Those Were The Days: Writing Fun Fiction For The Star

The trouble with death cleaning is that it’s too much of a walk down memory lane. Those were the days, you think as you try to decide which clutter to toss. It’s difficult –especially when you come across your first forays into writing fiction.

As I blogged last week, delving into boxes full of old papers and documents produced a whole bunch of acceptance letters for “confessional” stories I’d written when I was living in the U.K.

Death Cleaning Discovery, Part 2

It also produced this 10th anniversary issue of Star magazine (below) from May 1984 — which took me right back to the days of writing fun fiction for that tabloid.

I don’t mean making up stuff about real-life celebrities. We didn’t need to do that. For the most part, many celebrities were quite obliging by behaving badly enough off-camera without us having to make up stories about them.

Prime Time Soaps

The fiction I’m talking about were the storylines and plots which drove the prime time soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty which dominated television in the 1980s.

 Dallas, a CBS-TV series was the first of the nighttime soaps, premiering in 1978. The storylines revolved around the feuding members of a super-wealthy Texas family who owned a cattle ranch and an oil company. Larry Hagman played J.R. Ewing, a scheming, dirty-dealing oilman and Patrick Duffy played Bobby Ewing, the good brother.

 Dynasty which premiered in 1981 was also about an oil magnate, Blake Carrington. It was set in Denver. This series didn’t soar in the ratings until British actress, Joan Collins joined the cast as Blake’s scheming, villainous first wife.

It was Dallas that established the staple ingredient of a #1 prime time series: the cliffhanger season finale. At the end of the third season in March 1980, J.R. was shot — but viewers did not get to see who had shot him. They had to wait eight months while the show was on hiatus over that spring and summer. The frenzy of speculation and guessing games ended with 350 million viewers world wide watching the episode titled “Who Done It?” in the fourth season. 

Cliffhanger Frenzy

 It was a frenzy that tabloids like the Star and the National Enquirer jumped into with abandon. Sure, viewers were interested in the actors and actresses on these shows, but they were more interested in what was going to happen to the fictional characters they played on these shows. They wanted to know ahead of time what the season finale would be –and then wanted to know how the cliffhanger got resolved in the next season opener.

As Iain Calder, the longtime editor of our biggest rival, the Enquirer wrote in The Untold Story, his non-fiction account of his time at the tabloid: “Our readers really, really wanted to know about the characters on the  show.”  Calder “We were spending thousands of dollars on scripts especially the season-ending cliffhangers.”

Fun Fiction

The Star never had that sort of budget where we could spend thousands of dollars on a script to see in advance what was going to happen. But I absolutely loved the prime time soaps. I devoured every episode of each soap as they were broadcast. I became a walking encyclopedia on the lives and loves of the characters. 

So, towards the end of a TV season I would sit down at my office computer (first as a reporter, then news editor of the tabloid) to try to figure out where the producers and writers were heading for a possible cliffhanger finale. 

What would I do if I was a writer on this show? I would ask myself. How would I develop the storylines and characters? What would make the most outrageous, over-the-top season finale to rival Who Shot J.R.? Then, I’d write the preview, or what we called “sneak peeks” into the fictional futures of the shows’ characters.  

Educated Guesswork

That’s not to say I did it all on my own. I had valuable help from the Star’s Los Angeles bureau. The bureau reporters would come through with information about who had re-signed their contracts or who was demanding more money and therefore might be written out of the show; or who was tired of playing the same character and wanted out.

The bureau reporters developed contacts with extras who might have minor roles on an episode of either primetime soap; who could feed them information of what had happened on set to the major characters. With all those tidbits, it was often possible to figure out where the plot lines were heading.

Anyway, I would usually start the sneak peeks by writing something like: “Dallas/Dynasty producers and writers are toying with the following storylines for the season finale…” And, if I got it wrong, it didn’t matter. It was just fiction, and readers didn’t care. They just loved to read about what might happen to their favorite characters on these shows.

Sneak Peeks  

It was always gratifying, however, to see when I had gotten a storyline or plot right— until a couple of producers from Lorimar accepted our invitation to fly to New York to meet with us. At the time Star was located in Tarrytown, and we entertained the producers at the best restaurant in the area, La Stazione. Over lunch, one of them said:“You know, you don’t often get it right in your sneak peeks BUT sometimes we like your plot ideas so we include them in the script!!!!!!” 

I wish I’d been savvy enough back then to say: “Hey double my Star salary and I’ll come and write for you full-time!!!!”

Magnificent Con

Not long afterwards that same production company duped us badly. It happened at the end of season 9 which had run for the entire year without Bobby Ewing because actor Patrick Duffy had declined to re-sign with the show. So, the producers had killed him off at the end of season 8 by having him run over by a car driven by his wife’s half-sister.

Dallas ratings suffered, and Duffy himself regretted his decision to leave the show. So, at the end of season 9, the actor and the producers agreed he’d be brought back. It was the cliffhanger season finale when his “widow” wakes up and heads for the bathroom — only to find a naked Bobby standing under the shower.

Purloined Photos

Over that summer, every magazine and newspaper in the country speculated as to how producers/writers would explain Bobby Ewing’s return from the dead. We thought we’d gotten lucky at the Star when a “contact” called us and said he had still photos from the filming of the next season opener.

He showed us photos of Duffy with his head in bandages. This supported a storyline that Bobby had survived the hit-and-run accident but had needed a long time ( like a whole season!) to recover from his terrible injuries.

We paid for the photos, and ran with the “exclusive” — only to discover weeks later at the season opener that we’d been conned. The producers had plotted to get the photos into our hands to throw us off. They had already decided that Bobby’s death (and therefore all the events of the previous season) had been nothing but his wife’s dream!!!!

Win-Win

Did the Star look stupid when the season opener proved us to be totally wrong?

Not at all. By the time, the season opener aired, our exclusive was a dim and distant memory in readers’ and viewers’ minds. Anyway, that issue of the Star had sailed off the newsstands. The Star had made money; and we’d kept interest in the show alive during the summer months. It was a win-win for the Star — and for the show.