Press Conference with the Vampire, 1968

Sometime during the fall of 1968, Jonathan Frid conducted a press conference with dozens college and high school newspaper writers. He did this from the comfort of ABC's headquarters in New York City, with only a handful of young journalists in the room with him. Most of the participants spoke to the actor via telephone, courtesy of ABC affiliate WSIX-TV in Nashville, Tenn.

I say "sometime" because it's a little unclear on when this event took place. During the late 1960s, the news media wasn't as entertainment-driven as it is today. Even small town newspapers didn't give much coverage to celebrities when they hit town, often burying them in the back pages of the publication .. when they covered them at all. And even today, syndicated stories tend to run whenever the hell features editors decide they'll run, which is almost always as a tool to fill an editorial hole on a page. Good editors don't kill locally generated stories to make room for syndicated material, which makes researching events like this 1968 press conference a little complicated.

News materials documenting this press conference were published on a scattering of dates during November and December that year, and were edited to exclude direct references to the date of the event (usually a sign that an editor is trying to mask stale content.) A story published in The Tennessean Sun suggests it took place shortly before Halloween, though. "Editors Interview Vampire - From A Safe Distance" was published on Oct. 27. It was the second virtual press conference staged by WSIX-TV, according to the story, but the writer doesn't mention who was involved with the first.

If you've ever read an interview with Jonathan Frid, you pretty much know how the Q&A session went. He spoke about Shakespeare ("My big ambition after doing my job on 'Dark Shadows' is to do 'Richard III' on television," he told the kids) and his adjustment to television acting (“I never thought I would like television,but now I love it. The only thing I don't like about the series is the pressure. The first six months I was uptight every day.”)

"It was really neat," said Mindy Sterman, a student at Hillwood High School. "I just never knew anything like this could be done."

So, yeah ... not a lot of new material here. This is the kind of event that makes for a better podcast than a 10" newspaper summary, but that kind of medium was still decades away. I wonder if any of these kids held on to their recordings of the event?

Below are photos from the press conference. The first shows Frid at ABC in New York City, the second shows writers at WSIX-TV in Nashville, Tenn.

UPDATE: Jim Pierson of Dan Curtis Productions recently unearthed this crisp photo from the press conference in Nashville.