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More About Artists as Teachers and Fame and One of My teachers

by John Aquino on 03/08/12

As I get older, I think about what I have accomplished and what others I have known and admired have accomplished.

I often think about Leo Brady, one of my teachers, who acquired fame of a different and lasting kind.

Brady and Walter Kerr brought national attention to Catholic University in Washington when their musical Yankee Doodle Boy, based on the life of George M. Cohan, debuted there in 1940. The play was profiled in Life Magazine and received the endorsement of Cohan himself. Kerr went on to become a celebrated drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times and husband of playwright Jean Kerr, who authored one of the longest running plays of all times, Mary, Mary, and Please Don't Eat the Daisies, which became a 1960 movie about a Walter Kerr-like drama critic and his wife. Kerr's dilemma about whether or not to review Mary, Mary inspired the 1963 film Critic's Choice starring Bop Hope and Lucille Ball as a drama critic and his playwrighting wife. Kerr even had a Broadway theatre named after him.

Brady stayed at Catholic University and taught playwriting and other drama courses from the 1940s until his death in 1984. But he also published novels, one of which was made into a movie, had plays produced in Washington and off-Broadway, and wrote scripts for Omnibus and Studio One in the early days of television.

One way of reading Brady’s career can be as the story of early success as a young playwright and novelist followed by, shall we say, a quieter period. In his mid-20s he published a play version of Richard Connell’s short story “Brother Orchid” which became a staple of the Samuel French catalog and inspired Hollywood to adapt the story for a 1938 Warner Bros. film of the same name starring Edward G. Robinson. But Brady received no film credit since the filmmakers just went back to the original story. Warner Bros. also took the idea for a musical based on Cohan’s life and did its own story, Yankee Doodle Dandy, which earned James Cagney the 1942 Oscar as best actor. Neither Brady nor Kerr received any film credit.

In 1949, Brady published his first novel, Edge of Doom. It concerned a troubled man who murders a priest. Brady, who was a Roman Catholic, imbued the murder plot with a subtext of Catholic guilt. It earned good reviews and strong sales, and the legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn acquired it for the movies. But what appeared to be the road to great fame did not lead there.

Edge of Doom was a troubled movie production, directed by Mark Robson (Peyton Place, Von Ryan’s Express) from a screenplay by Philip Yordan (King of Kings, El Cid), and then refashioned by director Charles Vidor (Gilda, Hans Christian Andersen) with a new prologue and ending and narration by playwright Ben Hecht (The Front Page) and screenwriter Charles Brackett (Sunset Boulevard, the 1953 Titanic) that was ordered when Goldwyn thought after the initial screening that the film was too bleak. The contributions of very talented film people produced a muddled mess that became a notorious failure. Some have listed it as one of the worst films ever made. Goldwyn, Vidor, Yordan, Hecht, and Brackett just didn’t know how to deal with the subject matter. I’ve always felt that, in this modern era of filmmaking, someone should give it another try.

Brady’s subsequent novels—Signs and Wonders, the Quiet Gun, and the Love Tap—received good reviews, and his musical The Coldest War of All was produced locally and then off-Broadway in 1969. I think his last play was titled, maybe appropriately, Old Man Time. But the great blockbuster novel or play or even the multi-award-winning novel or play just didn’t happen.

Another, and my preferred, way of looking at Leo Brady’s career is the Casey Stengel /Leo Durocher /Tommy La Sorda/Joe Torre approach I have discussed before. Major League ballplayers themselves but not superstars, these men coached and groomed legendary ball players. Six of Leo Brady’s former playwriting students—Mart Crowley (The Boys in the Band), Joseph Walker (The River Niger), Jason Miller (That Championship Season), Michael Cristofer (The Shadow Box), John Pielmeier (Agnes of God) and Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive)—won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

I was a student of Leo Brady’s at Catholic University and did not prosper as a playwright, but that’s okay. I remember his classes as like sessions with a Stengel or Durocher, only they were about playwriting and screenwriting. Like them he was shortish. Unlike them, he wore glasses and he never yelled or bullied. Like them, he simply possessed confidence and skill, his being with dialogue and plot construction. He was generally analytical and helpful, illustrating something so effortlessly that it would produce the Eureka moment in his students of, “OH, I see!” He could sometimes be concise. When I and other students would defend our approach to something we had written, saying, “Well, what I was trying to do was—“, he would often respond, “Well, just don’t.”

