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Interview!

ICYMI Jean Passanante Interview

Patrick McMullan Archives
NEW YORK CITY, NY - AUGUST 18: Jean Passanante attends PALLEY CENTER FOR THE MEDIA Presents a Farewell to AS THE WORLD TURNS at Palley Center for the Media on August 18, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by JIMI CELESTE/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images) Credit: Getty

Soap Opera Digest: How did you get your first job in daytime?
Jean Passanante: After college, I had a whole career in theater in New York and was working for a playwrights’ organization when a friend who worked for ABC called me and said, “We’re looking for somebody who knows writers and how to work with writers.” And so I became the director of writer development for ABC, developing that program with Claire Labine, which was a lot of fun. My [role] kind of expanded when Linda Gottlieb started at ONE LIFE TO LIVE [as executive producer in 1991] and hired Michael Malone [in 1992], who had never written a soap — or probably seen one! — and kind of assigned me to be his tutor.

Digest: How did you make the transition from developing daytime writers to becoming one yourself?
Passanante: I owe it all to a great, life-changing conversation with Linda Gottlieb. I’d been at ABC for about two years and she basically said, “You’re teaching everyone how to write soaps. Why don’t you write one yourself?” I said, “Oh, no, I’m not a writer, I couldn’t do that,” and she said, “You’re doing it every week! I’m opening a window. It’s up to you whether you go through the window or not.” She made a job available and that was that. She really pushed me, and I needed to be pushed.

Digest: After a few years on OLTL’s writing team, you became its head writer in 1996.
Passanante: I was sort of the interim head writer before Claire Labine came in. I remember calling Claire and saying, “What do you want me to set up for you? I don’t want you to come in and find out that I’ve killed off your favorite character.” She said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, dear. If I don’t like it I can always have someone wake up in the morning and go, ‘What was I thinking?’ and that’ll be the end of it!” So I thought, “Okayyyyy.” We didn’t have a long-term story; it was more like, “This week, we’re going to have a fashion show where things go badly wrong. Then next week, we’ll do a big storm where things go badly wrong.” It was crazy — and the ratings went up! But it is a little terrifying to start out as head writer for the first time. All these people are looking at you in the meetings where you’re actually laying out the show with their pencils poised like, “Tell me what to write.” And you write the big story and the network says, “We hate that! Do something else!” And you have no idea what you’re going to do.

Digest: What was it like to get the call to head-write ANOTHER WORLD in 1998?
Passanante: I didn’t know that show at all and I was scared of that, I really was. But I’ve found that on every show I’ve worked on, there are at least one or two people who know the history backwards and forwards. I was supposed to be working with [Head Writer] Richard Culliton, but they didn’t really tell him that I was going to be his second and then he quit, like, two weeks in. It was insane! They brought in Leah Laiman [as co-head writer] and Chris Goutman [as EP]. We really thought we’d save the show, but we didn’t. That was sad. Horrible. It [going off the air] certainly had been in the works for a long time, but we weren’t able to pull it out of whatever flames it had sunken into.

Digest: Do you feel that on your shoulders, the weight of a show’s cancellation?
Passanante: I read some nasty person on Twitter the other day saying, “Oh, the show killer is gone.” I thought, “You know, there’s like 40 years of history leading up to this. You’re going to blame me for the last decision, that they had already made, probably, and were just waiting for the moment?” I knew they were desperate because Mickey [Dwyer-Dobbin, Procter and Gamble’s head of production for daytime] was entertaining all sorts of crazy ideas of what we might do; it was sort of like, “We’ll do anything to save the show.” The show was going to end, there was no question. I was also aware, when AS THE WORLD TURNS went off the air, that CBS was dying to be out of the soap business, except for the ones that made the money at the time, the Bell shows [Y&R and B&B]. They were just waiting for the moment to cut the ties, and they found it. So, no. I’m sorry about it, but I don’t [feel responsible]. I feel like we might have kept it on a few extra years. Once the ratings start to drop, it’s very hard, no matter what you do — you could stand there naked and I don’t know if it would bring eyes to the screen. They certainly go down when people are unhappy, but what would it take to really bring them up? I wish I knew. There’s not a lot of money to promote shows anymore, so how do you even get people to know about it?

Digest: After AW’s cancellation, you went to ALL MY CHILDREN and worked alongside Agnes Nixon from 1999-2001. What was that like?
Passanante: Working with Agnes was a revelation. The network execs and producers I’d worked with up until then had generally demanded we write fairly detailed long-term documents before we launched into a story. But Agnes, being Agnes, didn’t really have to do that. She wasn’t wedded to a document or preconceived notion of where the story was going, at least in terms of its details; she approached each day one scene at a time, and all the plot points came straight out of character. She also believed in “vertical scenes” — scenes that advance character, not plot, say, a chat between Myrtle and Erica just to illuminate the audience as to Erica’s frame of mind. Sometimes the powers-that-be on certain shows don’t love that kind of scene if it isn’t precisely moving story forward, which is kind of a shame. I really saw her as a mentor, though we had different styles of working. She couldn’t believe I actually thought in terms of building story toward some kind of climax or cliffhanger at the end of the week on Friday. She asked me once if I was good at jigsaw puzzles — I’m not — because of the way I like to piece plot points together. She really didn’t think like that. I’m not sure that was a compliment! She had a great, raucous cackle. And she loved a juicy piece of gossip. When my [AMC] contract was up after two years, I had a chance to go to WORLD TURNS and I grabbed it. Agnes had gotten less involved at AMC and frankly, at that point, I thought my days were numbered.

