GREENER FIELDS?

I've been asked to comment along the following lines about the nuts and bolts of writing for Broadway (as I've done from time to time and am doing now): do authors in the New York commercial theater have greater artistic control than in television or movies? Where's a good place to lunch in the theater district? Is playwriting renumerative today? (The joys, which are great, of writing plays and seeing them come to life in rehearsals won't be considered here).

Well, Orso on West 46th Street is great for lunch. As for the rest:

The truth is, even in the old days when the Dramatists Guild was riding higher than it is today, control was hard to come by. Personal example: in 1945, while I was still in the Army and World War II was still on, I got a play on Broadway called Kiss Them for Me, a dramatization of Frederic Wakeman's novel Shore Leave. During Boston tryouts the director, Herman Shumlin, asked me for some revisions. I sat up nearly all night in the Ritz Hotel burning wooden coat hangers in the fireplace to keep warm (fuel was rationed and heat went off at midnight) and accomplished most of the changes Herman and the producers and I wanted. However, there was one revision, involving the character being played by that sweet actress, Judy Holliday, that I didn't go along with. Herman Shumlin, a fine man I might add, came to see me. He had his arms full of extra coat hangers, which alarmed me because I'd thought I'd done my rewrites and could go to bed. He said: "I understand that your Dramatist Guild contract gives you control over the text, but if you don't make this change, the producers say they'll close the show Saturday night. They mean it."

Would they have? We'll never know -- I made the changes.

And those were the good old days.

Today -- well, personal example: Grand Hotel - The Musical, for which I wrote the book.

This show was conceived and written by Robert Wright, George Forrest and me thrice -- once in 1958 when it was done by the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera with Paul Muni in the lead, a second time in 1987-88 when we rewrote it from top to bottom. The third time was during our workshop.

Workshops (a relatively new institution in New York, started by Michael Bennett for Chorus Line) require a lot of courage from all concerned. In the case of Grand Hotel, the producers, Martin Richards and Sam Crothers, risked a couple of hundred thousand dollars in cold, hard cash that might never have been recouped; We authors rewrote and revised and pushed and pulled our material -- all at Tommy Tune’s direction; this brilliant man worked day and night to make the whole thing sing and dance. The cast of 32 professional actors gambled heavily that something worthwhile would come out of all this sweat (under Equity rules they had to be paid something, but it was barely enough for lunches and carfare). Artistic control? Of course we willingly and eagerly deferred to Tommy in almost everything, and rewrote at his every whim. If we hadn't liked the results we could have withdrawn our material at the end of the workshop, just as the producers and Tommy and the cast could have walked away (only two of the actors took that option) .

Renumeration? We ran three years on Broadway and toured all over the world. (One check from Japan was for three hundred million yen!); more tours are pending. It paid back its investment early in the run and is earning very well from stock and foreign and amateur productions. The producers and investors share in such revenue for 40 years; the authors until the termination of the copyright. Incidentally, under Equity rules for workshops, a small part of all the production's earnings goes into a pool for the actors who participated in the workshop.

Of course, part of what we call artistic control is just that -- but another part is enjoying undiluted credit for your work. In that connection, there's been an irritating problem with my part in Grand Hotel. It began right after our try-out opening in Boston, which was neither a big failure nor a big success. It was just the usual out-of-town tense loss of virginity revealing some weaknesses and more strengths. Wright and Forrest and I went to work and so did Tommy. Then, suddenly, our admired friend Tommy called a meeting and said he wanted Maury Yeston and Peter Stone to come "help" with songs and book. He had worked with both of them before and said he wanted his buddies who'd do his bidding without "so much talking and argument."

This was what Hegel called "the crux moment"; the moment when Burbage stared down Shakespeare, or vice versa, the moment writers have faced on many sound stages. But for the first time in theater history there was something new in this crux -- one of the people the director wanted called in was president of the Dramatists Guild! I felt that behind Wright and Forrest and me stood the laughing happy ghosts of the great playwrights who had founded the Dramatists Guild. For once the cards were stacked the authors' way. It was as if Frank Pierson, say, had become CEO of Seagram!

I ran to the nearest telephone and called our revered president. "Peter," said I, "Please stay the hell out of Boston! If Tommy has to work with me he will and we'll get past this moment. Our disagreements are really very small."

Bless his heart, Peter was just as staunch as I'd hoped he'd be. "Of course I won't come unless you ask me," he said.

I assured him that what I asked was for him to continue to enjoy the waters in Amagansett. I telephoned my agent, Robert Lantz, and asked him to call Peter and reinforce what I'd said. He did so. But, two days later:

EXIT STAGE DOOR OF COLONIAL THEATER, BOSTON -- NIGHT

A male figure wearing a safari jacket approaches stage door just as Davis comes out.

DAVIS: Peter? Peter Stone? Is that you?

STONE: Uh, hi Luther.

DAVIS: What the hell are you doing here?

STONE: Uh, listen, Tommy insists. Listen, I need him for my new show!

Tommy said if he didn't have his way, he’d resign. Wright and Forrest said that Maury could add songs to the score (a recognized event in many shows) as long as they were separately credited. I didn't feel that way about book revisions, which can't be separately credited. Tommy said if I didn't let his friend Peter Stone stay, he’d quit. The producers said if Tommy walked they'd close the show. Sixty-seven people would lose their jobs.

