Archives do not equal salable creative goods

Reader Richard Ingraham makes a worthwhile point in his comment on my post of  June 19  about the issue of  recording live professional-theater performances. He notes that, though Actors Equity Association does largely prevent  stage plays from being recorded for sale (as do some rights-holders of those plays), most professional productions can be recorded for archival purposes. He writes:    

“… I would add that most contracts allow for archival recordings to be created, this is especially true of original works for theatre. So performances are rarely lost forever, at least the ones that are new works. Most of the original productions I’ve worked on have had some type of archival taping. In fact I’m pretty sure the NYC library has a spot you can go and view the archival video tape of many shows.”

In fact, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts located at Lincoln Center does provide this service. Here’s the description of the facility from the Lincoln Center site:

About the Library for the Performing Arts

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts houses the world’s most extensive combination of circulating, reference, and rare archival collections in its field. Its divisions are the Circulating Collections, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Music Division, Billy Rose Theatre Division, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. The materials in its collections are available free of charge, along with a wide range of special programs including exhibitions, seminars, and performances. An essential resource for everyone with an interest in the arts—whether professional or amateur—the Library is known particularly for its prodigious collections of non-book materials such as historic recordings, videotapes, autograph manuscripts, correspondence, sheet music, stage designs, press clippings, programs, posters and photographs. The Library sponsors orientation programs tailored for graduate school and professional training students each term, and offers internships for museum, library, and archival students.

It’s great that records of live shows survive somewhere. But while the existence of these archives is important and valuable to the public, it’s beside the point that I was trying to make, which is:  The theater companies and artists creating these performances should be able to benefit financially from the sale of their own recorded work. Recordings represent a huge untapped resource for struggling nonprofit and for-profit theater organizations and it seems quite wrong for the union and others to prevent theaters from earning desperately needed income from their own productions. Doesn’t the union exist to ensure that its members earn a decent living? Wouldn’t the rights-holders of plays earn money from recordings, too?  

Yes and yes. Since the film industry has long ago worked out how to provide residual compensation to all the writers, actors, directors, technical staff and lord know how many others who work on film productions, I have to assume that the professional-theater industry could do it, too, if everyone involved just decided to bring about the needed legal changes. It would certainly be a lot of work, as Ingraham rightly stresses, but it could also make an enormous difference to the economic survival rate of stage companies and stage artists.

Wouldn’t that be worth the effort? Ingraham and I agree on that third yes.

Independence Day

The displays in the sky are fun, but the real fireworks are on the page:

 When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

(Continue)

Happy Fourth of July!

Creative risk pays off for the Guthrie

Jackpot.

If a well-planned theatrical event were a slot machine, Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater would be up to its roofline in nickels. Its April 18-June 28 Kushner Celebration, which featured three special productions of plays by Tony (“Angels in America”) Kushner as well as talks and classes about the playwright and his work, accomplished something astonishing in this awful economic period: It met goals for ticket sales, attracted 90,000 visitors from around the nation and world and drew press attention from the New York Times  to the Minnesota Monthly. 

The rich rewards of the Guthrie’s creative dare may have an even farther-reaching result: They may startle other arts organizations awake with the realization that hard times are the right times to increase artistic invention and marketing efforts – not cut back on them. 

“Recession, depression … that’s the time to take artistic risks, do work that’s engaging and compelling,” said Guthrie communications director Melodie Bahan by phone yesterday from her office in the theater’s stunning, three-year-old riverfront building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel.

She called ticket sales for the celebration “thrilling” – especially because the Guthrie, like many other theaters, has had to substantially reduce costs in recent months.  

But the company was determined to go ahead with the complex Kushner event that artistic director Joe Dowling had been planning for years. “Ever since Joe Dowling first envisioned this new building, he had the idea that this would be the perfect venue” for a themed festival of plays, Bahan said.

Kushner and his work were Dowling’s first choice for the focus of the event. The Guthrie commissioned the playwright to create The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures and to literarily knit together several of his existing short pieces in a work he titled Tiny Kushner. Those plays were produced, along with Kushner’s 2004 Broadway musical, Caroline, or Change, during the 10-week celebration, which also saw Kushner awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota. 

The programming was first and foremost an artistic project that focused an “unprecedented” level of attention and exploration on one writer, Bahan said. But, she added, even though offering local audiences a unique experience of  intellectual and emotional substance was the top priority, “we also knew something like this would be a theatrical event that would attract attention … outside the Twin Cities.” 

They were right: People came from all 50 states, from Canada, Europe and Japan to experience the Guthrie and spend their money in the Twin Cities; Tiny Kushner was “wildly successful,” Bahan noted; and all over the city, the Kushner Celebration was the topic of conversation. Despite the financial and artistic risks – Kushner is a lot edgier than Rodgers and Hammerstein – the Guthrie board of directors fully supported the project.

 The event’s combination of team effort and terrific art worked so well that the Guthrie is considering doing something else like it before long.  

“Joe was absolutely right,” Bahan said of Dowling. “This building, this institution, works great at this kind of celebration. It’s really exciting to think of doing it again.”      

Photo by Michal Daniel / Courtesy of the Guthrie Theater

Michael Esper, left, and Stephen Spinella in the Guthrie Theater world premiere of Tony Kushner’s play “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.”

Congress needs your creative input

Suddenly, change-course policies are a-borning all over the place. Interesting legislation of many kinds has finally got U.S Senate and House members struggling to address some of the most enormous and urgent issues facing the nation, and it’s clear that laws adopted now are going to have direct and probably immediate effects on whether or not the U.S. forcefully steers away from the brink of disaster or skids over the edge while pumping the brakes.

It feels as if we’re entering one of the greatest creative eras the country will have ever undergone - one, as in other times of great national crisis, in which we all have an active and measurable part in determining our own future.

We all need to pay attention, be informed and push for what we think will work best, so lawmakers will listen.  Here are a few of the most important bills to get familiar with:

American Clean Energy and Security Act, addressing global warming (and jobs); passed last week by the House, it’s now heading for the Senate 

Employee Free Choice Act , addressing business-managements’ anti-union tactics (and jobs), which may pass the Senate now that Democrat Al Franken has been officially declared the winner of Minnesota’s Senate race, giving his party the 60 votes needed to block a Republican filibuster 

Health bill, addressing health-insurance reform (and job benefits), is unnamed and still being constructed by members of Congress on committees including Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means. 

 Educate yourself. And then, whatever your position on these bills, call your Congress members and Senators – early and often.