In 1970, he directed Helen Hayes in her last stage performance—she developed an allergy to stage dust—in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Hartke Theatre at Catholic University. In our playwriting class, he expounded on O’Neill’s craftsmanship as part of his own reckonings with the play. He was like a man exploring the human brain from the inside, walking into the ear and working his way to the frontal lobe.

He was a man who lived and breathed the theatre. He was on the committee to which my wife Deborah defended her doctoral dissertation on comedy at Catholic University. She was in the literature department. He was in the drama department. Every time Deborah described a play as a “literary construct” Brady almost writhed in pain. He admired her work and joined the others in passing her, but he told her later, “By the way, these are plays, you know.”

I wish he were still here, if only because he knew and experienced so much but was shy about talking about himself. For some reason, the name of the stage and film actor Boris Karloff, known for his horror films, came up in regard to one of the student plays we were discussing, and Brady said, “I knew him. I worked with him in radio during the war. A very decent and good man. But we had a lot of trouble because the microphone kept picking up the clicking of his false teeth.”

One of my fondest memories is being on the Catholic University campus where Deborah was teaching in 1982. He saw me from a long way off and walked toward me, painfully, since he was not well. “I read your article on John Barrymore that was published in the Washington Post. I liked it,” he said, with a perfect mixture of surprise and pride.

Leo Brady found the enduring type of success because it endures through the people he taught.

I actually have another Catholic University connection with Leo Brady. My mother Philomena, who was teaching high school in Youngstown, Ohio in 1941, had been assigned to teach drama, and came to Washington to study under Leo Brady. She met my father, and they married three months later. So I guess I owe Leo Brady that too.

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More on Creativity, Especially as It Pertains to Sequels

by John Aquino on 03/01/12

Sequels are in abundance and tell us some interesting things about creativity. A story is presented, it’s well received, and suddenly there’s a built-in audience for more of the story. A problem usually occurs when there isn’t any more of the story.

This happened to the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in the late 1580s. His play Tamburlaine was about the 15^th century Timur, who was derisively called “Timur the Lame” by those who opposed him because he limped. Marlowe’s play was successful, he was asked to write a “Part II” since Tamburlaine was still alive at the end of the first play, and he basically wrote the same play again, only this one ended with Tamburlaine’s death. But telling the same story a second time is a pattern that still exists in sequels today, all the way down to Hangover II.

Perhaps the two best movie sequels are those that have or create more story to tell. Look at The Bride of Frankenstein. The 1931 film Frankenstein had ended with the monster being burned to death in a fire. Director James Whale and his collaborators had used a play adaptation of the novel that had addressed some dramaturgical concerns and then freely turned Shelley’s talkative monster into Boris Karloff’s mute, gaunt creature. For the sequel, Whale and the seven screenwriters who worked on the film actually began with a prologue in which Elsa Lancaster, playing the author of the novel Frankenstein Mary Shelley, mischievously telling those who felt that it was sad that the monster had died that the story had not really ended, that the monster had fallen through the floor of the burning mill and survived. This was all their own invention, Shelley never wrote a sequel. For The Bride of Frankenstein Whale and the screenwriters used a plot element from the novel that had not been used in the 1931 film—the monster’s search for a bride. They utilized this new avenue to expand on the monster’s story rather than just repeat it.

Similarly, for the Godfather II (1974), Mario Puzo, who had written the novel the Godfather, and director/co-screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola, used material from Puzo’s book that was not included in the first film as well as ideas and material that didn’t make it into the book.

So the secret would seem to be to make sure there is more story to tell. If you consider the four Indiana Jones films, you’ll see what I mean.

The first, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), concerned a professor/archeologist/adventurer in search of the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, which the Bible says housed the Ten Commandments. He fights the Nazis for this prize. In its sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the search is for some mystical stone, something that doesn’t really have the history, the cache, if you will, of the Ark of the Covenant. In the second sequel, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jones is reunited with his father to find the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper, and that King Arthur’s knights and crusaders searched for. Now, the Holy Grail has a history comparable to the Ark of the Covenant, and the film begins with a scene showing how Jones acquired his love of archaeology, his use of a bullwhip, the scar on his face, and his hat. The film’s delving into Jones’ relationship with his father also provides new material. The third sequel was filmed 20 years after the second and has Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) searching for crystal skulls, fighting Soviets and not Nazis, being reunited with his love interest from the first film, and finding a son he never knew he had. The crystal skulls don’t have the cache of the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail and expanding on Jones’ family history had already been done.

