Let's Make a Deal:
When Ryan's Hope Was Canceled,
All My Children and One Life to
Live Bartered for Their Sets
Soap Opera Digest, November 28, 1989
by Stella Bednarz
Article Provided By Wanda

You won't see RH's Lizzie or John in the bar anymore. It's now Max's Place on OLTL.

What happens when a soap opera permanently fades to black? The people involved look for work, but what happens to the "things?" In the case of Ryan's Hope, the props were auctioned off to various New York prop houses for resale. The sets were another story.

ABC approached their three NY-based soaps, AMC, OLTL and Loving, to see which sets they wanted from RH. Both OLTL and AMC requested Ryan's Bar. What to do? Flip a coin. OLTL won the crucial toss and acquired the bar, in addition to three other RH sets, which have not yet been used: Ryan's kitchen, a generic apartment and a generic office.

Loving's set designer, Boyd Dumrose, reports that by the time the network got around to talking to his show, there weren't any sets left to take. "We got pieces of scenery, but not whole sets," Dumrose reports. It's an ironic situation, since Loving moved into the RH studio.

When Ryan's Bar moved to Llanview, it was renamed Speakeasy, the restaurant purchased by entrepreneur Max Holden. Sharp-eyed viewers of OLTL may have recognized the familiar decor. Since then, however, the set has been renovated from homey to upscale.

According to OLTL's set designer, Roger Mooney, when Holden renamed the establishment Max's Place, "We upholstered the chairs and the bar stools, put up new drapes and hung up new pictures. The bar is constantly being upgraded and now we're doing major renovating on it - new lighting fixtures, etc. so it reflects the kind of place tht Max would own. So, actually the old Ryan's Bar is gone."

Recycling sets is nothing new. "We use sets repeatedly," reveals Mooney. "We shuffle them around. Michael Grande's house used to be the Sander's mansion, which used to be a villa in Vienna when David and Jenny Renaldi were there." Mooney adds that, since a show needs in the neighborhood of one hundred sets, old ones are constantly being redecorated. OLTL has a specific look and their sets tend to be big, observes Moooney, who says that he didn't want many of the RH sets because they were small and had a radically different look from his show.

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