I used to never talk about my relationship with Elizabeth Taylor because I’m a gentleman and don’t kiss and tell, but she did an interview a few years ago for Talk Magazine where she outed us as more than friends. … Yeah, so I don’t mind telling that. I was sort of her boy toy for a couple of years.

Geary then recalled how Taylor was upset when People magazine quoted him in 1983 as saying he hadn’t romanced Taylor.

They had a picture of me on the cover and the blurb there was ‘Anthony Geary looking for life after Luke… Admits his affair with Elizabeth Taylor was a hoax.’ I never said such a thing. I said, ‘No, we are just friends.’ So Elizabeth calls me and she says: ‘Tony? I hear you told People Magazine that we didn’t sleep together. That’s the worse thing that anyone has ever said about me.’

“Cage the Elephant” is an American rock band from Bowling Green, Kentucky consisting of members Matt Shultz, Brad Shultz, Daniel Tichenor, Lincoln Parish, and Jared Champion, where they were originally known as “Perfect Confusion.” The band became surprisingly popular after their single “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” reached number 32 on the UK Singles Chart and was recently featured in the Gearbox Software video game “Borderlands.” The next year, it became a hit on American alternative radio, peaked at #3 on the Billboard’s Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart. The follow-up single, “Back Against The Wall”, peaked at #1 on the same chart last month.

Per CageTheElephant.com:

“The music comes from a pure place,” Matt says. We really like the energy of music that feels passionate, raw, unplanned emotion. That’s what we were really trying to capture in the studio.”

The Shultz brothers grew up poor, sharing a tiny room in the family’s two-bedroom apartment with two other siblings. At age 12, Brad bought a beat-up guitar from a neighborhood kid for $20 that he played until it literally fell apart. Not long after their parents were divorced, Brad snuck home a cassette of Jimi Hendrix’s “Live at Woodstock,” which the brothers listened to obsessively for three years, cementing their love for rock and roll. A few years later, Matt bought Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” calling it a ‘huge life changing album’ for him. After the brothers’ parents divorced, the music floodgates opened and they began to devour everything they could find from the Beatles, The Ramones, Led Zeppelin, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Nirvana, and the Pixies, to name but a few.

“A lot of bands put themselves in a box and say, ‘We’re not going to be influenced by anything,’ Matt says. “We don’t mind being influenced though. I don’t think you should force influence but to fight against it would be like fighting against nature. You have a responsibility to innovate but a lot of the time people mistake pretentiousness for innovation and allow that pretentiousness to taint their creativity. What you end up with is very contrived soulless music. Everything we love about music we wanted to put in our own music. When it comes down to it, we just want to make music that we love.”

You can watch the video for their single “Back Against The Wall” above.

AWARDS:
1971 Golden Laurel Award nomination for Star of Tomorrow, Male

COMMENTS FROM THE PANEL:
Alan Carter: Talk about being known for and stereotyped by a role. It’s not like DARK SHADOWS lasted 40 years or that Frid played the role all that long, but there was something about him and the show that made us, literally, run home from school to watch. Do kids run home to watch soaps these days? No, they have DVRs and Hulu and cell phones and the internet. But I imagine if Frid was around on DARK SHADOWS, they’d still be running.

Roger Newcomb: Jonathan Frid became a pop culture icon in a role that was only supposed to last a few weeks. He didn’t debut until the 211th episode of DARK SHADOWS but his Barnabas helped catapult into the sensation it would become. Here’s hoping that Frid makes a cameo in the new Johnny Depp Dark Shadows movie that will go into production sometime this year.

Watch/listen to this week’s indie soaps:
- CHICK
- DIARY OF A SINGLE MOM
- GOTHAM
- IN THE MOMENT
- JACLIFE
- STEAMBOAT
- TABLE OF CHOICES
- THE LIKE US SHOW
- THE STEPS

1981: Robert is captured.
1981: The weather machine is destroyed.

1982: Robert tries to talk Tiffany out of leaving.
1984: Holly surprises Robert with a wallaby.

1985: Robin arrives.
1985: Robert talks with Anna about Robin.

1987: Robert is upset after a conversation with Robin about family.
1989: Robert and Katherine are rescued.

1989: Robert proposes to Katherine.
1990: Robert and Katherine have a huge fight!

1991: Robert and Anna sleep together while on the run.
2008: Robert falls into a coma.

2008: Robert wakes up from his coma.
2008: Robert returns for Robin’s wedding.

We Love Soaps: Tell me about your work on ALL MY CHILDREN.
Anna Stuart: That was a totally different experience from what I had before.