The most successful sequel would appear to be the Lost Crusade, which found new stories to tell and if it replayed elements from the earlier film—the Holy Grail rather than the Ark of the Covenant, at least examined a legend from a different period and found new material in Jones’ history.

The most ingenious “sequels” came from something the writers did out of necessity—each show being in a sense a sequel to the pilot episode. The British tv series Dr. Who premiered in 1963. He was a time traveler whose time machine was in the form of a police phone box or booth. After three years, the actor who played the Doctor, William Hartnell, wanted to leave the series. When this has happened in U.S. television, the producers either cancel the show—which they did when Patrick Swayze died from cancer when filming his tv series The Beast?-or re-cast, which has seldom worked well. Because the Doctor was from another planet and a time traveler, the writers created the idea that he had to regenerate his body, allowing them to recast the role as part of the story and to expand on the mythology of his Doctor and his world. Since then, there have been 11 Doctors all told, and the show is still developing new episodes after almost 50 years.

The trick of trying to find new stories is that the writers must be careful not to stray from what made the original film or show work. There was a 1946 movie titled The Ghost and Mrs. Muir about a widow in New England who finds that her house is haunted by a New England sea captain. There was an attraction between them but there could be no romance between the widow and the captain, and the movie ended with her dying as an old woman and being reunited, ever young, with the captain. They made a tv series of the movie in 1968, began it where the movie began, and then expanded on the story in 30 minute episodes. It was a sweet and gentle romantic story. The show was renewed for a second season on a different network, but the network and producers seemed to tinker with it to make it more successful. In the first episode of the second season, the captain lost his power because a ghostly pirate ship had entered the waters near the house. In subsequent episodes, the captain and Mrs. Muir were visited by the ghosts of Captain Kidd and Captain Blackbeard. The series became a kiddies’ show, and was quickly cancelled. Neither the movie nor the first season had sketched out any version of the afterlife, and the one ghost was confined to the one house. The network and producers lost track of why the original(s) had worked.

The Planet of the Apes is a 1968 movie based on the book by Pierre Boulle with a screenplay by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson. It concerns astronauts who land on a planet in which the apes speak, humans do not, and the apes are superior to the human. The novel was more of a Swiftian satire with an H.G. Wells’ overlay in that the humans had become weak and the apes had evolved to take over. The film was made during the arms race and the fears about nuclear attack. It ends SPOILER ALERT with the astronaut finding he is not on another planet but on earth in the future after an atomic blast, after which the physically superior apes took over.

The film was such a success that it spawned a sequel called Beneath the Planet of the Apes, It was a rehash of the first movie only with a different (rescuing) astronaut, and ends with the earth finally being blown up by an atomic bomb. In a second sequel, the filmmakers have two ape friends of the first astronaut escape in his ship and go back to the present time. In subsequent films their child—the son of talking apes—leads a revolution against the humans.

I swear, when you watch all the movies together, they don’t make sense because there are different reasons, depending on the film, why the apes can talk and humans can’t.

The series problem was that it was made up as the series went along.

George Lucas’ Star Wars series of films is the best example of a series of sequels in that he evidently sketched out all of the stories from the beginning. The first film shows this control in that it is labeled Episode 4. The subsequent films go from 5 to 6, and 1 to 3.

Which brings us back to the beginning, there has to be enough story to tell for a sequel or sequels to work, either you find it or you make it, but it has to be true to the original’s spirit, which neither The Ghost and Mrs. Muir nor the Planet of the Ape movies were.

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Seeing Moments of Truth on TV and Film

by John Aquino on 02/29/12

I have written about the whole issue of truth in films in my book and articles about fictionalization in fact-based films. An off-shoot of this is when something actual the actor is experiencing breaks out of the fictional character. This is not about an actor flubbing his lines but when what the actor is experiencing and his or her fictional character merge.

For example, in 2002 Al Gore, who had lost the U.S. presidential race in 2000 in a controversial moment in U.S. history, was said to be considering whether or not he would campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. He appeared as guest host on the tv show “Saturday Night Live in December of that year,” and in one skit pretended to reenact his deciding in 2000 who would be his vice presidential candidate. The scene ended with Gore sitting in a hot tub and drinking champagne with an actor playing Sen. Joe Leiberman, who was his vice presidential candidate. Later in the show, Gore was seen visiting the oval office set and cast of the tv show “The West Wing.” The scene ended with his being left alone by the cast and muttering in the dark while sitting in the president’s chair about decisions he would have made if he had been elected.

