>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:07 [ Pause ] ^M00:00:22 >> Maria Pallante: I'm Maria Pallante, I'm the Register of Copyrights and the Director of the U.S. Copyright Office. And on behalf of the senior leadership of the Copyright Office, I want to welcome everybody to the Library of Congress for this wonderful occasion to celebrate 100 years of the Dramatists Guild. You won't be disappointed. We've been looking at their history and the history of dramatists, in general, vis-ˆ-vis the copyright law, and what you should know is that it's very dramatic. There are pirates, there are secret agreements, there are betrayals, and all kinds of other surprises along the way. Our panelists today, whom I will introduce in detail later, are all members of the Guild, and I will just say they are so distinguished and accomplished in their fields that the words accomplished and distinguished are wholly insufficient to describe them, and that is just the best that I can do. They're just tremendous. Before we begin, I do want to thank, as usual, all of the people that contributed to making this possible today. From my staff, Rosemary Kelly, Chris Reed , Patricia Rigsbee, Cecelia Rogers, Jessica Sebeok, Syreeta Swann, and Aaron Watson. And I also want to recognize Tari Stratton from the Dramatists Guild, who we think now as an honorary member of our team. As we said, she's the Syreeta of the Dramatists Guild. And I want to also, as usual, extend a special warm welcome to all the government colleagues that are here. I know there are some from PTO and from Congressional Offices, and from the Department of Justice, and if there are others here that I haven't seen yet thank you, as always, for coming and supporting this program. So what is it that you should know about the dramatists? Let's set the stage by briefly recounting the relationship between the American theater and the American Copyright Act. I will say that you will see that you have the dramatists to thank for many important provisions in the law today, including very specifically and most importantly the first public performance right. And I will say that while everyone is a good advocate when they're speaking passionately about their cause, in looking at some of the legislative history and some of the early testimony and some of the dramatists' letters and published opinions in the newspapers on the issue of copyright, the poetry, the passion and the reasoned advocacy is just really amazing. In the early days, as many of you know, the copyright owners of books were afforded the exclusive rights of reproduction and distribution, and scripts could be published in books, but this did nothing to prevent others from producing or performing the script without permission. The early American theater environment was challenging, dramatists could not make a living very easily, if at all, from writing plays. They were usually attached to a stock company that paid them a salary. Payment of royalties was almost unheard of. If a playwright was lucky he might be granted some of the proceeds from an occasional third night benefit performance of his own work. In fact, because most works performed were imported and often pirated from Great Britain or from France, many American playwrights at the time served almost as editors for their companies. They had no say over production of their work, including casting, design, or amazingly even the final text. Around the 1830s, though, Americana playwrights began to agitate for a dramatic public performance right. Moreover, American copyright law was developing, and it was increasingly viewed not merely as a limited right of reprint, but as allowing authors to enjoy the long-term benefits of their intellectual and creative efforts. In the first half of the 19th Century the major arguments made in favor of a public performance right centered on the need to stem the tide of cheap imported dramas, and instead to nurture the development of homegrown American drama. The first public performance bill, the Senate bill proffered in 1841, was a critical development, although it was ultimately unsuccessful. From this point forward the dramatists were almost unstoppable in their advocacy. It would have secured to authors of a Òtragedy, comedy, play, opera, farce, or any other dramatic entertainment or the translator of any such production from a foreign language the sole right of representing or causing to represent any such production at any place of public amusement within the United States.Ó The main force behind the bill is thought to be the playwright and journalist, Robert Montgomery Bird, who had stopped writing plays after a falling out with his manager over profits, as well as the possession of the manuscripts of his plays. As a result of this quarrel, Bird reportedly abandoned dramatic authorship, never frequented the theater again, not even to witness his own plays, but he didn't stop advocating. He was also absolutely aggrieved that the Copyright Act applied only to citizens and residents of the U.S. British and other foreign authors received no returns from the sales of their works in the United States, and American authors had no recourse from foreign piracy. By the 1850s the absence of a public performance right was seen by many as the chief reason why there were so few good American plays. In the words of a contemporary journalist, Òif Shakespeare had been an American it would have been much more profitable for him to have made buttons than plays.Ó American dramatists who understood the need for protection and why the Copyright Act was important began contemplating organizing themselves, like their compatriots in France and England. One suggested that the formation of a ÒDramatic AuthorsÕ SocietyÓ was a necessary complement to statutory protection. Meanwhile, several prominent playwrights, including George Henry Boker, began working closely with Senators Charles Sumner and William Seward, whose pictures are there. They look very upset. [Laughter] And on August 16th, 1856 Congress enacted the first federal performance right granting authors of dramatic compositions designed or suited for public representation the sole right Òto act, perform, or represent the same or cause it to be acted, performed, or represented on any stage or public place during the whole period for which the copyright is obtained.Ó This 1856 amendment was the precursor to the public performance right for musical compositions, which would follow in 1897. The 1856 amendment, interestingly, also marked the first time that minimum statutory damages were in the Federal Copyright Law. The remedy for a violation of the Public Performance Right was payment of $100 for the first infringing performance and $50 for each performance thereafter. Despite the success, playwrights decided that these rights were insufficient. In practice playwrights were left to register their copyrights locally through time-consuming and complicated processes. The fines were too small to deter piracy and, in any event, the pirates learned to steal away in the night and take the productions to new jurisdictions as soon as they were threatened with legal action. Some of this will sound familiar to you. I want to mention this case for a moment. At least one playwright realized that the public performance right could not only be, would not only be a shield, but probably a sword. This was an interesting case, in 1868 this playwright, Dion -- and I will mess up the French -- Boucicault was sued by fellow playwright, Augustin Daley, who claimed that the play, After Dark, infringed his play, Under the Gaslight. Both plays contained that famous sensation scene involving the rescue of a hapless victim, tied to railroad tracks, although and under the gaslight the victim is a one-armed Civil War veteran. I don't know if you can see that he has one arm. And in the other the victim is a drugged army captain rescued by an alcoholic. The dialogue and the specific details of the railroad scenes were different, but the court nevertheless enjoined production of After Dark, finding that the rescue scene evoked the same emotions in theatergoers and that Òpart of the written composition which gives direction for the movement and gesture is as much a part of the composition and protected by Copyright Law as is the actual language uttered by the characters.