Digest: By that point in your career, did you see writing soaps as your true profession?
Passanante: Yeah, I did, by then. When I started writing, every week, it was like, “They are going to find out that I’m a phony and I don’t know what I’m doing” — you know, that wonderful over-achievers’ lament. Six months in, I was like, “Oh, yeah, I can do this!” But writing [episode] breakdowns is really hard, and the people who can do it, the reason they keep getting hired over and over again is that it’s really hard. It’s not just the writing; a lot of people can write. It’s the ability to collaborate effectively, and the ability to channel and improve upon the vision of the head writer. And if you can do that, great — but it’s not easy. So what I’d discovered by that point is that the work was incredibly difficult, but I loved it, loved being a full-time storyteller.

Digest: After ATWT went off the air in 2010, you returned to OLTL. It was canceled in 2012, then you moved to GH, left for a stint co-head writing Y&R with Shelly Altman, then returned with Shelly to co-head write GH in 2015. I remember something you said to me then, which is that given the pace at which soap writers work, you have to hope that your first idea is your best idea.
Passanante: Absolutely. It’s a first-draft medium.

Digest: Are there ideas you wish you had another crack at?
Passanante: Yeah, and I think Michael Malone would agree with this: When we did the Billy Douglas story on ONE LIFE, we wanted the character of Joey Buchanan [to be the teen coming out]. We were told we couldn’t do that [because he was Viki’s son], so we had to bring in a whole other character to be gay. It would have had much more meaning on the show if it had been somebody in that family; it would have been truly groundbreaking.

Digest: It took eight more years for ALL MY CHILDREN to have a member of a core family come out, Bianca.
Passanante: That was me, too [laughs]. I seem to be the person who brings in the gay kid! There were a lot of hands in that one, I can’t take full credit for that by any means, but that was really good. That’s one I was proud of. But back to my regrets [laughs], on WORLD TURNS, at the very end, we had this great character, Dr. Reid Oliver, the boyfriend of Luke. I’m really sorry we killed him off. I took a lot of heat for that at the time and I said, “No, it’s a great story, he gives his heart to Chris Hughes!” But now that I have it to reflect on, I should not have done that. He and Luke should have gone into the sunset happily ever after. That I’m sorry about, even though I defended myself at the time. I’m sorry that we made [GH’s] Julian Jerome try to kill Alexis. I think it’s very hard to come back from something like that and imagine a future for the couple. I believe that anything is possible, and I think the people at GH agree with me, that there still can be a future there. But it will require addressing it head-on.

Digest: What stories stand out as ones you’re proud to have told, other than Bianca’s coming out?
Passanante: On ONE LIFE, I really liked being part of the Marty rape story, and the courtroom stuff that followed with Hillary B. Smith as Nora. I loved bringing Todd and Blair together back in the day. And Viki, how could I forget? I have a friend who was, at the time, a psychologist who, weirdly, happened to have a bunch of clients who had dissociative identity disorder. I suggested that she come in and talk to us about Viki, which led to the whole thing with Jean, the gatekeeper character, and Tommy [two of Viki’s alters]. “Who Killed Rose”, the murder mystery we did on WORLD TURNS with [then-head writer] Hogan Sheffer, was a lot of fun, and the Luke and Noah love story. On GH, I really liked the Morgan stuff that we did leading up to and following his death, when we first figured out that he was bipolar. I loved Sonny and Alexis finding out about Kristina [possibly being gay]; watching Sonny rise above Kristina’s expectations was just great. I love Alexis’s family of girls because I come from a family of girls. Writing for Laura Wright [Carly], her reactions after Morgan’s death … her capacity to be this warmhearted, affectionate mom and be an absolute harridan at the same time is really amazing. Bringing Liz and Franco together; the two of them are so good together, such good actors, and they’ve had a delicate touch with it.

Digest: You’re ending your daytime career at GH. What will you miss and not miss?
Passanante: I absolutely adore GH and it has been such a great experience working on the show. I have really bonded with a lot of the actors; they are such a lovely group and so talented. I’ll miss the camaraderie of the writers. You get to be very close because you’re kind of in each other’s business all the time. Shelly is a fabulous partner and a great friend; I will miss our collaboration. I love the constant stimulation of the work, the, “Okay, how are we going to solve today’s huge problem?” Some of the things we’ve had to come up with because an actor suddenly becomes unavailable or we can’t have the set we thought we could have or who knows, somebody decided at a turn in the story that now we can’t go that way, you become a great problem-solver. That’s sort of the good news and the bad news. Nothing is smooth sailing, ever. I’ll be happy to not have to deal with that quite so much.

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