Uh... that doesn't add up.
Jun. 24th, 2014 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxWhy does LJ always have ONTD on the front sign-in page?
And I see that the top comment one is that Susan Lucci and Sarah Michelle Gellar had a feud back during their AMC days.
Um... yeah, this is not news. Well, well, well known among AMC watchers back in the day. It hardly qualifies as a 'secret'.
But the headline is that Susan Lucci got SMG fired. Er... I'm guessing the same people who think that it's news that SL and SMG didn't like each other don't know enough to know that there is simply no way in hell this is true based on the timing of contracts, announcements, and the storylines involved.
And I see that the top comment one is that Susan Lucci and Sarah Michelle Gellar had a feud back during their AMC days.
Um... yeah, this is not news. Well, well, well known among AMC watchers back in the day. It hardly qualifies as a 'secret'.
But the headline is that Susan Lucci got SMG fired. Er... I'm guessing the same people who think that it's news that SL and SMG didn't like each other don't know enough to know that there is simply no way in hell this is true based on the timing of contracts, announcements, and the storylines involved.
SMG blindsided everyone involved when announcing -- on air -- in her acceptance speech when she won her Emmy that she wasn't going to renew her contract. Soap press -- and SHOW -- were shocked by the announcement. It was a surprise. It was a thing! Soap Press covered everyone's reactions because it was an out-of-the-blue announcement. By her. On stage.
The show didn't have an exit storyline planned for her. They hadn't planned on her character exiting, and the existing plot had to be truncated and new story had to be pulled out of the show's asses to accommodate her not renewing her contract (a story that never made much sense, btw, and got disposed of once they brought the character back a couple of years later).
The show was not prepared to lose SMG's character (a character who was slated to become and who eventually became a show staple. When they recast the character a couple of years after SMG's exit, the character remained on canvas until the end of the show, having become arguably one of its most central characters). The swerve in story was 100% obvious at the time because it was so clearly a detour in the storyline engineered after her announcement at the Emmys.
SMG didn't re-sign her contract and exited at the end of her contract despite the show wanting her to stay (which, come on! It was a good career move for her at that time to move on. Look at what it did for her career-wise to jump while the jumping was at its apex. It was a smart move!). SMG was. not. fired.
I always side-eye Lucci getting tagged with this because it always seems to stem from people being incapable of separating Lucci from her character, the diva-ish Erica Kane. Lucci -- the actual woman -- as opposed to the fictional character that she played, was never known to be much of an instigator. She was on the show for 35 years and did not have a history either before or after SMG of on-going feuds or diva behavior with other actors (or actresses to use a gendered term)* I would suppose that Lucci being on the same show for 35 years (throughout many different regimes running the show and that misogynist asswipe Brian-what's-his-sexist face who took over running all of ABC Daytime in the late 90s-00s) that Lucci wasn't a boat-rocker. She appeared happy to go along with the status quo. That's not all that high maintenance in showbiz.
Lucci was not Erica Kane. She simply played her on TV.
An actress is not her character (Alyson Sweeney is reportedly a nice person as well, despite playing Days bitch-in-residence Sami Brady.) Playing an OTT soap diva doesn't necessarily mean that an actress is a real life shrew. They may not be great or even good actresses, but that doesn't mean that they are the characters that they play on screen.
Plus, it's not like Lucci didn't have other actresses playing her adult daughters on the show. Not only was SMG not the only actress to play an adult daughter of Lucci's character (and other than the little-kid version of Bianca, SMG was the YOUNGEST actress portraying one of Lucci's daughters ...at the time she was portraying her. {It was downright ludicrous that SMG was 16 playing a 24 year old, anyway. Not only did she NOT look 24 but it made it hella uncomfortable watching her character attempt to seduce her 50-something stepfather... ::shudder::} So it cannot be an age thing either. A few years later it would be a 32 year old recast playing the same character as SMG, and Lucci and Minshew got along from her hiring through the end of the show just a couple of years ago).
Anyway, SMG was not the only actress to be nominated or to win the Emmy by playing one of Lucci's daughters on AMC. SMG's replacement repeatedly got nominated for an Emmy (for the same role). And the actress who played SMG's character's sister won more than once (in fact... I think BOTH women who played the adult version of SMG's character's sister were nominated for that role....which...erm... guys. In case no one knows this, the 'younger daytime actress' (and younger daytime actor {looking at you yelly-mc-yellerson when you played recast Lucky Spencer...) Emmy is a joke. Always has been. Yes, even more of a joke than all the other Daytime Emmys... which are uniformly a bit of a LOL (for example: It hands out Emmys to the likes of Days of Our Lives... for real! Even for writing (once). I mean, seriously. That places things in perspective.) So, where awards are concerned, it's not the greatest one that an actor can get. Or within many, many, many miles of it. ) And all three four actresses who played Lucci's daughters were nominated for Emmys (and a couple won) . (Basically, the 'Kane women' were some of the most showcased characters of the show). So, again, this wasn't a SMG-specific thing. [And Michael B. Jordon -- yes, that one -- played Lucci's adopted son. So SMG isn't the only one to have mainstream success. For that matter, Amanda Seyfried started on AMC in the 00s as well...]