And I said aloud to my wife, “He’s not running! He’s telling us he’s not running! How could he run after doing that!” And it became clear when he made his announcement a few days later that he had been telling us he was not running.

Six years later on “Saturday Night Live,” Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, appeared in a show the weekend before the election with Tina Fey, who had created a sensation on the show with her caricature of McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin. In a skit in which the candidates took part in a home shopping network-type show, Fey, playing Palin, snuck away from McCain and spoke directly to the camera saying that after McCain lost she would be running in 2012. McCain took part in this bit, saying, “Sarah, what are you doing over there?”

This was the weekend before the election! And again I said, “He’s conceding! He’s telling us he’s not going to win!” And he didn’t, of course, although it wasn’t a blowout in that McCain won 46% of the popular vote to Obama’s 53%. But McCain knew, and he told us.

In a slightly different vein, there is a scene in the 1954 movie White Christmas in which the characters played by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are dressed in feather boas and fans and mime the singing of the song “Sisters” to help Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, who had sung the song earlier, escape from the sheriff. Kaye recounted in a television biography of Crosby done after his death in 1977 that prior to that scene Crosby, whose wife Dixie had died not long before, was moody and irritable on the set of what was supposed to be a warm-hearted Christmas family movie. Kaye said that he worked it out beforehand that the orchestra would vamp at the end of the song in a way it hadn’t when Clooney and Ellen had sung it. Then, miming the song with Crosby, he suddenly began strutting like rooster, swung his fan lightly like a baseball bat, and struck Crosby in the stomach. You can see in the scene Crosby reacting with surprise, because he is surprised. Kaye hits him again, and Crosby starts to laugh, and he’s really laughing. Kaye strikes him a third time and then poses with him, and Crosby is now laughing heartily.

What we’re seeing is something that’s really happening.

Kaye said that, while he didn’t take total credit for this, after that moment of genuine laughter on the set, Crosby loosened up and the filming was enjoyable, the movie a great success.

In 1960, in a western remake of the Japanese film Seven Samurai called the Magnificent Seven, Yul Brynner was starring with Steve McQueen. McQueen had made several films and had starred in the tv series “Wanted Dead or Alive,” but Brynner, who had won a Tony and later an Oscar for the King and I, was a genuine star. During a rehearsal for their first scene together, Brynner was lighting a cigar before the two of them rode off together in a hearse, and he was doing so with great flair, trying to upstage the newcomer.

In the finished scene, we see Brynner lighting the cigar and McQueen watching him. Then McQueen suddenly opens up his shotgun, takes out the shells, and shakes them, presumably to confirm they have gunpowder in them. You can see Brynner notice this out of the corner of his eye and smile at the young actor who refuses to be upstaged.

This leads to the subject of sequels, about which I hope to write more shortly. In 1966, a sequel of the Magnificent Seven was planned. The first film had been Brynner’s last big hit, although he had kept working, and McQueen had become a major star with the Great Escape and the Sand Pebbles. There are some stories that Brynner stipulated that McQueen not appear in the sequel, which would have been odd because McQueen was by then the bigger star and would have been a “catch” for the movie. The story I prefer, and think is more likely, is that Brynner called McQueen and asked him to be in the sequel. McQueen said, “Well, that would be interesting, but, the fact of it is that I don’t really like you too much.” Brynner thought about it and said, “I can understand that. I can accept that.”

All of which is in keeping with what we see in that one scene in the Magnificent Seven.

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Those Who Can Do, But Should Those Who Can Teach?

by John Aquino on 02/17/12

I have been reading about basketball great Michael Jordan and his difficulties as owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, which is on track to become the worst NBA team ever. It made me think again of the whole issue of who is the best person to teach others to do something.

A number of years ago I wrote a monograph for Phi Delta Kappa titled Artists as Teachers. I had originally wanted to have the subject be all professions, but the editors wisely instructed me to limit the scope to artists.

The idea for the monograph had actually started with my experiences as a young drama student. I remember I had an acting teacher at the Catholic University of America, the late Mark Hammer, who was a fine actor in his own right. If you want to see his work, rent the video of Much Ado about Nothing starring Sam Waterston that was produced by the Public Theatre in New York. I was doing a scene, and Mark said, “Something’s just not right. Here, let me show you how I would do it!” And he got on the stage and did the scene. After this happened a couple of times, I said, “Can you just tell me how I can do it better?” But he couldn’t.

Around the same time, a program was initiated called Artists in the Schools, by which artists—painters, musicians, actors—were hired to teach in elementary and high schools on the assumption that they would be the best people to teach in their arts. I later was the editor for Music Educators National Conference and in visiting schools met artists who were in completely over their heads as teachers.

