Kate Hall: You are listening to On Writing, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America, East.
Ron Carlivati: In each episode, you’ll hear from the union members who create the film, TV series, podcasts, and news stories that define our culture.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: We’ll discuss everything from inspirations and creative process to what it takes to build a successful career in media and entertainment.
Kate Hall: Hi, I’m Kate Hall. I’m a daytime drama writer whose credits include Days of Our Lives, All My Children, General Hospital, and Young and the Restless.
Ron Carlivati: Hi, I’m Ron Carlivati. I’m a daytime drama writer whose credits include head writer of One Life to Live, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, and staff writer on the new show Beyond the Gates.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Hi, I’m Charlotte Gibson-Bauer. I’m a daytime drama writer whose credits include All My Children as a scriptwriter, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, Days of Our Lives as a breakdown writer, and General Hospital as scriptwriter.
Ron Carlivati: To start, why don’t we all talk about how we got into writing for soaps?
Kate Hall: Well, I got into writing for soaps because my parents were actors on soaps, and so I was just surrounded by the industry my whole life, and then my mom moved over from acting to writing and I would just follow whatever show she was writing on at the time. So I always loved soaps and watched them pretty religiously. And after I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do at all and tried a million different jobs. And then I finally went to my mom and said, “Can I try what you do?” And she sort of trained me and would give me little writing assignments. She was writing for As the World Turns at the time. And I really enjoyed it and took to it.
And then I got a position at the ABC Writers Development Program and went through that. As I wasn’t a member of the program itself, I was the assistant to Millee Taggart, who was the instructor for it, and she was kind enough, as was ABC, to read my assignments along with everybody else. And then I got an offer to write a sample script for All My Children, and then I got the job and that was that.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah. I did the Writer’s development program too.
Kate Hall: That’s right. Yes.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: But I started out as an actor. I came out of NYU’s graduate acting program and was doing acting for soaps and other little things around town and plays and I started writing plays myself. And I remember when I was doing As the World Turns, I had this reoccurring role, Nurse Gwen under five, and Linda Miles, who I called my fairy godmother, had me do a reading of one of her plays, and she was a soap writer. And I said, “Oh, I write plays too, so I’ll invite you to some of my readings.”
And I remember I invited her to a reading of a play. I won the New Professional Theatre Award, and they did it downtown. It was the same day that the pope was in town, the older pope, the pope before this pope, and everybody was all excited, but I was so focused on trying to get to the show and have my reading done and everything. And afterwards, the popemobile came right in front of the theater and I was like, “Ah, I won and ward and the pope too!” It was pretty exciting.
But Linda had come to the show, and the next day, she called me and said, “I want to help you. Have you ever thought about writing for soaps?” And I was like, “No, but I watched soaps my entire life.” She says, “Well, I’ve already pitched you to Molly Fowler at the ABC Writers Development Program and send me one of your scripts. Send me that script.”
And so they did. And so I was invited to be a part of the ABC Writers Development program, and that’s how I wound up writing for soaps.
Kate Hall: Do they still have that?
Ron Carlivati: Sadly, no.
Kate Hall: No?
Ron Carlivati: Because it was great, yeah.
Kate Hall: It was great. They found a lot of great writers.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, I know, and Molly Fowler was a big champion of writers, so she was a great person too to run that.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Oh, yeah.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. I grew up watching soaps, my older sister and our babysitter, and we watched General Hospital, and that led into watching all of the ABC soaps. I watched All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital, and One Life to Live became my show, the one that I love the most.
And then anyway, then I went to college and law school and I still watched these shows. And after law school, I was working in a law firm and hating it, but I worked for a guy named David Baldacci who sold his first novel when I was working for him, and he’s gone on to be a super successful mystery-thriller novelist, and it inspired me to quit my job, and I moved to New York and asked myself, “What would you really want to do?” And I decided I wanted to be a writer at One Life to Live.
And I lived in New York for about nine months and lived on everybody’s couch and just starting to panic a little bit about my life choices when, through a series of coincidences, met someone who was leaving the job as writers’ assistant at One Life to Live, and I ended up getting that job. So I became the writers’ assistant, and then I worked for Claire Labine, who became the head writer very soon after I got there. And she knew I wanted to be a writer, so slowly, they moved me up from assistant to scriptwriter, breakdown writer, associate head writer, co-head writer, until I was finally the head writer of the show for the last four years.
Kate Hall: I remember meeting you during the strike, and I was… Not the most recent strike. When was that? 2000 and…
Ron Carlivati: Eight.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: 2008.
Kate Hall: Eight. I feel like I had landed my first job at All My Children for about five minutes, and they’re like, “And we’re going on strike,” so that was fun. But All My Children had not been my first choice of the three ABC shows, I definitely gravitated more towards a General Hospital or a One Life to Live. And I knew you, and I remember I was probably walking with my mom and was like, “You have to introduce me to Ron Carlivati if we walk by,” and we did. And I was like, “Oh my God!” You were like, yeah, an icon.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, I don’t know. I’d just become the head writer not that long before we went on strike, which was also a bummer because if a show is finally yours and then someone else takes over-
Kate Hall: And then someone starts writing it.
Ron Carlivati: … which was terrible. But then the strike ended and I went back and kind of got it back on track and it was great experience, but I could talk about that a bit.
Was there a particular show you’re obsessed with growing up? But you guys could talk because I said One Life to Live already.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: All My Children.
Kate Hall: All My Children?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: All My Children, and that was my first pick. All My Children was my first pick. So I was thrilled to get on that show, writing the sample scripts, and as I became an actual scriptwriter, at some point, I was invited to come and just sit into the breakdown room and just get a feel for things, how that process worked. And I got to actually experience Agnes Nixon in real time, and that was quite the treat. I still have a script that I wrote that she edited, and I wrote something that she really liked, and one of the characters, I think Palmer Cortlandt, said, “I’m impressed,” and she wrote a little note in the thing, “Me too.”
