BY BEN WINTERS
The newly appointed Commissariat of Culture of the United States has been making the rounds!
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Dana
Gioia
Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts |
Technically, Dana Gioia’s title is Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts–and he seems determined to give as many interviews as humanly possible. Alas, nobody cares much about the NEA or its chairman under the best of circumstances (unless they’re condemning or defending its support for "controversial" artists), and in times of war and terrorism…well…you know.
Still, it’s worth listening to what Dana Gioia (pictured above)–the poet, former General Mills executive and Stanford MBA–has to say.
First of all, anyone waiting for the NEA to return to its more liberal (pre-culture war) policy of funding individual artists, not just institutions, should be advised not to hold their collective breath. In comments to Backstage, Gioia focused on the importance of funding organizations, not artists. "[M]ost of the arts are not individual but collaborative," Gioia told Roger Armbrust. "So any program to support the arts in America can’t merely support the creative artist, or the author. It must support performers and performing institutions." An institutional grant, he concludes, "supports the performers and the playhouse at the same time," and not only that–"it supports the sandwich shop and the parking lot next door. It supports artists and the community."
Besides Backstage, profiles on Gioia have popped up in the Washington Post, Washington Times, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The articles focus on community, and very pointedly on "[Gioia’s] desire to have what he calls a different kind of conversation, not necessarily a tame one but a new one," as Philip Kennicott writes in the Post. Enough with the Karen Finley stuff, Gioia seems to be saying; he "wants to talk good art and bad art, not safe art and obscene art."
Prior to his appointment, Gioia was best known as the author of "Can Poetry Matter," an Atlantic Monthly essay "which argued that poets had become alienated from the public by restricting themselves to the confined world of academia," as Caroline Abels summarizes in the Post-Gazette. His personal advocacy for connecting arts directly to the people should gibe well with the NEA’s current drift, towards what Abels describes as "a more populist outlook" (i.e. more school programs, more rural music preservation programs, more symposia, less chocolate-smeared Lower East Side performance art).
But considering the grim prospect for state arts budgeting nationwide, the most important thing Gioia had to say was to Mary Voelz Chandler at Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. According to standing policy, most money the NEA gives to state governments comes in the form of matching grants, meaning that if Oregon does away with its arts budget, Oregon will get nothing from the NEA.
Voelz Chandler writes that "it appears that Gioia is willing to explore the legalities of how that match is generated…[he says] 'We will be as flexible and helpful as the law allows.’"
Speaking Of Which
Maureen Dezell of the Boston Globe reports on a survey from the McCormack Institute at U Mass which "showed that 94 percent of [Massachusetts] residents consider the arts to be as important a part of basic education as math and English, and that 92 percent favor state funding for arts programs in public schools."
Studies like this, and like the one commissioned by the Detroit Institute for the Arts showing that the exhibit "Degas and the Dance" brought $15 million into the city coffers, are important weapons against state arts budget cuts.
Now people in Boston and beyond can say, look, here is a strong indicator that the average American (or at least the average Massachusettsian) strongly supports (at least when answering poll questions in the abstract) the arts (at least in schools). Great news (it’s a start)!
Saving Private Lynch
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Jessica
Lynch
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Jessica Lynch’s story is the heart-warming human interest story of a lifetime. And you better believe that when the young, pretty, white woman was captured by the Iraqis and then dramatically rescued by US Special Forces, Hollywood sat up in bed, panting.
"Executives at NBC have decided to go ahead with plans for a made-for-television movie about Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch," reported Rick Lyman in the New York Times on April 9, "with or without paying for the rights to her family’s story."
Knocking out a TV movie without getting the rights, simply by drawing from the public record and news reports, is common practice. Lyman found a Hollywood pro to explain this rarified art form.
"'You can have a script in 30 days, if you push it," said Lawrence Schiller, a veteran producer-director who has made several of these kind of films. 'While you’re writing the script…you can scout your locations and the director can begin casting. In about 20 days you can make a two-hour movie and then finish post-production in another 30 days. So you can be on the air with something in 90 days, if you want to be."
And NBC very much wants to be.
Here’s the funny tagout to the Lynch movie item in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Casting an actress to play the attractive, blond Lynch in a TV movie shouldn’t prove difficult. Entertainment junkies on Internet newsgroups have already weighed in with suggestions: Reese Witherspoon (Legally Blonde), Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man), Elisha Cuthbert ('24’) or Meredith Monroe ('Dawson’s Creek’)."
Meanwhile, it’s the USA Network (whose most recent miniseries event was the widely reviled Rudy, about former New York Mayor "Rudy" Giuliani) that’s plowing ahead with The Beltway, about the D.C. snipers. As reported first in the Hollywood Reporter and subsequently in everyone’s TV columns, Charles Dutton has signed on to play Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose.
Hopefully The Beltway does better than his latest effort, a revival of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on Broadway, in which Dutton co-starred with Whoopi Goldberg. The reviews were lukewarm to negative (the New York Times called the production "hollow") and it cut short its run on April 6.