Posted on 01/07/2013 9:34:05 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Here is a thing it is difficult to remember in the midst of its box office tidal wave: Les Misérables owes its birth to a debate over public arts funding. We think of blockbusters as antithetical to the high arts that public funding might typically support, but in Les Miz’s case at least, the relationship was symbiotic. Some might say parasitic, of course, but the story reveals that we don’t quite know who was leeching off of who.
Les Misérables was originally staged, in 1985, under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a large portion of whose budget was provided by the English Arts Council. It wasn’t the RSC’s idea to develop it, mind you. Cameron Mackintosh, a private producer coming off a wave of success with 1981’s Cats, had been looking to put on an English version of the musical, which was developed and staged in Paris in French. And he wanted a good director for it, and found himself knocking on Trevor Nunn’s door, then the RSC’s co-artistic director.
Nunn and his co-director, John Caird (then an RSC Associate Director), substantially overhauled the plot and the script. They also gave the production what was, until the emaciated cheekbones of Anne Hathaway entered our collective consciousness, the musical’s signature image: the revolving stage. In other words, the look and content of the show was developed not just with public money, but by people who had made their careers in a publicly-supported arts environment.
Blockbusters, onstage and onscreen, are typically seen as ego projects. Production notes present a narrative of the great director who wants to implement his vision. Nunn, however, clearly had his eye on another prize altogether.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenation.com ...
Les Mis is a profitable movie.
They need to pay back the taxpayers.
I like the way you think. Big Bird and his pervy friend Elmo could retire the national debt if they paid back their profits.
And if it wasn’t for public domain works, we wouldn’t have countless adaptations and reinterpretations.
Something Hollywood billionaires refuse to acknowledge with their bought and paid for never-ending-copyrights.
Actually taxpayer subsidies don’t tend to make ‘safe’ art. It leads to nonprofit institutions with a mission, whether implied or eaxpressed, to produce work that otherwise wouldn’t be done. That is, to produce the manifestly unpopular.
I don’t know the specifics of the Les Miz/RSC deal, but usually when nonprofits stage productions for commercial producers they not only take in ‘enhancement funding’ from the producers to cover the costs of developing the piece, but often they take in a stronger box office, because the work is a musical that appeals to the public.
Purists complain the the nonprofits are selling out or straying from their mission, but they are actually staging what the public (taxpayers) want to see.
It’s a perverse system and the answer probably is to take nonprofit status away from cultural organizations.
“Brevity is the soul of wit[.]”
William Shakespeare, *Hamlet*
“Big Bird and his pervy friend Elmo could retire the national debt if they paid back their profits.”
At the very least, their profits should be taken and used to support NPR etc, and get them off the taxpayer’s teat.
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