Designing Women with Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Part 1

Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, part of the weirding Way Media Network. Eightiesley and So Pretty to the City, Dream of Getting the Money Man World. Hello friends, Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, where we explore female driven television shows from the nineteen eighties and celebrate the people who made them. You are your hosts, Sharon Johnson and Susan Lambert HadAM. Hello, I'm Sharon and I'm Susan.

Many blessings to mister Barney Rosenswig, producer of Cagney and Lacy, and our own wonderful producer Melissa Roth for helping us procure our incredible guest today. This is a dream come true. We shouted it out, I believe in episode one of season two when we knew we wanted to cover one of the most quintessential and consequential eighties television shows, Designing Women. Today's guest is none other than the creator of Designing Women herself, Miss Linda Bludworth Thomasin is a creator, writer, executive producer of so many popular television shows from the eighties and nineties. She's originally from Missouri, and some of her early writing credits were on Rhoda and the groundbreaking television series Mash.

Her first episode of Mash, Hot Lips and Cold Arms was co written with writer actress Mary kay Place and creator Larry Gilbert, and was nominated for an Emmy. In nineteen eighty three, she and her husband Harry Thomasin founded Mozart Productions and created and produced highly lauded and popular television series including Evening Shade, Hearts of Fire, and The Women of the House, and, of course, her most beloved work, Designing Women. She has written over four hundred and fifty scripts for TV. Miss Linda Bludward Thomasin is also a novelist, playwright, and documentary filmmaker, as well as an outstanding philanthropist. We are so thrilled to welcome her to eighties TV Ladies.

Hello, Miss Linda Bludworth Thomasin, Well, Hello, how are you. We're great and so delighted to have you join us today for the show. We have long been big fans and you're definitely a hero of ours and Designing Women is just one of my all time favorite shows as well as my mother and my sisters. We still talk about it to this day. So this is such a treat to be able to talk with you.

Well, I love to hear that, and I think we're like a little secret club all over America, especially in the South. But I get it everywhere I go. Really, if they find out, you know, I'm connected to designing women, people always have women in particular. I always have a comment, but especially mothers and daughters and sisters. And it's definitely a generational thing.

Unfortunately, now I get the grandma step too. You know, oh my grandmother. I watched that show with her. So but it's very rewarding, you know, to hear that it's still appreciated decades later. Well, it's a really particular show that I think resonated with so many people in the eighties, myself included.

I'm from Atlanta, Decatur, right outside of Atlanta. Oh you are. How did you lose that accent? You have no accent? Where did you play your accent?

Well, I used to say when I got to film school out at USC I sold it to an actress who needed it for a part. That's a worthy explanation. Otherwise I would say upset. I have a friend who grew up in Atlanta also and has no accent, and I asked her why one day she said, well, I just decided I didn't want so may have also had to do with the fact that her parents were both from England. Oh I think you know, so that had something to do with it as well.

I'm sure, but yeah, she same as Susan, grew up there and left without a local accent. I love the southern accent. My husband is southern Arkansas, almost Louisiana, and everywhere we go people comment on his accent because they'd love it. It's very melodic and shopped. And I don't love my own because I'm from southeast Missouri, which is the boot heel of Missouri, and so I've tried to pick his up, you know, but I can't.

But anyway, that the Southern accent I think was elevated on our show by all of the actors, but especially by Dick Say Carter, who was from Miclamorrisville, Tennessee. And she had such an eloquent way of using her accent that it actually elevated it. Speech she made and everything she said in the way that a lot of the very top British actors, you know, when they do Shakespeare. I thought Dixie always reminded me of that. That it wasn't just a Southerner talking, you know, it was it was higher than that.

It was memorable. The melody was bigger, and the elocution was more contagious. You just wanted to hear more of it. So, you know, I'm a fan of anybody who can master that. Absolutely.

The Julia Sugar Baker rant was made all the better by that accent. Yeah, and I think it's something you hadn't really heard before on TV. You certainly, well, you've always heard the southern accent of you know, you need to get out of our town, of that stereotype, and then the hyper feminine scarlet o'harea thing, you know, I declare and all that, but I don't think anybody ever used it the way Dixie did, and quite frankly the rest of them too, you know. And Jean Jean Smart was the only one who was from Washington State, but she had a beautiful accent, and everyone on the show. She represented Charlene, who was from my actual hometown in Missouri, but she really I had so many people say Jean's accent was their favorite, So you know, you can't tell how people are going to respond to it.

Did you have a dialect coach for the actors, not at all, because Delta, you know, just spoke the way she speaks. I mean she ratcheted up Suzanne a little bit, you know, just in her speech patterns. And Annie has her own very deliberate with speaking. It's very Kentucky, also melodic and but in a different way than Dixie's. And as I said, Jean was the only person who didn't have one that hers was beautiful and she filled everybody and me check was just me check.

You know, we never worried about if he's founded Southern. He had some Southern roots, but you know, he was just American and we just didn't worry about it. I mean mainly, you know, he was a black man and he sounded like a black man, and we didn't worry about him being from the South. That's so amazing. I love the way that you talk about the regional accents because so much of the Southern accent is sort of genericized, and that does bug me when you know you're watching a theater show or movies or television, when it's just generic Southern accent, You're like, no, no, there's a difference between yeah, Georgia and Tennessee and Texas and you know, oh, it's overdone.

There was one gentleman who was a silent coach who my husband believed that he infected at least thirty or forty old movies because you can tell when actors are overdoing it and it's so pronounced and slow, you know, and he goes, oh, that guy was that guy was advising people on this movement. You can tell because it never sounds like anyone we know, but mainly aside from the accent. I also, you know, when I started with Designing Women and wrote the first the pilot, you know, and when I sold at CBS, my main goal, you know, I wasn't really thinking of accents. I was really just thinking about the South and how many wonderful, beloved people I knew in the South. And my family is from Arkansas on both sides, and you know, I didn't see anybody on TV like them.