Ó Perhaps the significance of Daley v. Palmer in the history of American drama and copyright is that the court explicitly linked copyright protection to the unique performative elements of a dramatic composition. ^M00:10:01 Okay, so 1870, so this is two years after the Daley case, the dramatists are beginning to organize, and Congress undertakes the second general revision of the Copyright Act. This revision retained the dramatic public performance right that was achieved earlier, but revised the language to give the copyright owner of a dramatic composition the right of Òpublicly performing or representing it, causing it to be performed or represented by others.Ó It also provided for a dramatization right, empowering authors to reserve the right to dramatize or translate their works. Prior to 1870 novelists were helpless to prevent frequent unauthorized dramatizations of their works. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was the most popular play of the 19th century, despite the fact that Stowe, herself, never authorized a dramatic version of that work. Notwithstanding this incremental evolution of the law, playwrights still remain dissatisfied with inefficiencies in preventing piracy and compensating playwrights whose work was infringed, and they accelerated their attempts to organize. This organization, the American Dramatic Authors Society, was short-lived, but it was the precursor of the precursor to the Dramatists Guild, which is why I wanted to show it to you, all the while dramatists interacting in the world of copyright domestically and internationally. In 1890 Bronson Howard, who was known as the first American playwright to make a living by writing plays, David Belasco, and other famous playwrights of the era, founded what is often identified as the first really effective dramatists group, the American Dramatists Club. The American Dramatists Club, which was later called the Society of American Dramatists and Composers, has been referred to as the granddaddy of the present Dramatists Guild, and it was formed to assure authors fair treatment from producers to attempt to set a standard for royalties and to fight play and song piracy. The American Dramatists Club was instrumental in a couple of major developments in the law. The 1891 International Copyright Act, often known as the Chace Act, which extended copyright to foreign nations under certain conditions, and the 1897 Cummings Bill, which imposed criminal penalties for unauthorized public performances of dramatic works. This is also the first time that the application of copyright damages was expanded from compensating the infringed copyright owner to also punishing the infringer, so members of the American Dramatists Club continued their vigorous participation into the early 20th century. In the 1909 omnibus revision of the Copyright Act, Congress at long last created a provision that enabled authors or assignees of unpublished dramatic works to secure federal copyright protection. There were conditions, they had to register and deposit the works with the Copyright Office. And from there the dramatists moved forward. The law was getting better, but in many ways in the practice playwrights remained at the mercy of managers and producers. Certain of these abuses perpetuated by managers and producers were described by one playwright as follows Ð Òroyalties were variable, prompt payment unenforceable, scripts changed arbitrarily, there is in fact no way to protect authors against assignments and bankruptcy, no arbitration provisions to settle disputes, to enforce rights other than expensive personal lawsuits.Ó In 1911, the Authors League of America was founded with the aim of securing domestic and international copyright protection for its members and remedies for all business relationships. By 1914 the 350 members of the Authors League included playwrights. Then it became apparent that the interest of novelists and the interest of playwrights do not necessarily overlap, and a subcommittee was formed to develop a model dramatic contract. Recognizing the plight of dramatists, the Authors League formed an executive committee to allow the dramatists to form an autonomous committee and the Dramatists Guild was born out of this new committee. Playwright Owen Davis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1923 play, Icebound, was the first president. Playwright Channing Pollock, who later wrote drama criticism that so agonized the Shuberts that they prevented him from ever going to their theaters, served as the first chairman. Among their very many accomplishments, a minimum basic agreement that would bind all members and protect their copyrights and financial interests became a priority, signatories of that early agreement included luminaries, like Oscar Hammerstein, George Kaufman, and Eugene O'Neill. In the many heated and contentious negotiations that followed with theater managers and producers, dominant points of contention were secondary music rights and the right to change scripts. This was perhaps a pivotal moment in American theater and for the Copyright Law and dramatists as we know them today. According to one founding member, George Middleton, who was at the center of these negotiations, he said Òit was the most important action the dramatists had ever taken.Ó It was the ÒDeclaration of IndependenceÓ for dramatists. Of course, not everybody was a fan. I just, I love this quote because it's insulting enough, but I don't understand why the baby is British [laughter], other than that George Bernard Shaw is British. I'll end here, I just wanted to end by saying that perhaps in Stephen Schwartz's Wicked, Elphaba is referring to the story of the Dramatists Guild when she sings, Òsome things I cannot change,Ó but I will try, until I try -- I'm sorry, Stephen, I'm looking at Stephen and messing it up. ÒSome things I cannot change, but Ôtil I try I'll never know.Ó I would like to thank the Dramatists Guild for its storied participation in the development of American copyright law, and I would like you to help me recognize them with a round of applause. ^M00:16:33 [ Applause ] ^M00:16:40 And now I would like to introduce Ralph Sevush, he is the Executive Director of the Dramatists Guild. He is an entertainment attorney. He graduated from Cardozo Law School. He, as the Guild's Executive Director, advises over 7,000 playwrights, lyricists and composers writing for the stage, and he is a regular contributor to the Dramatists Magazine. His talents are many. Early in his career Ralph worked for Sony Pictures, Rice Media, New Line Cinema, and other film companies in various aspects of motion picture marketing, distribution and finance. Later, as the Director of Business Affairs for Fremont Associates he worked on the Broadway productions of Big: The Musical, Fool Moon, and God Said, ÔHA!Õ, and the Off-Broadway and Los Angeles productions of Blown Sideways Through Life. He coproduced and general managed an Off-Off-Broadway revival of the musical, Philemon. Currently, in addition to his work at the Guild, he is a member of BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater LibrettistsÕ Workshop, and his play, Little One, Goodbye, was last presented as part of the ImmigrantsÕ Theatre ProjectÕs, ÒAmerican DreamsÓ staged reading series at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. It's my pleasure to introduce Ralph Sevush. ^M00:18:02 [ Applause ] ^M00:18:05 >> Ralph Sevush: The Dramatists Guild, actually, the 100th anniversary, it's a bit of a misnomer, it's sort of a second anniversary of our 100th anniversary. We're taking Jack Benny's device of remaining 100 for as long as we can. Round numbers are always favored. The Guild started, as Maria has discussed, it was a subcommittee of the Authors League. The Authors League is the entity that begins in 1912, out of which grew the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and even later the Writers Guild. So in those early days the Guild was a subcommittee of that organization. Maria covered very well the copyright history, so parts of this discuss that, and I'm going to skip over those because it's already been laid out for you, but at the beginning the Copyright Act was about printers and publishers more than the authors. And it wasn't until -- and in that context, 19th Century playwriting, as Maria discussed, is circumstances for playwrights was fairly dire, which is why there weren't that many of them. No royalties, no control, no ownership, if they were lucky, that's right, the third night benefit performance, that was the money from the third night show was given to the author, and then the producer on the play. As a result, playwrights were generally other things, they were actor- playwrights, they were producer-playwrights, they were theater manager-playwrights, or house writers because there was no way to make a living at that job. Later, Mr. Boker, there he is again, the most important factor here is the notion of royalties for performance and performance right becomes something that is exploitable. And I think it's apocryphal, but I'll tell you a quote I heard from Jerome Kern, given to Jerome Kern, I'm not that old, that he was asked once when working on Show Boat, the age-old question that songwriters in theater were always asked, what comes first, the music or the lyrics? And he said, Òthe check.