 The SDC, which is the Society of Directors and Choreographers, talks about it. They are careful to point out that they've never attempted to infringe on a playwright's rights or a playwright's income. But the consequence of director's copyright should one ever be recognized. And the law does not recognize the director's copyright. It simply doesn't exist. But their union has been trying very hard to establish one. The fundamental reason it's a problem, it seems to me, is that it's thought of as something that a director who does a first production either on Broadway or at a theater like the Goodman, a major first production should be entitled to participate in some ownership way in what results on stage. The difficulty with copyright is that it does not simply apply to one director in one set of circumstances. If the director of the first production at the Goodman is entitled to copyright his staging, his or her staging, then it means that a director who does it in a high school in Texas someplace 10 years later is also entitled to the same copyright protection. So that a play, which exists as an independent piece of theatrical art, inevitably becomes something that you don't own on your own, but which you begin to own in partnership with every director who has ever mounted it any place. And the consequence of that in terms of your ability to control what you write would be devastating, frankly. And we have done everything we can and continue to do everything we can to intervene, to monitor, to try and put a lid on this. The SDC seems to have backed off slightly in their sort of political decision to push this, but they were very active for 15 years and they've created a situation in which people are confused about whether or not directors actually own what they create. There should be no confusion, they don't, and we're struggling very hard to make sure it stays that way. We are in the process and have been for the last, oh, year or so of having discussions with the SDC in an attempt to be not just at loggerheads and not simply to be hostile to one another, but to try to find as much common ground as we possibly can. One of our offices on the council, Doug Wright, has spent an enormous amount of time heading a committee, a group of dramatists who have been meeting with counterparts at the SDC to discuss these issues and to see where we agree and where we don't. And there has been a surprising amount of agreement, though we certainly have our areas where we still strongly have different positions. What we are going to attempt to do as a guild, and it's interesting that Ralph pointed out to me the letter from Robert Anderson, where essentially he wrote to the members of the dramatist guild with a kind of a guild position on this, what we are going to attempt to do and we hope we can achieve it by the end of this year is to have a fairly definitive set of recommendations for our membership in terms of when a director is entitled to some continuing participation in the show or maybe entitled to continuing participation in the show beyond the production that he or she directs. What are those circumstances and when is that not the case? And to try to define it pretty clearly and unambiguously for our membership. Obviously, we being a guild and not a union for the reasons that the legal reasons with which I think everybody's familiar, it's not something that we can dictate to our membership nor frankly, even if we could, would we probably want to but we would like to be pretty definitive about our recommendations and we will tell you the areas with which we are in agreement with the SDC and the areas with which we're not. And as I said, that's forthcoming. The discussions are ongoing. They've been extremely productive. Doug, James Lapine and Emily Mann in particular from the drama skilled have been putting in a great deal of time on this. Yeah, let me just so it doesn't sound as though Stephen and I are disagreeing because we're not. Stephen has really spearheaded this attempt to find common ground with the SDC which has been enormously productive. It's not useful for us to be at loggerheads all the time. The copyright issue, however, is like an entirely separate stream and that's really what I was addressing myself to not to the issues that Stephen is talking about. Absolutely and I think there is no question that the guild continues to feel and with the support of the copyright office that there is no director's copyright. The copyright law is currently up for review being rewritten and myself and other members of the drama skilled have been in touch with the copyright office. We've given some testimony, et cetera, to try to make sure that this does not change. Yes, we met with the current register and I think the copyright office is sympathetic to the notion that ideas, which is what direction is, should not be elevated to the status of property. It would be chaotic not just for the theater but for every industry working in with copyrighted material where people have ideas and then claim ownership. Ideas are not property. Under copyright law, ideas are public domain. So there may be some other theory under which directors might claim some interest or something but it's certainly not copyright and that's been our position. The SDC a few months ago put out, they put out a regular magazine or newsletter where they were once again telling their membership, make sure you register your work for copyright. So they haven't given up this claim and their basic contract with the producers says that they have a property right. It doesn't tell you what kind of property it is, it just says a property right and that they retain ownership of it. How they can do that when the producer who's their employer