Ron Carlivati: Wow.
Kate Hall: That’s cool.
Ron Carlivati: That’s awesome.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I was like, “Woo!”
Ron Carlivati: No, Agnes is such an amazing person. You know?
Kate Hall: She is.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah.
Ron Carlivati: I got to meet her too, but she created One Life to Live, but All My Children was more her baby. But obviously, working at ABC, we got to sometimes spend time with Agnes, and she really did become someone who looked out for me, and she would have me over for dinner at her apartment, and I’d pick up her rotary phone and call downstairs for them to send up steaks, and it was really an incredible experience. She was a great person.
Kate Hall: Yeah, she was amazing. It was so fun. Those were the glory days, I feel like, when you’d go over to the West Side and meet up and sit in the room and order lunch.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Café des Artistes.
Kate Hall: And even as a scriptwriter, I was able to do that because after the strike, we were kind of all… I think we just sort of got, not got rid of the breakdowns, but it was all hands on deck and everybody was just writing an episode just trying to catch up, and we had a lot of meetings there, and it was always, it just was… That’s the thing as a scriptwriter that I do feel like I miss out on is the collaborative nature of everybody in the room and talking and brainstorming. And even though it’s great that I don’t have anywhere I need to be ever, I get to fully make my own schedule and write when I want to write whenever that is, and it works for me, but I do, I get jealous of all the collaboration and you guys talking and figuring it all out together.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. No, that was great at the studio for One Life to Live on 66th Street, which they just sold the building. Getting to sit around that table with the other writers, especially when I was the assistant, I was just learning. And Claire Labine, who had created Ryan’s Hope and was a legend at General Hospital, took me and the other assistant, Tracy Mitchell, out to lunch at Café des Artistes, which you mentioned, Charlotte, and that was just a great thing to just be able to talk and listen to her.
And I remember her telling me at one point, because when I started writing scripts and if you couldn’t get it done or you were stuck, and Claire said to me, “Procrastination is good.” And it was good advice, but it was also the biggest excuse to be lazy because I was like, “The great Claire Labine told me that I could procrastinate.”
Kate Hall: Right. If she said it-
Ron Carlivati: Then it must be okay.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Wow.
Kate Hall: Oh, that’s funny.
Ron Carlivati: But you don’t have a lot of time in daytime to procrastinate really.
Kate Hall: No.
Ron Carlivati: Because we have to get this stuff in.
Kate Hall: I think that’s actually a gift sometimes. I will say to myself, “Just write anything.” Get anything down on the page, and it’s always easier to go back and edit and change it than it is to come up with the initial dialogue. So I just force myself, even if I think it’s pure crap, to put something down, and then every time I go back, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, no, we’re going to do this instead.” And it’s just a lot easier to change words that are already there than come up with the perfect ones from the get-go.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I find that my ability to compartmentalize has helped me tremendously because the work is so constant and life keeps happening around you, so sometimes you have to just say, “Okay. Well, life, sit over there for a little while. I’ve got to get this script out. I got to finish act three, and then I can come and deal with you.” And so-
Kate Hall: And how lucky sometimes, right? It’s the best escape.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Totally.
Kate Hall: I mean, we always talk about how we write so to give other people an escape. It’s an escape for me too.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Completely.
Kate Hall: Life gets heavy and this is the best playground to jump into and be like, “I’ll think about that later.” Yeah.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, no, we have to get those episodes in. And as head writer, and especially in more recent times where we do pretty much six episodes every single week, it was like if you don’t get those in by Friday, the network is going to let you know. And so you have to keep that train just moving all the time.
And it is, in a way, a good thing because like I said, I can be, my tendency is to be lazy or procrastinate or stop, and you can’t. You cannot stop. It is. And as a head writer, there’s writers waiting for you. They can’t start writing until you get on the phone with them and lay out their show. So you having that responsibility of knowing someone is sitting there at their computer with a blank screen waiting for you, it just forces you to do it. It forces you to be creative. You have to just keep-
Kate Hall: Have you ever panicked and been like, “I don’t know what is going to happen next”?
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, you do, but somehow that process keeps the thing moving. And I think because it is a serial and continuous, it isn’t ever a complete blank slate. You’re not just writing a story from scratch. You are really picking up from things that have already happened. And even if you’re stuck on a certain storyline, you could keep the other one moving.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: True.
Ron Carlivati: And you could just punt and be like, “All right, I’m just going to put that over here until I think of what to do with them,” but there’s always something that keeps you going, I think.
Kate Hall: It’s a lot of pressure.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah. [inaudible 00:12:52]
Kate Hall: Okay. Where to next? Sounds like we all joined the Guild for daytime drama.
Ron Carlivati: That’s true.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Mm-hmm.
Kate Hall: What about a daytime drama writers room?
Ron Carlivati: I liken it to an assembly line where step one is really starts with the head writer coming up with the story that we’re going to tell. And then as head writer, you sit with the team of writers known as the breakdown writers, or sometimes we call them the outline writers, and each one of them writes an outline for an episode, which ends up being roughly, let’s say, 15 pages.
And the way I did it was just going one by one. So I would sit with the first breakdown writer and say, “Okay, you’re doing Monday.” We would look at what we were picking up from last Friday, and then sometimes add a new story in there or however many, or if you were going to a new day, then obviously it was all new stuff, and sit with them. And then there are these limitations that we work within. You could have X number of sets per episode and X number of characters. Let’s say, it depends on what show you work at, but it could be six sets and, say, 12 characters and each day, and we’re rotating in, “Okay, we’ve played this story pretty heavily for three days, let’s drop it and bring this story in that we haven’t seen,” and spend time.
