User:TAnthony/Dynasty

Poor Claudia Blaisdel Carrington had another terrible end.

On her title card of Dynasty, Pamela Bellwood, who portrayed the character from 1981 to 1986, emerged blinking into a room to switch on a light, and that pretty much summed up the character: confused, depressed, crazy, and constantly being made crazy.

And so, at the end of her time on the show when the producers wanted to make Claudia crazy again (after a brief and discombobulating period where she had become another corporate power player), she protested.

“It made no sense to me, I asked then not to,” Bellwood recalls today. “They said, ‘Say the lines.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s my last show. Maybe not.’”

Karma of a kind was on Bellwood’s side. Claudia lit a candle for each of the Carrington family she felt had betrayed her. One of the candles fell into a drape, the room was suddenly on fire, and the last we see of Claudia was her face wreathed in flames.

‘The whole set was really on fire,” she recalls. “It was awful, crazy, I had to have a paramedic carry me out. The sound stage was destroyed. Beams were falling. I thought it was all very apocalyptic, and it seemed like karmic retribution. Maybe they’ll think of bringing her back.”

They didn’t, but now, over thirty years later the character is returning to the CW’s Dynasty, this time played by Brianna Brown. One of Bellwood’s sons showed her an interview with Brown paying tribute to “the iconic Claudia Blaisdel.”

“I said to my children, you didn’t know your mother was iconic. So she’s coming back. Good luck to them. I’m glad to have been in the original. One has to see what happens in the new one.”

Does she want to return too? “What could they do? Bring me back as my own mother? I’m not sure I want to live with that. It doesn’t matter. Actors are like circus performers. They never get it out of their blood. If they call me, I’ll say yes. It’s always better to say yes to life than no.”

‘You became like public property’

The attention that came with the show in the 1980s was overwhelming, Bellwood says. Claudia was “challenging” and Bellwood wanted to make her sympathetic and a role model for others with mental illness.

Her famous scenes and storylines include dropping what looked like a baby bit was in fact a doll off a tall building; being driven mad by calls from her dead husband Matthew, who wasn’t dead (of course he wasn’t), but who wasn’t making the calls either; and then having relationships with unsuitable Carrington men like Adam and Steven.

“I got a ton of mail,” Bellwood recalls. “People responded viscerally to Claudia. I had a sense of responsibility about how to portray her so people wound up with a bit of hope.”

Bellwood recalls going to gay bars in L.A. where people dressed up as their favorite Dynasty characters, and being recognized all over the world. “The reaction to the show was so overwhelming it made you realize the power Donald Trumpprobably feels. People respond to everything he does all the time unfortunately.

“You became like public property. People felt like they knew you because you were in their homes. It was difficult because I’m a private person. For me it was odd because I’m not that frivolous a person who needs that acclaim. It’s not something I need to validate or define myself.”

The nice airline seats and fast service were lovely, Bellwood says, but now, she laughs, people look at her and say, “You look familiar. Did you ever work at Nordstrom?” She wanted to sink back into anonymity. “I was happy to have the work, to go to work, but then leave work.”

As for Steven Carrington being gay—Claudia one of his longtime female relationships—Bellwood, like Gordon Thomson (Adam), thinks the producers were trying to “do something that they weren’t that comfortable with because of the atmosphere and misinformation of the time around AIDS.”

She liked Claudia being a counterweight to the “wealth and silliness of the Carringtons, and that her character’s mental health issues meant she had “more to do than wear shoulderpads.”

The Moldavian massacre was “the moment Dynasty began to take a turn, from that moment it floundered a bit. Dynasty had a simple concept, and it wasn’t going to go much beyond that,” Bellwood says. Bellwood would have liked Claudia to have surmounted her problems and helped others.

Though she didn’t like all the glamor and isn’t a glamazon in real life, Bellwood says, “You can’t say it wasn’t fun. It was fun. I’ll always have a tenderness for her. It was an emotional marriage of sorts to play her. I’m fond of the memory of her and always will because she was a part of my life.”

• Teeman, Tim (October 1, 2017). "I Burnt the Dynasty Set Down: Pamela Bellwood and John James on the '80s Show and Controversial Reboot". The Daily Beast. Retrieved October 27, 2017.