We Love Soaps: What was it like?
Anna Stuart: [Pause] I was a well established player coming into a well established company, which meant I was very much of an outsider.  And the fact that I wasn’t on contract…they didn’t want to interview me.  The P.R. person at that time wouldn’t even speak to me.  He would walk right past me and welcome the next person with great big smiles, it’s like I didn’t exist.  It was just a very different environment.  There were egos there.  We didn’t have a lot of egos out in Brooklyn [on ANOTHER WORLD] and if you did you paid.  That’s just not the way we worked out there.  We were actors out in Brooklyn, we weren’t about the ego thing.   It was a very different set.  But I love my crew guys, they are the ones you want to be friendly with.  They are the ones who, after all, are the bottom line.  If a crew guy actually likes what you are doing there on that set, or likes the way you look, you’re in.  They’ll be honest with you.  Again, I found my way.  I found the people I liked the most, that I resonated with the most, and I had fun.  You find the good corners and nestle in them.

We Love Soaps: Did it help at all when Mark Pinter was hired to play your husband?
Anna Stuart: It’s not a question of “help”.  I wasn’t miserable at all.  It was lovely to work with him though.  I enjoyed working with everybody.

We Love Soaps: Are there any plans for Mary to come back now that Greelee [Rebecca Budig] is alive?
Anna Stuart: I hope they’ll call me and have me come out.  But I don’t know if they’ll discuss that at some point once they get settled. I think they should.  As long as they have Greenlee on there, and as long as they have established Greenlee with a mother, it would be behoove them to bring her around now and again. 

We Love Soaps: Especially after your last appearance.
Anna Stuart: Yes, I showed rather a human side after she died.  But whenever somebody asks an actor, “So what are you doing”, they want to know what you’re working on, not what you’re doing.  I finally got past that one by saying, “I’m doing nothing that I don’t want to be doing.  [Laughs] Absolutely nothing I don’t want to be doing.”  David Forsyth [ex-John, AW] and I have a wonderful two character play we’re working on and want to get off the ground.  It’s a terrific play.

We Love Soaps: Of course we know now that you are working on something these days that many of us are excited about.   How did your part as Elizabeth on GOTHAM come about for you?
Anna Stuart: They called me.  Martha [Byrne] called me and said, “Do you want to be a part of this?” I said, “Sure, why not?”

We Love Soaps: What was it like for you to get that call and find out that Martha wanted you involved in this labor of love?
Anna Stuart: This is the part that doesn’t march to my own drum.  I thought, “Why is she calling me? Linda Dano would be much better for this part.  Linda must not have been able to do it.  Or the person they really wanted couldn’t do it, they didn’t really want me.”  I finally thought, “Well, okay, I guess, okay.”  I kept saying, “Okay, they asked me to do it, so I guess I’ll go do it.” It was great.  Those first few episodes we shot last month.  It was good to have everyone familiar around me, hair and make-up and wardrobe.  It’s always good to work with people that you know.

We Love Soaps: And we know Maeve Kinkead is in GOTHAM. Will you two be sharing any scenes?
Anna Stuart: We have to.  There has to be something, because it’s a very antagonistic relationship for these characters, acquaintances.  Whatever they have, it ain’t good.

We Love Soaps: With daytime television floundering, how do you feel about the internet becoming the new area where continuing stories can flourish?
Anna Stuart: I think it’s fascinating.  I’m not one of those [computer] people, I don’t do all those things.  But I’m aware that people live by them.  They live by their Blackberries, they live by their cell phones.  That’s how people live now.  If you don’t have all that in place, you’re nobody.  Lisa Brown was just saying to me that even when there’s lots of money coming in from sponsors, the episodes still won’t be that long.  It won’t be like sitting down at the television and watching your hour long soap.  This will be people getting them on their Blackberry while they are on their way home.  I just think it’s fascinating and I’m thrilled there is so much support from the daytime community. 

We Love Soaps: And you get to work with Matt Crane again.
Anna Stuart: I’m not sure if I do or not, but he is certainly on board.  I don’t know if we will have doings or not.

We Love Soaps: Is there anything you can preview for us about what’s coming up for you on GOTHAM?
Anna Stuart: Absolutely not.  I don’t know! I’ve just shot two episodes, and I’m about to shoot another one. I know [Martha] is a smart cookie and a good business woman.  She’s got her vulnerabilities.  I haven’t developed the character yet, she hasn’t been developed yet. 

We Love Soaps: What is it like to walk into a completely blank slate in such a new entertainment medium?
Anna Stuart: It’s exciting, and it’s also horrifying.  It’s nerve-wracking because when I went into those episodes last month, I didn’t know who she was.  I wasn’t sure where I was coming from. It’s anxiety producing, as well as exciting. 

