Continuation of interview from first file
Dance in America today seems to be a component or a child of Great Performances, but wasn't it actually a parent?
It was meant to be a separate activity. We had won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to give a much broader audience to the best concert dance companies they were supporting.
At the same time, the bicentenary was coming up and Exxon wanted to do something especially American. I said, why don't we launch a new series Great Performances, which would celebrate all of America's theater, music and dance in equal parts. In the first years, Live from Lincoln Center was the music part under that banner, along with Dance in America and Theater in America.
For a while we were carrying the only American drama on public television, and when Exxon pulled out in 1988, and Great Performances was cut from 52 to 26 weeks, the series could no longer accommodate it. We needed to change the scale of the series and bring in more support.
And there was another reason: I was very much a part of the founding of the idea that we needed a program strand completely devoted to American drama. Great Performances did not do enough. American Playhouse was created in my drama department. While they went mainly toward film drama, we stayed with theater drama as a smaller component of Great Performances.
Lindsay Law and Phylis Geller, after being developed as top drama producers here, had decided to go off to Hollywood. I had been producing drama personally and wanted to have someone to head drama and expand the department. I was having lunch with Lindsay and asked if he had any ideas. He said, "Why don't you offer it to me?" I said, "Aren't you happy in Hollywood?" He said, "No, I'm really not enjoying it." So Lindsay came back and was one of the forces with me in creating the basic ground plan for American Playhouse and became its executive producer. We worked with [CPB Television Program Fund Director] Lewis Freedman on the idea and finally Dave Davis was brought in to set up the four-station consortium. We needed the commitment from CPB. This period was also the beginning of WonderWorks and American Experience.
So we took a lower profile in drama in Great Performances.
Do you still hear the line, "It won't play in Peoria?"
If a program manager feels it won't play in Peoria, it's probably because he underestimates his audience.
Probably the most misguided sense of the arts is coming from Capitol Hill leadership at the moment. The attitude of the Gingrich community toward NEA hasn't saved the taxpayers money, it hasn't changed the public's morality, it is simply of some value to some politicians who think that attacking arts funding will help them politically.
Great Performances has a number of performers that are so loyal they're almost like a repertory company. One of your producers says that's because you've given them the time and resources they needed. What were artists not getting from network TV?
We're talking about the fine artists. They have often suffered financially a long time before they get recognition and can express their very personal voice.
A personal voice is not necessarily what commercial television does best. When Seinfeld gets an Emmy for writing, 12 of the highest-paid writers in America come up to receive the award. This is not the single artist's voice of a great novelist. Yo-Yo Ma did what you saw on "Carnegie Hall Opening Night" [Oct. 15, 1997], and no one else can do that. Someone's got to celebrate those singular voices in America. That's what I'm looking for very often, a unique virtuosity.
You recalled in a New York Times interview that early TV producers were making the dancers perform on the concrete floors of TV studios.
One of the reasons we won the NEA award for Dance in America was that when I had a grant from them to do a program on the 25th anniversary of American Ballet Theatre, I said to the company, "I want to do a program that's different from what you've done before. I want you to do your best work. That means we'll have to take a week to tape it, not just one day live, like you used to do. And we've got to get a wooden floor, and get a studio with the proper temperature to dance."
The dancers have to warm themselves up, and if it's cool, which is the right temperature for the cameras, the dancers can hurt themselves.
One of the things we did was build a wooden floor that has the spring they are accustomed to on stage. But if the floor moved with the dancers, that meant that the cameras had to standing in another place. Whenever you see Dance in America, we have brought in the wooden floor and set it up. The word went out the dance world. We were the first ones who had food for the dancers that they could eat on a break. We had coolers of yogurt and fruit instead of the standard catering.
Where have you produced those dance programs? Here in Manhattan?
The place where we did some of our most attractive studio programs, and stored the floor, was in Nashville. Where they produce Grand Ole Opry, they have a wonderful, large studio with high lights and and a high cyclorama. But we move that same wooden floor to other places when we need it.
Translating dance to TV must take a great deal of effort. How has this art of translation advanced over the years?
One of the important things we agreed to do, which was never allowed in commercial television, was that the choreographer would be a key artist in creating the program and should have an equal voice in deciding the form of the translation.
We prepared for production by spending a week's rehearsal with the dancers, using little nonprofessional cameras to see what the alternatives would be, working with the choreographers to decide whether they should change the choreography or we should move the cameras.
So when we finally taped the dance, we weren't exhausting the dancers, having them do things over and over again that they usually do just once in an evening. We would show those little rough tapes to the cameramen so they could plan how to frame their shots.
Last year, in the Paul Taylor program, the camera was almost a partner in the dance, in some scenes, and then you'd see the whole stage head-on, in other scenes.
In the early years, choreographers like Paul Taylor would just want a record of the theater work, but they began to look at camerawork in the cinema and other places.
Paul Taylor's work has been consistently inventive and surprising, and we've done more programs with him than with a number of other choreographers. It was probably the eighth program we'd done with him, during the taping of a ballet called "Last Look" [1988], when Paul suddenly got it. He realized this was an opportunity for him to use the cameras, to participate in a new way. He saw that dance, on camera, could have a completely different approach. That realization colored the next two dances, in which he was encouraged with the director, Matthew Diamond, to rethink the work for camera as a much different experience. This had much greater impact on the audience, because it's not as distanced. The choreographer isn't worrying about every little hand and foot, but about the best flow of images to put on the screen.
How do your producers plan shots for other kinds of performances?
