Spielberg Offers $100,000 Grant, LATC Official Says

Steven Spielberg has offered to give $100,000 to the financially troubled Los Angeles Theatre Center if six other Hollywood institutions match his offer, according to a LATC board member who is leading a campaign to interest the entertainment industry in supporting the theater.

LATC board member Frank Pierson, a screenwriter and former president of the Writers Guild of America, West, spearheads the Hollywood campaign. It began, he said, in a conversation with Harrison (“Indiana Jones”) Ford, who will appear in Pierson’s next movie, “Presumed Innocent.” The two were discussing “the irony that an industry that depends on a pool of labor that’s often trained in nonprofit theater” gives so little back to it.

Ford (who was discovered by a Columbia talent scout while appearing in a production of “John Brown’s Body” at Laguna Beach Playhouse in 1964) was sufficiently inspired to approach Spielberg, the director of Ford’s “Indiana Jones” movies. Spielberg responded with a challenge grant of $100,000, reported Pierson. Spielberg, shooting “Always” on location in Montana, could not be reached for comment.

Pierson is now approaching the major studios, seeking at least six matching amounts.

“The opening discussions have been very positive,” he said, “but no decisions have been made.”

Spielberg’s offer is part of a renewed burst of fund-raising efforts at LATC, in the wake of the latest challenge issued to the group by the Community Redevelopment Agency. The city agency has ordered the downtown Los Angeles theater to reduce its $1.3-million deficit to $500,000 by Dec. 31 and to half that by April 30, in exchange for another $832,000 in facilities support during the coming year and the CRA’s support for City Council authorization of an additional $350,000.

It has prompted LATC to cut an additional $400,000 from an already trimmed budget and to set a goal of raising $1,850,000 in donations this year--$475,000 more than was raised last year.

Of the $400,000 in cuts, 38% is coming out of the “artistic budget,” said LATC’s artistic producting director Bill Bushnell. Examples: $9,800 was saved when a commissioned script, “Stevie Wants to Play the Blues,” by Eduardo Machado (scheduled for next winter), came in requiring one less actor than expected. An extra week of rehearsals was trimmed from the upcoming “Boys’ Life.” The theater’s head of design, Timian Alsaker, will spend the summer in Paris working on a planned TV miniseries version of “The Phantom of the Opera,” eliminating his salary for those months.

“Some international directors and designers may not be able to come here this fiscal year,” Bushnell said, because of reductions in the travel and per diem budgets. He declined to name names.

Apart from the artistic budget, other savings will be achieved by reducing the theater’s contingency fund and its design and advertising budgets; laying off a clerk (who will nevertheless be hired intermittently to work on individual shows); postponing improvements in lighting equipment and computers, and eliminating Alarums & Excursions magazine.

One department, however, will receive a slight increase in its budget: Development--in other words, fund-raising.

The theater isn’t limiting its fund-raising to movie moguls. Bushnell said that LATC’s annual new plays festival needs a new name--and that name might well be that of whoever comes up with $250,000 for the festival.

Likewise, Bushnell is considering naming three of the four theaters in the LATC complex for especially generous donors. How much would it cost to get your name on one of these? Said Bushnell: “Suffice it to say it would be at least seven figures.”

Some funds have already come in. LATC producer Diane White contributed $100,000, made possible by a recent inheritance, and challenged the board to match it with $150,000--which was accomplished in less than three weeks.

Bushnell is approaching six local foundations “that have not yet provided us with any money”: the Ahmanson, Taper, Keck, Parsons, Wallis and Weingart foundations. He hopes that a complicated legal restructuring of LATC’s real estate and production responsibilities will help persuade these organizations to contribute.

The idea is to free LATC to focus its money and energy on programming instead of real estate, much as the Center Theatre Group does at the Music Center. And Bushnell expects that foundations will look more favorably on donating to LATC when it is no longer the direct recipient of the CRA money for maintenance of the building.

This isn’t the only reason LATC officials believe that now is the time for big donors to help out. In Pierson’s words, regarding entertainment industry support, “it has been premature (to ask for much) in the past. Nobody wants to put money into a sinking ship.” But now, LATC has reached “a plateau of maturity that should be attractive to the various funds.”

The theater has about 26,000 subscribers, up slightly in the last year.

Bushnell boasted that since LATC opened in 1985, it has sold more than 800,000 tickets, worth more than $10 million. Except for the theater’s budget, he claimed, “all indicators are going upward.”

PHANTOM WATCH: The $10 million in ticket sales at LATC sounds impressive, but it doesn’t match the sales so far for just one show, “The Phantom of the Opera,” which opened last week at the Ahmanson with more than $15 million advance sales.

Recently Calendar letter writer Robert A. Lerner wrote that “Phantom” producers could have saved a bundle on “decorations” by booking their show into the Los Angeles Theatre, one of the old downtown movie palaces (not far from LATC), instead of the Ahmanson; it “not only looks like the Paris Opera but feels like it as well,” wrote Lerner.

Asked to respond, “Phantom” producer Cameron Mackintosh said that he had examined some of the movie palaces, as well as the Pantages and “every theater I could see.” But he rejected them on financial and aesthetic grounds.

Financially, “you’d have to spend millions bringing them up to scratch,” said Mackintosh. And using the Pantages would have entailed “ripping out the stage” in order to install “Phantom” equipment underneath it. Aesthetically, he said, “the last thing we wanted was an auditorium that would make our sets pale in comparison. It would look as if the house lights had been put up.”

The black walls of the Ahmanson focus attention on the stage, he said. Furthermore, he added, the proportions of the Ahmanson were similar to those of a European opera house.