I didn't, you know, And I was so tired again of that Beverly Hillbillies concept. And even in my life, you know, I experienced prejudice out here because I would say, oh, you need to come home with me. You know, we have the greatest natural springs in the world, and you know, near my town and this beautiful river and I'll take you canoeing, and you know, everybody my agents had seemed deliverate, and they were they were just you know, a gas that I would even think that they would set foot where I'm from. And I just I didn't even realize the stereotype that I was up against until I came to California because I actually went to school in Missouri to college. So even though it was an international school in the sense that a lot of people from different countries went there, it was still in the heart of Missouri, and I just did not know until I came to La you know, how entrenched people were in thinking about the South in that very kind of scary, rural, ominous, ignorant, barefoot, sometimes incestuous way.

And that was why I was just determined, you know, to do a show that stood up against that. Unfortunately, a lady named fran Bascom, who I still say is the greatest casting director in the history of television, who did all of our shows. You know, she's the one who found those four women. I didn't know them, and I would never have come up with them. And you know, she was just brilliant, and she just always came up with the perfect person and even more importantly, the most brilliant combination of people that she had already matched in her head.

And that's what she did for me on Designing Women. She is no longer with us. I could not get through her eulogy. It took me forever because I could not stop drying. Just this beautiful red haired lady, beautiful clothes, beautiful temperament, just a joy to be around every day, and so supportive of actors and you know, the ones who hadn't been discovered yet, and so confident, never cocky, but so confident that they could do it.

And I never saw her fail on that front. I mean, you know, whether it was Billy byb Thornton or Hillary Swank who got the Oscar? You know who nobody knew? Whether this was not on Designing Women, but Evening Shade, Hearts a Fire, This was all fran Bascom. You know, the brilliant cast on Evening Shade, which actually that cast, that one could have been predicted somewhat, but no one had ever put them all together.

I mean, that cast had more Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominations. Than any cast ever in television history. I mean, it was Charles Derning, Ozzie Davis, hal Hobrook, Burt Reynolds and wedgeworths Elizabeth Ashley. It just went on and a talent that I haven't seen before or since. And she didn't self promote it.

Also, I don't think she's even known to the public, and not even that well known to a lot of people out here, but she was our secret weapon. That is amazing. Fran Bascom, I'm going to go look her up, because you know, we love hearing about sort of the women behind the scenes that really did a lot of the heavy lifting this kind of stuff and don't get their flowers, don't get the credit. But you know, besides that, if you're just talking about someone on a humanity. When my mother had AIDS and I would leave the hospital late at night, but what makes me cry, She was out in the waiting room.

So that's just who she was. That's amazing. And I watched a little evening shade where you watch some of it, and noticed that Billy Bob Thornton is in the pilot. So I did have a question about how that came about. But now you just told me.

I was like, well, he's from Arkansas, right, so maybe that was a family thing, but we did not know him. We ended up falling in love with him. Actually he named his son after Harry. And then we went on to do Hearts and Fire with Markey Post, who one of my dearest friends was, and John Ritter and Billy Bob and again friended that cast with those three brilliant people, and Billy Bob turned out to be just a wicked comedian, which he hadn't really done, and he and John bonded so much. And I know we're not here to talk about art sas far, but that cast too, Leslie Jordans thrown in and the brilliant George Gaines and Ed Asner.

I mean, she put that whole cast together. Billy Bob had one line on Evening Shade, but Fran came to me and said, well, listen, I've got somebody from Arkansassa. You and Harry are going to love him. And I had one line where he delivered. He's a flower delivery guy and he gives the flowers to Burt Reynolds and it just the way he said it.

He came in and said it you know, like Wood, these flowers are for you. Bert's name was Wood, and just the way he said it, it was kind of memorable. And Hal Holbrook went up to him afterward and said, I don't know what you've got, but you've got some things, so keep doing what you're doing. And then, of course wasn't long before you know, Billy Bob had an oscar. So that just kind of shows how prescient and brilliant Fran was and also how kind of how to go up to him and say that to him.

Yeah, Billy Bob, you know, he only had one or two lines and that's not necessarily something that even happened, So yeah, how awesome that was. Pal. I was like that with everybody. He I always say he was our north star, you know he was. And he so adored Dixie.

You know, I always say that there's something about Southern men and women when I don't want to make other people mad, because I know that people from other parts of the country had just as you know, wonderful a romance a Southern nurse, but there's something about Southern men and women, and Hal and Dixie personified that, you know that they just had this spark and it was just quinchable, and everybody saw it, and it wasn't different on screen. It was the same, you know, all week on the show. Behind the scenes, I always say we had to, like on show night, we had to keep him away from the microphones because everything Dixie did, he just laughed so hard that it kind of ruined the soundtrack. And he just watched her, you know, like a decided kid who can't believe that this girl accepted his invitation to the prom.

And that was true until the end. I wrote a eulogy about them for the Hollywood Reporter, And we had so many dinners at their house, you know, that were so adventurous, and it was like a dinner at eight movie. I mean, Dixie always had the worst help, and you know, we wouldn't even eat till like midnight, and there'd always be a lot of clanging in the kitchen things. He would walk would sweep back out and say, you know, it's almost ready, almost ready, and then hell would just look at her, you know, the big grin like he just thought it was all delightful. She had to come to the top of the stairs after everybody was there, and she come out in her dressing gown, and go, oh, my goodness, is there a party, you know, like she'd forgotten.

