Bo and Nora Forever Soulmates MESSAGE BOARD FAN FICTION VIDEOS & PICTURES FAVE SCENES ARTICLES HBS and NORA BIO RSW and BO BIO CHAT ROOM FAVE LINKS BO and NORA HOME PAGE E-MAIL US

Behind The Scenes...........BOUND FOR NOWHERE OLTL's Train Crash "Kills" Nora   Soap Opera Digest May 16, 2000   A ONE LIFE TO LIVE crew member cracked, "It looks like a train wreck in here!" But that's a good thing ---- it was supposed to. Sprawled across a spacious section of the OLTL studio was an unusual set. It appeared to be something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey ---- a multi-sided cylinder with smashed rectangular windows and a steel door at one end. But a walk around the structure yielded a surprise ---- a section was cut out of the side, revealing the tilted guts of a commuter train. On-screen, it would be the result of what happened when Will's train to Statesville prison collided with a truck in scenes that aired April 27-May 1.   "Inside the train, organized chaos reigned. "Do I need bruising?" asked David Fumero(Cristian)as he leaned forward in his seat to confer with makeup artists. Behind him, Erin Torpey(Jessica) was uncomfortable wedged between two seats. Nearby, John Bolger lay relaxing, although his character, Sykes, was bleeding from a "severe artery." "Don't mess with the secretaries in the commissary line," he jokes later,acknowledging his realistic wound. "In a train, you don't have seat belts," noted Cora McCraw, R.N.. OLTL"s medical adviser. "There can be lots of injuries. You just go flying around." The injuries weren't the only true-to-life touches. Although the train wasn't identified as run by Amtrak, Production Designer Roger Mooney constructed much of the set from discarded pieces at Amtrak's salvage yard. "It's close," he allows. "Our train had to be bigger than a real one --- wider and taller, with the seats further away from the walls so the cameras could get inside."   But the wreck wasn't the highlight of the special effects bonanza. When the train crashed, Nora was in a separate car, trapped under wreckage. Bo raced to save her, but was literally thrown aside in a fiery explosion. After failing to rescue his ex, Bo was informed by the dire chief that no one could have survived the inferno. "I'm very, very careful about working with fire," said Hillary B. Smith, as she eyed the twisted metal and props. "I have a healthy respect for fire."   In fact , the flames and blast were so dangerous that Smith and Robert S. Woods(Bo) involvement was peripheral ---the real work was done by stunt men. "They couldn't do their own stunts," states Stunt Coordinator Danny Aiello III(son of Danny Aiello). "Not when it comes to a ball of fire like that. Fire is very unpredictable." First, Woods was taped without the effects. "He just fell back as if it had exploded, and we put a light effect on his face to simulate the explosion," explained Aiello. Then, Russo stepped in. "We timed it out. He pushed off sandbags to give him a lift, the explosion went off, he came diving out."   A little fancy editing and the finished product turned Russo's dive into Bo's. The last scenes weren't shot until nearly sunrise ---- the end of a very long day. That's the way it goes with special effects. Aiello pointed out with a shrug: "Just getting Hillary in and out of her place under the train took time. Then, when we were filming on the train, we had to keep letting people on and off because if you're sitting on that tilted angle for too long, you lose your equilibrium. People were getting sick."   Aiello characterized this stunt as one of the more impressive in his career and noted, "When a director comes to me and says, 'We have a problem --- we have four great shots and we don't know what to use,' well, that's a great day."