"SOAP OPERA MAKES SCENE AT SMALL COLLEGE CAMPUS"
Published in the Indianapolis Star (StarSouth), in edited form, Sept. 19, 2002 ©
The beams of the just-risen sun streak the campus like police searchlights. Students and professors stroll the sidewalks on their way to classes, packs strapped onto many of their backs, time moving as slowly as sands through an hourglass.
But something is different this particular morning - which is actually Tuesday, but days are as irrelevant in soap-opera reality as hours are inside clock-less shopping malls. Three restless, fugitive teens have intruded upon the usual tranquility of Franklin College, along with "As The World Turns" director Chris Goutman, several production assistants, makeup artists, a ton of video and audio equipment and large reflecting screens that redirect the Indiana sun to the best advantage of the lenses of TV video cameras.
The police chief of Oakdale, Ill. - a town that won't be found on any real map since it only exists inside a television studio in Brooklyn, N. Y. - and an agitated father are stopping students as they walk between Shirk Hall and Old Main, the reflecting screens expelling the long shadows from their faces like tardy students from class. They are seeking out the three teens, Lucy, Alison and Aaron (the "hunky" Aaron, you may recall), who have fled Oakdale after a mysterious barn fire.
The make-believe tension is so thick it can only be cut with an urgent voice amplified through a bullhorn. "QUIET, EVERYONE!" instructs a production assistant.
Silence, except for the quick whispers of a few of the spectators, settles into the scene like a rampant virus. "ACTION!" shouts Goutman, making the cameras start and the actors deliver lines.
"CUT!" blurts out Goutman, a square-jawed man with dark, Hollywood-style hair sweeping straight back from his high forehead.
He quickly strides off to "lock down" the unscripted noises from the construction equipment that has fired up down the street, and the silence runs off like teen-agers from the authorities. The score of extras, who minutes before were strolling into camera range on cue, are herded back to their original positions just out of camera range.
The break gives the soap stars a chance to talk about their careers and get a few dabs of new makeup. Peyton List, the 16-year-old, brown-haired actress from Baltimore who portrays the "wholesome" Lucy, reveals that "ATWT" is her first "steady job" in acting.
Jessica Dunphy, a 17-year-old blonde from a small town in Pennsylvania (Glenside, which is on real maps), says she looks forward to a fuller career before the cameras. "When I'm done here," she advises from beneath her jaunty blue cap, "I want to be able to expand my acting range."
And, on the front steps of Shirk Hall, a handful of fans scattered around him like early-autumn leaves, Hunt Block - Lucy's conniving father in the "ATWT" world - extols the virtues of playing a soap-opera character. "The story lines have no endings; they're all middle," says the older actor, whose facial features are nearly as sharp as his wit.
"It's like swimming in a jelly doughnut."
Soon, Block and the others get back into today's dollop of jelly to finish the scene without the accompaniment of diesel engines, the speaking-part actors repeating their lines and the extras recreating the practiced strolls through campus all of their friends and relatives will watch for with binoculars when the Franklin episode airs the week of Oct. 28. Then, the people and equipment move down to State Street for a short scene with Aaron, a.k.a. Agim Kaba, and his hunky motorcycle.
Then the virtual reality moves north to the street beside the Ben Franklin statue to videotape the last scenes, the getaway scenes where the three teens trade the motorcycle for an old blue Volkswagen "bug" that probably doesn't have another trip to Woodstock left in it. "What a wreck!" is Dunphy's range-defining line when she first sees the car, the delivery of which probably won't ever rise to the level of Bette Davis' classic, "What a dump!"
They soon pull away, next stop Ohio State University, just as Lucy's father and the police chief come running up, the requisite seconds too late - otherwise the 10-college road trip for the story line would come to a premature, screeching halt.
"Great!" says Goutman, after his final shout of "CUT!" "It's not even noon, and we're done."
The director pauses a moment, leaning against the gray Franklin statue, and explains the choice of the small Indiana college as a mixture of demographics and seduction - this is soap opera, after all. "Indianapolis is very good to 'As The World Turns,'" he says, "so we shopped around for a college in the area.
"We loved what we saw on the Internet, quite frankly. It was incredibly charming."
The entourage of locally recruited extras disperses back into the living mural of small-college or small-town life, their moment in the glare of reflected light already fading like a soft sunset. "It was a lot of fun," says John Shafer, the college's director of counseling and one of the strolling extras.
"With any extras, there's a lot of hurry up and wait, but I thought the shoot went very quickly actually, and all the people from the show were just incredibly friendly."
Just not friendly enough to convince Shafer to run off with the traveling TV circus. "No," he says with an unrehearsed laugh, "I don't think I'm going to quit my day job."
And, though the Volkswagen containing the three photogenic teens has motored off - in the bed of a truck, actually - the world will still turn again for the local fans of the 45-year-old soap opera, several of whom inhabit the college's offices and dorm rooms. Like Pam Hilton, who works in the college's human resources office, an admitted fan of "ATWT" as well as the rest of CBS's lineup of daytime dramas.
"Before I started working, I used to watch it every day," she says, "and now I tape it."
While the appeal of the soap opera seems a lot like sorting through a neighbor's trash without worrying about getting caught, Hilton puts it in less vicarious terms. "I think sometimes the story lines that they have are things you can relate to as being true to life," she explains, with a normal-world smile.
"Other times, it's kind of far-fetched to me, but they're still entertaining."
The whir of VCRs when the sun turns another corner of another day for Franklin the last week of October, could be, it appears, as deafening as heavy equipment, in a virtual-reality sort of way. "CUT!"
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