John McCook (ex-Lance, Y&R, 1976-80; Eric, B&B, 1987-present)
What were your thoughts when you were hired at Y&R? “Y&R had been on a couple of years when I joined it and I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ I was glad to get the job but I was a little biased about soap operas. It wasn’t terribly negative but I thought, ‘Nah, soap opera. I don’t want to do that.’ I thought, ‘It’s corny, and the organ music, and the black and white,’ and all of those images from the early days of soaps out of New York. But, I went in and I had to sing and dance. I had to hold Janice Lynde [ex- Leslie] in my arms and sing a song to her and I thought, ‘What are we doing here?’ We did a lot of that in those years. But as soon as I got on the show, I was invested in it.”
What else do you recall of that era? “It was exciting to see how the magazines covered our show, and covered all the others. I went, ‘Look at all these people who work in this part of our business.’ I was very impressed. It was fun to step into that and to be welcomed and then, as a result, celebrated for the story that I was involved in. It just took over my life.”
The Lance/Lorie/Leslie/Lucas quadrangle was very successful. How did you respond to that newfound stardom? “That was the first big story that I ever got on daytime television. It was romantic. It was soaring. It was musical. I loved the actors I was doing it with. It was very exciting to be a part of a really successful storyline in daytime television. Of course, those were the heydays, of Luke and Laura over on GENERAL HOSPITAL…. Soaps were making a lot of noise in the mid-to-late ’70s.”
Then, you joined B&B for its 1987 debut. What brought you back to daytime? “I got very excited about doing a new show with Bill [Bell, creator/then-executive producer/head writer] and Brad [current executive producer/head writer] and CBS and Bell-Phillip Television. It was exciting to be part of a new show, and the fact that it was glamorous and it was international, that made it different from the other shows. It was set in a real place, Los Angeles. It wasn’t in a fictitious town somewhere. It was Beverly Hills, and it had tentacles in Milan and Paris and everywhere else in the world, story-wise.”
B&B was also a huge hit overseas. “Yes. Within a year, we realized that the show was starting to become very successful internationally, which was a new twist for most soap operas. We started having to go overseas to promote it and then, getting to go overseas to shoot it. Part of the reason it was so successful was that it was only a half-hour, so it was easy to watch, and a lot of Western Europe had never seen a daily serial. They had seen weekly ones, their own shows and American soap operas, like DALLAS and FALCON CREST, so this was a whole new deal — and it was a sensation.”
You were like rock stars there! “It was very heady. All of a sudden, we were recognized walking down the street in Rome or at the Spanish Steps, and a crowd of people formed around you like you were a movie star.”
Do you have a favorite location shoot? “Portofino [Italy], I would say. It’s a small sea-side village but very upscale and we literally took over the hotel to shoot for a week there. It was small enough that there weren’t hundreds of people hanging around. There were dozens, but not hundreds. There were lots of small boats and fishing vessels around. It was beautiful. I loved it there .”
What stands out the most about your early soap experiences? “The challenge of doing the show live on tape every day. That’s when Y&R was still a half-hour, and it retained the excitement of theater. Everybody had to do the job at the same time and so there were a lot of high fives at the end of the shooting day. Every day, everybody would breathe a sigh of relief that we did one and we got it and nobody fell over and we didn’t have to shoot anything over, which we hardly ever had to do. It was like doing live television every day from 3:30 to 4. The first years of B&B were exciting for the reason that we took time. We shot it in a very glamorous way. We took two or three days to shoot the first episode, just to be sure we got it exactly right. It was two or three days before Susan Flannery [ex-Stephanie] came in, and then the first day she came in, we were on our big set and she came down those stairs [at the Forrester manse] and she brought all her skill and talent. I thought, ‘Not only do we have beautiful sets and a wonderful pedigree, but I’ve got this fantastic woman to work with.’ She brought this wonderful character and put it right in front of me, and that was pretty exciting in those early years … Those really were glory years.”
CBS