And it sounds so pretentious that because it's something most people could not pull up, but they did, and you got the feeling we did that even when we weren't there, you know. Then she honest to god, lie around on the piano and sing and carry on, and it was just the most fun. But they were both so Southern, and her father, mister Halbert Carter, you know, was such a close friend of ours, and he was such a character. But they kind of represented all that. I always wanted to have a romance between the men and women on my comedies because I didn't think there was enough of that in the comedies i'd grown up with, you know, I mean, Lucy and Ricky had to keep one foot on the floor.

And I just really wanted to show people in love because that's how my parents were. So Dixie and how carried that on in spades, and then Delta and Joe mcgraaney the very same thing. I think, like with Jerald A specially, you know, there's like in the South, maybe a lot of Southern men who have big, happy marriages, I think have a high density of masculinity, but it's benevolent masculinity. And the women are always you know, high spirited, feminine, and I mean even my husband. I hate to brag that I've got so many women.

You know, where how do I find somebody like Carrie? And I always say, well, you have to go to Arkansas first, or the South, and you should find yourself a shock who reads a lot of poetry and loves his mother and cries over the evening News because that's Mets Harry and they always laugh and they go, oh, that's that's such a weird coming in. I know it's a Southern thing. So I've always tried to get that into my show. We did it on Evening Shade again hopefully between Bert and Mary lou Hinter and with Hal and the wonderful Linda Garrenger who was Fontana Buzsolet on the show.

But there's just you know, and if you look at Southern couples that you probably really admire their marriage, like Stave Pill and Tim McGraw, are Garth Brooks and Tricia Yearwood, you know, Amy Grant Vince Hill. There's a romantic spark that stays with these couples that I think is you know, you want it to be contagious. I mean, I think they make people want to search for that and to find it because it's so appealing. So anyway, that's something we tried to capture and I had a lot of help with the cast that friend gave me. That's amazing, and you did capture it.

Yeah, benevolent masculinity. I love that term. Well start it, We'll start it. We'll say that's masculinen devolo. I mean, I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm all for LGBTQ causes, and you know, I'm writing a movie, a comedy about trans people and all of that.

But I do think, you know, we have to really shavor and protect, you know, this wonderful thing called masculine and feminine. Just because people have abused it and misrepresented it, you know, doesn't mean we need to lose it. And hopefully really just laying it down on film in our little comedies, you know, maybe that will help a little. So I'll always feel a little bit proud of that. Yeah, there's space for all of it.

I think there's space for all of that. So yeah, and I'm not afraid to say that because I know people are so scared now to talk about anything to do with sexuality or anything. And also there could be the spark a with LGBTQ Southern people. But I'm just saying there's something about Southern men and women. I'm not speaking politically or about science or anything.

I'm just saying I just believe in that when Southern men and women get together and they are the right combination of masculinity and femininity, there's just nothing better in the world of romance for me, you know, And I just believe in that. You know, Seen is very Southern, even being not from the South. You know, she has such a softness and such a femininity about her, But boy is she strong. You only have to look at her and Hacks, you know, to see the intercore of strength that comes out of her. And when you talk to her.

I mean, honestly, she's the softest, most feminist, most feminine woman. I think I know that. Yet she inhabits this great strength you know of just and you're saying, and can give it back better than she gets. Yeah, I mean, she's pretty awesome. That is so amazing, And you reminded me I wrote a play about Jimmy Carter and Roslynd Carter is a character in it and that relationship, and one of the reasons I wrote it was I was so fascinated as both a kid and then as an adult with their relationship to each other.

And yeah, that's just that Southern couple nests where they're both partners yet individuals and there's something really and you still felt like, Oh, I think they're going to make left tonight. You know. In fact, I have a friend who was a speech writer for him, and he confirmed that. You know, he said Jimmy would be drinking wine and then talking a little bit it, which shocked me. I mean, he wasn't really talking out of school, but he was talking about how he'd like to have it last and wine before love making, and I thought, oh, my goodness, I shouldn't even know of this.

But yeah, what was your play? I have to check on that too. What was the name of your plague? It's called Confidence and the Speech, and it's about the ten days before President Carter's Crisis of confident speech. But it's told from a modern feminist perspective looking back at that time.

And in the play, the president's actually played by a woman who's telling the story of her time as a young female intern. And so the guy that's asking her questions about this time plays her as a young female intern in the Carter White House. So's it's kind of a made up package for a real life event. And yeah, but I use it to talk about the confidence it takes to speak up in the room women in politics and you know, yeah, all the leaps you have to make in your head to imagine a woman president. It may have been you know, written right around the time of I don't know, twenty sixteen, but it's the head of this day that hasn't been realized even today.

Yeah, well, that sounds very layered and interesting, and I congratulate you and that that sounds so original. The courage to speak in the room is something that you know, and I won't talk about this now. We can talk about it later. But you know, I did take a lot of the money I made from Designing Women and take it back to my hometown. And you know, we are the number one donation spot for the NRA in my town, and I just wanted to do something for the girls, and so, you know, I started this foundation and that's really the big thing that we do is give people, the women the courage to speak in the room.

We spent. We sent dozens and dozens of girls all through Europe and all, you know, every year they would go to the Broadway shows. They would come out here and stay with me and go to the fund stages. And so we're going to have a big event next year. Everybody's coming home.

We've put one hundred and seventy seven women through college, and we've sent people to Harvard and Duke and really just you know, it was really my money from Designing Women that did that. I'm not bragging, but I just mean, I want to make clear that it was my money. Came from Dixie and Delta and Annie and Jean, and so they really did that, you know, with me. But I'm just so proud of it because the women are all coming back. Only one has passed away, so they're all saying they're coming back next year and we're just going to have a big homecoming.

