EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Catching Up With Ellen Wheeler As She Begins A New Project With Old Friends (Part 2 of 2)

Michael O'Leary, Yvonna Wright and Ellen Wheeler.
Photo Credit: Sue Coflin/Max Photos

We Love Soaps spoke with former GUIDING LIGHT executive producer Ellen Wheeler, who recently reunited with a group of alums from the show's cast and crew on a fall Sunday for a day of taping, talking and pizza. Dubbed "A New Project With Old Friends," it was a chance for much of the old gang to get back together, shoot some scenes and catch up.

Read Part 1 of our exclusive interview here, and read Part 2 below.

WE LOVE SOAPS: When I visited the studio and Peapack in the final year of GUIDING LIGHT, the set had an really nice indie vibe to it, something you don't see much with a broadcast TV show.
ELLEN WHEELER: We were saying something like, "I want this to keep going because I understand it's important. GUIDING LIGHT has been chronicling American life since before World War 2, and I want to continue to chronicle American life. I want to show the stories of the people in American back to them so they have a place to talk from." It's not unlike pitching in when some hard or tragic moment kicks in. In the beginning people might have been thinking to themselves, "Oh my God, I might lose my job," but near the end it wasn't about it.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Catching Up With Ellen Wheeler As She Begins A New Project With Old Friends (Part 1 of 2)

Left to Right: Kurt McKinney, Frank Dicopoulos, Robert Newman,
Ellen Wheeler, Michael O'Leary and Jordan Clarke.
Photo Credit: Sue Coflin/Max Photos.

Former GUIDING LIGHT executive producer Ellen Wheeler began her career in Daytime as an actress. She landed the role of Marley Love on ANOTHER WORLD in 1984 and, a year later, she began playing Marley's twin, Victoria. Soon, she won an Emmy (for work in 1986).

She took on the role of Cindy Parker on ALL MY CHILDREN the next year, in what turned out to be one of the most moving HIV/AIDS stories ever told on television, and won another Emmy (for her work in 1988).

Primetime roles on DARK SHADOWS, HUNTER, STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and ER followed. She guest-starred on THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and returned to ANOTHER WORLD as Marley for its final year. That's when she first moved behind the camera and directed episodes of AS THE WORLD TURNS, earning three more Emmy nominations. Then, in 2004, Wheeler was named executive producer of GUIDING LIGHT.

Ranked last among the nine remaining daytime soap operas (at the time, in the key ratings demo) GUIDING LIGHT was only beating PASSIONS in total viewers. Forced to move to a new production model, with little time for the cast and crew to adjust (and no time at all for the audience), ratings dipped again in 2008, as the loss of fan favorites Beth Ehlers and Ricky Paul Goldin exacerbated the sense the show was, at times, physically jarring to watch.

Ironically, by the start of 2009 (CBS announced cancellation of the 72-year-old soap on April Fools Day) GUIDING LIGHT was back on solid footing. Some of the technical kinks had been worked out, Grant Aleksander returned as Phillip Spaulding and the Olivia and Natalia slow-burn love story garnered the show more buzz than it had received in years. Nevertheless, GUIDING LIGHT went off the air on September 18, 2009, with cast and crew moving on to other projects.

Wheeler and oher GL alums recently got together on a beautiful fall Sunday for a day of taping, talking and pizza. Dubbed "A New Project With Old Friends," it was a chance for much of the old gang to get back together, shoot some scenes and catch up. We Love Soaps recently spoke with Wheeler about this reunion, what she's been doing since GUIDING LIGHT and where it might go in the future.

Read Part 1 of our exclusive interview below.

Ellen Wheeler Turns 50: A Look Back at Her Career at ANOTHER WORLD, ALL MY CHILDREN, AS THE WORLD TURNS, GUIDING LIGHT & more

Emmy Award winning actress and producer Ellen Wheeler celebrates her 50th birthday today. We thought we'd take a look back at her accomplished body of work in television by presenting a number of insightful features and revealing interviews that span four decades.

Presented chronologically, our compilation follows Ellen's career, with links to over a dozen primary-source articles, transcripts and videos accompanying a selection of choice excerpts. We know she tends to evoke passionate, and even polarizing, emotions within the soap opera world, but whatever your opinion of her work, we challenge you to take a little time to explore Ellen Wheeler's legacy (so far). You're bound to learn something new about this complex industry personality, and you may even change your mind about her.

What are your thoughts on Ellen Wheeler, her career, and her impact? Please share with us in the Comments section, below.

Lunch With A 'Guiding Light' Head Writer And Producer

The first big agenda item during the two days I spent at GUIDING LIGHT with some of my fellow bloggers was a Tuesday lunch at the Gladstone Tavern (aka Company, at least from the outside) with Co-Head Writer Jill Lorie Hurst and Producer Alexandra Johnson-Gamsey.

Sara A. Bibel has written a wonderful blog about this experience already and I will try not to duplicate her effort.

I first have to say that you can't not like Hurst. There is a charm about her that reminds me a bit of a young Pamela Long. She went from being a waitress to receptionist in the same building as GUIDING LIGHT and then worked her way up through the GL ranks to become one of the head writers. If my film ever sells and I can work on another one, I'm going to produce the Jill Lorie Hurst movie of the week.

Johnson-Gamsey also worked her way from intern to producer. As that day's producer she had a lot of responsibility to ensure all the logistical issues were worked out keeping the tight ship running smoothly.

Hurst talked about some of the advantages of the new production model for the show: "I had a very brief stint as a producer in the control room in the old style until December and Main Street was sort of the bain of our existence because you would try to stage a car crash or something like that and it was really hard to do. I find this [new production model] freeing actually."

Johnson-Gamsey added, "It is very freeing. There were a lot of times when we needed, for story purposes, to do something like somebody getting hit by a car, and to bring that into the studio, which is what our option was before, it just doesn't work. No matter how well you try and do it, it just doesn't work. And now we can come out here [to Peapack] and do something real with a car in a parking lot and it looks real."

When I asked about the recent WGA nominations, Hurst said that the GUIDING LIGHT writers did not submit themselves this year.

I asked Hurst who she thought her audience was and received an interesting answer.