We Love Soaps: For us long-term soap fans, it’s exciting to see GOTHAM and other show picking up creatively where networks have dropped the ball creatively.
Anna Stuart: They don’t want to, but it’s happening.  It seems that the [web series] are being forced to go back to the beginnings of daytime where it was about relationships.  It wasn’t about fanfare, it wasn’t about all the glitter around it.  I mean, the great big party scenes, all these crazy episodes.  This is more about relationships.  The good guy versus the bad guy, the little bit of mystery.  It’s back down to the basics, to the most important part. 

We Love Soaps: I just love speaking with you Anna.  Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would like to share with our readers?
Anna Stuart: Just have an open mind and be supportive of our new venture.  Thank you for your devotion all these years.  Without the fans we wouldn’t be anybody.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanking you for reading!  And please enjoy Anna on new episodes of GOTHAM.

Damon L. Jacobs is a Marriage Family Therapist practicing in New York City, and the author of “Absolutely Should-less: The Secret to Living the Stress-Free Life You Deserve“. He is re-imagining a world without “shoulds” at www.shouldless.com.

Although mostly what we already knew from rumors, it’s good to hear it from the man himself:

I think it’s really a balance between creating intrigue about the movie, getting people excited to see something original, something different that they don’t know what they’re going to get. We have to start giving people a little bit of information, a little bit about what ‘Inception’ is.

We’re making a film that is a grand-scale action film. ‘Inception’ is about the world of dreams and the interior of the human mind. It’s about a guy played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has a team of people who have access to a technology that allows them to enter people’s minds through their dreams. That allowed us to craft a film with no limits, a film that could take you anywhere and raise all different kinds of action scenarios, different realities, really play with the fabric of what constitutes a grand-scale summer movie.

We certainly tried to fuse some of the more intimate things I find fascinating about human beings and about human interaction and character with the grand-scale filmmaking we were doing on ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘Batman Begins.’ (MTV Movie Blog)

By Jon-Michael Reed
Tune in Tomorrow
April 24, 1981

LOS ANGELES – Behind the cool, flip manner and the dashing appearance is a smirky smile that immediately rings “beware” bells. He’s the kind of man who could seduce you with his charm while he’s slowly twisting a knife in your back.

The character is Robert Scorpio, con-man extraordinaire, on GENERAL HOSPITAL. The actor who plays the role is 35-year-old Tristan Rogers.

Rogers was born in Melbourne, Australia, where he was “pushed” by his working-class father to become an engineer. After six months as draftsman, Tristan joined a pop-rock group as a drummer and lead vocalist. The band moved to England and almost immediately disbanded. But Tristan became a manager and disc jockey of a London rock club.

“I had streaked-silver, shoulder-length hair,” remembers Tristan, “and I became something of a celebrity, which led to modeling assignments and commercials. Modeling made me feel like a high-priced piece of meat and commercials are the scum-bag jobs of show business. Then, I bit my acting teeth in TV jobs and lots of B films.”

Among the TV jobs was a stint on England’s longest-running soap opera, CROSSROADS. Tristan has also appeared on the Australian-produced serials, BELLBIRD and NUMBER 96, which was, according to the actor, “one of the spiciest, raciest shows ever produced. The American version of ‘96′ had such a short life last winter as a comedy. But in Australia, it was controversial fare that featured sex, sex and more sex, even a dash of nudity.”

The primary difference between British and Australian soaps and their American ancestors, however, is the work schedule. “Overseas, we taped two and a half days a week and had a full day for nothing other than blocking and rehearsals. Here in the States, everything is done in one day, and a work week is often four or five days long.”

“Early in my career, I was usually cast as a street-smart cop. Then I got typecast as a young slick hood or a sophisticated dandy. Scorpio is a little bit of both. He’s ruthless because he pulled himself up by the bootstraps to become a self-made, wealthy man. Strangely, the audience isn’t threatened by what he might do to Luke and Laura should he be crossed. And that’s entirely due to the freedom I’ve been given to develop the guy’s sense of humor while maintaining an enigmatic quality.”

The audience has responded by boosting the popularity of a character that was originally intended for a short-term stint. Now, Scorpio’s in the midst of intrigue over the elusive Ice Princess status, which half of the “GH” characters are vying to net. The situation pits Scorpio with and often against the show’s reigning king and queen, Luke and Laura, which should guarantee Scorpio a long run on “GH.”

“I adore working with Tony Geary (Luke),” says Tristan. There’s always a high energy level that stretches me by keeping me on my toes. Off the set, Scorpio and Luke are referred to as the Abbott and Costello of daytime, but the fun contributes to the occasionally improvisational risks we take. I like the free-wheeling stuff with Luke, but I also relish the warmer, intimate interludes with Laura.”

Off-screen, Tristan is married to an actress, Barbara. “She’s my most objective critic. But after we once did a disastrous commercial together, we decided it’s best if we don’t work together.”