But yeah, I've been getting a lot of the letters from the young girls who traveled who wouldn't have gotten to do these things otherwise, and you know, they all talk about what Designing Women, the spirit of it, and what this money that came to them because of those women, you know, has has meant to their lives, and it's meant everything. And this all started really with me when I was a little girl. You know, my dad gave this river I talked about that I used to bring up to my agents. That is the most beautiful river I think in the world. Is kind of wild.

It's called Current River, and it does come from the largest natural springs in the world. And my dad loved it. He grew up on it, and he gave me my own canoe when I was seven, you know, and he gave me the paddle and he said, you can now paddle any boy on this river. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, you know, And that river just became my world, you know, whether I was paddling around in slews by myself or you know, my I had a couple of girls who were like my sisters, who had the cabin next door, you know, and oh my gosh, we smoke grape vines, which are you know, nothing, You just smoked them to be smoking. But you know, we'd sit around with our legs crossed and you know, give speeches and talk about everything.

And we were big readers that anyway that I always think about, you know, that gave me the confidence to speak up in the room was just the fact that you know, I owned that river and I did race all the boys on that river in my canoe, and so just that the template of that, I just kind of wanted to, you know, bring back to my town and give all these girls a leg up, which I think they really got, you know, And I'm anxious to see them in person because I haven't seen them and started in ninety about nineteen nine, So I'm really anxious to see them all and see what they're doing that is amazing. Okay, we want to keep talking. We're going to take a short break. Okay, we're back. Is this the Claudia Foundation.

Yes, the Claudia Foundation is the umbrella of it, because you know, my mom came from didn't have a sister. Her mother died when she was thirteen. This is in a little tiny pan Alicia, Arkansas, and she grew up, you know, really didn't get to go to college because her dad didn't have the money, and she came to the last place they moved was Copperbluff, Missouri, and they came over the Arkansas line. She'd grown up in Arkansas that anyway, she was the secretary for my dad's He was a lawyer, and he came home from the war and there she was working for my grandfather. My grandfather is the one who's really responsible for me becoming a writer.

He only went to sixth grade and he wanted to be a lawyer, so he studied and clerked under a judge, and then he became a lawyer, and then he became a newspaper editor, and then he became what today would be called a civil rights activist. He is really responsible for the liberal spirit that I hope exist in my shows. His name was C. T. Bloodworth.

He was about six foot four with white chaka. Their my favorite picture of him, he's in a Venice canal in a gondola with his stetson in the air waving it. When he died. I got follow of his books, Zachary Shakespeare, Dickens. He had four sons.

They were all so interesting. They put themselves through law school by playing poker, and they defended him when he got in a huge fight with a clan. My grandfather defended and was a found abhorrent. You know that they were tarring and feathering black people, running them out of town. This was in Corning, Arkansas.

So they had a lot of shootouts at my grandmother and grandfather's house in Arkansas. The governor would come. I mean, it was a huge thing. It went on for years, and finally they did shoot my grandfather in the chest and he lived, but he moved his family just across the state line to Paper Bluff. That's why I grew up there.

So then his sons grow up and my dad became a Japanese War crimes prosecutor, and my uncle, my uncle Charles, was a judge advocate at Nuremberg, and he brought home the transcript from the Nuremberg Trials that was written in hand, and we gave that to the University of Missouri. But all of a sudden became lawyers, and it was the largest family lass room in Missouri in the fifties. But the way they were different is that, you know, they always came. They were interested in social justice, and they had read a lot, and all of the boys could recite you know, Longfellow and Shakespeare. It just went on and on, and I grew up being around that.

I never mastered that myself. But you know, it was just common. You know, they would get out their cocktails and if it was sunset, somebody might be residing Tennyson. Now I'm not saying they did that every day, but I mean it was in our lives, you know, and it was interesting and they were interesting, and they were always very aware of what was going on in the town. And my dad was really alone in a lot of his opinions.

Nevertheless, people loved him. He was a very popular person. But you know, we couldn't join the country club because blacks and Jews couldn't belong that kind of thing. Then when he died, I said that in his eulogy, and my mother said, well, he also didn't want to pay the dues at the country club. You know, I looked like my dad.

My mother looked like a movie star. And because she didn't have all of this female support, you know, I was everything to her. I was her only daughter. I have a brother also. But anyway, when I, you know, was a She died of aid in nineteen eighty six, and the day I found out that she had ages is the day I found out that Designing Women was going to be a series.

And so it was very very, you know, hurtful and awful for six months. She died Thanksgiving of that year, and my husband's mother died four weeks later. So it was a pretty horrible year. And but you know, the canceled Designing Women, and my husband came out here and saved it. He got viewers for quality television, you know, behind him.

He got fifty thousand letters to come in and he got but grant the president of CBS to raise the white flag at CBS literally raised it, which would never happen today, and said, okay, we're going to give you another chance, because they had been moving it around and they hadn't given it a chance. But anyway, my mother, yes, I wanted to honor her so much because she, you know, just gave me everything. My dad gave me my confidence, but my mother just poured all the love in the world into me. And you know, that is part of being confident. I think giving someone confident just to just love them up every day.

I've never felt like, you know, I had to get a man or be anything, because I felt so loved, you know, from her, and so like being married, being happy would just be icing on the cake because I was already good to go, you know, just from being around her. So I wanted to kind of give that love to the girls in my hometown. I did a film for Hillary. I was very close to Hillary Clinton's mother, Dorothy Rodham, who stayed with me a lot at my house in Santa Barbara, and they had basically the same relationship. You know.