doesn't have the right to give them anything because the office contract with the producer says we own any changes in this work. So what can the producer give their employee, the director? Just one other thought to add to that. If you are ever handed a collaboration agreement and those of you who work on musicals may be and I have been a collaboration agreement that is between you and other writers but also conceivably a director as well, make sure you read your own agreement because it may contain language in which you acknowledge that the director has the right to copyright his or her work and I have dealt with an agreement like that with a close friend and insisted that the language come out and it did but you wanna make sure it's not there because it puts you in a compromise because it won't change the law but it puts you in an uncomfortable position. Simply their act of registering their stage directions it's often done with notations on your script submitted to the copyright office. So arguably just the act of the registration is a violation of your copyright. Certainly they need your approval to do it because if it's any kind of property it can only be a derivative work based on your play and when you create a derivative work you need the underlying owner's permission and unless you've given that permission then it's not an authorized registration. So there's very many reasons why this thing doesn't exist and shouldn't exist. That's interesting, there have been cases they've all been settled. There was a case right here in Chicago involving the show You're in Town. There was a production in Chicago and won in Akron about the same time and the New York director and choreographer and designers with their union representatives had a press conference in which they told everybody that these people were infringing their copyrights. And so there was a litigation. The directors, one of whom was an SDC director being sued by his own union decided to fight back and fire the first shot and preemptively sued them first for the kind of judgment that you would wanna have which is the court saying either this is copyrightable or this isn't. Unfortunately, both the director in Chicago and the one in Akron didn't have the means to withstand a kind of prolonged and protracted litigation. And so it was settled and these settlements have no legal bearing. No legal bearing but they can create the impression depending on how the language which comes out of them is framed. They can create the impression that a director's copyright sort of exists. And I would like to say that Tom Mullen who was the director who was accused of plagiarism here was did a very courageous thing which was to initiate the litigation essentially to sue his own union which is not an easy thing to do. And we were able to obtain through some odd freedom of information act the correspondence between the attorney for the SDC and the copyright office in which repeated attempts to copyright the Broadway director's work on your intent. Repeated attempts under different theories to file a copyright were rejected by the copyright office. And in the end, the copyright office asked the Department of Justice to intervene in the legislation. The assumption clearly being that they wanted this issue resolved and the way they wanted to resolve was a resolution that we mean there was no director's copyright. But the SDC settlement was reached before that happened. And of course courts are unpredictable and if this is ever litigated to conclusion there's really no way of knowing how one particular judge will view it. So it's a very prickly issue. And it's one of the reasons we formed the Dramatist Legal Defense Fund which we're gonna talk about a little bit later. I would like to get onto some of the other subjects and we'll take questions more at the end. Let's talk about some other collaborator issues. We have orchestrators and we have dramaturgs. Oh, let's deal with the dramaturgs first since it's related to the director's issue. John, you were on board when we did the rent case, right? Yeah. I mean, most of you, many of you may be familiar with this case, but if not, after Jonathan Larson died, Jonathan Larson wrote rent, all of it. After he died, a woman who had been assigned to work with him as a dramaturg asserted a joint authorship or co-authorship claim in the work that her contributions to the script itself, to the lyrics were so substantial that she should be recognized as a co-author. And the Larson estate vigorously rejected this assertion and it was litigated and the Dramatist Guild filed an amicus brief. Obviously, the issue involved was very important to us and to all of you. You don't want to discover that you've acquired a co-author when you didn't expect to, when you didn't ask for one, and maybe you were assigned one. And in fact, the outcome in the case was one that we would have hoped for. The, although these decisions are usually more complicated than you'd like them to be, but the dramaturg's assertion was rejected. With the issue, whether the issue will come up again, maybe less a matter of litigation and maybe a matter of the kind of pressure that's put on you if you are working at a not-for-profit theater or you receive a commission and there is a dramaturg on staff who somebody you are expected to collaborate with whatever collaboration means. So again, it's an ongoing issue that we're dealing with and you will be too. I think that the thing to take away from the rent case is we produced an amicus brief on both the trial and appellate levels and the judge's decisions on both levels quoted our briefs to some degree and accepted our reasoning and they held and it's still true and this is the law for you guys going