TASTE MAKERS : LINDSAY LAW

Calendar’s choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it’s because creative abilities come in many forms.

As a result, our group’s pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series “American Playhouse,” to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N’ Roses. All eight individuals have been significant players in 1988 and we feel will continue as leaders and creators in the future--as have the Taste Makers of previous years.

In this fourth annual survey, we hope to present an insight into what stimulates and influences these people of influence.

Vice president and executive producer of PBS’ “American Playhouse,” with a lengthy and distinctive list of credits for dramatic programs and films. His concern: The perpetuation of well-used English.

It’s almost axiomatic in American life that once an artist in the theater gets a taste of the easy money and renown afforded by television and the movies, the stage is kissed off into fond memory.

Lindsay Law, 39, is an exception to the rule. For 16 years he’s been prominently engaged in bringing original theater works to larger audiences through public television. He’s overseen works as diverse as the musical “Working” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”

Elsewhere he has produced a long list of plays, ranging from Chekhov and O’Neill to D.H. Lawrence, including a hefty roster of America’s leading actors and actresses. He’s overseen the production of films such as “Smooth Talk,” “El Norte” and “The Thin Blue Line.”

For Law, whose professional baptism of fire came with Edward Albee’s Playwrights Unit, entities like the American Playhouse and its earlier model, Theater in America (where he also worked), kept writers alive. They may not have helped financially, but they helped through their concern with, as he puts it, “the writer’s ideas and style, and of course, the language.”

Says Law, “To hear language well-used is rare. At least in this country. At the Olympics, when someone interviewed a foreign athlete to ask how he or she felt, you heard a descriptive response. For the Americans, the range of expression was minimal at best.”

Still, when an offer from Warner Bros. Television came in 1977, he bit. “I had been working for five years in Public Television and wasn’t sure I wanted to be in it forever,” he says. “It’s a protected world. And frankly, I saw some TV I wouldn’t mind having my name on. Besides,” he added with inscrutable understatement, “there was the financial consideration.”

“What I learned about commercial television is that it’s not a good place for artists and what artists stand for. It offers no moral support for what they’re trying to do. At the time, you had to keep an eye on the bottom line. Now, that’s all anything is about. Our heroes are determined by financial success. Michael Eisner makes the cover of Newsweek. I respect Eisner and don’t begrudge him his success, except that it’s based solely on how much money he makes for Disney.

“Economics has always eluded me. I don’t know how this country operates. When I read David Halberstam’s ‘The Powers That Be,’ particularly the part that deals with CBS, it was like I’d been hit by lightning. I realized that to continue complaining was useless. I have a basically positive outlook on life. You have to figure out what’s valuable to you and how you can share that value with others. It’s not even a judgment of ‘this being better than that.’ It’s a matter of what you can contribute.”

Law, the son of a Westport, Conn., businessman, considers himself predisposed to theater by having gone to a high school that prized its theater as much if not more than its football team. “I was a voracious reader as a kid. The world of books, and later the world of the theater, was something I felt comfortable in. I don’t have complex psychoanalytical reasons for having made my choices. To this day, my best friends are writers. There’s always a voluminous amount of opinion and thought that comes out of a writer after he’s spent a long lonely session with a piece of work.”

Since language is the matrix of theater, it’s only natural that Law should come go to a medium that not only relies on language as a means of opening the slippery complications of experience (as opposed to oversimplifying), but offers the best of two worlds in bringing that experience to the largest possible audience.

“I like the harmonious environment of working in public television,” he said. “I’m not one who thinks that art comes out of maximum strife. But aside from that, and on a larger scale, having grown up learning the variety of experience through reading, I’m concerned that the art of story-telling doesn’t come naturally to young film makers these days.

He believes that TV has “standardized and reduced experience in our culture. And we’re growing out of touch with history. As much sentimentalizing as there’s been about John F. Kennedy recently, at least he represented an ideal of heroism and hope. I don’t see that anymore. Where’s our point of view on Donald Trump, who’s famous because he makes big deals?

“I heard Budd Schulberg mention a college talk on his book ‘What Makes Sammy Run?’ Sammy Glick was conceived as a model of the disreputable. Now students were thanking Schulberg for his how-to book on becoming successful.”

“I work in a small world, but the projects are sustaining, whether they’re successful or not. It means a lot to me that our conversations center on how to make what we’re doing better, and that doing our best is our main criterion.”

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.