Broadway Theatre Archive
s & j klain
television productions of stage plays which will soon be available on
home video. Also check out the following article about Broadway Theatre
Archive in the New York Times (page 38 of the Arts and Leisure section)
April 18, 1999
New Life for Great Theater (Even Olivier)
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
NEW YORK -- As Basil Hero tells it, the saving of Dustin
Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Faye Dunaway and Wendy Wasserstein began three
years ago in a Burger Heaven in midtown Manhattan.
He and his best pal from boarding school, Andrew Greenspan, were
sitting around as usual, trying to think of a business venture they
could
start together. Former television reporters who had hung up their
microphones in disillusionment over "creeping voyeurism," they were
looking for some way to pool their video and computer skills.
In the mid-1980s they had come up with the idea for a line of history
videos shrink-wrapped with matching textbooks. But after putting
together a business plan they discovered there weren't enough
videocassette recorders around yet to make it work. Then the History
Channel came along.
Now they were thinking of some way to adapt Broadway productions
for television, using digital technology. After their burger lunch, they
decided to see how earlier stage productions had been adapted and
walked over to the Museum of Television and Radio on West 52nd
Street.
And then it happened. "Oh my God," said Hero, "we found hundreds and
hundreds of fabulous productions." The result was the new venture that
he and Greenspan, both 43, had been seeking. Called the Broadway Theater
Archive, it represents a collaboration between them and a deep-pocketed
partner (MichaelFuchs, the former chairman and chief executive officer
of HBO), a silent partner (the Broadway producer Chase Mishkin) and WNET
(Channel
13), the flagship public television station that is heir to a vast video
library preserving 40 years of the best of the American stage.
Now, with many of the tapes deteriorating, the theater archive is
proceeding to clear the underlying creators' rights and transfer the
shows
to digital format in exchange for marketing and commercial rights.
WNET, which contributed the tapes and prodigious research work in
tracking down the creators for rights clearances, will itself
rebroadcast
some of the productions as "Treasures From the Archive" in a new series
"Stage on Screen," to begin next January.
"In some ways, it's a no-brainer," said William F. Baker, president and
chief executive officer of WNET. "We're sitting on one of the great
libraries. This is an important art treasure for America."
As it happened, even before the Broadway Theater Archive materialized,
WNET had been searching for a way to preserve its library of classics,
which are not tapings of live performances but productions restaged for
television.
The match seemed made in heaven for Jac Venza, the station's director
of culture and arts programming, who as a pioneer of public television
and executive producer of its "Great Performances" series, helped create
many of the landmark television plays and a scattering of musical
performances now being preserved.
"So when I'm sitting in my rocking chair, I'll get to see them," he
said.
These are indeed the crown jewels of public television: more than 100
tape reels of gems like Dustin Hoffman in his first starring role on
television, as a wacky Turgenev character in "Journey of the Fifth
Horse,"
from 1966; Meryl Streep in her television debut in "Secret Service," a
Civil War melodrama from 1977; Faye Dunaway in a 1974 revival of
"Hogan's Goat," the drama that originally catapulted her to "Bonnie and
Clyde" and stardom, and Wendy Wasserstein's first play, "Uncommon
Women and Others," starring Swoosie Kurtz and featuring Ms. Streep,
from 1978.
Along with an additional hundred or so productions from network
television in the days before culture was banished altogether as
insufficiently commercial, there are also classics like "The Moon and
Sixpence," with Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, Hume Cronyn and
Jessica Tandy (1959); "Death of a Salesman," with Lee J. Cobb and
Mildred Dunnock recreating their acclaimed Broadway performances
(1966); the Joseph Papp New York Shakespeare Festival's "King Lear"
with James Earl Jones, Raul Julia and Paul Sorvino (1974); "Hedda
Gabler," with Ingrid Bergman in a rare television appearance, and
Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson and Trevor Howard (1963); "The
Seagull," with Frank Langella, Blythe Danner, Olympia Dukakis and Lee
Grant (1975); "Wuthering Heights," with Richard Burton and Rosemary
Harris (1958); "Follies in Concert," with Carol Burnett, Betty Comden,
Adolph Green, Lee Remick, Mandy Patinkin, Elaine Stritch and Barbara
Cook (1986); "A Moon for the Misbegotten," with Jason Robards and
Colleen Dewhurst and directed by Jose Quintero (1975), and a
Tennessee Williams trilogy of one-act plays with Ben Gazzara, directed
by Sidney Lumet.