Then basically talking through every single scene that’s going to happen in the episode, who’s going to say what to who, and then that person goes off and starts working on the outline for Monday, and then I, as head writer, would move on to the Tuesday person, and the Tuesday person generally would either be sitting there or get detailed notes from the Monday person so they know what they were picking up from.
And then we would go through those and then those five outlines would get written during the week, and those writers often speak to each other constantly on the phone, “If I say this, is it going to step on you on Tuesday?” Then those outlines would come back around to me and I would just edit them and put my little spin on it.
We would turn them in generally by Friday to the network and to the executive producer of the show. Monday, we would get notes from them. They would read them all generally over the weekend, and then we would get their notes, little things they wanted changed or adjust, and we’d have conversation about that, and then the breakdown writers would sit, put in those changes, then we’d send them out.
So then the next team of writers, who are our scriptwriters or our dialogue writers, each week they get that packet with the five or six outlines and an assignment. It says, “Okay, you’re writing this one,” and then you take that 15-page outline, and Charlotte, you can, or Kate, you can speak to this, turn it into a 75-page script, put in all the dialogue. So you have a framework to work off of, but some freedom within that to obviously expand a 15-page outline into a 75-page script. And so it is just keeps moving, moving constantly and you have to shovel that coal into the furnace.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: One of the things that I’ll say that you said initially was I had no idea until I came into the room how much of a variables of things like sets and guarantees and things like what personal crisis is happening in the actor’s life, how these things can all affect story because it really can. Like you said, you may have six sets or five sets or whatever your show says, “This is what you have to do and these have to be repeated, and then we have to put up a brand-new build and blah, blah, blah.”
So that all plays into the story that you’re telling or how you’re going to tell the story too because it can force you to get very creative with sets where you have major conversations in the mausoleum with people.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. Someone forgot their scarf. That’s why they’re there.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: You know? So that was eye-opening to me.
Kate Hall: Yeah, you’ll see on social media somebody’s livid because so-and-so wasn’t at so-and-so’s wedding and you’re like, “They were on vacation when they filmed this.” I mean-
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, yeah. They were unavailable or we weren’t allowed to play that. I think now most soap audiences have become a little more savvy and realize that we have limitations, but of course, in real life, this person would be at the funeral or that person would be at the wedding, and you just have to decide, do I really need them there?
And I will say, sometimes it’s nice to the actor who may have nothing to do. They may not want to sit in a pew for seven scenes with no lines watching this wedding, you know?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Mm-hmm.
Ron Carlivati: And you’re giving them a break by not putting them in there if they don’t really have a purpose. You know?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah.
Ron Carlivati: And so you have to make those judgment calls like, “I really need this person at the wedding, and even though this person would be there, we’re going to leave them out.”
Kate Hall: Right.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. Do you guys have favorite storylines that you worked on or most outlandish plots?
Kate Hall: Oh, you have to have some of those.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, you should be answering that.
Kate Hall: I mean, you were the Faison, the rip-his-face-off, right?
Ron Carlivati: Yeah.
Kate Hall: Right? That’s one of the most outlandish ones I’ve ever worked on with Duke Lavery and then Faison impersonating Duke, right?
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. We brought Duke Lavery, who was a very popular character-
Kate Hall: That was wild.
Ron Carlivati: … back to the show, but-
Kate Hall: This was General Hospital.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, it was on General Hospital and Duke Lavery had been sort of the gangster with the heart of hold that was with Anna Devane and had been, I think, dead. And we, of course, it was a soap, so that doesn’t matter. But Duke came back, but immediately, the audience saw that he was not acting like himself or acting so nicely, and he was doing horrible things and I was getting a lot of flack for, “Duke would never say this,” and, “Duke would never do this,” but of course-
Kate Hall: It paid off.
Ron Carlivati: … he was not Duke. He was really Cesar Faison wearing a latex mask. And the best, I think, one of the best reveals, I’m giving the credit to production not to myself-
Kate Hall: Oh, it was so good.
Ron Carlivati: … that we had Robert Scorpio, the super agent, throw a container of fondue in his face and the rubber mask melted off and you saw that it was Faison underneath, and it was a big gamble on Robert’s part because if he was wrong, he would’ve scalded poor Duke to death.
But yeah, no, those plots are fun. I was just talking to someone the other day about, look, when you’re writing so much and you’re writing every single day, every story’s been done, every story’s been told. And as writers, you want to… I remember Megan McTavish used to be like, I don’t know if I can curse on this, but she’d be like, “Let’s fuck with form. Let’s tell the story backwards or let’s do an episode like this.” Because we were getting bored with some of the things we do, and I had this idea for a long time to do a time jump on the show, which we would jump a year ahead and everyone’s lives would be different, and the audience would have to go along to see, well, how did they get there and what happened and why?
And I pitched at One Life to Live and General Hospital, and both times they said no-
Kate Hall: Oh, see? I love that.
Ron Carlivati: … because they said it was going to be too confusing for the audience because they’re going to think they missed something. And I said, “Yeah, they’re going to watch to see.”
And then at Days of Our Lives, they finally let me do it and we did a great thing. A character was in a coma, and her husband took an hourglass, which was one of the symbols of our show, and said, “I’m going to turn this over.” Each day he was determined to turn it over and she was going to wake up from this coma, and we went in close on the sand running through, and then all of a sudden it ran through and she opened her eyes and you thought it was just like one day, but it was actually she woke up and it was a year later.