Ó And there was no checks until Mr. Boker insisted on them. There's Mr. Howard again, our first professional writer, and these are the various revisions. Mostly what we come to is this notion of not only performances, but ownership, you can register your play even without publishing it. Many, very often plays were produced and performed without publication and, therefore, weren't protected, and at this point copyright becomes something playwrights can really appreciate. And in this era, 1912, you have the Authors League founded, there's Teddy Roosevelt, who is the first Vice President of the Authors League -- it becomes clear this is an era, the progressive era, the rise of labor in America, and there's a spirit of activism. And so the subcommittee of the Authors League, the Dramatists Guild Committee, starts working on contracts that they would like to see in the marketplace. George Middleton, who Maria mentioned, is sort of at the heart of this. And the efforts in those early days from 1915 to 1925 were in a constant promulgation of contracts, which were not adopted and were unenforceable, and probably Mr. Shaw's dissatisfaction with the Guild in that time related to that. But by the mid-1920s the radicalization of the writers' community had gotten to the point where they were insisting on a contract and they were going to strike over it. So there was the 1926 strike, playwright strike, the one and only time in our history. And a committee was drawn up to create a contract, Shaw wasn't on that, but Eugene O'Neill was, and Middleton, and George S. Kaufman, and they came up with a contract, the heart of which still exists today. That contract was called the Minimum Basic Agreement and later became known as Minimum Basic Production Contract. And at its heart was a concept, which was you producers, you simply cannot pay us enough to own and control what we write, so we're going to do that, thank you, and we will license to you the privilege of presenting our plays and profiting from them. Then those licenses will expire and the rights will revert to us, and we will do with our plays as we will. When you produce the plays you will hire directors and designers and actors and all of those hires will be subject to our approval. Our plays are our own. You will not change them, you will not change the stage directions unless those changes are approved by the author. And those radical notions, of course, were rejected out of hand. Mr. Middleton went across the pond and talked to writers, like Shaw and No‘l Coward, and convinced them that when the producers came to them as they inevitably would, to circumvent the writers in America so they could get plays to produce on their stages, when the producers did come Shaw and Coward said, yes, we'd love to license our plays to you as long as it's on the Dramatists Guild contract. So with their support producers finally conceded the point, and that contract exists to this day in different forms. There's been obstacles over the years, there've been conflicts with the producers, but the contract eventually became called, because known as the Approved Production Contract, which was negotiated in the mid-1980s and continues. And the Guild certifies each of those contracts as acceptable to our membership. The way the Guild works is since we are not a labor union, we are a voluntary membership association, a trade association, no one has to be a member of the Guild in order to have their work produced. If you are a member it is a condition of membership that if you do have a play produced on Broadway or a first-class equivalent production in the U.S. it's done on our contract. And such it is and such it remains because generations of playwrights have insisted on it, and for no other reason than that. Part of the evolution of the Guild has been to branch out into other areas in order to support playwrights in various ways. In the 1930s they created the Dramatists Play Service, which was a play publisher and licensing house which was then trying to exploit a market, which was not really tapped until then, which was the amateur market, the market for schools and community theaters and other nonprofessional production opportunities, which have grown over the years to be a very substantial part of the way writers make a living. ^M00:25:43 Maria said something about the original statutory damages were $100 for the first performance and $50 per subsequent infringements. It's ironic that that's pretty much still the rate by which shows are licensed into the amateur market by most publishers, $100 and now $75, over 150 years later we got a raise. So DPS was created to be a competition in the marketplace to Samuel French, which was the single most well established play publishing house in the world, and had an unfriendly contract for authors, and DPS created a friendly contract. And, as a result, over the years the Samuel French contract has begun to look a lot like the DPS contract. Though they were working in different markets, Samuel French and the professional and DPS and the amateur, now they both compete in both markets, and by the nature of that competition Samuel French has had to move along with the times and offer industry standard terms, and so they do. The Dramatists Guild Fund was created by the Guild in the mid-1960s as a charitable organization because many playwrights still weren't able to make a living as playwrights. There's another apocryphal quote, I think is allocated to Robert Anderson, a former Guild president, which was you can make a killing in the theater, but not a living. And so the Fund was created for those who weren't making a living, when in need they could go to the Fund for loans and grants. And over the years its role expanded to include grants to theaters who were producing original work by American playwrights to support that work, and they continue to this day to do that. And most recently the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund was created as a nonprofit separate organization, whose mission is to advocate and to educate on the issues of free speech and what we believe is important, which is a robust public domain. Those are the issues that we're facing today, those are the ways we've responded institutionally. I just want to tell you one last bit, which is about Arthur Miller, a former Guild member. This photo is testimony of HUAC, so I guess coming back to Washington is appropriate here to discuss Mr. Miller's work. He talked once when we -- the Guild gave him a lifetime achievement award about 15 years ago, and he spoke at the ceremony about the day he joined the Dramatists Guild. And he said he'd been called up to the offices of a producer named John Golden. John Golden was what they used to call an impresario, he owned his own theater, he had offices above those theaters, he produced all through the early part of the century, up to the 1940s and 1950s. At this point, Miller had written I think All My Sons and had won a Tony for that, but had not yet written Death of a Salesman, but he was a fair-haired boy of the time. The producer, John