News

1962: Search for Tomorrow's Marge was upset when adoption

plans fell through. 1982: Sft made its NBC debut.

1982: The first daytime episode of Capitol aired on CBS.

2004: All My Children's Kendall told Bianca her baby was dead."History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into d ifferent and unexpected images."

― Anselm Kiefer

"Today in Soap Opera History" is a collection of the most memorable, interesting and influential events in the history of scripted, serialized programs. From birthdays and anniversaries to scandals and controversies, every day this column celebrates the soap opera in American culture.

On this date in...

1962: On Search for Tomorrow, Marge Bergman (Melba Rae) reeled from Monica's (Barbara Baxley) decision to not give Jimmy up for adoption. She later went to friends Joanne (Mary Stuart) and Arthur Tate (Terry O'Sullivan) for solace.

1962: On As the World Turns,...

Daytime Emmy winning writer Harding Lemay died peacefully on May 26. He was 96.

Lemay was born into rural poverty on March 16, 1922, near his mother's St. Regis Mohawk Indian reservation in North Bangor, New York. The fifth of thirteen children, he escaped his parents' alcoholism and his father's suicide by running away to New York City at age 17, finding early refuge at the famous Brace Memorial Newsboys' Home.

The Brace Home gave them a roof, food, and even provided them with job placement so they could earn a salary and improve their lot in life. He worked in a library, returning books to the shelves, and met a librarian who assigned him a classic book a week to read. She would discuss the book with him. This was like having a private tutor. He also worked for a stationer delivering packages. But he was determined to become an actor. As luck would have it,...

1962: Search for Tomorrow's Marge was upset when adoption

plans fell through. 1982: Sft made its NBC debut.

1982: The first daytime episode of Capitol aired on CBS.

2004: All My Children's Kendall told Bianca her baby was dead."All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut."

― Anne Brontë in "Agnes Grey"

"Today in Soap Opera History" is a collection of the most memorable, interesting and influential events in the history of scripted, serialized programs. From birthdays and anniversaries to scandals and controversies, every day this column celebrates the soap opera in American culture.

On this date in...

1962: On Search for Tomorrow, Marge Bergman (Melba Rae) reeled from Monica's (Barbara Baxley) decision to not give Jimmy up for adoption. She...

From the first time I saw it until this moment, two days before what might just be the most important, potentially resonant (for good and ill) American presidential election since the days of the Civil War, no other movie has expanded in my view more meaningfully, more ambiguously, with more fascination than has Robert Altman’s Nashville. We often hear of movies which “transcend” their genres, or their initial ambitions or intentions, and often built into that alleged transcendence is a condescension to said genre, or those ambitions or intentions, as if the roots were somehow corrupt or unworthy, in need of reconstruction. If the form of Nashville transcends anything, it’s the shape and scope of the multi-character drama as we’d come to know it in 1975, which was dominated at the time by disaster movies and their jam-packed casts filled with old Hollywood veterans and Oscar winners. But...

“Y’all take it easy now. This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! They can’t do this to us here in Nashville! Let’s show them what we’re made of. Come on everybody, sing! Somebody, sing!”

Nashville screens one time only Thursday, September 24th at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar Blvd, St. Louis) at 7pm

In a decade of great films, Nashville is one of the greatest. I saw Nashville during its initial theatrical release and have seen it several times since but it has not played on the big screen (at least in St. Louis) in a long time. In 1974 director Robert Altman was directing films for United Artists and wanted them to produce his film Thieves Like Us. They agreed if he would agree to direct a story about country music that they had a script for. He rejected the script and said he would offer them...