And what was cool about it is that you got to turn the whole canvas upside down. You could do anything. And so we really… And the real trick was because we don’t have a lot of time to plot the show because we are writing every single week, but we had to know what happened to 30 different people over a course of a year, and we had to do it fast.
And so we did keep some consistency among the cast, among the characters of their lives because if everybody was different, it would be a little hard to absorb and follow, but we wanted to have enough big changes to sort of justify doing it. So it was like Kristen, who was our biggest schemer, was suddenly a nun. She was. And two characters who were a super couple were divorced, and of course, someone had to be dead, and you had to find out, well, what happened and why did they die?
So that was something really fun to do because we got to just play around a lot with the character and go, “Okay, what would you do with this character if you could do anything that something could have happened in a year that could have changed them this much?”
Kate Hall: Was that just one episode or-
Ron Carlivati: No, we kept it going.
Kate Hall: You did it for the whole…
Ron Carlivati: For months.
Kate Hall: Oh, that’s very cool.
Ron Carlivati: We did it for months until we sort of revealed all the big things that had gotten the people to where they were. So maybe that took three months, but we never went back. You were just now a year ahead and we just filled in a lot of what happened in that missing time, so that was a cool thing.
Kate Hall: That’s very cool.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, I think we started it on the anniversary, so people thought it was going to be just a very special episode, but then we kept going, which we did.
Kate Hall: Oh, I love that. Yeah, anything that goes outside the norm is always really interesting. I remember at All My Children, they did one episode where it wasn’t that crazy, but it was something I’d never written before where you just followed one character through the whole day and it was completely from their-
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I love that.
Kate Hall: … point of view, and I was scared to write it because there weren’t many other people in the show. You’re really just watching Greenlee navigate this one day of her life. And I just thought, “There’s not going to be enough material there,” but you can really get in. And it was almost freeing to be like, “Okay. I’m really just concentrated on her and how would she feel and what would she do and what would she say?” And it was really, I loved it, it was really fun.
Ron Carlivati: Wow.
Kate Hall: And it came out well. It was a good show.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah. Just like Scott wrote the episode about Alexis, Alexis Davis-
Kate Hall: Oh, yes.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: … on General Hospital, and that was a very powerful episode, actually, and I wish we could do more of that, actually. I like that idea very much.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. I don’t know if you remember, they used to do that on Guiding Light for a while. Dave Kreizman did this thing when he was head writer, I think it was him, called Inside the Light, and every Wednesday was an episode like that-
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Ron Carlivati: … where it was from one character’s POV. I don’t know how long it lasted or what they did, but that really intrigued me as like, “Oh, this is something different that you could do.”
Kate Hall: Something to do.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I think it’d help you clarify a character too.
Ron Carlivati: Absolutely. I know I think today there’s a show on Young and the Restless that’s just two characters.
Kate Hall: Oh, wow. Cool.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, that’s just Michelle Stafford and Sharon Case, I think.
A story that I love that was a little bit different on One Life to Live was Viki, who’s our matriarch and the grand dame of the show played by Erika Slezak, and she would take a long extended break in the summer. And so if you watched the show, Viki was always going to a conference in the summer. She ran a newspaper.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: That’s funny.
Ron Carlivati: So Viki was always leaving to go to a conference and you just dropped Viki and then Viki would come back when the conference was over. And so I was the head writer, and it was the moment where Viki was supposed to go to her conference, and I thought, “What if this was a storyline? What if Viki disappeared? Or Viki…” Like, “Why do we have to stick with the conference?”
And so we did a thing, I think it was the 10,000th episode for the show, and Dorian, who was her rival, challenged Viki. They were locked up together, as they often were, and said, “Viki, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Your kids are grown and this and that,” and basically challenging her that her life didn’t have meaning anymore.
And at the end of that episode, Viki was taking, it was Asa’s funeral, and Viki was taking the kids back to the airport who had come for the funeral. And at the very end of the episode, she went up to the counter and she said, “Give me a one-way ticket on the next flight anywhere,” and she left. And then we had a little time because Erika was on her break to figure, I didn’t know at the time, well, what was it going to be? But Viki was going on an adventure to find herself.
And we ended up, when the actors came back, doing this thing where her kids suddenly were getting worried and hadn’t heard from her, and they’d call her and you don’t see very much. You see her face on the phone. And she said, “I’m in Paris,” and it seemed very Viki-like to be in Paris. And then all of a sudden you heard, “The order’s up,” or something, and Viki has to hang up and she’s in a waitress outfit in a roadside diner. And she was in Paris, Texas as a waitress.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I think I remember watching that.
Ron Carlivati: I grew up watching the sitcom Alice with Linda Lavin, who just passed away this past year, and I loved that show. And essentially, we took Viki and made her Alice. She showed up at this diner. No one knew who she was. No one knew she was this rich, powerful woman.
Kate Hall: I remember this.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I do too.
Ron Carlivati: And we made her a waitress at the diner and created a whole new little cast of characters in this diner in Texas. And of course, the storyline somehow tied back to Llanview eventually and got her back to home, but it was so cool to actually have fun with the actors and make her this blue-collar waitress.
Kate Hall: I’m sure so fun for them to play something different.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. Yeah, Erika really loved it.
Kate Hall: Yeah. That’s very cool.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, that was fun.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, we’ve done that. We just did that a couple of years ago. We had a whole nother town, Nixon Falls on GH.
Kate Hall: Oh, for Sonny.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: For Sonny, and he was in a whole nother… It was like having two soaps, actually. It was the Nixon Falls soaps and the GH Fort Charles soap.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, I love stuff like that.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, it took a while.
Ron Carlivati: How do you approach getting notes on your script?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: With a big glass of vodka. No.
Kate Hall: You don’t really get notes. You just read the edits and go, “Oh, okay.”