Golden, summoned him, and Miller went to meet Mr. Golden in his offices. They were discussing plans Miller had for future work and Golden's interest in producing them. He excused himself for a moment to go to the bathroom and left the room, and while Miller was waiting in his office he looked at the bookshelves. They were lined with beautifully bound leather editions of plays, and Miller took a closer look to see what plays they were, and he was shocked to see so many of them had been co-authored by John Golden. And so Mr. Golden reemerges, and Miller says, Mr. Golden, I didn't know you were an author, as well, some of these are musicals, you wrote music and lyrics, too? And he's like what are you talking about? Well, your name is on these plays. He said, sure, I produced them and I put my name on them. And Miller said that's when I went outside and walked down the street and joined the Dramatists Guild. >> Maria Pallante: At this point, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you our distinguished panel. I'm going to start to my right with Stephen Schwartz, who is currently the President of the Dramatists Guild. He was born in New York City. He was educated at Juilliard and then Carnegie. He initially played piano for children's theater. He worked for RCA Records as a producer after graduating from college, and then he moved on to Broadway, where he met with very early success. All of you know Godspell, you know Pippin. At one point three of his musicals, Godspell, Pippin, and The Magic Show, were simultaneously on Broadway. He has also worked extensively in film. He collaborated with composer, Alan Menken, on the scores for the Disney animated features, Pocahontas, for which he received two Academy Awards and another Grammy, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He also provided songs for DreamWorksÕ first animated feature, The Prince of Egypt, for which he won another Academy Award for the song, ÒWhen You Believe.Ó He has recently collaborated with Alan Menken on the songs for Disney's Enchanted and in the works of DreamWorksÕ Bollywood movie titled, Bollywood Superstar Monkey. A book about Stephen's long career, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz, from Godspell to Wicked, was published in 2008. And I'll just say it may be premature to call that your capstone book ... >> Stephen Schwartz: I hope so. >> Maria Pallante: ... given the work that you're still doing. ^M00:32:04 To my left, I'll introduce everybody first and then we'll talk -- to my immediate left we have Doug Wright, a Dramatists Guild Board Member. He is not from New York, but from Texas. He earned his bachelor's degree from Yale and an MFA from New York University. You did end up in New York, though, I'll point that out. He was awarded the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the Drama Desk for his play, I Am My Own Wife. In 2006 he received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for his book for the musical, Grey Gardens. He also authored the book for the stage incarnation of Disney's The Little Mermaid, and the 2013 stage production of Hands on a Hardbody, for which he received a Drama Desk nomination. Earlier in his career he won an Obie Award for Quills, and subsequently adapted it for the screen. The film was named Best Picture by the National Board of Review and nominated for three Academy Awards. His screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and received the Paul Selvin Award from the Writers Guild of America. Other film works include rewrites on major releases at Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and the Weinstein Company for director Rob Marshall. Wright penned the television special, Tony Bennett: An American Classic, which received seven Emmy Awards. ^M00:33:31 And, to my far left, Gwydion Suilebhan. He hails from Baltimore, Maryland, not too far away, and received his masterÕs degree in Poetry from Johns Hopkins University. He is the Washington, D.C., rep to the Dramatists Guild and a Founding Member of the Welders, a D.C.-based playwrightsÕ collective, and the author of The Butcher, Reals, Abstract Nude, The Constellation, Let X, The Faith Killer, Cracked, Anthem, Evolution, Hot & Cold, The Great Dismal, and Buggy & Tyler. His work has been commissioned, produced, and developed by theaters in New York, Chicago, LA, D.C., Baltimore and St. Louis, including Active Cultures, Centerstage, dog and pony dc, and others. He writes for stage for screen, for print, and throughout the blogosphere, including HowlRound and 2amTheatre. He is a frequent speaker on theater and the arts around the country, including for the Dramatists Guild National Conference, South by Southwest, the Ethical Society and academic institutions. His publications include two of his plays, Abstract Nude and Cracked; Inner Harbor: Ten Poems, and more than 75 articles on poetry, education and cuisine, and the Foreword to The Complete IdiotÕs Guide to Grammar and Style. [Laughter] Gentlemen, welcome. Now, Stephen, I'd like to start with you, and there's so much to say and not a lot of time, so let me give you some open-ended questions. What does the Dramatists Guild mean to you and how do you interact with the copyright law? >> Stephen Schwartz: Well, I first became a member of the Guild right when I came to New York. My agent, Shirley Bernstein, who was Leonard Bernstein's sister, when I began aspiring to work in the theater encouraged me to become a member of the Dramatists Guild right away. And relatively shortly thereafter I had an experience, which made me, (a) very glad that I was a member of the Dramatists Guild and (b) extremely glad that as a playwright, thanks to your office, I and my collaborators, my writing collaborators, own the copyright on our own work, and that had to do with the show, Pippin. When, after the Broadway production of Pippin, as it began to be available for licensing to other theaters and companies who wanted to do the show, my collaborator, the book writer, Roger Hirson and I, dissatisfied with the ending of the Broadway show, decided that we were going to change it among some other changes we wanted to make. And the producer of the show, Stuart Ostrow, and the original director of the show, Bob Fosse, were opposed to this because the ending was something that they had fashioned. And so ultimately this became an arbitration, and the Dramatists Guild stood for me in this arbitration, and we won, which meant that authors had the right to make changes to their work for subsequent productions and whether or not the original producer felt that that was diminishing the value or hurting his feelings or whatever the objections were, nevertheless, because we were Guild members and subject to the Guild contract and because we were copyright holders we had the right to do that. Shortly thereafter, a few years later, my show, Godspell, which was becoming popular abroad, was offered a production in South Africa in 1974. This was during the era of Apartheid, and because I and my co-writer, John-Michael Tebelak, held the copyright rather than producers, et cetera, we were able to say to those theaters who came to us from South Africa that we would not allow the show to be done unless it were performed before an integrated audience and with an integrated cast. And for some time they resisted, but ultimately due to the -- fortunately, due to the popularity of the show, finally producers came along who agreed to do that, and while it was never performed in Johannesburg, it was performed in Cape Town that way. That sort of resistance to the Apartheid, which John Michael and I were very opposed to, would never have been possible without our copyright ownership. And only just recently, a very similar case, I've been approached about a couple of shows of mine being performed in Moscow, which is now more of a venue for touring shows, in particular touring musicals, due to the new laws that Mr. Putin and his compatriots have established the anti-human rights laws affecting gay people, I'm not allowing any shows to be done in Moscow, any shows of mine for the time being. Again, I wouldn't have the right if this were a movie or something where I was work-for-hire, but I cannot only protect my own work and how I would like to see my work