[Coco] [OT] Republishing Magazines

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 06:20 PM 1/3/04 -0800, Neil Morrison wrote:
>The Gershwin Estate hates the film and refuses to grant the musical
>rights

>Another example of problems with copyrights. And yet the recent TV
>version was released OK. Why this one? I remember this as a great
>production. Perhaps time has lent enchantment - I'd like to see it
>and judge for myself.

The film was not merely hated by the estate, but also by some critics and
even participants, many of whom were unhappy after the hiring of Preminger.

These are legitimate artistic issues that are way beyond our poor little
CoCo articles for meaningless publications. Porgy is an American
masterpiece, but Gershwin (like Mozart) died very young, and there remained
no one to fight for the artistic integrity of a production. Porgy is not
just a collection of songs; it is an opera, and as written in 1935 carries
with it sets of production values and philosophies. It has *significance*.
The 1959 Porgy had wonderful performances (a good half of them dubbed by
other singers), but a few good songs was not enough.

There are thousands of artistic issues which go beyond mere copyright,
while there are other issues of simple venality. It took the death of
Madame Berg for Alban Berg's great Lulu to be premiered in its entirety,
written in 1937 (two years after Porgy) but not heard complete until 1979.
She withheld the largely finished last act. Negotiations with post-Nazi-era
musicians for small change held back the release of the Wagner Ring as
conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler for some 30 years. Certain episodes of The
Twilight Zone have never seen syndication due to squabbles.

On the other hand, directors and composers with bad editing have withdrawn
their names from credits. Or imagine Ted Turner colorizing Woody Allen's
Manhattan or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin; he could get away with the
latter, but not the former. And don't forget how Disney ripped off
Stravinsky for Rite of Spring (used in Fantasia) because the neither the
U.S. nor Soviet Union recognized the pre-Soviet copyrights, and the
ever-cutthroat Disney saw an opportunity. (If anyone was ever curious why
Stravinsky did late 1940s rewrites of the 'big three' ballets -- Firebird,
Petroushka, Rite of Spring -- it was to withdraw the earlier versions in
favor of ones for which he could get paid.)

Yes, I'm a strong advocate of copyright, but there are issues of practice
that are not easily solved, as well as ethical questions posed that rail
against ironclad copyright. The worst legislation we have seen in years is
the copyright extension in the Sonny Bono Act a/k/a the Disney Copyright
Extension. That means, unless he releases them, none of us will see
articles Lonnie published until 70 years after his death.

But the protection of Porgy from the wide distribution of Preminger's
wreckage ain't so bad to me. :)

Dennis