Ron Carlivati: So on your script, you get the script back and there’s changes that were made?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah.
Kate Hall: I mean, everybody gets it. It’s not like they send it back to you, unless there have to be rewrites or something. But yeah, you-
Ron Carlivati: Do you ever call and say, “Why was this changed?” Or, “I’m just curious,” or not really?
Kate Hall: No.
Ron Carlivati: Charlotte?
Kate Hall: Do you? Do you do that?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: No. Nope. Nope. I have not yet.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, my experience, obviously when I wrote scripts and breakdowns was like that, but as the head writer, you’re getting the notes directly from the producers and from the network. And that-
Kate Hall: Yeah. That’s different. In real time.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, yeah. So you get the notes on your week, and of course, it’s funny. We’re in this creative business, so they have a job to do, we have a job to do. But it is, because it’s creative, it’s not like someone just says, “You added up this column of numbers wrong,” and you’re like, “oh, yes, I did. Let me fix it.” This is someone saying, “Your idea isn’t good,” you know?
Kate Hall: Right.
Ron Carlivati: Or, “There’s a problem with it.” And look, I think it comes from a good place. We’re all trying to make the best show possible. My approach is always you could probably quibble with any note that you get, and my approach is always to, if it’s really not that painful, find a way to take that note because then one that really matters to you, you could push back a little. You could challenge and say, “Well, I don’t want to take that note,” or, I” prefer to try to address it this way.” So I try to take as many as possible so that when you want to put your foot down, you have a leg to stand on and it’s a little collaborative process.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah. I think it’s different when you’re writing breakdowns because you’re right there usually, so you can push back, but by the time you get your scripts-
Kate Hall: People have moved on.
Ron Carlivati: Right.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Your edited script is two weeks later sometimes.
Kate Hall: But it’s similar to what you say. Sometimes it’s just, “Oh, this set changed,” or, “they clearly changed something in the story”-
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, and then the story.
Kate Hall: … “and that’s why.” Or you just see, “I guess they didn’t like the way I wrote that and they changed it.” So yeah, some feel personal and you get annoyed by it. But no, I mean, like Charlotte said, they’ve already moved on. So for me to be like, “Um, page 65 on, what was this about?” They’d be like, “We don’t remember.”
Ron Carlivati: No. And sometimes there are reasons you don’t know or understand or like, “Oh, the actor can’t say all these lines and memorize all this, so we shortened it for that reason,” or whatever reason.
Kate Hall: Yeah, you’d love to have an explanation for everything, but there’s no time.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. And what’s kind of great is I can remember back in the day when maybe it didn’t move as… It still always moved at a rapid pace because we were doing so many, but there was maybe a little more time, and the producer might come in on a Monday and throw out the entire week. They hated it. And you would start over. But what I think everyone has realized, at the pace that we’re going, they might’ve hated the week, but they kind of can’t-
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: They can’t.
Ron Carlivati: If we stop and rewrite last week, then we’re not writing the current week. So the notes are generally not that extensive and not that bad. It’s, “Can you make her a little less bitchy?” or, “can you make whatever,” or, “can you cut this line?” And unless it’s a line that you really love so much, you’re like, “Sure, we can.”
Kate Hall: How do you feel about, I know you’ve written for shows where you write so far out, and as opposed to it’s airing in six weeks or two months?
Ron Carlivati: Well, it’s funny, I remember that was always a thing where, oh, if you weren’t so far ahead, you could adjust the story to what the audience was hating a story or liking a story. Or they love this couple, you could lean into that instead of, “Oh, we weren’t even planning to go in that direction, but now the audience loves these two, so let’s write that.” Or, “They hate these two and we were planning to write them for six months,” and you could respond. They had focus groups in real time, and you could adjust. And at Days of Our Lives, we were like nine months ahead, and there was absolutely no way you could do it.
And I’m sort of of two minds. I do think there is something about being a little closer to air where you can react and respond to things in real life in real time. On the other hand, I’ll watch other shows, primetime shows or streaming shows where you’re like, “They wrote all 13 of these before anybody saw one”-
Kate Hall: That’s true.
Ron Carlivati: … and they did not listen to what the audience thought or what anybody thought. They’re like, “This is what we did, and we’re putting it out into the world. Hopefully, you like it. You might not.”
So I think it’s twofold. I think it’s good to be able to listen to your audience. At the same time, I don’t think the audience should guide where the story goes. That’s the writer’s job. You know?
Kate Hall: Right. That’s your vision, not theirs.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, yeah. I agree. Who is the best character you think to write for in daytime drama? Who are some of your favorite characters?
Ron Carlivati: Oh, wow. I’m going to put that on Kate.
Kate Hall: Ooh. Wow. That’s so hard. There are so many. I’ve written for so many characters.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I know. Who are some of-
Kate Hall: I can say that there are some characters, people always say, “Oh, do you have favorites?” And of course you do, and there are people you love writing for. But for me, I have far more characters that I love writing for than I did. I remember being very intimidated when I first started out at All My Children. The second I got my assignment, I would just be going through it. I was scared to write Erica Kane. She was so iconic to me that I just thought, “What if I get her wrong?” You can’t get her wrong. And so I remember that more.
And then what was so freeing and exciting was when I didn’t care who was in it anymore, and I didn’t care if I had a legal scene or a scene at the hospital. I was always worried about that jargon and not knowing what I was doing. And I feel like Google wasn’t even as helpful back then. It was a while ago, and you would have to get an expert on the phone and say, “How would you write this?”
And then how nice it is to not ever be nervous anymore. I know I can handle anything and I can handle any character and I can do it. But yeah, when you were green, it was all very intimidating. And I just remember kind of getting over that hump and realizing, “Oh, wow, none of this scares me anymore. And how nice is that, that I’m finally to that place?”