done, but where it's done and under what circumstances thanks to the Dramatists Guild and thanks to the Copyright Office. So these are just a few anecdotal examples of how significant it has been to me. >> Maria Pallante: Thank you. And, Doug? >> Doug Wright: Oh, it's -- I think I first became aware of the Guild when my mother would take me to the Dallas Public Library on Saturdays, and she'd be researching and I'd go to the periodical section. And there was an old magazine -- I don't know if you guys remember it, Theater Crafts, that used to come out, and there'd be articles about the Guild. And so when I came to New York and started writing plays in college I joined the Guild as an Associate Member, and now I serve as their Secretary. And if you work in the theater you're also inevitably a fan of the theater, and I have to say that it is a peak thrill in my month when we have our Council meeting and I get the stray chance of sharing an elevator ride with Edward Albee and sitting at a table there, where not only luminaries, like our beloved President, Mr. Schwartz, sit, but where I know Rodgers and Hammerstein sat, and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. So for sort of an impressionable young, furtive little writer in Texas it really seems monumental to be a part of the Guild. And copyright, for me, is absolutely fundamental to what I do. I know we might touch on this later, but I also work a great deal in film and television. And in film and television you are a writer-for-hire, and so the material is owned by your employer. If it's a TV show it might be owned by HBO, if it's a film it might be owned by Warner Brothers, and so writing in Hollywood is a perilous profession because you can be replaced at the drop of a hat, you have no say over the ultimate realization of the material, and most screenplays weather seven or eight writers before they actually go into production. So I know many of you have gone to the movies and it'll say screenplay by Bob and Ted and Sheila, and I used to always have this image of Bob and Ted and Sheila in a little cottage on 20th Century Fox's grounds, you know, drinking beer and tossing popcorn at each other while they wrote the script to Chinatown. Well, that's not how it happened. People, writers were summarily replaced over time on this hypothetical project, and maybe there were eight writers on this movie. All of those scripts were then submitted to an impartial board, which went through each draft of every writer's script to determine what percent of verbiage was used in the resulting screenplay, and the writers with the top four percentages get credit on the screen. So these are writers who have never met, probably never exchanged a word, and probably have a fair amount of animosity towards one another, as well. [Laughter] And I'll never forget that I was summoned to work on a movie in L.A., it was the adaptation of a very popular novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, and I was about the eighth or ninth writer on this project, and so I knew that a lot of writers preceded me. This particular project was wildly idiosyncratic because we had a lot of Asian actors cast who didn't speak English and were going to learn their lines phonetically, so I had to create lines for each actor that eliminated any problem consonants that didn't exist in their native tongue so that they could learn these lines phonetically. I spent about six months in LA. I lived on set for most of the film. I had to rewrite every line, given the nature of my assignment, and at the end of the day the script went before an arbitration committee. And I was in London at the time seeing a show, and I remember I was absolutely frantic, dying to know, did I write this screenplay [laughter], what was this committee going to decide? And I got a text that told me that, in fact, I had not written the screenplay, Memoirs of a Geisha. Now the compensation was I can compare I Am My Own Wife, a play that I wrote which I hold copyright to, which has been produced all over the world now from Zimbabwe to Taiwan, always in productions I approve, only using my text, only with my blessing. I was paid a certain fee by the theater company that commissioned that play, I was paid 80 times that fee, 80 times for my uncredited work on Memoirs of a Geisha. I would choose copyright every time because that's my play, it's an extension of my imagination, and it suggests that our imaginations and the products that they create have enduring value in the world. And it's precious, it's indispensable, and it's why those of us who work in our media return to the theater again and again. It can't offer remuneration, it rarely offers fame, but what it does offer is ownership and autonomy of your own work. >> Ralph Sevush: I've often said that it's one thing to be treated like a screenwriter, if you're being paid like a screenwriter, but quite another to be treated like a screenwriter and paid like a playwright, which is the worst of all possible worlds. >> Maria Pallante: Thank you so much, Doug. Gwydion, tell us about your experiences? >> Gwydion Suilebhan: So I came of age as a dramatist after a career in academia and as a poet in the Internet age, and that informs in many ways everything I think about my relationship to both the Guild and to copyright. As I was discovering my voice as a writer for the stage I went to learn what others were doing and the way that we learn anything now is by the University of Google, and I kept finding this thing called the Dramatists Guild. What is this, what is this curious thing? And I joined purely out of aspiration, purely to say I want to be a part of this, I want to be one. I had had a production, and I met the requirements of membership, and I just, this was fascinating to me, and the more I learned the more I just felt this could be an important part of my life. And, in fact, it has become really an important part of my life. The Guild, for me, is my community service. I'm the representative to the Guild for the city that we're in here, and serving the playwrights who live in this community, and being their line to these folks in New York is really important to me and to who I am. The fact that the Guild serves us all and has done a lot of work to protect us over the years, over 100 years, is really great. And so that's -- my relationship to the Guild is one of humility. I see so many people who have made amazing stands for things generations before me, and I see that all as a great gift that I've been lucky to inherit. The same is true really for copyright, so all the protections that we have, that Stephen had to fight for and make tough decisions in his own career about and that have protected Doug are now protecting me, as well, because they fought and the people that we saw on the projection fought and made tough decisions, so it's a privilege to have inherited that. At the same time now because I come from the internet age and the Internet is so important to what I do as a writer at the intersection of the arts and technology, copyright is also a thing that's in some ways become a hindrance because the culture that I inherit is from the people who came before me is so deeply locked down by copyright that the engagement with past culture is difficult. So I'm both protected by it and restricted by it at the same time. >> Maria Pallante: So let's have a conversation, and I want you all to jump in, but we've spent a lot of time today talking about the past of the Dramatists Guild and then your careers and how you got to where you are. I'm imagining that all of you interact with young dramatists or aspiring dramatists pretty frequently, in fact, that's probably part of your leadership work at the Dramatists Guild, what kinds of questions do they have and what kinds of things might you be worried about as dramatists move forward in the 21st century? >> Stephen Schwartz: Well, I think one of the things that is of concern is exactly what Gwydion has just mentioned, which is albeit what we do is meant to be performed on a stage, nevertheless, the arrival of the Internet changes things. First of all, there's a lot of piracy, and you can find, for instance, just with my own work if anything happened which was that I needed for a certain reason