressions that we did not pay for," CEO Bob McDonald told investors recently, recounting that he saw an editorial cartoon showing Obama on horseback, a takeoff on Mustafa's "I'm on a horse" Old Spice catch-phrase.

For a company known for measuring just about everything, P&G touts big numbers from Old Spice tracking:

• Number of impressions (people who saw, read, or heard about commercials): 1.8 billion.

• Number of YouTube views for Old Spice and related videos: 140 million and counting.

• Increase in Twitter followers for Old Spice: 2,700 percent.

P&G also said Old Spice sales are growing at double digits, taking more of the market for body washes and deodorant.

Just 20 months ago, P&G hosted "digital night" at its Cincinnati headquarters by inviting Google, Facebook, Twitter and other online experts to help test ways online and digital media could be used in marketing. By the Vancouver Winter Olympics last February, P&G was coordinating TV commercials with Facebook messages and tracking instant reactions to new commercials on Twitter.

P&G, which sponsored Team USA, unveiled sentimental "Thank you, Mom!" commercials at the Olympics that it estimates added $100 million in sales. The campaign has included Facebook essay contests and e-Cards for mothers.

P&G says it's still exploring new uses for social media.

"It's kind of the oldest form of marketing — word of mouth — with the newest form of technology," Pritchard said.

Anna Stuart Interview

You Tube

There are several Another World episodes on Youtube.com, be sure to check them out here!

Dano Web Series?

Julia Barr, Jill Larson & Linda Dano are developing a web series called The Vindicated, about three women who are at a point in their lives where they are without their male counterparts for different reasons

MY EMMY MOMENT

Past winners recall the moments they won their first Emmy: Anne Heche won a Daytime Emmy in 1991 for her work on "Another World": "I was in Nebraska in a Motel 6 shooting a Hallmark movie with Jessica Lange, and so, I was actually sitting, eating a hamburger and fries, on a skanky bed, watching to see if I was going to win. And when they called my name, somebody came out and said, 'Well, Anne can't be here right now because she's in Nebraska.' Some weird, like, stiff person, 'She's not here . . .' And the phone rang and it was my agent and I said, 'Does this mean I'm an actress. Do I have to move to Hollywood or something?' And she said, 'Yeah, I think so.' And that was it. The Emmy made me move."

Another World Today

See what your favorites characters from Another World are up to today: anotherworldtoday.com

Another World Trivia Book

Book: The Ultimate Another World Trivia Book

Another World : The 35th Anniversary Celebration

Take some memories home with you. Buy Another World : The 35th Anniversary Celebration

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Facts

1. Song played at the end of the last episode: Bette Midler's 'In This Life' (It can be found at Amazon on the CD: Bette of Roses)

2. In the final scene of the soap, Rachel (Victoria Wyndham) looked at a collection of family photographs with Carl at her side before ascending the staircase in the Cory family living room for good. As tears rolled down our faces, we were left with a still picture of Mackenzie Cory (the late Douglas Watson) giving one of his famous & greatly missed toasts. We will miss this show more than words can say. I can't believe it's over.

   Of the final tape date, veteran Linda Dano (Felicia Gallant) recalls that it was fitting the entire AW cast was called to the Brooklyn set. "There's so many favorites at Another World through the years that when I said good-bye, I wasn't just saying good-bye to us there, I was saying good-bye to all the people I loved and all those memories," the actress shares. "I took it so personally. Everyone did. We all were struggling, all of us. I just hope everyone lands, that everyone finds a home and be happy and be fulfilled."

3. April 12, 1999 NBC announced that Another World was cancelled

4. Irna Phillips originally conceived Another World as a spin-off of as The World Turns. The plan was scrapped when CBS turned down the show and the rival network NBC snatched it up.

5. AW tops the list in technical firsts that changed the soap genre. It was the first soap to make the transition to color from black & white (1966) and to videotape from live broadcast (1967). It also was the first to regularly broadcast as an hour-long show (1975) and the first ongoing soap to be broadcast for 90 minutes (1979).

6. In 1987, AW was the first soap to have a character with AIDS. Dawn Rollo, Chad’s sister, came to town with the disease.

7. Contract negotiations between AW and Charles Keating (Carl) collapsed on March 19, 1998. While AW chose not to go into details about Keating's exit, the actor had no such problem- he addressed his fans with a statement on the Internet saying that AW had contacted his agent and that they had made a decision "to rest the character." Soon after, Carl was "killed." He returned a few weeks before AW's final episode, rising miraculously from the grave to reunite with his love, Rachel, just in time for the show's final episode.

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