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News for the week of 10-Sep-2007

by Carol Banks Weber

Despite rumors having her out the door and off to greener, primetime pastures, Kelly Monaco (Sam) will stay on with GH and moonlight in other projects. She re-signed a new contract.

Josh Duhon (Logan), 23, would never have imagined himself front and center in the middle of a mob war and a hot, heavy romance with Luke and Laura’s daughter Lulu, and heavily in demand as a leading soap actor. His acting roots weren’t, by his own admission, very encouraging. Athletic in high school, the August 27th-born, Whitewright, TX native clashed majorly with his drama teacher and was given the boot before a play he auditioned for even kicked off. The drama teacher didn’t think he sucked, per se, just that he was one argumentative pain in the ass who would do better as a politician or attorney. Later, he majored in finance at Southern Methodist University and worked as a model, when his barber dropped the idea in his head to pursue acting by taking an acting class given by this teacher who knew people in Hollywood. He signed up, but wound up driving her up the wall with his attempts at acting well. “I was horrible. There were times when she became exasperated to the point of … She would never say, ‘Josh, quit!’ but I got her to where she was speechless. But I just kept with it and kept with it and finally, I got to where I was okay.”

He landed in a RadioShack commercial, received his SAG card for the work, hooked up with a manager who then aided in procuring an agent. And true to his word to his parents, he up and moved away from Texas to L.A. He lives in L.A. now, in a humble pad (try “shoebox”), trying to live modestly save for the Honda CBR 1000RR he bought from motorcycle fanatic Ingo Rademacher (Jax), Duhon used to race them around back home, …

… and living for the day when real leading men types like Clive Owen, Daniel Craig, Steve McQueen, Robert DeNiro, John Wayne and Bruce Willis show ‘em how it’s done. Duhon—sounding a bit like these macho movie stars himself—opinionated on what’s wrong with Hollywood’s latest fare. “I’m sick of these metrosexual pretty boys. A leading man should be a man that you would look at and go, ‘I will follow you into battle.’ Are you gonna follow Jake Gyllenhaal into war? I’m not! You gonna go chase after Jude Law leading a battle cry? I don’t think so. Where’s the substance?” He rattled off the names of those real leading men, and launched into a favorable description of the type he’d like to be too one day. “You believe in them, that no matter what happens, it’s going to be all right. That’s what being a leading man is all about. When I try to do my work, I want people to feel confident and secure with me that, at the end of the day, it’s all going to work out.”

Duhon gets his kickass attitude from dad Robert, who’s a real man’s man if there ever was one. Robert comes from the Green Beret-Special Forces, and has trained SWAT teams and law enforcement for two decades. His mom Terri runs a Neurostructural Integration Technique shop, promoting healthy living and nutritional diets. And his little brother Jerrod, 21, has yet to choose a career, least of all one in acting…not that Duhon would ever push him there.

This straight-shooting, straight-talking young actor recently received some tabloid press on his love life, with some speculating from the past Daytime Emmys that he was seeing Annie Wersching (Amelia), just because he was seen putting his arm around her as pals, that’s all really, he insisted. But it’s not just the chicks. Another time, he kissed his on-screen dad Kin Shriner (Scott) on the cheek, and all of a sudden, it’s Brokeback Mountain time. The actual truth is far from glamorous; Duhon remains a single guy, with “the worst luck out here when it comes to women in L.A. Just atrocious. Remember that Steve Martin movie, The Lonely Guy? I kinda feel like that cat sometimes.”

One cat Duhon definitely gets along with is Shriner, who can also be plain-spoken. The two exchanged mildly teasing remarks in “Like Father, Like Son, Like Hell,” the sidebar to Tom Stacy’s Soap Opera Digest, September 11th interview, “Logan’s Run.” Duhon said Shriner’s singular, repetitious advice has been to remember that Shriner, the vet, has been there, done that, two times over on Duhon, the newcomer. When Duhon dared to suggest Shriner could’ve done worse for an on-screen son, a bad actor perhaps, Shriner cut in, “Now he’s a thespian all of a sudden.” And when Shriner dared suggest he and Duhon’s characters shared bad haircuts in common, Duhon balked immediately with, “I don’t want to be included in the haircut thing. My hair’s doing okay. Don’t you wear a toupee, Kin [laughs]?” Shriner shot Duhon a dirty look and deadpanned, “Would you wanna try and pull it off, ‘son?’ See? He’s definitely got that sarcastic Scotty gene.”

Leslie Charleson (Monica) can’t rave enough about the late Anna Lee’s (Lila) “Anna Lee: Memoir of a Career on General Hospital and in Film” book. Charleson assisted with the GH parts, helping Lee and Barbara Roisman Cooper, the autobiography’s co-writer. The autobiography itself is all Anna Lee, “feisty” “funny,” courageous, a “colorful history,” Charleson said. –Soap Opera Digest, September 18, 2007

Character actor Bruce Weitz doesn’t look like he could hurt a fly. But in the hands of GH’s writers, he’ll soon be transformed into that of the murderous, psychopath mob rival Anthony Zacchara, recurring. Weitz is familiar to TV fans, because he was on Hill Street Blues as Sgt. Mick Belker. He also did ER, Judging Amy and Sisters. Check him out on GH, starting October 12.

