David Paulsen, Former Head Writer and Producer of DALLAS, DYNASTY and KNOTS LANDING, Reflects on Classic Soaps

Featuring Bonus Excerpts

Art Swift

July 8, 2004

The 1980s was the golden age for primetime soap operas. Viewers worldwide reveled in watching J.R. Ewing, Alexis Carrington Colby and Abby Ewing on “Dallas,” “Dynasty” and “Knots Landing” week after week. One man was a driving creative force behind all three of these classic dramas, and his name was David Paulsen.

In this rare interview, Paulsen reminisces about his years as a head writer, supervising producer and executive producer. He also offers revelations about some of the actors he worked with, from Barbara Bel Geddes to Linda Evans to Joan Collins.

“It’s not easy to write a serial,” Paulsen said last week from his home outside Los Angeles. “You have to watch the dailies, watch these actors, see how they talk. Some writers would write jokes and that’s often not what was needed if you followed the storyline.”

Paulsen hails originally from Baltimore, Maryland, and was close friends with a number of men who became multi-talented writers and directors, including Barry Levinson, David Jacobs, the creator of “Dallas” and “Knots Landing “ and Roberto Loiderman, a writer for “Knots Landing” and “Dynasty.”

“I got started as an actor in a show called ‘The Three Sisters,’ a Chekhov play, with George C. Scott. I also was in the Second City Theatre Company with David Steinberg, Fred Willard and Robert Klein.”

From his lofty beginnings, Paulsen also paid his dues as a clown for Holiday on Ice.

“I traveled around Europe as a skater,” Paulsen laughed. “I was the ‘hottest violinist on ice.’ I always looked like I was going to fall as part of the act, but I never did.”

Paulsen stayed in Europe for a while after skating, acting in Spain, and eventually making it to Israel where he hooked up with Menahem Golan and the seminal Cannon Films.

“Cannon was doing feature films, which at the time people weren’t interested in doing, but it was great for me because I wound up writing five or six pictures for them. They gave a lot of people work,” Paulsen said.

Paulsen found his way into soaps when he co-wrote a successful paperback with Jim Rogers titled “Daytime Affair.”

“I was living in Israel and I got a call from Jim Rogers that Lorimar and ABC had picked up the book for television. The executive producer was the same as the one for ‘Dallas,’ Phil Capice. He wound up introducing me to ‘Dallas,’” Paulsen recalled.

At the same time, Paulsen reluctantly called up his friend David Jacobs and went to lunch with him.

“I find it difficult to ask anyone for a job. But when I saw him he was doing ‘Knots Landing’ and he said about me writing a script, ‘you would? I didn’t know.’ And so I did a script for ‘Knots Landing,’ too.”

Paulsen at first just wrote an episode of “Dallas” here and there but soon was hired to be a staff writer, or what is commonly known as a “story editor.” “Dallas,” the saga of the oil-rich Ewings and their rivals, the Barnes, had become the number one show in America the year before, and Paulsen was one of only three people crafting the storylines.

“I was with Len Katzman, who was the supervising producer and Arthur Bernard Lewis and we would write the storylines out and do some of the scripts ourselves and would hire freelance writers to do the rest. I would rewrite the scripts that were done by the freelance writers usually.”

Paulsen said Katzman was the visionary of the show in Paulsen’s early tenure. After Paulsen’s second year on “Dallas,” he, Katzman and Lewis decided to stop using the freelancers.

“We wanted to give work to other writers because you never could tell who you’ll find, but we realized it would be easier to do it ourselves.”

And so three men wrote “Dallas,” with Paulsen doing the lion’s share of the scriptwriting.

“I would go home on a Friday night and start a script and spend all day Saturday writing acts one and two and all day Sunday writing acts three and four. And then we’d go into pre-production on Monday,” Paulsen said.

In the sixth season of “Dallas,” the 1983-84 year, Paulsen estimated he actually wrote 18 or 19 episodes of the 30 episodes that aired, though he was credited for less.