Her mother grew up with a very impoverished environment and two teenage parents who were sixteen years old could not take care of her. She was given to a family California, relatives who were very unloving, and yet somehow she invented love, you know, and she heared it out and she just filled Hillary with love and that gave her all the confidence to be who she was. And in twenty sixteen, I made a convention film for Hillary that was online, and it told their story about Dorothy and venting love and giving it to Hillary, and then Hillary going all over the world, you know, and helping girls in Afghanistan and women who you know, who are living in poverty all over the world, and the misogyny that keeps women down all over the world.

All of that came from a mother and a daughter, and so I tried to kind of duplicate that, you know, with my own mother and hopefully on a smaller scale, you know, have done kind of the same thing. I love the idea that you don't have to take sort of abuse and terror and fear in your life and continue that you can actually turn that and decide you're going to make a decision to make sure that the people that come behind you and the people that are around you are going to be filled with love. Yeah, and that's what Dorothy Rodham did. I know this show's not about Dorothy, but I love her so much. I have an English garden at the Foundation.

It's dedicated to mothers and to Dorothy and to my mother. Dorothy, at six years old, was on a train. You might know the story Becausehillary has about it too, as I trained to California with her little sister who was three, alone on a train from Chicago for three days. You know, the stories that make me cry the most are the ones where women help each other, because I do think things are so stacked against us all over the world. And you know, I mean, I won't make my big soapbuck speech air because that's not what it is kind of I know, it's what you all are about it.

We had Coffey and we got to get some comedy in here, but no, just you know, our national hobby is obviously killing and raping women and then making shows about it and documentaries about what was in the killer's mind. And I'm just so set up with all of it, you know that. I mean the just the uh, it's really a celluloid holocaust. You know, what we do to women. And then the way women are treated all over the world, whether it's the Taliban or it's the pernogavy industry, you know that it's now commensurate with really the arms fail.

It's the biggest, the biggest business in the world. I just feel like women and I feel like we're going backwards too. And I won't get into all of that, but it's very disappointing, you know. And women are just constantly over sexualized. Now it's you know, it's a sideboob, it's the under boob.

Have you seen this? You know, I'm not afraid of nudity, but why is this the only thing, you know that's being constantly presented everywhere? I just feel like, you know, I don't want to be like old Lady Bloodworth screaming, get off my lawn, or in my day, just the Kardashian thing, just constantly, you know, oh my god, here I am, here's my look at my ass? Once more. I watch the show, I know them.

I've been to their house at dinner. I try to kind of keep up with the Kardashians. And that was enough. In the show what are the Shows? I saw recently they found a book in an old box in their garage and they were so puzzled.

No one knew what to do with it. It was a book streaming it ran anyway, enough, Okay, thank you for letting me get that in. Oh my god, you're absolutely right. I mean, even to something like, you know, Vanity Fair, does this cover every year of you know, up and coming people in Hollywood. You in some years it's all men, some years it's all women, sometimes combination.

But in the year that it's all women, all the women are dressed in lingerie or bathing suits or whatever, and then the men they're all in T shirts and suits and yeah, it's mapping. I don't understand it. And then when they do their Oscar shows, they've got Sophia Coppola halfway lying on a bed with her legs off, with her pants pulled down. I'm like, oh my god, well when did Martin Scarcesei do this when he was nominated? You know, it's just so I mean, I don't care if Scott.

Everything can be naked, you know, I'm fine, human body can be beautiful, we get it. But what is the purpose? What is the message? I don't understand it. On this latest HBO offering Lily Ro's Depp, you know, it's completely naked for the entire series, with her leg spread, with him looking like he's giving her some kind of gonecological exam, and then you know, abusing her so many ways, and then they rush in to say, oh that we're showing you that that's wrong.

You know, we're teaching a lot wrong with We don't really need to hear that. Your concerned parents are concerned producers. We know what you're doing, and we're that to fill in where succession was. Come on, you know that was shameful. So anyway, yeah, I went over between looking at the idol on HBO and I switched over and on another channel was Harrison Ford in Witness watching Kelly McGillis prepare to take a bath, and he was at the door and she didn't know it.

He was just flicking at her so lovingly, and I thought, oh, well, you know, I'm sorry for all the young people looking at this other trash that they might not see these things. You know, Harrison is old, and that's an old movie. But you know that kind of you know, really carefully brilliantly constructed sex scene is just so erotic and appealing. I think so much more than just you know what is it now? Every love scene is just slamming a woman around the room, choking people, choking women.

I don't get that. Like, I'm just I asked my husband to anybody just like make love anymore. Like it doesn't even exist in filmmaking anymore. I know, we're way a field of designing women. This is a whole new podcast.

You can you can tell I've been cooped up during the pant But anyway, it kind of does dim from the kind of you know, romance we were trying to show on behalf of the women who like designing women. I would like to appoint myself one of their representatives to say, you know, ladies, please stop taking us backwards. You know, we can do a whole podcast What has Happened to Women? That's what we can call it. Oh, and you know you're so right that scene and uh witness between Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford.

Do you remember the hottest scene in movies, isn't it? Oh? Yeah? Yeah. If only young people could be exposed to these things.

And I think their world is smaller, you know, maybe than ours was, at least for girls, because I don't I'm older than you, ladies, But you know, when I was growing up, the world was our oyster, you know, and we were running free, you know. I mean we did what we wanted, We said what we wanted to say. You know, we'd love do, we wanted to live. I mean, we were really wild in that sense. And oh, I just see girls trying so hard to be I'm going to say the words sable because that's what's used in our industry constantly.

Is she is she hot? I see women as that is their greatest aspiration, and it makes me sad. You know, there's just so much more to life than this over sexualization of everything. It's pornography. I mean, we didn't have yeah, we didn't have a pornography available like five minute pornography available to us on the internet.

