Speaking of "subsidiary rights revenues," please pardon this digression:
For those of you who may have missed the news, The Roundabout agreed to drop its requirement to receive up to 40% of an author's "subsidiary rights" revenue when producing plays at their Laura Pels theatre off-Broadway. The theatre will now, instead, pay authors a substantial fee for its initial thirteen-week subscription run, paying a gross royalty for extensions of up to an additional five weeks, and authors will have to pay NO share of their subsidiary rights revenue to the theatre as a consequence of such productions.
In addition, The Public Theater will continue to pay authors a gross royalty, but will reduce their guaranteed percentage share of authors' subsidiary revenues from 20% to 10%, waiving their share on the first $75,000 of such income, with the $75,000 threshold amount increasing by $500 annually throughout the theatre's ten-year participation period.
While these theatres are taking different approaches to the issue of subsidiary rights, they both seem to have reached a similar conclusion: that foregoing most of their sub-rights participation is an important element in accomplishing their mission to develop new dramatists and new work. As non-profit institutions, fulfilling that mission is essential to their charitable purpose, for which they receive their tax-exempt status and are eligible to receive governmental subsidies, corporate grants and underwriting, and individual donations, as well as discounted contracts with the various theatre unions and guilds.
In the Guild's view, it is antithetical to the purpose of non-profit theatres that the very artists they have promised to develop should be charged for those services. But not only are sub rights provisions unfair to writers, it is bad business for theatres. Financial statements reveal that most non-profits receive only a relatively small share of their operating revenues from such sub-rights provisions. Yet those monies, while having little practical impact on an institution, could pay an author's rent or buy groceries. But, most importantly, what these future revenues buy for a writer is time-- time to keep writing for the theatre. So, if the nonprofits want to continue to have a professional quality of writing talent available to produce on their stages, they need to allow playwriting to remain a profession, not just an avocation or steppingstone to Hollywood. And so the Roundabout and the Public have bravely chosen to invest in theatre writers, to the benefit of all. They join such theatres as Lincoln Center, which has never asked to participate in authors' income, and the Mark Taper Forum, which announced its change in policy last year, as part of a growing trend among regional theatres across the nation.
Hopefully, we will have successfully laid the groundwork at the TCG conference for an ongoing dialogue with theatrical institutions, as we look toward developing a national strategy to reduce the burdens on authors imposed by production at non-profit theatres, festivals, and development companies around the country. We will certainly try to get this subject on the agenda for the following year's TCG conference. [For more on this subject, keep an eye out for the transcript of the business affairs seminar "On Subsidiary Rights:' featuring Stephen Schwartz, David Faux, and yours truly, conducted at the DG on May 27].
Also while in Chicago, Abby and I [plan to host/hosted] a town hall meeting for DG members and prospective members, coordinated by our regional rep, Doug Post. I would be happy to regale you with anecdotes of the wild goings-on that crazy night, but alas, they have not yet occurred...and, frankly, are unlikely to. nut I'm sure a good time was had by one and all, and we're grateful to Doug and Chicago Dramatists for helping put the event together.
And thanks, too, to all the writers working in or around Chicago, that toddlin' town. Yours may be called the Second City, but your work is second to none. So keep filling those empty pages...the rest of us are counting on you.
Back in 60.