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: It’s interesting you say that because when I was on All My Children, and I think Megan was the third head writer that I was working with, and I made a mistake, I think, one time of saying in a conversation that I was pre-law as an undergrad, and I started writing all the legal stuff.
Kate Hall: Oh, no.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I wrote Brooke who shot… Oh, God, I can’t remember now. Anyway, I wrote practically the entire courtroom battle, and it just seemed like, “Okay, legal.”
Kate Hall: It became your specialty?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: It did. And I would talk to the legal expert all the time about it. And then when I was on, As the World Turns, I started writing Susan’s legal battles. It was like-
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, no, I remember that too because the writers knew I had gone to law school, so they would turn to me and be like, “Well, what would happen?” And I said, “Well, we didn’t cover the murder victim showing up alive during the trial and walking into the courtroom.”
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Right.
Ron Carlivati: So we would practice law lite. And also, when we were, if you’re in a fictional venue, we could say, “Well, that’s what the law is in Salem,” or, “that’s what the…” On One Life to Live, we had a legal expert, and he was a Pennsylvania lawyer because the show was supposed to take place in Pennsylvania, and we tried to stick to real Pennsylvania law.
Kate Hall: Yeah, we do too.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Same, same.
Ron Carlivati: And the thing with Salem is a lot of people think it’s Illinois because it’s close to Chicago and all, but on Days of Our Lives, it has never been said that the show is in Illinois. So we can always say, “In our jurisdiction,” or, “in Salem, this is what the law is.”
Kate Hall: Oh, that’s nice.
Ron Carlivati: And you’re not violating the law. You can kind of do it that way.
I mean, when you write for, as you said, so many characters, it really, and as the head writer and I have 30 contract people, and they’re sort of chess pieces on a board that you’re moving around, you really don’t play favorites. You really can’t. And even though the audience may always tell you though you have pets and favorites, which I do not, but I do like to write for sometimes the larger-than-life people, like the Asa Buchanans or the Erica Kanes or the characters that are going to… You can write them big, you can write them funny.
I can remember one executive one day, it wasn’t even me, some writer wrote something really funny for Asa, and the producer at the time said, “You know this isn’t a sitcom.” And I said, “Well, maybe it should be.” I mean-
Kate Hall: What?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, why can’t it be?
Ron Carlivati: Well, as you grew up on All My Children, you saw that Agnes put a lot of humor into the show.
Kate Hall: Yeah, it was campy, for sure.
Ron Carlivati: With Phoebe and Langley and Myrtle and all those-
Kate Hall: Opal.
Ron Carlivati: … Seabone Hunkle and Opal, yeah, all these. Humor was very much a part of soaps always. And you have to be careful maybe not to lean into it too hard, but that’s one fun thing about writing soaps is you can be writing an action adventure show, a medical drama, a comedy-
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Exactly. Gangsters.
Ron Carlivati: … a fantasy.
Kate Hall: All in one episode.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oftentimes all in one episode.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah. It’s kind of like you ask a parent, “Who’s your favorite child?” Well, you can’t really say who it is.
Ron Carlivati: Right. No.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: But you can definitely say, “Well, I love Tracy Quartermaine! I love writing for her.”
Ron Carlivati: Right. That’s a fun character to write for.
Kate Hall: Me too.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: You know?
Kate Hall: Me too. She’s the best.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, or just anybody who just kind of sparks your fancy, you know?
Ron Carlivati: Right, yeah.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I think somebody who’s so different than you are too. You know?
Kate Hall: Yeah.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Your alter ego can come through.
Ron Carlivati: Right, or you could take a character that’s maybe getting, is a smaller character or more of a character on the sidelines, and suddenly you’re writing for them and you can give them a certain new personality trait or some new thing that brings them to life a little more.
Kate Hall: Absolutely.
Ron Carlivati: Which is fun.
Kate Hall: I love fight scenes. I don’t know what that says about me, but I love writing a fight.
Ron Carlivati: Like verbal fights?
Kate Hall: Yes. Oh, yeah. Not physical. Verbal fights. I just really, my little, I don’t know, catty personality-
Ron Carlivati: Just comes out.
Kate Hall: … comes out. Yes.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, you can get a lot of stuff out sometimes.
Kate Hall: Yeah.
Ron Carlivati: Where and when do you do most of your writing?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Hmm.
Kate Hall: When I lived in New York City, I did all of it at coffee shops or I would do the morning in the coffee shop because I couldn’t sit there all day, and then I’d go to my parents’ apartment. I hated being in my own space. I felt like there was always something else I could be doing. I could be folding the kids’ laundry or whatever it is. I just felt like there was too many ways to procrastinate.
But then when we moved out of the city and it takes five years to drive everywhere from my house, that just became so annoying. I remember going to a coffee shop once and realizing that I forgot my wallet at home, and I almost burst into tears being like, “For me to go home and come back, it’s going to take me half an hour at least, and I can’t.” So now, and then COVID obviously hit, and so now I mostly work from home just at the dining room table.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: In my very cluttered office that’s got everything in it. And every now and then, I’ll treat myself. I’ll go downstairs if there’s nobody around in the house, and I’ll sit at the kitchen counter and just enjoy being able to see my garden and stuff like that, but.
Kate Hall: Do you have a cutoff time when you are done writing? Would you write at night a lot? I never do.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: At 10 o’clock, my brain shuts down and everything I write, I have to rewrite the next day anyway, so it’s like, “Just stop.” But no, I keep myself on a very strict schedule. It’s like I got to get act one, the prologue and act one done the first day, blah, blah, whatever. I have to stay on schedule, especially if it’s a double. And so I push and push and push. I try to push until I can meet that schedule. If I can’t, then I know I’ve got to get up early, get started the next day.