My lawyers told me that to bring an injunction I'd be required to post a bond to cover the cost of production: $4,250,000. It was a warm September in Boston, so this time I didn't have to burn coat hangers.

I said Peter could stay as a consultant to Tommy, that had nothing to do with me. Tommy said no, Peter had be considered a consultant on the book (!). Peter stayed as a consultant to me. Because he is known to have done a lot of play doctoring, he was generally thought to be rewriting the book. He wasn't. He didn't. The book is substantially the same today as it was opening night in Boston. I guess Peter was helpful to Tommy who was rethinking some of his staging -- that is, they sat side by side through many rehearsals (maybe they were planning Will Rogers Follies, I don't know). After GH opened in New York and won 10 Tony Awards, Peter started referring to it as "my show" and has claimed book credit in many interviews; his biography in the Motion Picture Almanac (and other places) lists GH among musical books he wrote -- all this despite the fact that contractually he has zero credit.

I wish a different kind of man was president of the Dramatists Guild.

There is one way to achieve total control of a production: when Charlie Lederer's and my (and Wright and Forrest's) Kismet opened for the Civic Light Opera audiences in Los Angeles in 1953 it was an unfinished, sprawling mess. There'd been insufficient rehearsal and only one (one!) preview. Less than a third of the Jack Cole dances were ready, the score was beautiful but badly served and incomplete, the book unsure and wordy. As authors we couldn't do what we wanted -- which was to make the show a combination operetta and spoof -- because the producer, Edwin Lester, head of the Light Opera Association, wanted pure operetta. Finally, Ed came to us and said, "I'm used to dead authors who can't argue. If you two are so smart you can buy the show for its unrecouped costs -- $180,000. Otherwise, go to work and do what I tell you!" Charlie said "Give us 10 minutes." He called his rich aunt Marion Davies while he had me call her attorney to describe the set-up. Charlie became producer.

We went right to work and, with no more interference, prepared new material which went into the show in Boston and Philadelphia; we brought a very healthy show to Broadway, but newspapers were on strike. However, six days later the strike ended and the papers came out with reviews that were mostly raves ("Kismet Soars Alone As Gay Magic Carpet," "Lavish Musical Gay and Terrific," "Gaudy, Fantastic, Superb!"); Life gave us four pages of color photographs, the magazine notices were great. Only Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times wrote a bad notice, and in those days the Times was but one voice among many. Later, London notices were terrific.

We ran and ran. Marion enjoyed a clear profit of $7,000 a week for more than three hundred weeks plus, of course, her share of foreign, stock, movie and recording incomes. Charlie was in a position to guarantee that the authors were paid promptly and well (this includes the estate of Edward Knoblock who wrote the original 1911 melodrama). "Old Kis", as my daughters call it, has produced income for Charlie and me and our families on a spread-out, tax friendly basis since 1953. The numbers don't compare with modern movie and TV series numbers, but, what the hell, they would have looked pretty good to, say, Balzac.

Would Kismet have been as successful if Ed Lester had kept control and made us revise the show his way? I strongly doubt it, but I can't prove it.

On Kismet Charlie and I and Wright and Forrest had a Dramatists Guild musical show contract which provided that we be paid from the Beautiful, Desirable Unfiddleable Gross.

Today, most Broadway musicals and some plays pay the authors out of a profit pool -- a civilized form of net: every week the gross is compared to the weekly operating expenses and the difference divided among the creators and the production company. This is much kinder than the formula used in movies and television where not a cent goes to profit participants until and unless all costs of production have been recouped. Waiting for that event, as Frank Loesser put it, "a person could develop a cold."

I'm told that when a show is doing peak business a profit pool may actually pay more to the author(s) than a percentage of the gross -- but, probably because of the Hollywood profit deals I've been in that never produced a penny, I'd feel safer in the

gross.

The New York commercial theater has been shrinking ever since the ‘30s. Instead of 70, 80, 100 new shows per season, a dozen or so come in. Why? Many believe it's because costs and ticket prices went up. This doesn't sound right to me.

Rock concerts, for instance, sell out enormous amphitheaters at astronomical prices. Recently I passed a man on Sixth Avenue scalping tickets to the MTV Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall at $200 per ticket. Tickets to sports events often cost more than those to theaters, and seem to sell out quite regularly.

I think theater shrank when writers headed west in very large numbers. I'm one of those who strongly suspects that theater would unshrink if enough writers now typing "fade in" would switch to "act one, scene one." Both established writers as well as writers just out of universities should consider bringing their energy and originality to playwriting as once upon a time the Moss Harts and Maxwell Andersons and Lillian Hellmans et al did. As noted above, the battle for artistic control may be bloody, but, unlike in Hollywood, in New York it's a battle that's at least occasionally winnable.

Theater has its drawbacks, just as the celluloid world does, but you can physically see your audiences. It's easy to count the empty seats, if any -- no distributor or ad agency or network stands between you and your customers. There's perhaps less very big money than in owning a couple of successful series, but very nice money abounds, and it's enough for all practical purposes (ask Andrew Lloyd Webber). When a picture grosses two hundred million dollars, say, and the writers receive perhaps a fraction of one percent of that, the proportions don't seem to indicate that anyone thinks the script was an important contribution. However, if a stage play or musical takes in, for instance, $500,000 a week and a playwright is handed a check for $50,000 dollars, it seems that somebody appreciates him or her.

There's greater fame in theater for writers ... and, don't forget the fun and blessed relief of addressing smaller, more nearly educated audiences.