NEWS: Depp's Dark Shadows, Zimmer/Newman, Alison Sweeney

Johnny Depp on his new Dark Shadows movie
Depp says his inspiration comes from the original, which had a hand in warping his young mind. "I loved it. I loved the show," he says. "This soap opera with gothic vampires. I knew, 'This is not ALL MY CHILDREN.'"

He even intends to incorporate the show’s goofier aspects. “As naïve as the early, early episodes are, in his approach to Barnabas, Frid was such a striking presence, there’s definitely a sliver of him [in the new version.]” That’s when Depp says those immortal words: “What I’d like to do with him is maybe stretch him out a bit — in the extreme. Just ever so slightly take him a little further, beyond what may be considered … corny.”

Depp explains, laughing: “I’ve always sort of liked that. The idea that maybe you’ve got to go through bad acting to get to what may be really bad acting or — something interesting.”

Hey, it worked for Jack Sparrow, a performance the studio originally hated… until it started making them billions of dollars.

Dark Shadows starts shooting in London next month. It’s expected to hit theaters next year.

Alison Sweeney on how soaps are fighting to stay alive
"It hits close to home. It's really sad," Sweeney tells Zap2it while promoting the Hill's Science Diet "Million Pound Pledge" for pets. "I know, like many soap opera actors do, when you meet fans, that soaps have been a part of their family for generations. They've watched it with their mom or their grandma and it's close to their heart... It's hard to say goodbye."

"At DAYS, it's clearly a different place to work than it was 18 years ago when I first started," she says. "We don't have a lot of rehearsal time and we have to keep going. And the writers have to work harder and be able to write very simple scenes that are easier to shoot, inexpensive, without any fancy special effects, but still tell really compelling stories. Ultimately, most of the responsibility falls on the writers to tell really good stories and the actors to have to turn it around and bring it to life with a lot of constraints."

Kim Zimmer & Robert Newman: Knocking Them Dead Backstage
"They don’t get to be a couple in 'Curtains.' Mr. Newman is quietly charming as the detective, Lt. Frank Cioffi, who falls for the show’s good-hearted ingénue (Amanda Rose). Ms. Zimmer is lovably hateful and very funny as Carmen Bernstein, a tough-as-nails theater producer whose husband (Daniel Marcus) is knocked off in the first act. Carmen is hard-hearted enough to humiliate her own daughter, Bambi (Anne Horak), née Elaine, an aspiring actress-singer-dancer, in front of the whole cast and crew. But is she hard enough to commit murder?"

Todd VanDerWerff: Television can be this kind of connection to our shared pasts at its best and even at its worst
"Despite any attempts to modernize, then, the daytime soap is essentially very similar to what it was decades ago. But where the audience used to consist largely of bored college students, older people, and, especially, housewives, the third leg of that stool has largely disappeared, and college students have never been reliably counted by the Nielsens. This leaves old people. And if there’s an audience modern TV can’t stand, it’s old people."

Nick At Nite To Test Original Comedy Waters With Scott Baio Sitcom
David Hobbs (Baio) becomes a stay home father to his three young children in order to honor the deal he made with his soap opera star wife so that she may return to the limelight.

Cameroon: CRTV will air TINSEL
Soap opera lovers will not need to switch to foreign channels to watch "TINSEL", a popular soap opera in West and South Africa. CRTV will be broadcasting TINSEL to viewers. Friday nights have been set aside for films.