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Bellwood is pregnant, no word how the show will deal with it (1985)

• Holsopple, Barbara (July 12, 1985). "Charlton Heston heads Dynasty spinoff". The Pittsburgh Press. Retrieved December 10, 2019 – via news.google.com.

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Pamela Bellwood was granted her wish to leave; she "died" in the La Mirage fire.

• Sonsky, Steve (September 17, 1986). "New Season Also Brings Changes To Old Standbys". Toledo Blade. p. P-4. Retrieved December 4, 2017 – via news.google.com.

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Perhaps because their roles are smaller, Bo Hopkins, as a field boss for the corporation who has had an affair with the Evans character; Pamela Bellwood as his emotionally disturbed wife, and Dale Robertson as the wildcatter looking for his last chance to make his pile, are more successful in their portrayals.

• Buckley, Tom (January 12, 1981). "TV: Premiere of Dynasty, a Series on an Oil Family". The New York Times. Retrieved June 20, 2017.

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Another Dynasty character, Claudia Blaisdel, played by Pamela Bellwood, was also dismissed for plot purposes, though not so irrevocably. "Claudia was an incredible neurotic and has a very good story arc for about a season and a half," Mr. Pollock adds. "But after a while, neurotics become very repetitious and the audience becomes bored, as in real life. So, at the beginning of the season, we wrote her out by sending her to a very expensive private sanitarium." In terms of soap-opera tradition, however, this will not be the last to be heard from Claudia, as viewers will discover this Wednesday night on Dynasty's final show of the season. "Fortunately, Claudia will make a total recovery," Mrs. Pollock says. "On the last show of the season, she will return—somewhat tempered, a little bruised, but a lot more interesting."

• Denison, D.C. (April 17, 1983). "Sometimes a TV Character Steps-Out and Stays Put". The New York Times. Retrieved May 31, 2017.

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Initially, the series followed two families from different socioeconomic strata: that of oil baron Blake Carrington and that of middle-class striver Matthew Blaisdel. Through Blaisdel and his wildcatting partner we learn about the scrappier side of the oil business, and with surprisingly gritty realism. (The Blaisdel plots tended to unfold at glamour-free locations, from the rig to the crew's dive bar to the boxing gym.) The Blaisdels' story line was meant to give the series the epic scope and struggle of Giant, but primetime viewers didn't respond. "The audience told us almost immediately: All they wanted to do was be in the mansion," Esther Shapiro explains on the DVD of the first season. "[They] couldn't care less about the oil fields. They didn't want to see grubby rooms." By Season 2, a caricature of upstairs-downstairs life complete with butler and housemaids (but absent any real class resentment) replaced the middle-class world of the Blaisdels.

The anguished Season 1 story line of Matthew Blaisdel's wife Claudia suffered a similar fate. Claudia is first introduced in an artful, extended sequence: Matthew drives their teenage daughter to pick up her mother, who is checking out after 18 months in a sanitarium. In a delicate talk in the parking lot, he prepares his daughter for a fraught reunion, only to discover that Claudia has checkedherself out unannounced weeks earlier. Ultimately, the family comes together at the diner where she has quietly been waitressing. All of this is handled with a naturalistic touch, free of the expected histrionics and melodramatic musical cues. (In their own prime-time way, Claudia's family scenes evoke A Woman Under the Influence.) Claudia struggles through her transition back into suburban home life with convincing pathos and impressive spirit. (At one point, she recites Dorothy Parker poems as a pick-me-up.) But by Season 2, with the writers pandering to viewers who wanted to be "in the mansion," the Blaisdel family could not survive. By the middle of the second season, Matthew and Lindsay had been written out of the series with a handy car crash and by Season 3, Claudia had gone from struggling painfully with an illness to being full-on, soap-operatically crazy.

The foil to vulnerable Claudia was Blake Carrington's razor-sharp daughter Fallon.

• Mar, Alex (May 25, 2011). "The Dynasty That Could Have Been". Slate. Retrieved May 28, 2017.

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Thomson said in 1986 a potential sixth season storyline for Adam and Claudia was sidelined by Bellwood's pregnancy: "They had all sorts of wonderful plots involving Adam and Claudia—takeovers, antagonism, the works. Then Pamela, of course, had her baby, a terrific kid. But that took up the first part of the season. That's why you saw so few full-length shots of her, or she was holding towels in front of her."