There’s naturally an internal aspect of being artist that may not transfer well in communicating about the arts. Also at Catholic University, I met the actor and playwright Jason Miller. He was an excellent actor—you can see him in the film The Exorcist—and playwright—the Championship Season—but when he was brought in to talk in the playwrighting class I was taking he was not far from inarticulate when asked questions about how he wrote plays. I saw him later walking across campus with his head down and I said, “Hey, Mr. Miller!” and he kept walking, involved in some internal debate. It could have been me, but the same thing happened to others in my class.

So in writing Artists as Teachers, I talked to actors and artists about the topic and was surprised at how many times they used sports analogies. I was and am a baseball fan, and I came to the conclusion that many if not most of the great baseball players hadn’t gone on to be great managers. Look at Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, all Yankees, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. Their skills were mostly instinctive. They could do it themselves. But communicating to others on how to do it evidently wasn’t their forte.

The great managers tended to be those who had played ball professionally and been good players but not necessarily great ones. What they did have was the ability to stand back, look at how someone was running or throwing or swinging the bat, and tell them how to do it better. Look at Casey Stengel, Leo Durocher, Tommy Lasorda, Billy Martin, and Joe Torre.

I used the sports comparison to the arts in the monograph, and I also proved to myself that the analogy to sports supported my original concept that the issue has relevance for all professions.

When I first started working as an editor, I was turned down for jobs as editors of magazines in particular disciplines, and the people they hired were professionals in that discipline. The assumption was that it was easier to teach a mathematician, a biologist, a mortgage banker, or a musician how to be an editor than it was to have the editor learn enough about math, biology, mortgage banking, or music. These people ended up not being any more able to communicate about their field of expertise and to help others learn more about it than Babe Ruth was able to teach others how to hit.

Over the years I did serve as editor of magazines in the areas of music, mortgage banking, and environmental management, learning enough to be able to talk intelligently about their jobs with those working in the field and communicate in the magazine about what the major issues were.

As to Michael Jordan, he became an owner of the Washington Wizards in 1999 and returned to play in 2001. Even though he turned 40, he still averaged 20 points a game and three times shot over 40. He’d sometimes score more points than the rest of his team combined. And he would criticize them, saying they weren’t focused, and, implicitly, that they weren’t as good as he was. He not only couldn’t help them play better, he actually made them play worse since they were angry at his comments. And now his choices as an owner of the Bobcats have, shall we say, been ineffective.

Obviously, there was are musicians, poets, athletes, actors who have been good teachers. But it’s certainly not a given, and, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, those who can do, and those who can should not necessarily teach.

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Joint authorship: It All Comes Down to Intention

by John Aquino on 02/06/12

Joint authorship is an interesting and relatively new aspect of the U.S. copyright law.

Perhaps the perfect example of joint authorship is the authorship of a song. Under the current copyright law, minus an agreement to the contrary, the composer and the lyricist are joint authors of the entire song, not just one being the author of the music and the other the author of the lyrics, because the song was, in most cases, intended to be jointly created.

It wasn’t always this way. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1909, which was the copyright law for most of the 20^th century, did not define or even mention joint authors or joint copyright. It only referred to “the author” or “the proprietor.” As a result, when you look at old sheet music of a song by Rodgers and Hammerstein, for example, the music was copyrighted by Rodgers and the lyrics by Hammerstein,that is until they formed Williamson Music and assigned the copyrights to it.

This concept that the music and the lyrics were distinct had ramifications beyond copyright. When the 1931 musical comedy Of Thee I Sing won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the prize was awarded to the lyricist Ira Gershwin and the librettists George S. Kaufman and Morris Ryskind and not to the composer George Gershwin. No one denied that his music was an inseparable and essential part of the show. But this was the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and there was and is a separate Pulitzer Prize for music, which Gershwin did not win for Of Thee I Sing. People just thought the music and lyrics were separate items. This separation had vanished by the time the 1949 musical South Pacific when composer Richard Rodgers’ name was included on the award.

I remember hearing the lyricist Sammy Cahn describe how during the writing of the songs for the 1947 musical High Button Shoes he and composer Jules Styne wrote a song for the heroine that went something like,

I’m betwixt, I’m between,

Don’t really know which way to lean,

Don’t know why, don’t know how,

You see, I really can’t make my mind up.

