Not sure how I missed the passing of Bonnie Franklin…
The loss of Allan Arbus, who played M*A*S*H’s shrink Maj. Sidney Freedman, only twists the knife.
I know we’ve lost a lot of greats in the last year or two, but I tend to keep my head buried on these things. Occasionally I catch a glimpse…and go right back to burying my head in the sand.
It is with great pleasure (and greater trepidation) that we present the very first glimpses of Soap! The Inside Story of the Sitcom that Broke all the Rules. You are among a very privileged few, as you are the first people to see what we’ve been working on for so long. (Our apologies to our esteemed publisher, who will be seeing these for the first time right along with you.)
What These Pages Are
Our goal with posting these is to give you some idea of the format of the book, including its approach to incorporating behind-the-scenes material into detailed examinations of each episode. These pages:
What These Pages Are Not
Not wanting to “give away the farm,” we have decided not to post pages that include much in the way of exclusive information and images that we dug up during our five year exhaustive research. Some of these we will post online shortly after the book is released, because we simply can’t imagine keeping these things from you, especially those who’ve been with us from the beginning. But hey, we would like to hold on to a little mystery…
These preview pages do not include:
And now, without further blather from yours truly, I present the first (rough) preview pages for four spreads from Soap! The Inside Story…
Thanks for making it this far,
Aaron
…in an hour or less. Take all appropriate precautions.
Congratulations to former Father Tim and all around beautiful human being Sal Viscuso (above, seated), who’s knockin’ ‘em dead at Portland Center Stage with his performance in “Clybourne Park.” Here’s a little of what’s being said about Sal there:
“As Russ, the grieving father in Act I, Sal Viscuso progresses from evasive to exasperated to volcanic; then as the chatty but largely ignored workingman in Act II, he’s easygoing and oblivious.”
– The Oregonian“Tense and reactive”
– Willamette Week
Sal rocks!
For those of you who have already pre-ordered the book, please email your name, address, receipt, and the name of your favorite Soap character to asberman813 (at) gmail.com. I will be sending you a special “thanks for bearing with me” gift. Nothing fancy, mind, just a token of appreciation 
I can’t believe I haven’t posted here since December! Yes, I’m embarrassed 
Still, I’m posting here today to say that we’re going to begin posting a few sample pages from the book this weekend. This is to give you some idea of what you can expect once this #$@ book finally lets go of our hand and stumbles off into the world.
And, let’s face it, it’s also a bit of proof that yes, damn it, there IS a book. Kind of like a kidnapper putting a purloined loved one on the phone to show that they’re not dead…yet. “Proof of life” I think they call it.
So there 
Hi all. Just a note to let you know that you can catch Sal Viscuso (Father Timothy Flotsky) in the first few minutes of CBS’s “The Mentalist” on Sunday, Jan. 6th.
And no, he didn’t kill Peter Campbell
Also, a status update on the book will be coming along shortly. Hang in there… (You, too, Brian
Hi gang. We received this “Soap” story this weekend and didn’t want anyone to miss it, particularly the school play story. Enjoy! – Aaron
I stumbled across this site a couple of weeks ago and am eagerly awaiting the release of the book. What a great idea, and a long time coming! I absolutely loved this show and have for more than 34 years.
I was able to catch several episodes during its original run in the 70’s (I was 11 when it premiered) when my parents would let me stay up – most of the show flew over my head at that time but I remembered loving Chuck and Bob and the physical comedy of Burt.
When I was in the 5th Grade, I convinced our English/Theater teacher that our 5th Grade Play should be an “original” episode of Soap and that my best friend and I would write it. I was the tallest kid in the glass, and my best friend (another Soap fan at age 12) was the shortest. Of course, I was Chuck and he was Bob and I’d carry him all around stage while reciting lines. I wish I still had the script….we cooked up some bizarre story lines and had all of the Soap regulars represented. It ran about 40 minutes, and we did three shows (2 for the school, 1 for the parents). Looking back, I can’t believe they let a bunch of 12 year olds do a semi-parody of an adult, controversial sitcom. My how times have changed!
By the time I got into high school in the mid-80’s, Soap was syndicated and airing on local TV stations….since it was a serialized storyline, all the episodes ran in order and the local stations would get two or three complete runs done in a year. It was around then that our family got our first VCR, and I managed to record the entire series in order….I was in heaven.
A year or so later, I got a second VCR and re-duped my original BETA cassettes to VHS and edited out all the commercials. I literally had Soap running in my room every day whether I was directly watching it or not….it served as my background noise to doing homework, cleaning, etc. etc. After a couple years, I could recite just about any line of dialog from the 4 season history of the show. I watched those tapes for YEARS.
I picked up the DVDs many years ago but never got around to watching them. Then while building a Movie/TV media server for our family room a couple years ago, I thought about Soap again and ripped the DVDs to individual files and put them in my media server database. I spot checked the files to make sure everything was in sync, then promptly forgot about them again. Then about 2 months ago, I got a hankering to watch Soap again in its entirety so I put them on my iPad to take with me as I traveled for business.
What a wickedly pleasant surprise….these episodes are the entire ORIGINAL episodes as they originally aired whereas my brain and memory was hardwired to the chopped up and edited syndicated versions of those shows that I had watched for years. Each episode has anywhere from 1 to 4 minutes of extra dialog (often complete conversations or even mini-scenes) that I’d not seen before. And in this new context, it makes some of the seemingly abrupt editing in the syndicated episodes of the show make more sense!
I’m enjoying Soap at a whole new level with the “new” dialog/scene additions. Looking forward to the book!
-Kris
Cheers to Soap fan Gary for reminding me about The New Yorker piece I was going on about a little while ago. I did a quick search and found that it did, in fact, come out. You can read it here.
Before I go into the usual rigamarole about where we are with the book and why the bloody blue blazes it’s taking so long (please turn to page 239 in your Soap book excuse hymnal), I wanted to refer you for a moment to history being made.
If you’ve been following Jay Johnson’s blog at all (and really, if you’re at all interested in Soap or excellent showmanship, why would you not?), you know that Jay this very week is performing his Tony award winning one-man show The Two and Only in North Carolina, where it will be filmed for DVD release. However, if you really want to get the most out of this experience, you need to follow the production’s Facebook page.
I know, I know, Facebook is to the human soul what soda is to tooth enamel, but really, he’s been posting some brilliant stuff there. Break a leg, Jay! (Just not your own, OK?)
And now on to the book.
We are about halfway through the part of the process where I send to each person interviewed the segments of the book that either quotes or discusses them. This is quite an involved process where in some cases we go line by line to make sure that we’ve gotten as close as possible to what actually happened. Often this takes the form of a type of “triangulation” where person A remembers something happening one way, person B another way, and person C yet another. It’s at times like this that you just have to go with who you think was in the best position to remember it (some people’s memories are better than others) and what was the most likely thing to have occurred. I still can’t believe so much is remembered of events that happened 35 years ago!
Anyway, thank you for your continued patience and support for this project. I’ve learned a lot more than I ever thought I would, and hopefully that means the same will go for you all when you finally have the opportunity to read it.
Confused? You won’t be