forward. You can't get a co-author by accident. It requires two things. It requires actual copyrightable contribution by both parties. So ideas are not copyrightable. But the court in rent said, okay, well except for the sake of argument that this was a copyrightable contribution. They really didn't get into the specifics. But it also requires the intent, the subjective intent of the two parties that they be co-authors. With Larson having passed away, they had to look at what they called indisha of authorship. What things did he do that would make it clear to a third party that he intended for her to be a co-author? Did he give her co-authorship credit? No, he gave her dramaturg credit. Did he give her approval over the text? No, he maintained the text and she only had input and advice. Did she have approval over casting or the other approvals that authors are entitled to know? It was his exercise of approval. So these are the kind of things that the court looked at. So when you're working with people in this context, it's the obligation of the other party to try and get an agreement with you if they want a co-authorship deal and it's your right to say no. Those are the kind of situations that the court is gonna look at if you're giving somebody a conceived by or a with or any kind of ambiguous kind of credit that could be thought of as a thorial, you're laying the groundwork for a claim. So I would suggest you not do that. You can be grateful in the thank you section..(audience laughing and laughing loudly in background.) Let's move on to orchestrators. Steven, could you tell us a little bit what issues have arisen between composers and their orchestrators? Yeah, in a way, Ralph, I'm gonna kick this back to you pretty quickly because I know you were looking at these contracts as they come in. Over the last few years, this is a fairly recent development brought about by sort of aggressive representation of orchestrators trying to expand the rights of orchestrators and arrangers in a composer's work. And part of it is the fuzziness of defining what the difference is between an arranger and an orchestrator, which is a somewhat blurry line. It's very clear if the composer has presented quite complete music to be orchestrated. It gets less clear when you have a composer who sings a tune and someone puts the tune down and provides harmonization, et cetera, of the tune. That gets to be increasingly blurry. And there are a lot of examples of this, including extremely well-known Broadway composers who... Tony-winning composers. Tony-winning composers of whom this was true. And so this sort of leaked into the orchestrator issue. I wanna kick it over to Ralph to talk a little bit about what he has been getting in terms of contracts. And we've had discussions with representatives of orchestrators and arrangers, again, to try to make sure our position is clear and understand their position such as it is. My understanding of the way it works with an orchestrator is that, again, they are hired by the producer as employees, obviously with the approval of the composer, generally you get to pick your orchestrator. But you're not hiring the orchestrator. The producer is hiring the orchestrator. The producer is paying the orchestrator in a way that's very clearly defined by the union, by the musician's union. And then over the course of time, if you have a show that's running for a length of time and generating income, as the composer, a certain amount is deducted from your weekly royalty to pay back the producer, what he, she, they have paid the orchestrator. Is it up to 50%? Yeah. But, and obviously if the run ends before that 50% is completed, so be it. But if it's running a good long time, that does get paid off. And my understanding is under that agreement, the composer owns the copyright to the orchestrations. Yeah. The composer owns the copyright under the APC and the work done by orchestrators and arrangers are done on a work for hire basis. And the producer assigns those property rights to the author, the composer. That's part of the deal. So under, the orchestrator is part of the musician's union. The musician's union has something to say about what orchestrators get paid. It has nothing to say about what arrangers get paid. So we have to look a bit, what's the difference? I mean, as Stephen says, this is a very fuzzy area. And so I'm gonna over generalize in a gross way to try and make you see what might be the difference. If you imagine an orchestration being, the arranger, a composer has provided melodic, harmonic, rhythmic elements score to an orchestrator, and the orchestrator takes that and assigns those lines, those notes, to various instruments in an orchestra, orchestrates. They technically may not add any additional copyrightable material to that score. It is an interpretation of that score to make it work for the size orchestra that is gonna be using that score. An arranger may be only, may be asked to change rhythms, may be asked to change harmonic elements for a specific moment in a show, for specific uses. They may be adding copyrightable, theoretically, material to the score. And that's why the union doesn't represent them, because if they're authors, they're not employees, they're not union members, but orchestrators are employees. So the orchestrator should be getting for their orchestration the fees that they get from under the union guideline, plus what are called new use fees. When the orchestration is used in a new context, for example, if you've produced it on Broadway, you then wanna use that orchestration for stock and amateur licensing. That's a new context. And so an additional fee is paid. If you want to do it for a movie, if you wanna use that music in a movie, that's