For Yeah, now by high school, they've all seen pornography, and we know that that's where women are getting beat up for the first time they see it. They see it, that's what it is. And they're being taught that's what's saying, and they replicate it, and yeah, and you boys begin to think that's what you do to girls, that's correct. I just think, you know, I think there's a lot of people, a lot of people in America who feel this way. And I think the conservatives in our country would be surprised to know that a lot of liberals like me feel the same way.

And this could be a meeting ground, you know, for all of us. If we can't agree on Donald Trump or January sixth, let's agree on this. You know, it's a starting place. You know, Let's start teaching our kids. You know, let's start teaching our boys that this is this is really not you know, how things are supposed to be, and teaching our girls that they are worth way more than this ridiculous over objectification and you know, of their genitalia and of their bodies and of their sexual beings.

I just feel like a lot of girls just aspired to this now. And I do everything I can, you know, in my little hand to get the girls not to feel that way. Okay, this is another podcast because we've barely talked about it, and I have two step children and then a ten years younger boy, and yeah, you want to raise good people, and it's very challenging right now because there's so much cruelty in the air. Crualty, it's a good word. Thank you for saying that it is cruel you know what they're doing.

I'm so glad you said that. A lot of the stuff I think. I think girls have become very confused, that they confuse cruelty with masculinity. You know, they think if the guy treats them poorly, that's sexy until they can't take it anymore or they're dead, you know. And when we and I don't know, I always thought, I think kindness is probably the sexiest thing around.

You know. That's what I think about my own husband when I see a man like Brad Pitt or George Clooney. You know, a lot of the actors who I know are kind of like, can you read Keanu? I was always want to, I guess because of my canoe. You want to make the canoe.

Yeah, anyway, you know, that's what I find sexy because they're so kind to people. That's a turn on. And now I think that's interpreted as weakness, like during the pandemic, you're not as social and you watched a lot more TV, which is what happened to me. I saw a lot more of what is out there, and it made me feel lonely and sad and depressed that you know, how will you ever fix this? Well, okay, I mean these these young people, they may never get over this.

I mean, this is what they think and we and this is what they feel is hot and sexy, you know. And I don't think Hollywood does anything to help. No, I was no. I mean they're the because of it. They are the cause of it, absolutely.

And I brought this up at the Academy of Television, Arts and Science because I had one year on the board. Every year, the president gets to have a guest and I was chosen by the president of that year to be the guest. And I don't really like organizational things too much. I mean I don't enjoy it. I don't join a lot of clubs.

But I went you know. And I made my little speech there and I said, you know, I'm not I'm not advocating censorship, but I'm just saying we can do better, you know, like that does Does the actors really need to walk naked and gained on Game of Thrones down the street naked? Why is she the only one? Why is she the woman doing it? You know, these just examples of even the most prestigious table organizations do this crap.

And I'm just saying, think about it. You know, I know you see yourselves as you know, the most liberal, open minded people in the world, and you and you do this, you continue to do this. It's denigrating women, and you do it because you can. And I don't want to pass the law that stops you. I'm just asking you to consider, maybe don't do it on you know, at every opportunity.

Maybe turn it down for your daughter, or your wife or even your mother. Maybe don't do that. And oh it was not well received, and the arguments went on. Even when I got back to my office, I still had I won't say who, but I'm the head of a major network called me and we had quite a long argument because I you know, made him feel defensive. He called me to tell me that he hoped his own daughter would be president.

And I think he was so defensive because they don't see themselves that way, you know. And yeah, yeah, you hit a nee if you called I hit it there. Yeah, because he's a very cool guy. You know, he's a cool network, a cool guy. It may be art, but it's it's for me.

It's about the balance. If there was a balance to the then fine, But there's no balance. It's very tilted. It's very tilted, and women are losing this battle. And you know, if you think, if you say something, you're not going to be cool, you're going to sound like Tip or Gore when she got after the music industry for bad lyrics.

But you know, I mean, come on, listen. Have you listened to some music, you know, the violence toward women, the horrible descriptions of their genitalia, what they're going to do to women, and then all these big corporations are giving them millions of dollars. I don't know, it's just a whole you know, all of the entertainment industry is riddled with this misogyny, and nobody wants to talk about it because we're supposed to be the supportive, liberal minded feminist people that you know, we're kidding ourselves because we're going backwards. So and it is really kind of relevant to your podcast. Although I know there's no way that this can be part of you know, the Designing Women.

You'll be surprised, but I just think, well, you could, you know, you could pick this up and kind of have this be a tributary of you know, the river you've been writing back to the canoe metaphor, because it is so important and it is connected. We have seen how television changes the world. We have seen how how television changes the world for women, you know. And my three mentors when I started out, who were Norman, Larry Gelbart, and Jim Brooks. And I had no idea because I was so young.

I was just out of college. I had no idea that that was an incredible thing that had happened to me. You know, now I get it. I mean, it's like winning the you know, the billion dollar lottery. And there weren't that many women comedy writers.

And my partner was Mary kay Place, and we were kind of exotic because we were just cheerleaders from Oklahoma. We didn't come from an urban environment, you know, and we were trying to be funny and to be real serious comedy writers. So what I found out, though, is here's Norman Lear, you know, changing the world racially, changing the way people feel about black people. And then here's Larry Gelbart changing the way people feel about war. And there's Jim Brooks changing the way people feel about women and the way women feel about themselves, with Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda you know, which I grew up on.

And so I just see how powerful it could be because I lived it, I saw it, I participated in it, you know, I got to work with all those men, and I honestly feel like Norman and Jim and Larry changed the world more than most legislation can do. And so it breaks my heart now that we still have even more ways to reach people. You know, never could you have imagined from the four networks, we have five hundred outlets now and this is what we're putting on it, you know, and it's just it's a real squandering of an opportunity that wasn't available, you know, for hundreds of years, and now we have it. Now we can reach everybody and we can change the way men think about women and women think about themselves, and we're just not doing it.