“It was my trial by fire,” he joked. “Len Katzman would say let’s have a race and he’d have 52 pages ready for the typewriter, because that’s how many pages we’d shoot. After a while, once we got the outline down, while Len typed, I could actually dictate a show in eight hours.”

On one Saturday night, during a feverish rush of scriptwriting, Paulsen called Camille Marchetta, his predecessor on “Dallas,” and joked about the prediction she had made when he joined the show.

“She had said, you’ll make a lot of money, more money than anyone should make in this situation, but after a few months you’ll say, ‘they can’t pay me enough to do this.’ I called her and told her she was right.”

As a writer, Paulsen put much emphasis on research and detail in his storylines. He says his favorite plot on “Dallas” revolved around the “tundra torque,” a drill bit for oil production that Cliff Barnes (Ken Kercheval) had and J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) needed.

“I got on the phone with a lot of oilmen about that and paid attention to getting it right,” Paulsen said. “We did a lot of research for things like that and slant drilling, too.”

While creating gripping, trenchant stories was enjoyable, “Dallas” was challenged when actors either died or left the show. When Jim Davis (Jock Ewing) passed away before the fourth season began in 1981, the cast and crew were greatly upset and no thought was given to recasting the role.

“What we did think about was replacing the Big Daddy,” Paulsen concedes. “We talked about Punk Anderson (Morgan Woodward) coming in and eventually we got Howard Keel (Clayton Farlow) in there. Howard Keel was just going to be Dusty’s (Jared Martin) father but we thought, ‘this guy is pretty good, let’s extend him.’”

The transition wasn’t as easy when Barbara Bel Geddes (Miss Ellie Ewing) left the show three years later. Many fans have complained that her yearlong departure, and recasting by Academy Award-winner Donna Reed, signaled the beginning of the end for “Dallas.”

“There was a contract negotiation and her agents and managers got in the way,” Paulsen said. “She didn’t want to work the full week, money wasn’t really the issue and it just kept going back and forth.”

Bel Geddes had had heart surgery in 1983 and published reports often cited that she voluntarily chose to leave the show because she tired of the part and wished to recuperate.

“In the last minute we had to move on,” Paulsen said. “We told her we had Donna Reed lined up and she was going to lose out if we didn’t come to an agreement. (Her agents and managers) didn’t believe us and when we said we were going with Donna Reed, Barbara called us at the last minute and tried to fix things but it was too late.”

Paulsen was insistent that Bel Geddes’ replacement by Reed wasn’t her fault, but the fault of her people.

“I’ve seen more deals blown by managers and agents than I could even mention.”

When Reed began filming her scenes as Miss Ellie, it quickly became obvious to Paulsen and the producers that she was miscast.

“She wasn’t Miss Ellie,” Paulsen said. “I mean, in certain ways she probably looked more like Miss Ellie than Barbara did. Barbara is very New England and Donna was dressed and appeared more like a Texas woman, but she wasn’t Miss Ellie.”

In the musical chairs that became “Dallas,” Reed was dropped and Bel Geddes brought back, this time with a contract that required her to work a full week. Charlene Tilton (Lucy Ewing) was written off the show because the writers ran out of story ideas for her (though they would “discover” new stories for her three years later), and Patrick Duffy (Bobby Ewing) decided he wanted to leave the show in a big way.

“Patrick’s seven years (contract) had run out,” Paulsen said. “In soaps, when a character dies off screen, he doesn’t really die, he can return. When you die onscreen, you are really killing the character off.”

In the seventh season finale, Bobby and Pam (Victoria Principal) had decided to remarry right before he was run over by a car. Bobby died in full view of the audience in a weepy deathbed scene, allegedly never to return.

“Patrick was gone,” Paulsen said. “Patrick was going to be a movie star and there was no thought whatsoever to having the character live. (Ronald) Reagan would come back sooner than him.”

Meanwhile, executive producer Phil Capice and supervising producer Len Katzman wrestled in a power struggle over control of “Dallas,” seemingly similar to plot developments on the show they worked on. Capice won, and Katzman left. So did Paulsen.