a new use. If you wanted, you know, cast album, there's a new use, all of those. But what if the orchestrator and or arranger wants a fee, not just for new uses, but for reuses. If they're going to do another first class production somewhere, maybe in Europe, maybe a touring show. That's not provided for in the union contract. That's provided for in a side letter deal that you as composers are asked to sign by the producer with the orchestrator as a condition of them signing their contract and doing it at work for hire. They want you to sign a side letter, giving them all these additional fees. And if they don't get paid those fees, you can't use their orchestrations, they say. That's a question still. But anyway, it's making all of these things more expensive. If you look at the growth of the cost of orchestrations compared to the cost of the growth and the cost of any other aspect of a theatrical production, it's disproportionate to say the least. But that's part of the cost of doing business, okay, the orchestrator, the composer is being asked to bear these additional costs now. And so there's now a conflict between the composer and the orchestrator. So we're trying to, it's too important a relationship to leave like that. And so we've been in conversations, we've been having some round table discussions with composers, with their representatives to see if there's some way to resolve or come up with an industry standard that everybody's okay with. May I ask, has the use of, because this is something that I'm ignorant of, though I know in execution, I always wind up, my orchestras always wind up getting paid for the stock in amateur. But is that really a new use? It's not a new use, it's a, well, it is a new use because the contract with the union has a provision that says if you want to do the stock in amateur, it calls it a reuse, a new use, and it says you can pay a discounted rate. If you exercise that option within a certain amount of time. So the producer can sort of pay a quick option on the orchestrations without having to pay the full fee if they do it quickly. By the way, one of the things that has been happening recently with some aggressive representatives is they have said that their clients are refusing the discounted rate. Yes. At which point, what I have done and what I recommend doing is to say then I'm getting a different orchestrator. And at which point the orchestrator then accepts the discounted rate. Right. What you're buying when the composer reimburses the producer, what they're buying is the physical scores. You already own the copyright in the scores, which you're buying is the physical scores that you can take and give to the stock in amateur licensing house so they can make copies and use it for their licensing and other producers and productions around the world. So it's becoming less and less valuable for composers to do this since especially in the digital age when there are no physical scores necessarily, there could just be a digital file that is emailed back and forth and sent to the, eventually somebody has to print something out so there will be a physical score so there's at least an argument that the producer still has to be paid back for that. But it's becoming less and less valuable to the author to pay this option, this fee for you might be better off hiring a new orchestrator than paying the reuse fees that are attached to them. So I think that's enough on that. I'd like to switch us to production issues. After collaborator issues, the biggest major issue is what happens when a show is in production and what issues arise that impact the author. I'd like to talk about subsidiary rights and what the Guild has been doing about that over the years. John, can you start us up on that? Yeah, I can start, and I'll pass it up to Stephen and we can talk about what's going on now. Over the course of the last four or five years, this is an issue that we've tackled head on starting in New York City. We're in New York City, that's where often these battles get fought for the first time, but the success that we've had there, we now expect to roll out across the country once we've established a kind of a standard with New York Not-for-Profit Theatres, and we're talking about not-for-profits for the most part. There are in New York, it's generally recognized to be sort of four preeminent not-for-profit theaters, Lincoln Center Theater, the Public Theater, the Roundabout Manhattan Theater Club. The sub-rights policy that was in place at the Roundabout was essentially this, that they would give a playwright a production on their off-Broadway stage. It would be for a limited number of performances, covering, let's say, a couple of months. The author's royalty would either be fixed or would be quite low, and in exchange for that, they expected 40% of the author's sub-rights going forward. 40% of a play which is not successful is 40% of not much, but if you take a play, and this was one of the plays that started this discussion, like Intimate Apparel, for which I think Lynn Nottage won the Pulitzer Prize, as soon as the run at the Roundabout was finished, there were dozens of other theaters that were interested in producing her play, and the issue was, given the compensation she had received from the Roundabout, was it fair for the Roundabout to expect 40% of her income from those subsequent productions? The answer is no. We entered into discussions with the Roundabout around another play, and in fact, and credit to the Roundabout, they recognized that fact, not comfortably or easily, and they changed their policy to something which is now eminently acceptable. They will run a play for a limited period of time. There was no sub-rights relationship. There's no