Instead, we're reverting back to you know, this toxic masculinity all over the world and women better be quiet and you know, do what we say. And that's what's happened. So I'm just hoping, you know, that they'll just be more and more. Yes, there's some beautiful things on cable, but just more and more brilliant, edgy, original new things for women that are not over sexualized. And what is the chance for that right now?

I feel like it's pretty slender? What do you all think? Two words? Okay, Barbie and Oppenheimer. I can't I can't even describe my my frustration and anger that those are like they came out in the same day they're being touted as like the best Barbenheimer Burbenheimer.

Yes, yeah, I mean, well, well the critics are all little boys, now, is that it? But it's just so weird? Is it? The femininity? And then like destroying the planet.

I know what I mean. You're very good. You guys are so good at condensing my rambling, because then after I've done, you'll just go one word pornography. That's exactly what I've been trying to say, and that you just did it again. Yeah, I think, but what are we going to do?

And we can see this happening to us, to our daughters and to you know, all the women we care about, We can see it happening in front of us, but we're not stopping it. One reason is I think people publicly are really women are very afraid of being considered not cool and not sexy, you know, and I know actresses are very much afraid of being labeled you know, oh she's you know, she's trouble and she's not hot. You know, nobody wants to be not hot. If you're not hot, you might as well be dead. And so, you know, unless you can be Maggie Smith or somebody like that.

For all the women in between, like between fifty and seventy five, very dangerous area to still be hanging around. You know, there's a lot of women on the precipice who are getting ready to go into that dark tunnel, right you know, but yeah, you know where they pick you up in the van and take you to Palm Springs and throw you out in a ditch. That's kind of what's coming. And you know, because we've done nothing to change the perception, there are still cultures that revere older women. Unfortunately we're not one.

And the interesting thing is, I just think there are millions of us, but we're not organized. You know, we're not organized, and I don't you know, at some point we get old and tired and we go good luck. Yeah, but all you can do is your little corner of the world and make it better, exactly, and make it more beautiful, and make it more make it smarter, make it more unafraid, like the unafreat girl, you know, make it brave. And when I first sold designing, first got my first big tech from designing women, I called, you know, my town is not a very pretty town. And the girls I felt had nowhere to be to just be themselves and to read and to spend an afternoon, and to have access to things that the public library doesn't have, you know, just like beautiful coffee table books and you know, learn how to cook food other than what was really you know, negative to our area.

So anyway, called Crowther and Scion, who are the four hundred year old English architects, who did you know the Queen's architects, I should say, they redid Windsor Castle. They are, you know, responsible for all the palaces. And I said, I'm here in the Ozarks, and I would love for you to build a big English library for all the girls in my town because I think they're the most beautiful rooms in the world. And could you do that? And they said, oh, ma'am, we don't even know where you are.

What are the Ozarks? And so they they looked at us and they called me back and they said they would do it. And they built it in England, came across the Atlantic, came down the Mississippi River by barge, came to my town on flatbed trucks. They lived in the town for almost a year and they reconstructed it on my grandparents' house next to it, and then we redid the entire thing. But the library stands on its own.

I have Lord Byron's fireplace, beautiful things and so and then now we're just now getting you know, then I got involved in politics, so I didn't get to do everything I wanted to do. But now we're doing the English gardens and we're I think we're going to be on tour America, I hope and have people come see it. But meanwhile, this is where you know, all the girls can come and they've through the years where they've met and they've you know, gone on their trips and come back. It's really like a big clubhouse, you know, for the girls. So I feel like, as I, you know, I'm getting older, Okay, that's going to exist forever.

Nobody can take that away. And there's a philosophy that I think we've instilled in the girls that they'll pass it along to their daughters. So how many how many girls does that make you know? All together? Well, we've probably affected maybe five hundred girls that maybe that will multiply, and I guess that's the way we'll have to do it.

But do you all feel like you know a lot of girls who are who are of the same mind as you, and that makes you feel good about the world. I am astonished at the generation that's happening and coming up, the younger generations, because as much as they're being fed consistent you messages of cruelty and pornography and also just damage, they're the kindest people ever. My kids and their friends are so kind to each other, so supportive and maybe they're unique particular batch, but I think that the challenge that we're in and that is very hard for me and what I assume my generation to be is we're in this transition, and so the access to so much kind of horror and pornography and sort of terrible is also in the same pipeline as access to other cultures, other people, other understandings, and vast communication that can be misused, but can also be used to communicate with like minded people, to to sort of spread the message that you know, that gender is a different conversation for the younger generation and in a way that's much more accepting of who you want to be and how you want to be and when you want to be it.

And so I actually have a lot of hope for that generation, though I think they're being damaged. Like I think that it's that weird conundrum of the Internet and of this this fast communication where we're being you know, sort of pummeled with really kind of horrific things, and yet it's also accessible to find someone who loves what you love, wherever they are, and if you're alone in your and love whatever it is that you love, and no one else loves that. You can find somebody online who loves it too, and you can recognize that community and be in community with that. And so I think it's going to be a very tumultuous few generations. Yeah, but when I'm looking for hope, right and you know, I'm a big optimist, I think of Agecbladies and Messa.

Melissa's rolling her eyes at me right now, I'm sure. But now I'm hearing you. I like what you're saying. I think it's so clear what you're saying, you know, is that there's a kind of a word going on in the soul of our girls. And I do understand both sides because you explained it.

Yeah, no, perfectly that everything I've been complaining about, and you all are saying, amen, we hear you. We feel the same way. I'm so glad you said that, because this is the other conversation I've had with my friends is that we are gobsmacked by how compassionate and empathetic these young girls are. You know, they want inclusiveness. They will not stand for anybody being bullied or ridicule.