• "From Despair to Success". New Sunday Times. June 15, 1986. p. 6. Retrieved May 31, 2017.

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The actress says she's been itching to escape from Dynasty for more than a year, and it's no secret that after six seasons of mayhem and madness, poor Claudia has finally gone out in a blaze of glory. And now, Bellwood finds herself with a problem that is the reverse of the dilemma which hampered her career when Dynasty was first created.

"I'd played a succession of tough, self-sufficient women until then, and the producers wondered if I could be convincing as someone who was meant to be a victim. Now, everyone associates me with Claudia. Although things were getting better for her on Dynasty—before the fire, that is—she's never had much to be happy about."

Bellwood says she wanted out when when she discovered that she was pregnant, but the producers persuaded her to stay an extra year. It came as no surprise to the actress that ratings dropped when viewers finally became exasperated with the incredible goings-on in and around the Carrington mansion.

"Instead of making a splash with all of that, they very nearly drowned the lot of us. I'd heard before that successful shows develop a death wish after a while, and now I've actually seen it with my own eyes."

• Harmer, Ian (May 31, 1986). "Bellwood Leaves Show". Ludington Daily News. p. 11. Retrieved May 31, 2017.

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... and a blaze that kills Claudia (Pamela Bellwood) and leaves other characters' fates in the balance.

One character who definitely dies in the episode is Claudia. Pamela Bellwood, who has played her since the series began in 1980, wants to quit to spend more timer with her eight-month-old son, Kerry.

She had a row with Dynasty bosses last year when she became pregnant. Her husband, British journalist Nik Wheeler, says they complained because the baby wasn't in the script.

The fire scene in which she dies went terribly wrong and nearly killed Pamela, too—despite fire experts being on hand to supervise. When furniture around her was set alight, flames leapt 50 ft, knocking out all the studio lights. Two studio firemen with extinguishers and fire blankets ran to her rescue but collided with each other in the darkness, sending a heavy lighting pole flying. It hit Pamela, who was knocked screaming to the floor as the fire raged around her. The two bungling firemen picked her up and whisked her to safety in the nick of time.

"I thought I'd really die," she says.

The scene is set in La Mirage Hotel. As Dominique's party in full swing, Claudia is alone in an upstairs suite and begins lighting candles. She opens a window and a breeze blows the curtain on to a candle, sparking off a fire that sweeps through the suite...

• "Die-nasty!". New Straits Times. August 10, 1986. p. 15. Retrieved May 31, 2017.

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• Walcott, James (November 22, 1982). "Bachelor Father Finds a Bug in His Soup". New York. pp. 80–85. Retrieved June 1, 2017 – via Google Books.

David: Yeah. I skipped through. I wanted to know not only the story-lines they had done, but also I wanted to see which of the characters, popped off the screen. And which didn't so I could lose some. I had also read the budget and found that everything was spent. There wasn't enough in it on a per episode basis to even take the show out one day a week.

David: We were gonna be shooting a seven day show completely on the lot. We needed to get out, let the show breathe, see horses, get some cars running, open it up a little bit. But when you take a show off the lot, the trucks start to roll, you incur extra expense. And it wasn't in the budget. We needed to get back some budget monies which meant cutting down the cast. In conjunction with that I also saw that the relationship between Linda Evans, Krystle, and Blake was stale.

David: No drama, no threat to the relationship. Then I learned that they didn't wanna do anything to disparage their relationship. I could respect that from a personal standpoint, but where do you go with it dramatically?

David: I had to do something to jeopardise that relationship. Given that fans of a television show all know that if an actor signs a contract for twenty-two episodes, he/she’s gonna be on it for twenty-two episodes. So what I decided to do was, for two reasons, cut Linda Evans down from twenty-two episodes to six, which saved us a tremendous amount of money to use to open up the show, but equal to that, let the audience know that something is gonna happen to this character in a very real way. Otherwise she wouldn't be cut to six episodes.