sub-rights agreement with the author at all. If they want to extend the play, they can then enter into a discussion with the playwright in which they ask for a sub-rights participation. The playwright can say, no, I'm happy to have you close the play. But if the playwright says yes, the sub-rights participation is capped at 10%. Is that right? It's not. How high can it go? It will probably float up back up to 40. It can go back to 40. But let's understand that this pertains to shows at the Roundabout that run more than 18 weeks. They give you 12 weeks for a flat fee, up to another six weeks of extension for gross royalty. And then past that, they have to come to terms with you. But you get 18 weeks of presentation with no subsidiary rights obligations at all. If they go past 18 weeks and you make a deal with them, you make a deal on whatever terms you feel like making a deal with. The issue though is that they've never run a show more than 18 rights. In their history. So it's more theoretical than actual. I mean, we then, and I'll let Stephen talk about this. We then entered into what was essentially a negotiation with the public theater, which under Oscar Eustis, again, was eager to fix what once it was pointed out to them. They acknowledged was an imbalance in this area between them and their playwrights. And we arrived at a different arrangement, but one which seems equally equitable. It's a version of what's referred to as a windfall of sub rights participation in which the first $75,000 of sub rights income to the playwright is not touched by the theater. And then beyond that, the theater will participate. So it's only if the playwright has had a really successful play, which has had a vigorous stock and amateur life that the public then begins to participate. So the playwright is protected in that instance. Lincoln Center's never taken any sub rights. So we felt we would leave them alone. They're not trying to negotiate them out of that position. Although they do have a guild contract. They, you know, it's a certified guild contract. And Manhattan Theater Club, which was recalcitrant in this area for a long time in discussions with Stephen has made real progress. Not quite as much as we would like, but it's coming. And once this package is completed, I think it's fair to say the plan is to try and extend these standards to comparable theaters across the country. Did you want to add anything to this? Not really. I think John has given a, you know, really clear explication of this. We are close with Manhattan Theater Club, but there is one, I won't go into detail because the negotiations continue, but there is one area that is very, very significant to us in the guild that they have not yet agreed to. And that may founder the entire agreement we'll see. But the point is that we are talking quite actively and aggressively with those theaters which present new work and attach themselves to the author's income from the new work subsequent to those presentations and trying to arrive at some standard that is fair to the theaters, but also not over burdensome to the authors. And we're making progress in that area. I mean, just to add to that, one of the things that is sort of entertaining about this, it seems to me is that because not-for-profits have to make public filings that other theaters don't have to, we have had access to the information about how much money they have actually derived from these sub-rights' participation. And the numbers, particularly taken as percentages of their operating budgets, are insignificant. And so put us in a position to be able to point this out to them, something that you would think they would have known themselves. But again, it's one of those negotiations where you're dealing with- Egos? Well, yes, egos, but also very shifting senses of what's fair and what isn't fair. What am I as a theater entitled to as a result of having produced your play? Have I sort of done you a favor which has now made it successful around the country? The counter argument, of course, is, well, it didn't do the round about any harm to produce intimate apparel. It's good for them to produce both surprise winning plays. But there's a lot of emotion involved in these discussions. And we've been able to get past a lot of that, actually. I think part of that conversation was to show them that what was essentially paperclip money for their administration of their institution was grocery money, was rent money for writers. It allowed writers to keep writing in the theater. And if they weren't willing to invest in the writers instead of their overhead, that's a choice they're making. And they can make a different choice. And so some theaters have made a different choice and we congratulate them for that. We're gonna ask some other theaters to make that choice. I mean, Todd, Todd Hames, excuse me, Todd London did all of us a favor. I mean, I don't know how many people have read Outrageous Fortune here, but it's a dismal picture of what it's like to try and make a living as a playwright. But the fact that he quantified how dismal it is means that there's sort of an objective source of information about how much more it means to a playwright to receive $175 that you don't need than it does to you. And so hopefully it'll help us going forward. We're running out of time. So I wanna talk about the Dramatist Legal Defense Fund. This is a recent initiative. The Guild is created in part to try and deal with some of these issues that we've been talking about. John, do you wanna talk a little bit about it? Yeah, this is a young organization. For many years, the Dramatist Guild had virtually no money. Then all of a sudden, the Dramatist Guild had money thanks to Ralph and Stephen. And so some of