Sellars Calls ‘Botched’ Fest a ‘Miracle’ Too : Assessment: Los Angeles Festival director reports staging problems but also artistic achievements.

In a surprisingly candid assessment of September’s Los Angeles Festival, festival director Peter Sellars said Wednesday night his staff had “botched” much of the mechanical and technical aspects of staging the 17-day arts extravaganza but declared the artistic achievements and “feelings” produced in the city a “miracle.”

“There were many, many moments that were embarrassing and deplorable,” Sellars said during a public “Post-Partum Los Angeles Festival” discussion at the Pacific Design Center. “But we had very, very limited money. For the same amount of money we could have done very beautifully 1/10th the things we did. But instead we decided to do 10 times more things . . . and we were under the illusion that we could do these things justice.”

The festival succeeded, Sellars said, by providing new cultural experiences and a “fixable” model that could be easily improved for the next festival, planned for 1993.

“The things that were good I’ve never seen so good anywhere else,” he said. “And the things that were bad are things that are done everywhere else, pretty well, nearly every day of the week. So it’s things that are fixable.”

Those fixable things were problems such as a virtually unreadable ticket brochure, inaccessible performances and poorly paid artists, whom Sellars said are always “cheated” at festivals and that this one was no exception.

Both Sellars and festival executive director Judith Luther, who attended but did not address the 200 people at Wednesday’s event, said final tallies on accounting and attendance figures will not be compiled until near the end of the year. The 1990 festival will not even receive its final grants until December, Luther said, and many bills still have to be paid.

“I really don’t know (what the final figures will be), but I think we’ll just squeak by,” Luther said. “There probably won’t be a nest egg, but we’ve already started raising money (for 1993), so that will be our nest egg.”

Sellars did not discuss concrete changes he will make for his next festival but noted that this time around, “It was too hard--I’d like to make it less hard in the future.

“Most specifically,” he said, “we were late (with major decisions such as programming and funding), and it was because the festival was not capitalized until the last moment. There was never the sense that (we) knew what (we) were doing, right up to the point where we designed the festival so that nobody (else) knew what we were doing. . . . And we didn’t make it easy to get to. You really had to go out of your way.

“The miracle is that it did happen,” Sellars continued. “We were told every day that it would not happen, even right up through the festival itself. . . . It was like a lab experience, some things blow up, some things foam over, and the idea is to do it better next time.”

Although attendance was half of that expected, the listeners were enthusiastic and at times broke into spontaneous applause. Many were eager to laud the festival and discuss their personal experiences at the public session concluding the discussions.