Posted on 01/07/2013 9:34:05 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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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