that money was carved out to fund a separate organization which can be more immediately into use of, we'll be hearing the papers all the time, more nimbly involved in actual legal issues and litigation. The board consists of me and Ralph and Lauren and Rick Pappas and Sarah Rule and Lydia Diamond and J.T. Rogers. So it's a very nice balance between sort of attorneys and playwrights. And for example, at the moment, we're looking at anti-smoking laws, which don't seem to have a lot to do with the theater. But the anti-smoking law in New Jersey prohibits smoking in public places. And as a consequence, certain plays can't be done without changing the stage direction. You cannot smoke an herbal cigarette on stage. You cannot use an electronic cigarette on stage. So if you're doing 12 Angry Men, you've got a problem. And but if you think about the number of great American plays that look dumb if somebody's carrying a candy cigarette around the stage, this is clearly one assumes an undetended consequence of this legislation. So it's the kind of thing that we now have an organization which can step directly into this and try and get the law altered so that Emily Manitou-McCarty Theater can go back to using cigarettes, herbal cigarettes and her Edward Alvey plays. There was a Colorado law suit on this issue that TCG defended with the theaters. And we participated in that with an amicus brief on that one. But I think Chicago also has this very same problem. I'm not sure, but I remember getting contacted by a reporter in this town about a year ago on this very issue. So it's something we'd like to address nationwide eventually, but we're gonna need a test case and we'll see if we can find one. Meanwhile, the Defense Fund is a 501C3 non-profit organization that can accept donations for its efforts. So that's different than the GIL, this is a trade association. And we're going to be dealing with this and censorship issues, directors, copyright issues, anything that impacts the public domain because if you take work out of the public domain and give an ownership interest to Romeo and Juliet, to every high school teacher in America who directs a production of it, that's an impact on the public domain and on the rights of audiences to see that play. So those are the kind of questions we're gonna hope to deal with and we hope you will bring us some issues that you're dealing with. And right now I'd like to throw the floor open for questions. Yeah, what about how conversion times are over the director's right for future royalties or first refusal on productions which can be a real impediment to going forward with the play? What's the GIL's position on that? GIL's position is no. But you're under a lot of pressure. Yes, absolutely. Look, am I gonna tell you that writers don't give those? Yes, some writers give those. It will encumber your play. If especially early in the life of a play, if you've attached a director that a subsequent commercial producer doesn't want, the commercial producer has to buy out that director and then hire another director. So that makes your play more expensive to produce than somebody else's play. And you don't wanna give producers reasons not to produce your play. With regard to, and that's regards first refusal. What's interesting about first refusal is they want the right to produce the next production but they don't want the obligation to direct the next production because that's indentured servitude. We don't do that in this country anymore. But they certainly, there's a one way, there's an assumption that they, by directing your play, they have added value to your play, your copyright. But yet they have gained nothing from you so you have to pay them or give them future employment. No, directing your play has allowed them to present your play as their work, to other theaters, to work with actors, to work with designers. It advances their career. They don't do it out of altruism. They do it because their professionals looking to advance their career and think that your play is a vehicle for that. So that's the value they should be getting and you should be getting the value of having had the production. Everybody bears their own risk or should be but you're being asked to be a guarantor of their future employment. I tell you what, if you're gonna be their employment agent take 10% of what they make. And let me just add to that because this is, Stephen has been in the middle of this. I mean these conversations with the SDC about, they take place in New York and they have to do with relationships between playwrights and directors immediately in that area. But regardless of where the negotiations or the conversations go, correct me if I'm wrong, but the intention is to publish a set of guidelines that hopefully will allow you as a guild member when you're asked to do something that is offensive to say, you know what? My guild has published a set of standard behaviors that apply in a situation like this and I really have to adhere to that. That doesn't mean they're gonna go, oh well in that case you can have everything you want and we apologize. But it hopefully it's something which the guild, as your guild can do, which will support you when you're confronted with that kind of dilemma. Last night in that video that we showed that sort of says, introduces the dramatist guild to people. One of the pieces that I find the best in that is John Kander saying that being a member of the guild has allowed him to say, because he's not a confrontational gentleman, he has allowed him to say producers, I'd love to give you all my royalties, but I can't because my guild won't let me. And listen, it's all very well for us to sort of make jokes about saying no to directors, but you are