Zacchara turns out to be vulnerable after all, with a grown, young, handsome man for a son in Johnny. Actor Brandon Barash takes on this major, recurring role starting September 20. Of course he crosses paths with Lulu.

GH: NS’s Nazanin Boniadi (Leyla) crosses over permanently (she was put on contract) to take up a romance with Dr. Patrick Drake, much to Robin’s consternation. On NS, which wrapped its last, stunning story arc finale last week, Leyla and Patrick have been circling each other with considerable romantic interest while Robin has been preoccupied with adopting a newborn infant girl who recently lost her mother to complications after a C-section performed by Jason in a stuck elevator (don’t ask).

Annie Wersching (Amelia) – who’s rumored to be dating Sebastian Roche (Jerry) – retires from GH for good to join FOX-TV’s primetime hit, 24. She already started as Agent Renee Walker on 24 September 7.

Pulling off GH: NS hasn’t been easy for head writer Bob Guza and his team. “It’s nearly killed all of us, but it’s been an extraordinary experience,” he shared with Soap Opera Weekly. Going into the filming of this story arc for the summer, Guza said nobody had any idea of the difficulty involved, they just plunged right in and took off. And that, he said, is to the credit of everybody involved.

Credit the chic haircut to Megan Ward (Kate). It was merely a fortuitous accident that the haircut matched the chic of Ward’s new GH character. Real-life mom Ward merely needed to get the hair off her face, especially after her second baby was born, so cut her locks down two months before landing Kate. Ward has had to be practical, she’s a mom, but her natural style, pre-mom if you will, still pays attention to fashion. That’s because as a teen, she was a model in Japan and learned all about clothes, went to sample sales and developed a love for the eclectic, the funky, while mixing it up with the casual and the buttoned-down. “All I can say is it’s good to be employed when you like clothes [laughs].” –Soap Opera Digest, September 11, 2007

Because of her stint in Japan (and, I daresay, early years in Hawaii) and her fluency in the language at one time in her life, Ward is fond of following Hiro on NBC’s hit primetime show, Heroes, specifically to see if she can understand his Japanese. But she also loves the show itself.

Jason Gerhardt (Cooper) majored in accounting at the University of Wisconsin, in order to better slip into the investment banking workforce. But for the latter part of his college years, he said he may have struggled a bit in the grades. Already taking on a full course load and a 40-hour-a-week job, and loads of extra-curricular sporting activities, Gerhardt also had plenty of recreational time with pals, especially the prankster variety. He stayed in a dorm and partook of all that dorm life had to offer, including some memorable snowball and pillow fights, which spread throughout the campus. “Those are two of the things I could admit to [laughs].” Another memorable stunt involved a three-man slingshot for the water balloon fight. They shot the water balloons at students waiting to board a “drunk bus” back to their dorms after a hard night of partying. –Soap Opera Digest, “Alumni Association,” September 11, 2007

Gossip for the week of 10-Sep-2007

by Carol Banks Weber

GH: NS will most likely reappear with its second story arc next summer. Producers can’t figure out a way to pull off a story arc along with a more full-time filming schedule for GH at the same time during the fall through spring months.

Serial Drama’s expert Blogger Becca (I think she’s the same Becca as featured regularly in Soap Opera Digest) hit it out of the park with her scathing, sarcastic, September 1st GH put-down parody – “GH Showrunner Speaks Out on Controversial Storyline” – surrounding the rape of Jax. She takes on the fictional voice of executive producer Jill Farren Phelps to exemplify the utter stupidity, short-sightedness and insult of treating Jax’s rape at Irina’s hands as nothing more than a joke and a footnote to the central mob characters. Bravo to this intro:

“Bob Guza and his fellow writers have definitely sunk pretty low before -- you have to when you've made the mafia the moral core of your show -- but this week they really stretched and I'm proud to say I think we really did reach the bottom.  We found ourselves in a bit of a predicament, because after the character of Jax was beaten, threatened, and coerced into having sex with a lunatic character that we had little reason to bring onto the canvas other than to perpetuate all kinds of disturbing crimes against one of our few remaining non-mob leading men, the fallout from that story threatened not to center around Carly, Sonny, or Jason.  So we put our minds to it and figured out that the best approach would be to make Jax being a sexual assault victim be all about Carly, and blame him for having been brutalized.  It was an inspired choice, if I do say so myself.  And as a woman, I'm especially proud to have been at the helm of ABC Daytime's flagship soap during this time, overseeing such groundbreaking storytelling.

But it wasn't easy; we really had to work to get things just right.”

Becca also went on to crucify the scenes of Carly translating Jax’s rape as cheating, Carly and Jason giggling over the concept of Irina raping Jax, and later, Jason accusing Jax of cheating on Carly by succumbing to rape. It’s a great read about everything that’s wrong with GH lately, including the forced humanization of terrorist James Craig, aka Jerry Jacks, at Jax’s expense.

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