The song was cut from the show when it was on the road, and it became one of Styne’s “trunk songs”—songs that either weren’t used at all or were cut and that he would later either reuse or mine for ideas.

Cahn recalled that 12 years later he was in the audience for the musical Gypsy, with music by Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and he heard Ethel Merman sing to the same melody that Styne had written for Cahn’s lyrics in High Button Shoes,

You’ll be swell, you’ll be great,

Going to have the whole world on a plate,

Starting here, starting now,

Honey, everything’s coming up roses.

Cahn had written the original lyrics for the 1947 song first and contributed to the song’s rhythm. His lyrics inspired the melody, and he most likely worked line by line and bar by bar with Styne on the original song. And yet he had no ownership in the "Everything's Coming Up Roses" because the music and lyrics were copyrighted separately and considered to be the separate property of the composer and lyricist, respectively. All Cahn could do was grin and take it.

In the Copyright Act of 1976, that all changed. The Act defined joint authorship as a work prepared by two or more individuals with the intention that their separate contributions be merged into a single work. The key word is “intention.”

So, subject to an agreement to the contrary, joint authors own the work jointly and equally unless they agree on some other division of ownership. Each joint author, therefore, has the right to exercise any or all of the exclusive rights inherent in the joint work. For example, each author can grant third parties permission to use the work on a nonexclusive basis without the consent of the other joint author (although he or she has a duty to account to the other joint author for any profits received from licensing the joint work) or can transfer his or her entire ownership interest to another person without the other joint authors' consent. Each author may also update the work for his or her own purposes.

I said that the key word in the definition of joint authorship is “intention.” The authors have to intend that the work be considered a single work with joint ownership. A song, as I said earlier, is perhaps the perfect example of joint authorship. The song does not exist without both the music and the lyrics. It is a single work of joint authorship. To be sure, these things are usually handled in contracts that specify joint authorship. But even without a contract, joint authorship for a song is clear because the intention required for joint authorship is inherent in the songwriting process.

But joint authorship doesn’t just apply to songs. The work can be scholarly articles, a celebrity autobiography that the celebrity writes with a professional writer, fiction, a sculpture, a painting, anything that is jointly created.

In some instances, however, a contract is absolutely necessary to establish joint authorship. There was the situation regarding the musical Rent. Jonathan Larson wrote the music, lyrics, and book. He was also very ill. Lynn Thomson was the dramaturg for the show, and her job was contractually specified as helping the author of the show. Larson died the day before Rent opened. When it became a big hit, Thomas asserted that she had contributed in the course of her work with Larson 16 percent of the material of the show. She said she had never assigned, licensed, or otherwise transferred her rights. She asked that a federal district court declare her a co-author of Rent and grant her 16 percent of the author's share of the royalties. (Larson, of course, was not around to provide his account of what had happened.)

The district court held and on June 19, 1998 the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed that there was no evidence that Larson ever intended that Thomson be co-author of the work. She was hired as the dramaturg. If she had contributed lines and lyrics, the court held, it was part of the collaborative give and take that is part of the theatre.

Even though she lost the case, Thompson threatened to litigate the ownership of each line of dialogue and each line of a lyric that she claimed to have written. Rather than go through another court case and potentially establish the precedent that someone could own a line of dialogue or the line of a lyric, Larson’s estate settled out of court, with Thomson receiving an undisclosed sum but far less that the equivalent of 16 percent of the royalties.

A line of dialogue or lyrics has not been considered a work of authorship, which is the major requirement for whether a work can be copyrighted. And the idea that an individual could own a line of dialogue would surely chill the collaborative process of the theatre and of film. In 1960, the television cartoon show The Flintstones debuted. In a moment of enthusiasm for the character of Fred Flinstone, Alan Reed, the actor who was giving the voice to Fred, blurted out in an ad-lib “Yabba-Dabba-Doo.” The producers were so taken with the line that Reed was encouraged to use it frequently, it became a catch-phrase for the show, and it was even built into the lyrics of the title song,

When you're with the Flintstones
You'll have a yabba dabba doo time.
A dabba doo time.
You'll have a gay old time.

The famous songwriter Hoagy Carmichael (“Stardust,” “The Nearness of You,” In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”) lent his voice to an episode of the Flintstones and even wrote a song for the episode titled “Yabba Dabba Do.”

There’s no record of Reed having fought for ownership of the line. He may have been subject to a “for-hire” situation for the whole work process under his employment by Hanna-Barbera. But more likely, Reed just viewed it as something actors did as part of their professional work and not an act of authorship.

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