All I could think of was we were about to start filming for the last final weeks of the TV show and here I am in the hospital, so I missed the final weeks, and a couple days later, sore stomach and all I got on the horse we started filming.
And I haven't met too many actors along the way that haven't told me how much the show has meant to them. It's one of the reasons they say they are doing what they're doing, today.
And it was so special, and to tell you the truth that's how I feel about the whole thing, I mean when I meet someone that has watched the show, and it has brought such joy to them, it just makes you feel so good.
But I had no idea that they were going to pull the plug so quickly.
I did a lot of personal appearances because I was under contract to ABC.
I don't think they knew exactly where they were going with the character, but they lay those stories out ahead of time, so they had some idea where they wanted it to go.
I may have been lucky with some sort of intuition, but I believe in training a great deal.
I never found it frustrating not speaking.
I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other.
I used to watch a lot of Westerns as a kid, I remember going to see Gone with the Wind by myself when I was in high school.
I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through.
It took us away from the real world and we were all privileged in that way, to be able to get into that world, whether it was heightend realism, certainly there was mellow drama.
Much of the art that goes on in this country is probably nonprofit in every state.
Now I would go home and usually eat and fall asleep for awhile, get up and then learn lines, and some of those scripts were... ..Wow, if I remember some were up to 40 pages.
Oh I am trying to remember, we would read the script after we did the show.
One of the reasons I think Dark Shadows still runs is that it's dependent on nothing else other than a story.
Right right, because up to that point I had not been a viewer, and I didn't know alot about the show, it was all new to me and the cast members were wonderful!
So boy, once we rolled camaras we didn't stop and that's why you see all the mistakes and bloopers and so on.
Students need to feel that their ideas count for something and that they are part of something exciting, something worth participating in.
That's the reason support for the National Endowment of the Arts is so important. It enables those ventures that aren't viable commercially to be done.
That's why I do the Dark Shadows Festivals, because for some of the people I never managed to reply to, I can thank.
The movie wasn't really derived from Dark Shadows - they developed a whole new script for that particular one.
The movie, if I recall, didn't have to do with the television show because there were concerns from everyone that they didn't want it to be like the TV show.
The only thing I thought I could do were plays, because that was the only performance I thought I could control.
The only thing I wish I had kept were all the peace beads, because in the 1960s people made these and hung them at protests and it was a wonderful thing.
The thing of it is though that's the only way people know you, they see you in that roll and they see you in person and they only know the perception of what you are.
There were a lot of shows that had voice over things, sometimes you would record them after the show in the sound booth.
This particular voice performance allowed me to be a totally different character from any I could play physically.
We have to provide good teachers, good environment, community involvement with schools.
We knew that the show was in trouble, because it was expensive and that they wanted to do game shows instead, because they were much cheaper.
We need to produce students with strong self-esteem, patience - all those things needed for the creative field, as well as any other field.
We taped as if we were live, at one time we did tape live, but for the most part we just taped as if we were live.
We would change out of costume, then we would read the next days script.
We've always had nonprofit theater.
When I entered college, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. My advisor happened to be from the theater department, and he encouraged me to take some classes there, which I did.
When I was younger I decided I'd hop on the train to New York.
When I went to college, I started doing a lot of plays with the theatre department, so I suppose it was always a dream.
When you succeed at creating your own world, whether it's in any realm - like Tolkien was able to do - and people are able to enter that world, it's a special thing.
You know... the wonderful thing about Dark Shadows, the thing about going and looking back at it. It was so sucsessful at creating its own world.
David's wife is Claudeis Newman.
David received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the College of Communications and Fine Arts at Southern Illinois University, in May 1992.
David has written two volumes of poetry: My Mother's Autumn and Happenstance.
David named his son (Jamison Selby) after a character on
David serves on several nonprofit boards in Los Angeles.
David and his wife ran a summer Children's musical theatre in New York for ten years.
David was honored as a distinguished alumnus of West Virginia University, in 1989
David worked with the Governor's Honor Academy.
David received his Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University.
David was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia.
David, as Joshua Williams on
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