“I was looking for producer’s stripes, but Phil had tapped Peter Dunne from ‘Knots Landing’ to be on ‘Dallas.’ I left the show and Peter came upstairs, one flight up. Both shows were in the same building, within two floors of each other,” Paulsen recalled with a laugh.

Dunne came upstairs and Paulsen went downstairs, assuming Dunne’s role as head writer on “Knots Landing.” That’s when the emerging troubles at “Dallas” kicked into high gear.

“Peter was better at ‘Knots.’ ‘Knots’ was a woman’s show, personal, familial. ‘Dallas’ was a male show, more of an action show.”

Paulsen said “Dallas” was successful because J.R. Ewing drove the story. When Dunne took over at “Dallas,” Paulsen added that the focus wasn’t on J.R. anymore and it became more of a woman’s show.

“It took one or two episodes to notice this, that it was off.”

Paulsen wasn’t happy working on “Knots Landing,” the spinoff of “Dallas,” featuring the “black sheep” Ewing brother, Gary (Ted Shackelford) and his insecure country wife Valene (Joan Van Ark).

“It was a difficult year. I tried to instill it with a male point of view. I tried to strengthen Gary and Greg (William Devane).”

Over at “Dallas,” the ratings were plunging and Len Katzman was in exile. The movement began to get Capice off the show.

“I said, sure I’ll go back,” Paulsen said when asked by Katzman if he was interested in returning with him to “Dallas.”

Patrick Duffy’s movie career did not materialize and the three of them, Duffy, Katzman and Paulsen, began thinking of ways to return to the ailing soap.

“One day I’ll remember, I was directing a ‘Knots Landing’ and Len just burst in and I yelled ‘cut’ and he said to me, ‘it was all a dream,’ and I said, ‘Perfect!’”

The preparations for Duffy’s return were underway. Pam was going to have “dreamt” the entire season that Katzman and Paulsen were absent for. The incoming producers were extremely secretive about what they were doing, and decided to have Duffy shoot a soap advertisement in a shower.

“We shot Patrick in an Irish Spring commercial,” Paulsen said.

Katzman took the film of that “commercial” and slipped it into the final reel of the 1986 season finale. Pam “woke up” and saw Bobby in the shower, the man she had thought died a year earlier.

“In retrospect it was the best reason we could come up with,” Paulsen said about the dream. “We weren’t going to have him as somebody’s twin; we respected a kind of reality. We had to bring Bobby back, not Patrick Duffy as someone else.”

John Beck (Mark Graison) and Barbara Carrera (Angelica Nero) were not signed for the following year, Paulsen said, and the plots from the eighth season of “Dallas” were wiped clean. The ratings slide stabilized for a time and Paulsen enjoyed the return to “Dallas” from “Knots Landing.”

Around this time, Esther and Richard Shapiro, creators of “Dynasty,” made an offer for Paulsen to become a writer on their show. He declined.

“I liked ‘Dallas’; ‘Dynasty’ was a woman’s show. ‘Dallas’ was a man’s show. Our reality was different. (‘Dynasty’) was dealing with clothing, styles, and extraordinary placesettings. I didn’t know a lot about placesettings.“

A couple of years later, the Shapiros approached him again, this time wanting to give him carte blanche to run “Dynasty,” as that former number one show was sliding into the sunset.

“The two of them, Aaron Spelling and Doug Kramer wanted to pull back,” Paulsen said. “It was kind of a clandestine meeting. I wasn’t sure about the show but my business manager gave me the three-hour pilot to watch.”

Paulsen decided that the pilot reflected the kind of show he would want to write, a far cry from what mid-to late-80s period “Dynasty” had become.

“I can’t write what I had seen in the past four years, can’t see all this foo-foo stuff. They had a cliffhanger where someone shot up a warehouse and there’d be no way for anyone to get out and they all wound up living. They didn’t pay off their cliffhangers but on ‘Dallas’ we always paid off our cliffhangers.”