Ron Carlivati: It’s funny, when as the head writer, you’re not really sitting at a desk. You think of writers at their desk on their computer, hunched over the laptop, and as the head writer, you’re no longer writing the episodes. I mean, I went from writing scripts to writing breakdowns, to writing thrusts, to all of a sudden my “writing” was being on the phone with one of the writers and talking, talking, talking. And they’re typing and they’re taking notes. And that, I found, I couldn’t do sitting still. I cannot.
So I’m walking with headphones. People are probably looking at me on the street because I’m walking, I’m at the beach, I’m walking into town, and I just have my headphones on and it helps me to think, to move and walk.
Kate Hall: Oh, that’s interesting.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, I can’t. And now it’s different because I’m back to now I’m a staff writer on Beyond the Gates, and now I’m writing a breakdown and it’s much different. I’m not on the phone all day. I am on the phone one day, and then I’m sitting at my computer, and like you guys said, it’s like, “Okay, if I can get to act three by five o’clock, then I’m going to stop and do the rest tomorrow.” And that’s really great.
Kate Hall: I write in my car a lot because I’m always dropping somebody off or picking them up or waiting for them outside of dance or whatever.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: She’s got young kids.
Kate Hall: So I bring my computer with me wherever I go, and yeah, lots of car writing happens.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, no, I definitely can remember having to write around, like, “All right, I’m just going to pull over into this parking lot and then I can take notes.” I’m like…
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Oh, I did that once on a train and they could hear in the background.
Ron Carlivati: No, and a few other people can hear you because I’m often talking about, “Well, what kind of poison would you use to kill this person?” And people can hear you.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, and like, “Oh”-
Kate Hall: The cops show up five minutes later.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, no, we had a writer who, this is a weird story, her husband was being investigated for a crime he did not commit. He was 100% innocent, but sort of a bad person had steered them in his direction. And so she had this thought, I don’t know if it was true or false, that their phones were being tapped.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: What?
Kate Hall: Sure.
Ron Carlivati: And we were talking about all kinds of murderous plots on the phone. And I’m like, “Well, let this confuse them if nothing else.” He was 100% exonerated and he did not do it.
Kate Hall: That’s so funny.
Ron Carlivati: But that was a funny thing to… We were talking about honestly plotting murders and worried that the police have the phones tapped.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: That totally happened to me. I was on All My Children and I was getting a mattress delivered, and I was talking on the phone to the editor or something, and the mattress guy was bringing everything in. I was like, “Yeah, well, if we kill her, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And when I got off the phone, he looked at me, he goes, “Miss, were you just talking about killing somebody?” And I was like, “Oh, no, no! I write for All My Children!” And he said, “All My Children, isn’t it awful how Erica stole that baby?”
Kate Hall: Oh, that’s great.
Ron Carlivati: That is funny.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I know. I was like, “Oh my God, I didn’t even think about it.” You know?
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. No, I mentioned Beyond the Gates, which by now, most people maybe have heard of because they’re making such a big press push for it.
Kate Hall: For sure. It’s exciting.
Ron Carlivati: But it is the first new soap in, I want to say, 27 years.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Wow.
Ron Carlivati: And in a time when soaps were shrinking and disappearing, it’s a major thing that this show is coming out now. I mean, I remember when I started, maybe there were 10 soaps on the air and now there are four, three on the air, and one streaming. And then I got a call from Michele Val Jean after I left Days of Our Lives, and she said, “I created this soap opera and CBS just greenlit it. Do you want to be on my team?”
And it has been a really exciting… I mean, as we’re recording this, the first episode was yesterday and on daytime TV at 2:00 PM on CBS Eastern Standard Time.
Kate Hall: Awesome. So great.
Ron Carlivati: But it’s historic in that look, they greenlit a new soap and it centers around a Black family and it’s the first hour-long daytime drama to do that, and so it’s really exciting to be part of it in this moment.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Especially…
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, with everything going on in the world. It’s great to have the show launching and getting such positive feedback. At least in the lead-up to the premiere, I just saw all kinds of online excitement about the show. Then in this crush toward the premiere, a billboard in Times Square, and it was on CBS Sunday Morning and it’s in the New York Times.
Kate Hall: I saw it. It’s so great.
Ron Carlivati: So really exciting and so exciting for the cast. I was at an event in LA last week, and Clifton Davis, who plays our patriarch, they asked him about being on the show, and he’s had this long, storied career, and been on the Broadway stage and had a variety show with Melba Moore and then on Amen for many, many years. And he said, “This is probably the most exciting,” I might be paraphrasing him, “that has happened to me, to be on, it just feels historic to people.”
Kate Hall: It is.
Ron Carlivati: And it’s a good thing for soaps in general that suddenly there’s a new one being launched when people have this attitude like they’re going away.
Kate Hall: They’re dying. Yeah, we’re dinosaurs.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah. Shout out to CBS and the NAACP.
Ron Carlivati: Correct.
Kate Hall: That’s right.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. No, it’s great.
Kate Hall: Is the structure of the writing team the same as other soaps, or are they doing anything differently?
Ron Carlivati: It’s the same. They do it a little differently than I did, but I had my process, which was it took me really all week to lay out the shows. I would, on Monday, maybe get one done, and then two on Tuesday, and another one on Wednesday. They work on a thrust for five. And then on Monday after we get the notes, we stay on the Zoom until all five are done and laid out.
Kate Hall: I see.
Ron Carlivati: And so then by Tuesday, me and the other breakdown writers are already at our desks writing those outlines and then turning them into each other on a Thursday and then turning them into Michele and Bob on Friday.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I’ve worked that way too.