to be able to show somebody a copy of Wicked, which of course technically has never been recorded legally, and all I did was call a friend of mine in Los Angeles, who I know has -- he has like eight different versions of Wicked pirated, and just said could you send me one of those? So the point is we have to start dealing with this, both from that point of view, but also from the point of view that Gwydion raises, which is where is the copyright and sort of the old positions of the Guild, where are they now restrictive, where are they getting in the way of the development of new works, and how can we balance protecting authors and giving us some of the feelings of control and ownership of our own work that Doug and I have talked about without being too restrictive. And this is something that we're trying to figure out, along with you and your office and others who deal with this. And then I would say the other big issue is for theater the fact that movie companies and producers, et cetera, are constantly pushing back against the Guild and constantly, frankly, trying to establish the work-for-hire model in the theater and different of the trades are sort of chipping away or trying to chip away at authors' rights, so a lot of it is sort of trying to control and stem that tide. And I think those are two things that are of current concern. >> Doug Wright: And the dissemination of our work over the internet, the fact that scripts can be downloaded, and then presumably productions mounted without our engagement or participation, and the fact that we have no formal mechanism to police this practice and no real concrete recourse when we discover that it's been happening. And, of course, as writers we live to see our work realized, but we also expect and hope for compensation because of it. So we are, as owners of our work we're also cast as its warden in a way and don't always have speedy or clear recourse when our rights are violated. >> Gwydion Suilebhan: And the onus is on us instead of on YouTube to protect our own copyright, and that seems a little unfair. >> Maria Pallante: Let's switch gears for a moment and just talk about for the audience because I don't think everybody is an expert in the theater, how are shows produced, how are they financed, tell us about the business side. >> Gwydion Suilebhan: I'm going to listen to you guys. >> Stephen Schwartz: In a bunch of different ways, you know, I work mostly in the commercial theater, as opposed to the not-for-profit theater, though I'd rather work for the not-for-profit theater, but that hasn't really happened. It can happen in various ways, but more often than not a writer or a couple of writers will have an idea to do something. Sometimes it will involve getting rights to that work. That's what happened in the case of Wicked, I came across the book, I was interested in adapting it, I discovered that the rights were held by a movie company, Universal Pictures. I had to go and talk them into doing a musical. Then I went to meet with Gregory Maguire, who wrote the novel, and was able to persuade him to allow me and my collaborator to do an adaptation. In that particular case most of the financing for the show came from Universal, but there were individual investors as well. A lot of times things then get developed through workshops, readings, ways of working on the show, seeing the show, making changes and presumably improvements in the show without the huge expenditure that a production demands, and then ultimately if one is lucky it leads to production, so that's sort of one way that it gets done, certainly with musicals. >> Doug Wright: It's also, I would say the way that playwrights participate in a theatrical production financially is very different than the way that our colleagues do because we do own our work, sometimes it's commissioned and we're paid a small fee up front, but usually we're not given a fee for its initial production commercially or at a nonprofit theater. And then the director gets a fee for his services, the actors get a weekly paycheck, the designers are all retained, but the author doesn't actually start earning money from the production until it's running and because, again, they own its content they start to make their money off royalties. So we get paid last, but we get paid over time, so interestingly it is the subsidiary rights and royalties from productions we've already done that allow us to tenably live and support us while we're writing the next work, and it's only because of the fact The Little Mermaid is happily a hit in Tokyo at the moment that I was able to survive Christmas and underwrite the writing of my next play, which has been commissioned I think for the princely sum of something like $5,000, but it'll open in New York next fall, so it's the proceeds from the last project that are underwriting the next project. And, again, our financial lives work that way because they are dependent on royalty, and royalty is in turn dependent on copyright. We don't get salaries or fees like our colleagues do. >> Gwydion Suilebhan: A paycheck is like a letter from you five years ago, saying hi. [Laughter] In large measure the nonprofit theater is funded by individual donations and foundations, so it's a completely different transaction than the commercial theater, and it's really dependent on the largess of people who want to make theater happen and give it to the world. So every paycheck I get is a gift that somebody decided to give to, usually to an institution, who then says I'll give some of that to you. >> Ralph Sevush: The problem over the last 20 years or so, especially in the nonprofit theater, is the notion of subsidiary rights. Subsidiary rights are the rights authors have in their work after that initial production, after that producer is sort of out of the picture and no longer involved with the production they earn an ongoing passive revenue stream, an interest in the author's future use, in the stock and amateur licensing, in the foreign licensing, in movie adaptation, if you're so lucky. But that model is a commercial theater model, but what a commercial producer does is say, look, investors, I've got these rights from the author, we can earn 40% for the next 20 to 40 years of the author's work if we mount this show. So that's the asset that the producer is trying to monetize, that he's trying to sell to investors. Nonprofit theater works on a very different model, they have a season that is subsidized, not just through ticket sales and subscribers, but through state, federal underwriting, corporate grants, private donations, and it's -- they receive a tax exempt status for doing this work. Essentially, theater is charitable work. So when they turned around and say we also want a share of your subsidiary revenues, that's a problem because there's no rationale for it, the way there is in the commercial theater. They don't need to sell to investorsÕ future profit. They, in fact, shouldn't be profiting off the back of the authors, who they've received tax-exempt status to produce. So we've worked in recent years to explain that to the theaters, who have been more receptive on this question, and particularly the New York theaters, which some of which used to take a huge chunk, have now agreed to a whole range of rollbacks on that, and we expect that to continue throughout the country. So that's one of the issues, the economics of the production and how that filters down to the economics of the author, and one of the examples of what the Guild is doing relative to that. >> Maria Pallante: So one of the challenges that we have in the copyright space generally is that as copyright law has gotten more and more complicated it happens to be at the exact time when more and more people are interacting with copyrighted works. And so bridging that through educational programs is a challenge, and just generally trying to educate the general public, I think there's not an industry in the copyright space that isn't trying to work on that. But, you all, have produced works that everybody loves, everybody sings, everybody goes to see, people see the play, read the book, watch the musical, want to see the movie, et cetera, and you're beloved and all of the impact that I think you probably hoped for has