David: At the same time, I wanted to cut Joan Collins from her twenty-two episodes to eleven, for the same reasons. I wanted to bring in some fresh faces who would, on the one hand, be much less expensive – cast budget on a long running show goes up a lot each year. It gets overwhelming. Worse, shows like Dallas and Dynasty weren't making any numbers on their second runs, so the networks cut them to one, even after they’d paid for two. That was one of the major reasons ABC wanted the show off the air. It was costing them double. You follow what I'm saying?

David: So . . . you can't re-negotiate an actor's salary downward.

David: No actor or agent would go for that, but you could diminish the number of episodes. And my feeling was that, among the top three, Blake, the family patriarch, was the one around whom we could run the best stories. I also wanted to make the stories a little more male oriented.

David: I knew we weren't gonna lose the female audience, but making it more male oriented would, on the one hand, bring in another audience, and give us a strength of story that I could count on. So we re-negotiated. Linda was very good about that. And we ... There was a reason for telling you all this.

David: Right. OK well I'm not sure why. He approached me after reading some of the early scripts and, well, he was reticent about it. But I thought he got some terrific stuff. From the very, very first episode. We had him - do you remember what happened that year?

David: My predecessors allowed me to introduce elements into the final episodes of their final year, you know, to help set up the coming year. What we did . . . we had Blake come home and find his and Krystle’s bedroom room completely destroyed. The maid then tells him it was Krystle who did it. And he walks out (chuckles) and puts his hand on his heart and says, "My God, Krystle, I thought we had more time."

David: That set up the entire year. The first episode of our year we had him out looking all over the city for her.

David: What we wanted to do was give Krystle some new character stuff that would run counter to her lovely, pure self, but that couldn't really be blamed on her, you know what I'm saying?

David: We couldn't have her turn into a Sue Ellen Ewing. So we gave her this brain disease which we researched very carefully. I have a psychiatrist friend, Dr. Lew Baxter, who was wonderful. He suggested actions she might take that could have been instigated by pressure on certain areas of the brain.

David: In conjunction with that, I had remembered a story that I had read in Upstate New York years earlier. Very simple story, just a couple of lines in a newspaper. It was one of those things I just sort of packed into the back of my mind, never could figure out what to do with it, and I realized: "Wait a minute. Those are the first eight episodes of the show. It was just a story I'd read about a frozen lake that unfroze in spring; a body floated to the surface. It turned out to be the body of a logger who had been missing for twelve years. The next day, the sheriff went to somebody’s house and arrested him for the murder of the logger - which took place twelve years earlier. When he floated to surface he was perfectly intact.

David: That's how the whole Roger Grimes thing started. We had Krystle for six episodes - but I didn't wanna use them up too fast. So we held her back for the first two episodes. She was the focus of attention; John Forsythe was out looking for her, but she never appeared. At the end of the first episode, we heard she was dead. Story came back that she was found dead by the lake.

David: She was dead. Just like a year later they did in -

David: In the next episode we find out, "Wait a minute. The blonde woman is not Krystle even though her car is there. That blonde woman is not even a woman. It's a man. But Krystle's car was there. Then hold on, Krystle must have killed him."

David: "All the evidence points to the fact that she killed him." And then by the end of the episode, Blake's sent to - I don't know - Iowa, Idaho, something like that, to meet Krystle's cousin whom we've never seen before, who called up saying, "Krystle's here. And wait a minute, she said she killed somebody making it definite. She killed somebody. Then, in the next episode – which we really thought about because, if she’s mentally ill, how is she gonna look - all dishevelled and terrible?" We'd been hearing Blake talking to a doctor about a certain mental problem. But then we meet Krystle and she's as gorgeous as ever. She just doesn't know where she is or why she's there, has little recollection of anything. Well, he brings her back to Denver and then we find out, "Whoa. She didn't kill anybody. In fact, the victim's been dead for twenty-five years."

The biggest challenge that year was, "How do we get rid of Linda in a way that (1) exalts her, so to speak, and gives her a proper, queen-like departure, and (2) also leaves us the possibility of bringing her back?" So we did it with a night, candle-lit wedding – quite different than any of the other weddings the show had done .. and then she goes off, presumably to her death.

Well you avoid [death] onscreen. As with Linda Evans. I would never have had Krystle die on screen. We last saw her going off to have a mortally dangerous operation after which she’d be in a coma for as long as we chose.