What's more, the "Kathy Griffen says..." rumor says SMG was fired by Lucci because SMG won the Emmy. Um... SMG announced her exit as part of her acceptance speech, and the soap press at the time revealed that EVERYONE was shocked by the announcement. Including the show. That gives Lucci approximately a 1 minute opportunity to stink-eye and magically fire SMG while SMG walked down the aisle to the stage... or something.
And the feud was not taking place while SMG was off being successful elsewhere, but while SMG was just an unknown soap vixen, so it cannot boil down to 'career envy'. At that point in time, when this would've happened, Lucci was substantially the more successful of the two (it reversed AFTER SMG left the show) and Lucci had front-burner storylines on the show during the entirity of SMG's tenure with the show. She wasn't being sidelined.
At any rate, it simply does not really fit the timeline, the in-show writing, or the general circustances that Lucci supposedly engineered the firing of a 16 year old girl (Wasn't SMG 19 by then?) apparently without the show knowing about it... because they would've planned a better exit if it was the show firing SMG. And it would've had to be the show and Agnes Nixon firing SMG because Agnes Nixon (and whoever was beneath her at that time) ran the show not Lucci, who was only an actress even if perhaps the highest profile one. {I've heard of actresses 'getting' a couple of actors fired... but in both those cases it stemmed from actresses accusing actors of sexual harrassment with said actors being abruptly replaced/recast as love interests {one guy this happened to, had it happen on two different shows with a total of 4 actresses accusing him -- 3 on one show, 1 on the other so...yeah. He was scuzzy and the shows were fearing lawsuits... especially given that he revealed he'd also been dating a teenaged -- jailbait-- costar.... while he was in his mid-thirties.)
So... I'm just not buying that Lucci had SMG fired.
It might make juicy 'gossip' for Kathy Griffen to float that (why at this late date, I do not know. But, I guess, it works better when people don't remember the context of SMG's announcement and exit.) Given the shock surrounding SMG's Emmy announcement that she was leaving and the show having been blindsided by it such that they were not yet prepared for an exit storyline -- and had to pull one out of their asses -- yet STILL had a couple of months to write and film the SMG exit storyline (so she didn't just disappear overnight or had the character suddenly recast (as is what generally happens with abruptly fired actors on soaps). They instead wrote and filmed a 'happy ending' plot for the character, having her within-a-few-weeks-fall-in-love with 'good guy' Del, with her swearing off her perpetual revenge against her mother to run off to 'be happy' with the {temporary} 'love of her life' (Want to know who got fired? The guy who played Del who got written off with her!).
Anyway, way to pull out ancient gossip and mangle it.
* Noted while Lucci has no track record of feuding, SMG has a few known 'feuds' in her history... (Neve Campbell, Charisma Carpenter, and Alyson Hannigan among them).
The show didn't have an exit storyline planned for her. They hadn't planned on her character exiting, and the existing plot had to be truncated and new story had to be pulled out of the show's asses to accommodate her not renewing her contract (a story that never made much sense, btw, and got disposed of once they brought the character back a couple of years later).
The show was not prepared to lose SMG's character (a character who was slated to become and who eventually became a show staple. When they recast the character a couple of years after SMG's exit, the character remained on canvas until the end of the show, having become arguably one of its most central characters). The swerve in story was 100% obvious at the time because it was so clearly a detour in the storyline engineered after her announcement at the Emmys.
SMG didn't re-sign her contract and exited at the end of her contract despite the show wanting her to stay (which, come on! It was a good career move for her at that time to move on. Look at what it did for her career-wise to jump while the jumping was at its apex. It was a smart move!). SMG was. not. fired.
I always side-eye Lucci getting tagged with this because it always seems to stem from people being incapable of separating Lucci from her character, the diva-ish Erica Kane. Lucci -- the actual woman -- as opposed to the fictional character that she played, was never known to be much of an instigator. She was on the show for 35 years and did not have a history either before or after SMG of on-going feuds or diva behavior with other actors (or actresses to use a gendered term)* I would suppose that Lucci being on the same show for 35 years (throughout many different regimes running the show and that misogynist asswipe Brian-what's-his-sexist face who took over running all of ABC Daytime in the late 90s-00s) that Lucci wasn't a boat-rocker. She appeared happy to go along with the status quo. That's not all that high maintenance in showbiz.
