REPORT FROM A ROVING EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER

I am just into the second week of my annual escape to The National Playwrights Conference ("playwright's summer camp") here at the Eugene O'Neil Theater Center in New London, Connecticut. Under the tutelage of Lloyd Richards, recently resigned head of Yale Drama School, director of all of August Wilson's plays (two Pulitzer prizes, etc.), I a dramaturgy (another name for producer/story-editor) to three of the seventeen playwrights here for rehearsed readings, and having a great time in this wonderfully uncommercial atmosphere. During the next three weeks I will be up to my elbows in a wildly comic play about a murderously dysfunctional Appalachian family, a romantic boulevard/comedy about a nineteenth century French hermaphrodite (true story), and a touching tale about an elderly couple who kidnap their infant granddaughter because their daughter won't let them see the baby more than once every two weeks. How often would the movie-of-the-week business afford me the opportunity to work on such a far-out slate?

Meanwhile back in the real world, one of the two low-budget feature films I have been developing over the past couple of years appears to be gaining financing ($3.5 Mil), and final plans are underway for a family junket to France after the O'Neill with our daughter #2, son-in-law and 9- and 12-year-old granddaughters, which includes a week on a barge in Burgundy. You'll forgive me if I have difficulty in deciding which requires the higher priority.

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