Paulsen was told he could have carte blanche on “Dynasty” under one condition: he had to stay within budget. How hard could that be? He thought, until he noticed the budget for the year had already been spent, most of it on salaries for the show’s high-priced stars.

“I realized I couldn’t take the show off the lot,” Paulsen lamented. “To go off the lot it costs $18,000 to $20,000 per shoot, you have to pay the Teamsters, the trucking people. Without going off the lot, the show wouldn’t have any air. It would have a look that was claustrophobic.”

Paulsen wasn’t sure what to do, but he knew that he couldn’t have every scene be on the soundstages. He screened every fourth episode, about 40 to 50 in all and paid attention to “who was popping off the screen.” He noticed that the marriage of Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) and Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans) was as solid as TV pairings go, and was boring.

Paulsen wanted to shake up their marriage, as he looked for dramatic possibilities in the ninth season of “Dynasty.” He also needed more money. He began to solve both problems when he contemplated what to do with Evans.

“I thought why don’t we cut down Linda Evans? We couldn’t reduce her salary but we could pay her less if she was in fewer episodes. If we could create some danger to that marriage, that would give us a good storyline.”

Evans’ role on “Dynasty” in the 1988-89 season was cut drastically. Instead of appearing in all 22 episodes, she was in only six. Paulsen also let go of other supporting characters. Evans wanted a break from working on “Dynasty,” but Joan Collins did not. Paulsen cut her role from 22 to 11 episodes.

“She didn’t like that much,” Paulsen said. “She threatened not to sign the contract. They never had anyone say no to her before. I said we could lose Joan and have Stephanie Beacham replace her.”

Collins took the reduced involvement, even though Paulsen didn’t cut the role of Forsythe, citing Blake Carrington’s position as “the leader” on the show.

“With that money, we were able to build some sets, a new exterior set and we were able to go off the lot,” Paulsen said.

Evans may have been in few episodes, but her presence loomed in the last season of “Dynasty.” Krystle was in the middle of a murder mystery, “Who Killed Roger Grimes?” that Paulsen said was a precursor for the series “Twin Peaks,” which came a year later.

In a yearlong buildup, at the end of the season the most unlikely suspect, Fallon (Emma Samms), was revealed to be the killer, when she was eight years old. This creative resurgence was not enough to save the show, and “Dynasty” was cancelled in 1989.

“The president of ABC told me he had been trying to get the show off the air for some time,” Paulsen revealed. “The show was so expensive to produce for one thing, and for another, anthology series do well in reruns, but serials do not. The ratings for the reruns plummeted. I don’t think they even showed the second half of ‘Dallas’ in syndication.”

If “Dynasty” had continued for a tenth season, Paulsen says it would have been without Linda Evans and Joan Collins. Stephanie Beacham, who returned to “Dynasty” in the last season, would have “assumed” the position that Collins had.

“Stephanie, we brought her on in a much lower salary, but I think Joan did a lot of her best work that year when we put them head to head. We got some of the cat fighting back from years’ past,” Paulsen added.

Writing weekly for nearly a decade exhausted Paulsen. He was especially worn out by that last year of “Dynasty,” mainly because there was a Writer’s Guild strike, which limited the amount of planning for the season. Add to that a bout of pneumonia and Teamsters strikes and Paulsen said he had no interest in returning to work at “Dallas” for that show’s final two years.

He re-teamed with Len Katzman in 1992 for a series named “Dangerous Curves,” a late-night offering on CBS that was shot in Dallas. “Curves” featured the first major performance by Michael Michele (“ER,” “Homicide”).

“It was about two young women, one black and one white, who had a detective agency in Dallas,” Paulsen said. “We were on for two years and then we got ‘Lettermanized.’ To make room for David Letterman, five shows were knocked off the air.”

Katzman, Paulsen’s old boss and partner, died in 1996. Paulsen said he still keeps in touch with Esther Shapiro frequently and is currently working on screenplays and short stories.

Art Swift is a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.