Lucci was not Erica Kane. She simply played her on TV.
An actress is not her character (Alyson Sweeney is reportedly a nice person as well, despite playing Days bitch-in-residence Sami Brady.) Playing an OTT soap diva doesn't necessarily mean that an actress is a real life shrew. They may not be great or even good actresses, but that doesn't mean that they are the characters that they play on screen.
Plus, it's not like Lucci didn't have other actresses playing her adult daughters on the show. Not only was SMG not the only actress to play an adult daughter of Lucci's character (and other than the little-kid version of Bianca, SMG was the YOUNGEST actress portraying one of Lucci's daughters ...at the time she was portraying her. {It was downright ludicrous that SMG was 16 playing a 24 year old, anyway. Not only did she NOT look 24 but it made it hella uncomfortable watching her character attempt to seduce her 50-something stepfather... ::shudder::} So it cannot be an age thing either. A few years later it would be a 32 year old recast playing the same character as SMG, and Lucci and Minshew got along from her hiring through the end of the show just a couple of years ago).
Anyway, SMG was not the only actress to be nominated or to win the Emmy by playing one of Lucci's daughters on AMC. SMG's replacement repeatedly got nominated for an Emmy (for the same role). And the actress who played SMG's character's sister won more than once (in fact... I think BOTH women who played the adult version of SMG's character's sister were nominated for that role....which...erm... guys. In case no one knows this, the 'younger daytime actress' (and younger daytime actor {looking at you yelly-mc-yellerson when you played recast Lucky Spencer...) Emmy is a joke. Always has been. Yes, even more of a joke than all the other Daytime Emmys... which are uniformly a bit of a LOL (for example: It hands out Emmys to the likes of Days of Our Lives... for real! Even for writing (once). I mean, seriously. That places things in perspective.) So, where awards are concerned, it's not the greatest one that an actor can get. Or within many, many, many miles of it. ) And all
What's more, the "Kathy Griffen says..." rumor says SMG was fired by Lucci because SMG won the Emmy. Um... SMG announced her exit as part of her acceptance speech, and the soap press at the time revealed that EVERYONE was shocked by the announcement. Including the show. That gives Lucci approximately a 1 minute opportunity to stink-eye and magically fire SMG while SMG walked down the aisle to the stage... or something.
And the feud was not taking place while SMG was off being successful elsewhere, but while SMG was just an unknown soap vixen, so it cannot boil down to 'career envy'. At that point in time, when this would've happened, Lucci was substantially the more successful of the two (it reversed AFTER SMG left the show) and Lucci had front-burner storylines on the show during the entirity of SMG's tenure with the show. She wasn't being sidelined.
At any rate, it simply does not really fit the timeline, the in-show writing, or the general circustances that Lucci supposedly engineered the firing of a 16 year old girl (Wasn't SMG 19 by then?) apparently without the show knowing about it... because they would've planned a better exit if it was the show firing SMG. And it would've had to be the show and Agnes Nixon firing SMG because Agnes Nixon (and whoever was beneath her at that time) ran the show not Lucci, who was only an actress even if perhaps the highest profile one. {I've heard of actresses 'getting' a couple of actors fired... but in both those cases it stemmed from actresses accusing actors of sexual harrassment with said actors being abruptly replaced/recast as love interests {one guy this happened to, had it happen on two different shows with a total of 4 actresses accusing him -- 3 on one show, 1 on the other so...yeah. He was scuzzy and the shows were fearing lawsuits... especially given that he revealed he'd also been dating a teenaged -- jailbait-- costar.... while he was in his mid-thirties.)
So... I'm just not buying that Lucci had SMG fired.
It might make juicy 'gossip' for Kathy Griffen to float that (why at this late date, I do not know. But, I guess, it works better when people don't remember the context of SMG's announcement and exit.) Given the shock surrounding SMG's Emmy announcement that she was leaving and the show having been blindsided by it such that they were not yet prepared for an exit storyline -- and had to pull one out of their asses -- yet STILL had a couple of months to write and film the SMG exit storyline (so she didn't just disappear overnight or had the character suddenly recast (as is what generally happens with abruptly fired actors on soaps). They instead wrote and filmed a 'happy ending' plot for the character, having her within-a-few-weeks-fall-in-love with 'good guy' Del, with her swearing off her perpetual revenge against her mother to run off to 'be happy' with the {temporary} 'love of her life' (Want to know who got fired? The guy who played Del who got written off with her!).
Anyway, way to pull out ancient gossip and mangle it.
* Noted while Lucci has no track record of feuding, SMG has a few known 'feuds' in her history... (Neve Campbell, Charisma Carpenter, and Alyson Hannigan among them).
