Introduction: A Complete Unknown

As I was reading through the recent media blitz and copious critical commentary surrounding the release of the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, I was struck by the title, which I realized is, well, ironic…

It would be understating the case by several orders of magnitude to say that Bob Dylan has led a well-documented life: in addition to numerous biographies; films, both documentary and biopic; interviews with him and his contemporaries; reviews and critical observations, Dylan himself has published memoirs. And then there are the lyrics — a staggering amount of material to peruse and parse.

But Irna Phillips, the subject of my biopic screenplay, Scheherazade in the Afternoon, is, indeed, a complete unknown. In 1930, she began writing “Painted Dreams,” considered the first radio serial drama, then went on to create an additional nine radio serials before moving to television in 1949, where her most important creations — “The Guiding Light,” “As the World Turns,” “Another World” — would air for a collective 146 years.

Irna Phillips should be better known, something I had hoped to correct with a documentary. But, the lack of primary materials made that impossible — hence, the biopic.

Her papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society fill more than 70 boxes of scripts and professional correspondence, press clippings, some photographs and tape recordings. But, no personal letters or journals — nothing that might reveal the inner Irna. Interviews with colleagues are at best perfunctory; virtually all have passed way, so no chance to follow up. And while serious soap fans were aware that Irna had been working on a memoir at the time of her death, the unfinished manuscript was not available until after her daughter, Katherine’s, death in 2009, a few weeks after “Guiding Light” was cancelled on April Fool’s Day (really!). Which is when my long journey with Irna began.

As I was writing the screenplay, I began chronicling the changes I needed to make, including why and how I was making them. At first, it was just for my own information. But then I began filling in the details behind scenes I had encapsulated and realized that I was also chronicling aspects of the early years of television soaps and their continued influence on popular culture. When I began considering how a project that began as a documentary film evolved into a biopic, it occurred to me that these annotations could stand on their own.

I’ve organized these annotations — think of them as longish footnotes — into nine essays that make up this newsletter, Annotating Irna…, which I’m planning release over the next few months. Each essay begins with the scene being annotated, followed by commentary.

The first three, Reconciling “Fact” with Dramatic Truth, consider some practical aspects of writing a biopic, and include examples of how I navigated real-life, often conflicting, “facts” with the dramatic truth a screenplay demands.

The five essays that make up Filling in the Backstory flesh out the details behind Irna’s professional journey and the influence her long-hidden, far reaching legacy continues to have on popular culture.

A final essay, What If…, identifies several points during Irna’s 25 years writing television soaps (1948-1973) where a different decision might have taken serialized storytelling in a radically different direction.