Ron Carlivati: It is a great way to do it. I could not keep up with that pace.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Long conversations.
Kate Hall: Right. It’s a long day, yeah.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. And just to lay out five and still be creative in one day is a lot, but for moving the thing along, it’s a great thing. But it’s shooting in Atlanta, which is maybe new for daytime because the soaps have been in New York, or now all in California, but pretty much it’s being run any other daytime soap, and it’s just, I hope that it does well because it does bode well for the future of daytime drama.
Kate Hall: Absolutely.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: I have to say, I do miss, and you touched on this too, the writers room. It was so nice when I was on As the World Turns and Hogan was the head writer, and that was a joyful time for me. It really was. It was really great being in the writers room, and it was like the Dick Van Dyke Show or something. We cut up. We had so much fun.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. No, I’ll finish a day and I’ll be complaining bitterly about things, and my husband’s like, “I just heard you laughing all day.”
Kate Hall: Right. “What are talking about?”
Ron Carlivati: I was like, “Well, that’s part of the process.”
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah. It really is.
Ron Carlivati: Well, and it is true. Sometimes-
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: It keeps the creativity, everybody was involved, you know? It was-
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. And sometimes you are sort of talking jokingly about a story idea as just an outlandish thing and then-
Kate Hall: And it sparks something.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. And you’ll say, “Well, we could never do that.” And then I always said, “Well, why can’t we?”
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, yeah.
Ron Carlivati: You know?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: “Yes, and.”
Ron Carlivati: Viki goes to Mars. But really, on daytime you can do almost anything. But sometimes the best ideas came out of that, what you’re talking about, that camaraderie around the room and people just saying the most outlandish things or just laughing about different things, and then all of a sudden you’re like, “Wait a minute. That could be a story line if we massage it a little bit or do something like that.”
I don’t know how much time we have, but I could go to it’s a Sunday afternoon. Where are you and what are you doing?
Kate Hall: I am on a sports field somewhere, either indoor or outdoor, depending on the time of year. My children play every sport under the sun, and we just drive them around and go to their games. That’s truly what Sundays are.
And if I’m not where I should be with my script, then I’m running to the car in between and writing a scene, which is interesting because back in the day, I hated that. Either I wanted to get the whole act done, just diving into it a little bit, I thought was, “No, that’s not going to work for me.” And now I have to write that way. I will write half a scene and be like, “Well, I got half of it done,” and I’ll come back and revisit it because my day is so broken up now with once school is over, then you have to get them to this place, and then you can write a little bit there, and then you get them home, and then you can write a little bit there.
So that’s where I am on a Sunday. I hope you guys are doing something more fun.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Oh, no, I’m not. I’m in my cluttered little office, writing away. I do a lot of my writing on the weekends because during the week is… Tuesday and Wednesday are my weekends kind of because I’ve just-
Kate Hall: Gotcha.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: … turned in a show and I’m like, “Ah!”
Kate Hall: You take a breather?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yes. And then so I find I do a lot of writing. And if I’m doing a double, I’m in my little cluttered office in my pajamas because I’ve just been focused and focused and banging things out.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah. I used to work seven days a week pretty much because by the time I laid out everything and then trying to start thinking about next week, I was doing something every single day. And then eventually, you do it enough where you’re like, “Okay, I can get this done.”
I decided in the past couple years I’m not going to work on Sunday. I’m going to… I will work Saturday, and often I was still laying it out with one of the writers and we were doing the sixth episode or something, but then Sunday, I was like, “I’m just not going to do anything at all.” And also now, if I’m just writing one episode, I’m generally done by Friday.
So Sunday was like a day to just have fun. And I don’t have children, but I do have a dog, so you can generally find me somewhere either in the city in a dog park, or maybe in East Hampton at the beach-
Kate Hall: At the beach.
Ron Carlivati: … walking my dog, who’s taken up a lot of my time.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Aw, that’s so cute.
Ron Carlivati: But it definitely just helps to just empty your mind and totally relax and not think about the characters at all because it is hard to turn them off. I’m sure you guys probably dream about them too.
Kate Hall: Oh, yeah.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Trying to get there. Trying to get there, Ron.
Kate Hall: It’s helpful.
Ron Carlivati: It’s going to happen, Charlotte.
Kate Hall: Yeah. You have to turn it off or else it’s too loud.
Well, this is so fun-
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: It is.
Kate Hall: … to be sitting here with you guys.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: And it sounded maybe a little arduous at times, but writing for daytime is so much fun.
Kate Hall: It is so fun.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: It really is fun. It’s a lot of work, Lord knows.
Ron Carlivati: It’s definitely the perfect mix of a lot of fun and a shitload of work.
Kate Hall: It’s relentless fun. How’s that?
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, yeah. That’s great, Kate. Relentless fun. Yeah. Well, wow, this was really fun.
Kate Hall: It was.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah.
Kate Hall: So good to see you guys.
Ron Carlivati: Yeah, great to see you too.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ron Carlivati: Now we’ll go back into our respective worlds.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: Yes, yes.
Kate Hall: Yes. Good luck with your double, Charlotte.
Charlotte Gibson-Bauer: And food luck with your double, Kate.
Kate Hall: Thank you.
Outro: On Writing is a production of the Writers Guild of America, East. The series is produced by WGAE staff members Jason Gordon, Tiana Timmerberg, and Molly Beer. Production, mix, and original music are by Taylor Bradshaw.
To learn more about the Writers Guild of America, East, visit us online at wgaeast.org or follow the Guild on all social media platforms @WGAEast. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe and give us a five-star rating. Thanks for listening. Until next time, write on.
