Giving Thanks for City’s Arts Endowment; Serving Up a Bounty of Turkey Awards

Warning: About every 20 years or so a Thanksgiving comes along wherein you really have to give thanks. Life’s turkeys notwithstanding, this is one of them.

In the wake of Tuesday’s landmark bit of city legislation that tentatively approved the first L.A. Endowment for the arts (see related story on Page 1), one is compelled to begin this column with a round of applause for Councilman Joel Wachs, whose vision spearheaded the drive to establish this $25-million arts fund.

Twenty-five million.

Admire this beginning of enlightenment. Relish its possibilities. Savor the difference it could make.

It’s a start.

We may be coming to this funding late--well after New York, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco, which have long enjoyed the benefits of similar support--but at least we’re catching up.

Let’s not get too carried away, though. It could be two years before that money trickles down. Meanwhile, there are Turkey Awards here to carve up.

Far and away the most traumatic thing to happen to theater in Los Angeles since last Thanksgiving was the introduction by Actors’ Equity Assn., the actors’ union, of its new 99-Seat Theatre Plan.

This replacement for the Equity Waiver Plan managed several feats at once. It divided the theatrical community, created pandemonium among the warring factions and brought on a lawsuit.

But the merits or demerits of the new plan are not an issue here.

The issue is Equity’s myopia in failing to invite significant participation by the operators of the 99-seat theaters--many of whom are actors as well, and all of whom are affected by the new plan--in the drafting of a mutually workable solution to a shared problem.

This failure cost the union plenty: in rancor, spleen, bucks and good will. The old argument that Equity unilaterally created the Waiver and had the unilateral right to withdraw it, won’t wash.

It didn’t wash with a vocal sea of opponents within Equity’s own ranks. And it didn’t wash with 15 actors who are still in court challenging the legality of the plan and the manner in which it was submitted to a vote.

The irony is that eight months after this storm began, Equity is doing what it could have done in the first place: It is talking to the theater operators, searching for that mutually agreeable solution. And it is doing it at the urging of the judge in the lawsuit who couldn’t understand why these two groups weren’t speaking.

So even though eight months of warfare might have been averted and because things are looking up (though no final agreement has been struck as yet), we’ll anticipate a happy ending--and issue a moderate RUFFLED FEATHERS AWARD to that specialist in the field: Actors’ Equity Assn.

But if you thought this was going to be a one-sided view of these events, look again. Members of ATLAS (the Associated Theatres of Los Angeles, which number about 60 theaters of 99 seats or fewer) won’t waddle out of here unscathed.

These theater producers and operators could have prevented a confrontation with Equity by heeding early warnings.

Signs of trouble were evident as far back as 1984, when Equity commissioned a report on the state of Equity Waiver. The operators could have acted unilaterally to regulate abuses and to compensate actors (key contentions in the new plan). They didn’t. And there was hell to pay.

So to the Associated Theatres of Los Angeles, with the same regard for extenuating circumstances that tempered our award to Equity, we issue the slow-to-burn TARDY TURKEY AWARD.

Everything else this year pales in importance. There were no major bloopers and therefore no recipient for our GOLDEN GOBBLER.

The film and television industries, which regularly raid the ranks of theater and just as regularly put nothing back are the winners of our PERENNIAL TURKEY AWARD. One day this will change. They’ll be called to account. It’s virtually certain. But it’s not happening yet. And while individual artists benefit from “The Industry’s” visibility and big bucks, theater itself never has.

So we reward these twin industries, not for the cradle-snatching they practice, but for their ongoing, not-so-benign neglect of the hatchery they love to plunder.

Finally, some MINI TURKEYS to the following:

Councilman Ernani Bernardi for being the only boy in class to vote no on the new arts endowment. While his reasons reflect a difference of opinion as to how the money ought to be raised, and not opposition to the service it would render, it was crucial to accept the idea of a municipal obligation to the arts without any more delay. Fortunately 12 of his co-council members saw it a different way.

The Nederlanders, for playing their usual game of tag with their Los Angeles Civic Light Opera season and their quasi-mythical Playgoers’ Series, as much this year as any other, adding and subtracting and delivering ever less in service, style and quality.

Eric Monte, for insisting in the advertising for his play “If They Come Back” that “If this (play) doesn’t tear your heart out, you don’t have one.” If it doesn’t tear your heart out, it could be because Monte doesn’t have a play.

Al’s National Theater for fooling around with reviewers’ quotes. That’s a very old no-no.

This writer, for all the errors, inadvertent transgressions and missed cues. Those, too are very old no-nos. Here’s to straightening it all out. Tomorrow.