Copyright 2004 Arthur Swift

mailto:aswift@arthurswift.com

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EXCLUSIVE BONUS EXCERPTS from the David Paulsen transcript, July 2, 2004.

On Marlon Brando:

David Paulsen: Oh wow! I just got on IMDB and saw that Marlon Brando died at 80! Died on Thursday at his home. Huh.

Art Swift: Did you ever meet him?

David Paulsen: Yes. I used to be on the Film Team at the United Nations and the people at UNESCO got Brando in to speak, to do some fundraising. He got there and said he wanted to do it right. He said, “Put me in a makeup room and I’m yours. Let’s do it right.” He said he could come back another day if this was going to be a problem, but they made him up right there and he dressed nicely and he made a pitch for UNESCO. His look set the tone and was effective for fundraising.

On “Kazablan,” his first work for Cannon Films:

David Paulsen: Menahem Golan called me out of the blue and told me who he was and would I come to Israel? They asked me to write the lyrics for the musical “Kazablan.” I didn’t think it would get past Ellis Island, so I rewrote the whole script.

On crafting “Dallas” storylines:

David Paulsen: We would play a lot of “What if?” before the beginning of the season. J.R. drove “Dallas,” it didn’t start out that way, but it quickly turned out that way. “Dallas” was “Romeo and Juliet” mixed with “Cain and Abel.” The marriage of Bobby and Pam was the centerpiece of the show at first. Bobby was supposed to die in the seventh or eighth episode and leave Pam there, and finally someone said, “Why would he die? Why would his wife stay in this nasty house?” So David (Jacobs) said, “Huh. Maybe you’re right.” (Laughs) But then he died seven years later anyway, and you can see how well that worked.

On Mark Graison:

AS: I liked how the supporting characters during your tenure were so well written and drawn, especially the character John Beck played.

David Paulsen: That was my character. I liked him a lot.

On his favorite storyline:

David Paulsen: The one where Cliff Barnes had the drill bit. I don’t remember the name of it offhand.

AS: The “tundra torque.”

David Paulsen: (laughs) The tundra torque! How do you remember these things?

AS: SoapNet.

David Paulsen: That’s right. I got on the phone with a lot of oilmen about that and paid attention to getting it right. We did a lot of research for things like that and slant drilling, too.

On location shooting versus sound stage shooting on “Dallas”:

David Paulsen: There was the Southfork in Dallas and the Southfork at MGM (in Hollywood). You could always tell if you looked closely where we shot what. If there were horses in the background it was in Dallas. If there was a car coming up the whole driveway, it was Dallas. If a car kind of nosed in, it was Hollywood.

On why he went to “Dynasty”:

AS: What do you say to the rumor that you left “Dallas” because you wanted to get off a sinking ship?

David Paulsen: Someone said that? There’s no truth to that. Why would I leave one sinking ship for a ship that was sinking quicker? “Dynasty” was worse off than “Dallas” was at the time. I took a chance on “Dynasty,” hoping I could do some good work there.

On where he got the “Who Killed Roger Grimes?” idea from:

David Paulsen: I was at the house I had in Upstate New York and I was reading a local paper. There was a story about this frozen lake and this body that popped up to the surface. It was wrapped in logger’s chains for 12 years and the chains had broken apart. I got the idea for the whole story from that one article.

On the 1984-85 ratings battle between “Dallas” and “Dynasty”:

David Paulsen: We were still strong when that season ended (prior to the dream season). We were number two, even though we really weren’t. We should have been number one and not “Dynasty.” They didn’t count a section of our ratings in the 22 weeks they used to determine the ratings.

AS: You mean the last several episodes?

David Paulsen: Yes. And that’s when everyone knows we’re hitting our stride, putting out our best work. So it was really a cheat. Something that hurt us was how we had to extend our season. I remember CBS telling us, “We have some good news and some bad news.” The good news is you got four more episodes; the bad news is you have to do them. The result was that “Dynasty” beat us by a split second.

On Priscilla Presley:

David Paulsen: No one worked harder.