To name just a few.
The shows are widely scattered in climate-controlled vaults and open
basement shelves of the Library of Congress, the Public Broadcasting
Corp., Time-Life, HBO, the networks, museums and universities and
WNET itself. Many, in deteriorating condition, are in dire need of
preservation. "Secret Service," the Meryl Streep debut, for example, was
in such precarious shape that the cleaning and copying process destroyed
it, Hero said. But now there is a digital master.
Others have simply been lost over the years. No known copies exist, for
example, of three acclaimed 1961 "Du Pont Show of the Month"
productions: "The Prisoner of Zenda," with Christopher Plummer;
"Heaven Can Wait," with Robert Morley, Wally Cox and Anthony
Franciosa, and "The Night of the Storm," with E.G. Marshall and Julie
Harris.
Before the salvage process can go forward, however, the three partners
including Fuchs, who ran both HBO and the Warner Music Group
before leaving Time Warner in 1995, must gain permission from the
authors or other creators or their heirs.
Past efforts to obtain such rights, which in these cases can run between
$75,000 and $350,000 per production, often bogged down in royalty
disputes. But the tapes' fragility, which could soon moot the issue, is
persuading owners to accept a percentage of the Broadway Theater
Archive's take rather than demanding up-front payments out of the
archive's limited initial capitalization of several million dollars; the
partners declined to be more specific. Just tracking down legal titles
has already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Salvaging the tapes may cost several million more. Once the shows have
been digitally remastered -- a complex laboratory process that can take
up to a week if the single soundtrack has to be separated into two for
foreign broadcast requirements -- the theater archive must still come to
terms with the performers' unions on residual fees or royalties, also to
come out of the archive's income.
Without going into detail about what have become delicate talks, Hero
said, "They're being extremely cooperative."
Some works in the public domain come cheap, said Susan Marchand,
executive director of program marketing and distribution for WNET.
"Luckily," she said, "we have three Shakespeares."
With rights issues cleared up and digital copies made, the theater
archive
gets the right to license the shows for home video sale and rebroadcast
by commercial and public outlets worldwide.
The archive is already on the Web (www.broadwayarchive.com)
offering, at last count, 137 titles for sale (VHS, $39.95 each),
starting this
summer, provided the clearances come through.
Hero said he expected overseas outlets like the BBC and German,
Russian, Eastern European and Israeli television to be his biggest
customers. "They've never seen these before," he said, "and audiences
haven't been dumbed down there yet."
More than anything else, he said, the Internet makes the venture
feasible,
giving access to a global population of culture consumers. Like nothing
before, he said, "the Internet can get the enthusiast together with the
owner." And at so little cost.
Finding their angel, Fuchs, took some doing, Hero and Greenspan said in
a joint interview with Fuchs in the theater archive's offices in Fuchs's
42nd-floor suite on West 57th Street, with all of Central Park stretched
out panoramically below.
Shortly after their brainstorm at Burger Heaven, they said, they saw
Fuchs interviewed on "The Charlie Rose Show," talking about the lack of
culture on television. They had a solution. But how to reach Fuchs?
He was, it turned out, a board member of the Los Angeles-based Simon
Wiesenthal Center, where Greenspan's ex-girlfriend worked. With her
help, they tracked him down.
"They came in and pitched me," Fuchs recalled. "I liked the idea they
were investigative reporters. They had the tenacity to wrestle this to
the
ground."
Fuchs said that while commercial considerations were hardly uppermost
in his mind, "nobody ever went broke accumulating a library."
The business could grow in new directions, he said. There was always
Hero and Greenspan's original idea of coming up with the digital age's
answer to the black-and-white classics now in the public television
vaults.
"I looked at Broadway like an ex-TV person," Hero said. "After all these
years, it has yet to make the leap to broadcasting. The camera today has
the ability to buzz around the stage like a bumblebee. You can digitize
the
sets and take actors into a studio and shoot with 360-degree mobility
and point-of-view taping. You're suddenly given a depth of field not
possible before."
After all, "Roone Arledge through instant replay completely altered
sports
coverage," he said. "Why not do for culture what TV does best?"
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company