Bold & the Beautiful resuming production

Good news for fans of The Bold & the Beautiful with production resuming this week in Hollywood.

They expect to be back on air in the US “in a few weeks,” meaning 10 could follow suit soon (it has been running classic eps).

Executive producer Bradley Bell has given an interview to the Hollywood Reporter around steps being taken to protect cast & crew, including camera tricks for intimate storylines and reworking of some scripts -they don’t expect to factor coronavirus into storylines.

Most interestingly the show will even draw upon the real-life partners of cast as “love-scene doubles.” Radical…

Here are a few interview excerpts:

Daytime drama is built on intimate and close-contact scenes. How do you plan to handle that?

BB: We’ll really rely on our directors to employ all techniques. [Actors will] shoot eight feet apart, following all the safety standards, but use the tricks of the business. We’ll shoot one side of the couple in a romantic scene alone in the room, but looking at a spot very close to them, and then shoot the other side alone. When we edit it together, it will look like they’re nose to nose.

Does that then increase your post-production time?

BB: It will increase post-production. We’re also bringing in, in some cases, the husbands and wives of the actors as stand-ins for their [characters’] significant others. So if you see hands touching faces in close proximity from a wide shot, instead of a stunt double we’ll have a love-scene double, where it will be the husband or the wife doing the actual touching. Then when we edit it together, it will look like our couple on screen.

And we’ll probably also be using some of the classic, old-fashioned tricks of soap opera, where when things heat up, we pan to the fireplace or pan to a candle to indicate things are getting hot [laughs]. All in all, I think a lot of it will be done with the eyes and the voice, and there can still be love in the air and romance on the screen from a safe distance.

How soon are you looking to be back on air?

BB: We’ll start filming tomorrow. We have our first scene scheduled for tomorrow, and then back at it Thursday and Friday and into next week. We’ve eaten up our pad — usually at this time we have a month or a month and a half between tape and air. That’s disappeared now, so I think after a week or so of filming we’re going to turn it around and be on the air within a few weeks. It’ll be quick.

You can read more here.