When you're recording a symphonic piece, the director literally marks the cuts on his score, as opposed to his script. Since the director can't look at the score and the monitors at the same time, a music score counter works with him, telling him: "Your next cue is on bar so-and-so. Five, four, three, two, one." He reminds him where the next planned cut was.
You've had some ingenious crossover acts--Linda Ronstadt singing Mexican folk songs, Bobby McFerrin doing Mozart, Perlman doing klezmer. Was there a prototype that inspired this?
It goes back to my answer earlier. Our job is watching. When we sense a trend, or someone important who does something fresh, our idea is to move quickly for the system. That's why being able to be able to say, 'Yes we're ready, we'll put our money down,' is important.
Sometimes it's a full-blown production, like the night I went to England to see Les Miserables in concert. I didn't know whether the show would be very good. As it turned out, it was sensational. Our job is to be there as often as we can, to get it before anybody else does.
Are these crossovers, where an artist is working outside their usual genre--where do they come from?
The first generation of major artists had no reason to believe television was their friend. They had not been treated well by commercial television. So our first job was to convince the conductors, the choreographers, etc., that we wanted to do what they were best at.
The younger generation of people, like Thomas Hampson, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, have seen their art on television, so they're much more venturesome. They see television as part of their careers. So they will very often come to us with ideas.
On the other hand, we went to Itzhak Perlman with the idea for "In the Fiddler's House" because we heard he had hired one of the klezmer performers for his daughter's wedding. But he had never played the music himself. So we said, "Why don't you come with us and be our host in exploring this thing?" There was this klezmer conference in Poland, which his father had left as a refugee.
When we began the show there was no indication he would try to play klezmer music. But, with Itzhak's generation of performer, the difference was, when he first played klezmer, he didn't say, "Stop the cameras."
Yo-Yo Ma really created the idea of the Bach Suites series [Inspired by Bach] that is coming up later this year. He initiated this collaboration with other artists. It would be very hard to talk someone into anything as grueling and chancy as that. And the result is extraordinary.
And there are other cases: Thomas Hampson, coming to meetings in his blue jeans saying, "Why are we doing German art songs, when we have songs here that celebrate the American heritage? Could I talk you guys into doing a program on American art songs?"
Let's return to the dramatic part of public TV's mission. What's your interpretation of what happened with "American Playhouse?"
I don't know. I'm not going to try and answer that question. Right now, I'm putting my energy into developing another thrust for American drama. We are the longest-running producers of American drama, and before I step down, that's one of the things I'm going to focus on: getting American drama back as a continued offering.
One of the advantages of producing in music and dance, as opposed to drama, is you are often choosing among proven productions, while a drama series like American Playhouse often has to rely on unproven originals. Does that help explain why it's difficult to do drama?
[Hearty laughter.] No. I remember going with Lindsay to some think-tank PBS meeting, where they said, "Look, we don't need this many programs--just bring us the blockbusters, the big projects." And we looked at them and said, "Do you think we sit down to plan and say, 'This is going to be mediocre, or uninteresting'?"
There's no question that--if we're only going to get two dance shows next year--my job should be to make sure the system gets two of the best ones.
You can say, "I don't like modern music," but at least what we offer is the best modern music. If we're going to do ballet, it's the best of ballet.
We also try to do a variety of things. One year we did "Billboards" with the Joffrey Ballet and music by Prince [1993-94], and this year we're doing great classic work with great classic artists.
Will there be more drama in Great Performances, now that American Playhouse is gone?
Not necessarily. For me the most important thing is to help PBS and CPB develop an agenda. Right now, my group is trying to best plot what that strategy would be.
We've heard whiffs of rumors that your unit was working up new approaches to drama. Back in 1994, there was an item about Glenn DuBose working on something called Thirty-Minute Theater. Ervin Duggan and others have talked about returning to live drama in the 1950s style, or live-on-tape.
Are there some different approaches that could work on continuing basis? Or does public TV simply have to reestablish a unit that would do TV films, or shoot plays from the stage?
There are certain basic things that were uniquely part of the drama presented on public television.
One was the voice of a different kind of writing, the voice of the playwright. When we brought drama from England, we didn't bring their popular drama, which is much poorer than ours. We brought David Mercer and Harold Pinter--rising playwrights who were supporting their families by working for television.
Commercial television is never going to be as interested in the voice of the playwright. That would be the basis of Thirty-Minute Theater, an idea I proposed that would have new writing debuted every week, as in the 1950s Golden Age drama series. That's an idea we are interested in talking about: commissioned writing for television, not police chases but a place to showcase dramatic writing and virtuoso acting.
Over the years, you also see us working with literature as a base. Brideshead Revisited was based on a Evelyn Waugh's novel.
Another approach has been to use drama to tell history or the lives of great people.
Out of these projects will come television writing. But when people become "television writers" they usually head for Hollywood as quickly as possible, and if they're any good they're making a fortune on a police show or something. The ones that stick it out, because they want their own voice, are the ones who will stay and work through theater.
And there are writers like Larry Gelbart and Steve Martin, who have been writing things for the theater that are very different from what they do for the movies or network TV.
What American Playhouse did very well was essentially new cinema, with important funding from film distributors, but first of all it has to work in commercial theaters.
I think there were many very fine things done at American Playhouse. If the system and PBS chose to not support it, then my job is to focus on what we will support. We've got to quickly build another presence. We cannot have another season with the embarrassment of having only British drama. There's an urgency that everyone feels in Washington. We are now working with some research and development funds from PBS to put some of those ideas in proposal form.
What's the timetable?
As soon as possible.
Outside link: Great Performances web site at PBS Online.
Web page created Nov. 17, 1997
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PBS's U.S.-made drama series American Playhouse loses its planned
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