Eric Bogosian
The Big Mass Media Talent Rip-Off
December 18, 1995.
Greetings, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
I have gotten some queries about the play "Scenes from the New World" which was published alongside Notes from Underground a couple of years ago. This is a set of three one acts, written to employ a small company with doubling in each act. It's a rewrite of a piece I did at Dance Theater Workshop in 1981, "The New World."
If you would like the entire transcript, we will send it to you free. Or you may download it in the near future. You can use this piece without any permissions or royalties as long as you are a bona-fide not-for-profit theater group. Just let me know you're doing it, take the script and fly.
A few observations as we enter the New Year:
If you wanted to create an apparatus that destroyed and removed the most talented people in the theater, i.e. the soul of the theater, you could make none more efficient than mass media. Like a giant eraser, this machine moves neatly over each year's prominent stars making them impotent and invisible. Promising deals, maybe some money, maybe some glory, the exciting talents of New York are drawn away and consumed like moths to candleflame.
A few people are not completely disabled by the grim reaper, in fact, one or two actually go on to greater success in the land of milk and honey. But imagine what the New York theater scene would be like if, instead of writers and actors flocking off to California to be forever frozen in the purgatory of "development", they stayed here, and made stuff?
Do I sound bitter? I shouldn't. I've made huge chunks of money wasting my time in this way. Since 1986, I've written six screenplays for studios and two TV shows for networks. One movie got made ("Talk Radio") and maybe one TV show will show up next season. I got to star in "Caine Mutiny Court Martial" with Robert Altman. And I write lots of theater stuff and I have a great time. But I am one of the lucky ones, and there have been days when I have felt very bad about the whole thing.
But there is a world of whirling swirling humans out there. There are even people in certain corners of the world who never watch TV or movies. Never listen to canned music. But everyone, everywhere, since the dawn of mankind, is hip to performance. That's sort of why when you're in your twenties you're drawn to nightclubs and concerts and performances. Because you're still alive. There's this need to go to the place where all the other people are, and see something performed live. Music. Comedy. Performance. Jeez, even theater sometimes.
As one gets older and more dead, pre-packaged sterile entertainment is more reassuring. I'll have plenty of time to watch TV when I'm dead.
What's weird is if you go back in time to a period when performance was all that people got as far as "entertainment", most plays were intense, many were scary. If you check out so-called "primitive" people, same thing is true. This is the kind of theater I like. Scary, intense. Even as recently as early in this century, people flocked to intensely dramatic theater. Now most stuff is either diversionary at best or grossly sentimental.
It's all supposed to be "amusing." Personally, I don't want to be amused. Amusement is not on my dance card. I want to be reamed. I want to be skewered. I want the Bacchae, I want Brecht, I want Woyzeck. And if I can't get that, entertain me, perform for me. But 'amuse' sounds too Kenny G. for me.
It's a truism to say that movies, TV and canned music are all dead media. In fact, they are machine-made. Might as well have electrodes sunk into my gray matter as a pair of headphones and some house music. Now, don't get me wrong. I like a blasting boom-box as much as I love jerking off and I'd be sad if I couldn't slink into a refrigerated movie theater in the middle of a hot, stinking New York afternoon and sedate my self with greasey salted corn while watching illuminated photos of people killing eachother.
But it's all dead. Which is to say, un-unique. Every one the same as the other. The movie (or TV show or record) is the same whether I'm there or not. That's why it's like porno as opposed to sex. Good theater is like having sex. It's different depending on who you're with. (It gets eerie when a transcendental master like Deepak Chopra is on PBS five nights in a row, being beatific over and over again like some kind of wind-up doll.)
Somehow I think the Internet is part of this revolution of live performance. And I think it threatens the system because we are connecting so fast and so cheaply. We caught them by surprise and now they're trying to think of how to shut it all down. (By the way, any Mike Diana fans out there? Censorship is Un-American!)
The formerly unnoticable, very alive tribes out there: the poetry groups, the theater groups, the non-major label music people...we can interconnect. And not be concerned about trivial shit like "adult themes" and "too much edge", instead actually using our free speech to let one thing happen. In the new world, just being human is being radical. Just caring about clear-cut logging or torture in Chiapas or free-sex or fun or peace or the tragedy of AIDS means being radical. We are living in the age of powerful networks of materialistic, mass-media hate-mongers like Pat Robertson and the Neo-Nazis. These are the people who blow up buildings and assasinate people. Not some geek like me who stands on a stage and says naughty things about Sally Fields.
Strangely, what was just recently so seemingly ineffectual is suddenly hugely powerful again. The word.
(P.S. Why do I do this page? Because I get to avoid the inherent censorship of "editors" and "producers." There are too many people out there second-guessing what "the people want.")
I started all this with a musing about show-business. Someone who read this page asked me to provide some "tips" for people starting out in "show business." Here's the tip: you're an artist, not a business-person. Leave the business to the business men.