You know, I think, oh my god, these are like they just what you said, These are the kindest, fearest people, and they feel so deeply that yet there's this other thing happening to them, you know, an assault on them really where you feel like because of the not only the Internet and the pornography, but just the way you know, the entire you know, media industry of the world, you know, is presenting them and over sexualizing them in a way that just summons them and beckons them to try to be that creature or you're not worthy, you know, and it's got to be so confusing. It's like they have kind hearts and deep convictions about what is fair and how everybody has a right to be at the party, you know that, yet they're being told, you know, well, if you want to be at the party, you know, get your clothes up and you know, shaddle up because you know this is the ride you're going to get.

It's very interesting that you pinpoint it that way. And I don't think anybody really has that I've heard, you know, I haven't read anything like that, but I think you've hit au fun something. Well, it's it's part of the reason, like, you know, the deeper reasons of this podcast are looking at, you know, these shows that we loved and having a good time with them. I promise we will get to that good time. But also because more important, it is more, this is important conversations, because this is how do we get here.

We should be, We should be in a better future for our kids. We shouldn't have just pushed back women's rights fifty years. We should have been pushing them forward fifty years, you know, like yeah and so, And it's all tied. It's tied to this sort of what I would say is sort of an out of control capitalism. It's tied to sort of this this pushback against great strides for LGBTQ and people of color and black people and women, and and now suddenly there's this giant Oh no, we're gonna shut that down or we lose you know, generations.

And that's it's sort of a it is a fight that has come to a certain precipice. And yet it's also tied to the strikes, the actor strike and the and the writer strike. It's tied to workers strikes and go workers go and wait a minute, and the corporate greed. It's corporate greed. It's also just this cultural greed and controlling the information and I'm sure we're gonna we better get to a conversation where we're talking about people in power doing damage personally to people as if it's their right, and that filters down in the messages that they have sold us over the years and the stories that they have prioritized, and that making sure that you know, yeah, we're going to make it edgy by by doing all of our exposition while women are naked.

Yeah, you know, and that's going to be art. And don't worry, maybe we'll we'll show you a guy too, like it's fine. Yeah, that's what they do, thank you. They show when guys behind. Yeah, and then we're good to go for about three months where another one has to get up to back so to speak.

Yeah, that's you know, you're you should have a podcast. Oh thank god you said that. No, but really, you're so smart. That was everything you just said. It's so true at the base of it, though, since you have been so good at condensing what I've just said, I would if I was looking through a little telescope right now for who is the real offender in all of this, it would be the white, out of control, hissed off, toxic masculine guy who is now stomping around all over the world, you know, and they're the people.

I'm not saying they control the purse strings, but they are the people who are providing also big pushback on women, Jews, Black, LGBTQ because they're losing their power, you know. And that's what was happening on January sixth, That's what's happening all around the world. And you know, we, the people who work in television, could have a big influence on that. It can't just be with elites coming on CNN, you know and saying, oh woe is me. You know, we don't change minds that way.

You know, We've got to do programming that's really smart and brilliant and appealing. And I have to hand it to Taylor Sheridan. You know, what he's been doing with eighteen eighty three is showing a real America and that fearless girl who rides that horse every week, you know, is just incredibly appealing and beautiful. You know, that's the way we change their minds. Nick Christop always says, you know, you can tell Americans that fifty thousand people are dying starvation in Africa, and they won't send a check that you tell them one story and that check will be in the mail.

And I think, you know, just talking about how women can you know, start to elevate themselves again. And people always go, oh, well a little sitcom should in trouble itself, you know too. I mean, how pretentious to change the world. And once again I give you Norman, Larry, Jimbrooks and Larry Galbart, you know, or even in our own way, just undesigning women. You know, we did this strange case of Clarenson Anita and CBS.

Jessicansky was wonderfully supportive of us, you know, said he's a big Republican. He said, hey, if it's funny, do it, I'll put it on, you know, and I did, and I think I know from my mail you know that that. Yeah, it's a lot of people up and it made a lot of people change their mind, you know, and believe in need of help. I don't know, I'm just saying, we have more chills than we've ever had to change the world, and we're just just not using them, you know, We're not using them properly and with the respect that they just I mean, they talk about far reaching, you know, there's almost nobody we can't reach now, but we just keep putting the same kind of you know, some of it's brilliant, but so much of it is setting women back, and we don't have to do that.

Yeah, I would have to say, you know, because I was trained on, say some really amazing eighties TV ladies, I'm going to put you in that category of changing things things between designing women and for women to find their voice and make those connections. I was trained on how to speak by eighties television and particularly the women of eighties television. So I'm putting you in that category with Norman Lear and James Brooks with the shows that you created, so we should probably talk about them. You want to take a little break, just to take a break, Yeah, excellent segue. So obviously, our discussion with Linda Bloodworth Thomasin continues and is so great.

We are making this a two parter. I don't want you to miss a bit of it. Please tune in next episode to hear part two of our deep discussion with her, where we really do get to more designing women's stories and we solve all the deep problems of misogyny. Okay, well maybe not really Sharon, but we talk about them and the first step to solving a problem is I do defying it. Seriously, if you loved part one, you're really gonna love the second half of our in depth interview with Linda Blogrit thomasin.

Please join us, Hey, we want to hear from you. What's the eighties ladies driven TV show that you remember or have heard of and would like for us to cover. Tell us your thoughts at eightiestvladies dot com, and please help us make the show by going to Patreon dot com slash Eighties TV Ladies. As always, we hope Eighties TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous old and new shows to watch, all of which will bring us closer toward being amazing ladies of the twenty first century. See you next time.

Eighties So bread through the city, every tear it is