happened. But what is your experience with people maybe appreciating the fact that it is your intellectual property? >> Stephen Schwartz: Well, I've had a couple good experiences recently with what I guess would be called derivative works, and two songs from Wicked I was approached by two different writers who wanted to interpolate some of those particular songs into a new work that they, one, the singer- songwriter Mika wanted to take the song, ÒPopular,Ó and write a whole other what turned out to be really terrific and clever song around it, and recently a young lady in Canada has interpolated some of ÒDefying GravityÓ into a song. What was nice about that was they didn't just steal it. Because of copyright both of them got in touch with me, asked for permission to do it, which I was happy to grant. I do share in the compensation, the royalties from those works, and I did, I was able to have approval in terms of saying, you know, there are certain things I don't want surrounding this work, I don't want stuff that I find politically or morally offensive, or I don't want pornography or whatever surrounding this, but that being said go and do what you want. That was an easy transaction, frankly, and very satisfying to me, and I think satisfying to them, as well. And this is the way it should happen I feel. They understood that I was copyright owner. They understood that they had to ask my permission, but it was pretty easy. And one hopes that with the sort of advent of more and more of the Internet and people downloading scripts and downloading songs and posting things on YouTube, et cetera, that there will continue to be through education, et cetera, a recognition that this work belongs to somebody, someone wrote it in the first place, which is the title of a little song that Alan Menken and Craig Carnelia wrote for a little anti-piracy video that I guess we could show at some point. >> Ralph Sevush: Do we have it? Yes, I guess we do. >> Stephen Schwartz: Oh, gosh, all right. This is sort of Muppets speaking to ... ^M01:01:52 [ Video ] ^M01:04:05 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:13 >> Maria Pallante: That was great. So I don't think I have any particular questions, but I'd love to hear any last thoughts you have, and then maybe if you're willing we'll take some audience questions. But what do you want us to know? What do you want Congress to know? What do you want your colleagues and other copyright industries to know at this point in time? >> Doug Wright: Well, it is interesting, we also talk a lot about derivatives and fair use and all of that, and we were saying earlier this morning and I think it's true that the notion that the plays I write will be protected by copyright for my lifetime and then some is very consoling to me because that gives the plays the requisite time to become established and known entities that have been guided in their production life by my oversight and vision. And when I'm gone and the work has concretized its reputation it then becomes available when it enters the public domain for rediscovery and reinterpretation and reinvention, but the play is rendered safe by the passage of time. And by that I mean Shakespeare's, ÒRomeo and Juliet,Ó has been interpreted a million ways since it was written, and yet if a production doesn't work or a director applies ill-gotten conceits to it no one ever blames the play. The play is regarded as a relatively reliable vehicle, and usually it's scrutiny that's brought to bear on the production, but that's because the play has had time to establish and perpetuate its reputation. And I think we would all agree that that's incredibly important, but that ultimately the public domain and fair use are incredibly important. I know that on the ride home we're all going to be fighting over public use of Under the Gaslight, about that soldier with one arm tied to the railroad tracks, all of us want to run home and adapt that precious nugget. [Laughter] But it's important that ideas and plays, themselves, be subject to continual interpretation, and I just also add as a sideline to what Ralph said about our subsidiary rights, I think it's important that we do keep an eye on them as writers and as increasing claims are made upon them we have to view those with a great deal of deliberation and caution because they represent our future revenue. And it's revenue from the last play that will generate the next play, and that's why any conversation about any claims on our work we have to regard with intelligence and foresight and caution. >> Gwydion Suilebhan: Yes, I would say my final thought would be that I think of the work of my imagination as both my property and as a gift I am giving to the culture at large, and those things are both true. And that's why I share Doug's sort of take here that while I'm alive to curate that experience of what I've created and to nurture and protect it and harbor it, then it ought to be my property to license and share it with the world, but after I'm gone it's a gift and I want the world to have it and take it and make with it, and the freer that is, the longer it lasts, I personally believe the further it will go. >> Stephen Schwartz: And I guess along those lines I would just like to say that I would -- this is very specific, but right now there doesn't really exist a mechanism yet within the Copyright Office so that if someone wants to do, to register a derivative of your work, like somebody wants to claim that they did a particular staging, let's say, of your work and that somehow that staging belongs to them, they can just register it and they're not required -- they're required to represent that they have my permission, but they're not required to prove that. And I would love to see some kind of mechanism where, it's sort of like what I was talking about with those two songs, what if they hadn't come to me, what if they had just claimed that it was okay with me? I really wouldn't have much recourse except legal and very complicated and expensive suits, et cetera, and it would be great if there were a mechanism that that could be avoided, great for me and easier I would think for the Copyright Office and for lawyers, et cetera. >> Ralph Sevush: I also think that people need to understand that as playwrights we're often on both sides of the copyright question, and for each show that's written there's an often an underlying work that's being adapted. So as much as we want our work to be protected and have the exclusive rights over it and control over it, eventually we understand that that work goes into the public domain, and that's the purpose of copyright law, not to create an entrenched artist class, it's to create work that eventually becomes the public's property. So the continual perpetuation of the duration of copyright is not something that many playwrights support. It's not -- you might think it counterintuitive and copyright owners may say, hey, that's enough, that's long enough, my life is okay, my grandchildren don't have to benefit for me to write this play, so that it serves to diminish the public domain when you extend copyright indefinitely. It also impoverishes the public domain when you bootstrap the notion of ideas into property, into intellectual property. Stephen mentioned staging of a particular version of the play, when a director claims an ownership interest in that version of enter stage left or whatever, it puts an encumbrance on the work that the playwright suffers from, but mostly from other directors suffer from, and the public suffers from. Doug was talking about Romeo and Juliet, you can imagine a scenario where every high school English teacher in the country who has directed a high school production of Romeo and Juliet registers their staging of Romeo and Juliet, and pretty soon Romeo and Juliet is no longer performable without paying a license for work that's been in the public domain for hundreds and hundreds of years. That's the danger going down that road of saying ideas are copyrightable. Directors are paid to have ideas, they are well compensated for it, they are part of a union that collectively bargains for their compensation. And so that's the right vehicle to deal with their compensation and not to attach themselves via copyright law to other