right, there is an enormous amount of pressure to do so. And this is why we are working urgently to try to come up with guidelines. I will tell you that knowing in advance some of the things that I believe are going to be in these guidelines, I have just had a circumstance with a specific director on a new show who asked for more than these guidelines where I could say to the representative, I can't do it. So if he wants to direct the show, I cannot do that because the guild is not gonna let me do that. And that was the end of that discussion. And this is a pretty powerful director. So there is some value in that and some power in it, and that's why we're really trying to get some specifics for you guys. And I don't know if it makes you feel better or worse, but I mean, those problems don't go away when you get to be Stephen Schwartz. No, they don't. They don't. That's what I'm saying. You're always under a lot of pressure and there's sitting in that room that there's a letter from Clifford Odette's from 1930 something to the Dramatist Guild asking for help because I think it's a wake and sing. And he's saying, this is my first play and I really wanna get this produced and I like this director, but he's asking for things that I don't wanna give help. So this is an ongoing problem and it's one of the things we wanna try to be able to be helpful with. There are folks in the back who've been. I have the microphone. Okay, oh, okay. Oh, sorry. But a very brief. We can get to you, I promise. But a very brief question. Just the name of the rent case? The rent case, a Thompson v. Larson or is it Larson v. Thompson? One of those. There's a Larson and a Thompson. Yeah. There are guys in the back. The actual case. The cases and our briefs are on our website. So you can go to our website, the DLDF website. Go to the Dramatist Legal Defense Fund website and you'll see all these statements we've made about those cases and the year in town cases and everything else. Ned? On the first and third topics today, is choreography not copyrightable in some form? I remember working with the original choreographer of Ain't Misbehavin' on a project and he used to tell me stories. He would go around the country suing people for copyright infringement. Choreography is specifically identified in the Copyright Act of 1976 as being copyrightable. There are odd little things which work their way into the legislation. At the same time, you can make a case for choreography being copyrightable because of the issues, Ralph, I'll turn this over to you, the issues of fixation and... There's ways to notate choreography. Laban notation, other forms of notation is a bunch of them now. So that satisfies the fixation requirement for copyright. For copyright, you have to have original expression fixed in a tangible medium. So choreography, if it's original, you cannot choreograph folk dances and common movements, which is why a stage direction, when it claims itself to be stage movement or stage or choreography, that's one of the strategies directors have tried to use. The copyright officer said, no, it's not original movement. These are general scenes of fair. These are common movements. You can't choreograph them. You can't own them. But choreography as a category is a copyrightable category of expression. And secondly, on the orchestrator question, since I've been occasionally represented by one of these aggressive gentlemen, I think you mentioned. You didn't talk about royalties. And a number of my contracts, I've had royalties. Does the guild, never mind new use and reuse, and you've stated it all very well, but does the guild have a position about royalties? They can get whatever they can negotiate for. If the producer wants to give you, give an orchestrator 50% that's the producer's business. That does not impact, other than affecting the length of the run of the show. But it doesn't impact author. It does not impact the authors. What impacts the authors is when your show is going to be produced in Bolivia and you can't get the production, you can't get the orchestrations without some extraordinary payment for what is not a new use, et cetera. That's where it comes into play and that's what the guild is in discussions with. But orchestrators, and I'm happy to say that some of my best friends are orchestrators, do great work and I'm delighted that they make a lot of money from royalties from a long running show. They deserve it. I also have two questions. Is somebody like the STC or some entity lobbying to rewrite the copyright law when it's up to be rewritten to give directors make a direction or state directions copyrightable? And the second question is you said you're coming up with a set of recommendations for playwrights to deal with these issues. Would you go one step further and perhaps make an agreement, a boilerplate agreement, that you could give to a director that would say, if you direct a show you'll agree not to file a copyright or ask to write a first refusal. In terms of drafting a model agreement between authors and directors, that's something we've been thinking about. It may encourage it more than we want to. But the criteria within the memorandum we're going to issue, the white paper, if you will, will be very specific and give you or your representative the ability to draft an agreement that is consistent with those standards. Whether we actually give you a template for it, we haven't really decided yet. As to the first question was about the copyright office, you would think they would. But so far, in our discussions with the copyright office, they've told us that there's been absolutely no pressure or effort to include direction as a category of copyrightable work. That doesn't mean they won't. It's just