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no subject
Date: 2014-06-24 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-24 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-24 11:18 pm (UTC)Word. It's been annoying the heck out of me. Obvious marketing ploy.
If you want to post celebrity gossip - at least post relevant and good celebrity gossip.
At any rate, it simply does not really fit the timeline, the in-show writing, or the general circustances that Lucci supposedly engineered the firing of a 16 year old girl (Wasn't SMG 19 by then?)
I think 16 is about right - since she was 18 when she started on Buffy. Buffy was about two years after AMC.
Noted while Lucci has no track record of feuding, SMG has a few known 'feuds' in her history... (Neve Campbell, Charisma Carpenter, and Alyson Hannigan among them).
I was thinking as I was reading through your post...that I'd long ago come to the conclusion that "that particular feud" had a lot more to do with SMG than Lucci. From what I read, SMG was the instigator. SMG has a long history of "issues" with her co-stars. She has this reputation in common with Shannon Dougherty - who equally didn't get along well with her-costars.
And as I vaguely recall - it wasn't just women, she has had issues with male co-stars too. (Marsters and Blucas had issues with SMG. Marsters describes her as his bratty younger sister. And apparently there was a falling out with Whedon.)
While as you state, Susan Lucci has always had a stellar reputation in the soap world as a professional and an extremely kind and supportive actress. A lot of soap opera actors are. Weirdly the divas tend to be more on prime time series.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-25 02:43 am (UTC)Rumors also were that by Season 3, SMG and Boreanaz were on the outs. Lots of noise about the filming of 'Forever' being kind of hellish for the crew on the crossover location shoot.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 12:52 am (UTC)Wow, I thought that was Michelle Trachenburg - I know she still hangs out with Michelle and with Seth Green on occasion. And apparently she buried the hatchet with Boreanze this past year - or long enough to take selfies.
Marsters has told some interesting, and rather hilarious stories about SMH at various Q&A's. I wonder if he knows that people post them to YouTube??
You'd assume so...but then again. From the stories - they had a weird sibling relationship or rivalry, in which they enjoyed baiting each other on set and teasing. (Which Marsters being a method actor - sort of plays into the whole Buffy/Spike relationship if you think about it. ) He apparently did have a falling out with Eliza Dusku, or thought he did at any rate. I've learned a lot of Buffy backstage gossip listening to Marsters Q&A's.
I remember reading on various fansites in 1998/1999 - S2-3 Buffy - that Gellar may have had a hand in the breakup of Boreanze's marriage. Apparently they were sort of dating each other in S2, then broke up or something along those lines. (Reminiscent of some other tv pairings I can think of...the adage don't date people at your work place is pretty good advice for actors, who of course blatantly ignore it. Especially if they are ahem, already married to someone else. Kudos to Denisof for telling Hannigan that he would not date people that he was working with - she didn't get him to cave until he moved over to Angel.) Apparently everyone was dating one another at one stage on Buffy - which explains a lot.
I remember at the time there were crew reports saying that basically Amy Aacker and Marsters were the only low maintenance ones on either show.
They were just happy to have a job. Both came from theater backgrounds, and had struggled a while to get a job.
But yeah, picked that up in some of the commentaries - in Angel, one of the crew guys doing a commentary with a director and I think Adam Baldwin, stated that he never saw Marsters crack up during a take. Or pull a prank.
It was during the scene where Angel holds a meeting and Spike pulls out his briefcase, opens it, pulls out a beer and drinks it. Boreanze kept breaking character and laughing. So they had to do ten takes, but Marsters never laughed and did it perfectly each time. Baldwin makes the comment right before that one - how pranks and cracking up during a take annoys him, smacks of unprofessionalism and makes the day longer for all concerned. And the director, I think, states that of the entire cast - Marsters was always on mark. (Which explains why Gellar got along with him - she was famously annoyed by unprofessionalism and not being able to hit your marks on queue - coming from a soap background, she didn't a lot of patience for re-takes. CC was horrible at hitting her marks and drove Gellar nuts.)
Hee, I find backstage television show gossip riveting. Particularly the Buffy stuff - because they were really catty. All young, first time series, with a young boss who was a bit too laid-back and had just come off of dealing with Rosanne Barr.
Nick Brandon wasn't known as difficult but 'troubled' --read: substance issues. They nearly got him fired in season 4)
I thought that was season 6 for some reason? I know he is an alcoholic. There were quite a few people struggling with addiction issues, Marsters is an alcoholic - and has to stay away from it. Poor Marsters was quitting smoking while on Buffy - and using nicotine patches. And of course the guy who played Doyle (who died from an overdose shortly after he was fired for substance abuse problems).