people's property, and so I think that's an issue that we're dealing with on a regular basis, and we've had conversations with directors about this and there's been some understanding about that, but I think the public needs to understand that when a theater like a solo theater in Florida says it's okay to rewrite Brian FrielÕs play, and then he says, well, no, no, that's not okay. And they understand now that they have to restage the play, they don't like it, but that's Brian FrielÕs prerogative. When he's gone, when the rights have gone to the public domain they can do with it as they will. But playwrights have sacrificed too much to retain ownership and control for that to be given up lightly. Their words matter because they've invested too much in them. >> Doug Wright: And unlike film or television the theater remains fundamentally a literary art because the ultimate document of The Godfather is the DVD sitting on your shelf or the ultimate document of, you know, a miniseries, Rich Man, Poor Man, it's the DVD sitting on your shelf. A play is built of language, it's like a recipe and a cookbook that's going to be realized by chefs all over the world. There is no constant definitive single production or vision of it. It's solely on the page, it's the words committed to the page by the author that are the only constant through time because productions are ephemeral, they're not kept as films, they're not duplicated and sent all over the world. Productions are ephemeral and they evaporate, and they become memories, but the one constant in the theater is the printed word, and that's why the stewardship of any play should always rely on the person who committed those words to the page because they are what endure in our craft. ^M01:13:55 >> John Weidman: The Dramatists Guild was once described as a promise that playwrights would make to each other, and I think that's an accurate way to describe it. It is an organization that brings to the other playwrights from all across the country, and by bringing them together as a community and aggressively representing their interests it gives them a chance to reinforce the problems that each of them faces individually. The Guild has been in business for 100 years, and when you look back at the people who have served on the Council it's astonishing, I mean it's a Who's Who of the great playwrights in American history. >> Brian Yorkey: If someone said to me would you like to join a club that includes Steven Sondheim and Christopher Durang and Arthur Laurents and Marsha Norman and Lee Adams and Charles Strouse and dozens and dozens of other amazing, amazing people, would you like to join that club? Yes, you would. That club is the Dramatists Guild. >> Zina Goldrich: The Guild can get these amazing people in a room, and they're going to comment on new work, how great is that? >> Marcy Heisler: It really makes you a part of things, and it really is taking your dreams and making them very real. >> Chisa Hutchinson: The Dramatists Guild I think gets you thinking in terms of building relationships and going out and seeing people's work and being in the room and showing some face, you know? >> Itamar Moses: Writing is really solitary, the process of writing can be very lonely, and so I think the idea of a collective to which playwrights can all belong, that's just psychologically important. >> Stephen Sondheim: There's camaraderie about joining the Guild and being part of it, you are part of a movement that's larger than yourself. >> I think that the way to do a story like this is to write [inaudible]. >> Meredith Friedman: I think for young emerging writers it's really important to be part of a community because I think starting out you can feel very alone and not really know how to make a career in the theater, so it's really useful to get to know playwrights who have been doing it a lot longer than you and can give you really good concrete advice and steps to take. >> Rebekah Melocik: There's something about just having the clubhouse card, so people can say, oh, you're a writer? Do you have a show on Broadway? And you can say, no, I don't, but I am a member of the Guild and I am recognized and so this is what I have been doing. It just makes you a part of something larger. >> Nicholas A. Myers: It really keeps you in touch with everyone, and I think that's essential for somebody who is just starting out in theater, wherever it may be. >> Timothy Huang: It is absolutely community, and it is sustenance for your artistic spirit. ^M01:16:21 [ Music ] ^M01:16:23 >> John Weidman: The Guild, particularly in the last couple of years, has really blossomed as a place where playwrights come for a vast array of resources and programming. It feels as though the guild catapulted itself into the 21st century. The most obvious example of that is this absolutely vibrant website, which gathers together virtually all the information that a playwright needs. It's a one-stop shopping for a playwright, and there's nothing else like it. >> Lynn Nottage: The Dramatists Guild has been a wonderful resource in my life, from The Dramatist magazine, which I get bimonthly, to the panels and the mentorships that they provide. I have been able to see for the last few years firsthand how the Dramatists Guild advocates for playwrights throughout the country, and it's been absolutely astonishing. >> Annie Baker: The Dramatists Guild is such an incredible resource and wealth of information, and there's just such an incredible community of playwrights behind it. >> Clarence Coo: I'm a big admirer of The Dramatist, which is one of their publications. It's really neat to know that there's a publication that's out there just for playwrights. >> Jacob Yandura: The bill of rights actually it's so easily accessible to us, as well, because it's on the website. It has informed me about information that I would not even have known about. >> Victor Lesniewski: See, I've used the Dramatists Guild website quite a bit, you can read or see previous interviews from people who have gone through everything, so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel. >> Stephen Schwartz: So I urge you to consider that what is something that the audience knows that the character doesn't, or the character is trying to hide? >> John Weidman: On the business side I think the most valuable service that the Guild provides is to playwrights who are not represented by agents, not represented by lawyers, just entering the profession. The legal staff here is first rate and they provide playwrights who otherwise cannot get information of what their rights are and what kind of contracts they ought to sign from anyplace else, this is where they come, this is where that information is available. >> Lin Manuel Miranda: Theater is one of the last bastions where the writer has control, has power over his baby, and that's largely because of the Guild. >> John Kander: I know from my own experience how comforting it has been being basically a nonaggressive person to be able to say to a producer, gee, I would really like to help you out on that and give you all of my earnings, but my Guild won't let me. >> Carol Hall: Moss Hart said it best, the writer is the person who is there when the paper was white. The theater is the only place that I know where the writer can control her work. The Dramatists Guild exists to protect that right. >> Edward Albee: A writer doesn't belong to the Dramatists Guild is a damn fool because this is the only protection organization we have that tells us how to fight against these forces of darkness, and it will protect us and will help us retain our integrity. >> Terrence McNally: There's going to be a time in your life as a playwright you'll be so glad that you have the support, the experience, the savvy of the Guild behind you, and its tenacity and its ironclad recognition of the fact that it all begins and ends with the writer. ^M01:19:33 [ Music ] ^M01:19:38 >> Maria Pallante: Thank you, all, for coming, and from the Copyright Office to the Dramatists Guild we wish you the best for the next 100 years. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, all. >> Ralph Sevush: Thank you for being here. ^M01:19:51 [ Applause ] ^M01:19:54 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.