so far no. Oh, I see somebody has a mic. Kind of far down the list of topics was contests and festivals and I know we're out of time. So I wondered if you could say quickly something about guild activities related to that. We're concerned when people ask you to self-produce under their banner and then ask you for sub rights on top of that as if they produced your show. It's morally reprehensible and silly. Sub rights are for producers, not for presenters. And if they haven't taken on the risk and expense of producing your show, they shouldn't be getting any share of sub rights. Also, the notion of contests or when they charge these excessive entry fees or submission fees, where does that money go? If it's going to hire readers to read your scripts, why are they having a festival if they can't afford the overhead or the staff to run it? Why is the author subsidizing their overhead to do these things? If they're taking all the money and giving it to the winner of the festival or contest, why are you subsidizing another writer's work or career? So there's just really no good reason for it, but it's sort of the genies out of the bottle to a certain degree on that. And what we've been trying to do over the years is maintain a lid, if you will. There are festivals of contests that we won't even print in our resource directory because they charge excessive fees. And if they charge any fee, we make note of it in the directory. So we try and give you as much information as possible without being too parental about it. And there are a couple of specific sort of major festivals that over the last couple of years asked for subsidiary rights and we very actively discussed it with them to the point where, in both cases, they withdrew that. So, but we like to know about it when that happens because we are vigilant about it. If you put more stage directions in your script, would we get rid of the directors? And the old company managers? I mean, why should they get rid of it for saying she lives over there if you wrote it? Well, let's not use this as an opportunity to bash directors. I get a bad rap for that as it is. I respect the director and the work they do as interpretive artists and their essential relationship to the author is fundamental to the theater. So I don't want to get into... Well, but actually your published script or the script that you are sending out, whether you are doing it yourself or it's being licensed, you are responsible for whatever stage directions or none you want to have in there. It doesn't matter what happened in the original production. You could include certain things or not, but she enters stage left, whether that's something that the director did or you would like to see the actors coming from stage left or whatever. That's entirely up to you. That's not copyrightable. And what's more, you should assume that most people doing the production will simply ignore it and bring her in from stage right because that's... There is some controversy, though. And stage directions as text have been copyrighted like you can't print these words in this order on this page without my approval, without having a right to perform that. So there's still some area of controversy regarding the reprinting of stage directions. I know some of the licensing houses get very skittish unless they have the directors okay to publish directions that you are including their stage directions in. But the point is that whatever the niceties of these specifics, it's the author's decision. The director can't simply willy-nilly insert his or her stage directions and say, here's the show. It's not up to them. There's nothing... No matter what you put in your script, it won't stop a director who wants to be adding stuff and sending it to the copyright office. So you'll be making yourself crazy. It's hard enough to write a play without trying to fend off a director adding material to your printed page. This is the last question here. Quite a lot, actually. We have the committee with Theresa and... Yeah, the three men sitting in here, though we've been pretty active as a guild, there's a lot going on with that. It's been spearheaded by Theresa Rebeck and Marcia Norman and Julia Jordan. They've done an enormous amount. We do the Lillie Awards now have become an annual thing celebrating the contributions of women to the past season. When there have been... We have been doing surveys of not-for-profit theaters taking a look at gender parity and when it is sort of egregiously unbalanced, we have pointed it out to the theaters and actually made some good progress. Sometimes they were completely unaware of it and fairly appalled when they actually saw the figures. This is something that is ongoing that we feel very strongly about, but we are not the best people to talk in great detail about it. Theresa's here and you can ask her about it because it's something she feels very strongly about and is active. Let me just add to that. I think one of the strengths of the Guild Council is that unlike other institutions, other unions, people on council are not people who would like to be playwrights but have time on their hands and so they do union work. The fact that Theresa and Julia and Marcia all come once a month to participate in running this organization has put them in a place where as an extension of the... Marcia was vice president for 10 years with me. One of the huge benefits of having people of this caliber running the organization is that when they take something like this on, it's not just the sort of Guild letterhead, it's really prominent dramatists attacking an issue like this and it makes people listen in a way that they otherwise might not. And on that I think we have to conclude. Thank you for coming.