Heading towards more corporate control of the history books.
Seems like Showtime will have the authority to restrict distribution to PBS
and other venues.


April 1, 2006
Smithsonian Agreement Angers Filmmakers
By EDWARD WYATT

Some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking have denounced a recent
agreement between the Smithsonian Institution and Showtime Networks Inc.
that they say restricts makers of films and television shows using
Smithsonian materials from offering their work to public television or other
non-Showtime broadcast outlets.

Ken Burns, whose documentaries "The Civil War" and "Baseball" have become
classics of the form, said in an interview yesterday that he believed that
such an arrangement would have prohibited him from making some of his recent
works, like the musical history "Jazz," available to public television
because they relied heavily on Smithsonian collections and curators.

"I find this deal terrifying," Mr. Burns said in a telephone interview from
San Francisco, where he is filming interviews for a documentary on the
history of the national parks. "It feels like the Smithsonian has
essentially optioned America's attic to one company, and to have access to
that attic, we would have to be signed off with, and perhaps co-opted by,
that entity."

On March 9, Showtime and the Smithsonian announced the creation of
Smithsonian Networks, a joint venture to develop television programming.
Under the agreement, the joint venture has the right of first refusal to
commercial documentaries that rely heavily on Smithsonian collections or
staff. Those works would first have to be offered to Smithsonian on Demand,
the cable channel that is expected to be the venture's first programming
service.

A Smithsonian official who is managing the institution's content and
production assistance for the venture said yesterday that while the new
arrangement did limit the ability of commercial filmmakers to sell some
projects elsewhere, it ultimately would affect a small number of the works
that draw on the museum's resources.

"It's not our obligation to help independent filmmakers sell their wares to
commercial broadcast and cable networks," said the official, Jeanny Kim, a
vice president for media services for Smithsonian Business Ventures.

"What it boiled down to is that we don't have the financial resources, the
expertise or the production capabilities," she added, to continue to provide
extensive access to materials but not to reap any financial benefit from the
result.

She said films that made incidental use of a single interview with a staff
member or a few minutes of pictures of elements of the Smithsonian
collections would be allowed.

The Showtime venture, under which the Smithsonian would earn payments from
cable operators that offered the on-demand service to subscribers, comes as
the Smithsonian has suffered financial problems. At a Congressional hearing
on Wednesday, a Smithsonian official said some necessary repairs to
Smithsonian buildings could not be made because of lack of financing. That
led to a suggestion by Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia,
to suggest that the institution should charge admission, a proposal that its
board of regents has rejected repeatedly.

The Showtime agreement began attracting widespread attention this week as
filmmakers said they had been told that some of their projects might fall
under the agreement. Two Smithsonian curators, who were granted anonymity
because they feared for their jobs if they spoke publicly about the Showtime
venture, said in interviews yesterday that they could not be certain what
kind of projects would be subject to the restrictions because details of the
contract with Showtime had been shared with few employees below the
executive level.

Linda St. Thomas, a Smithsonian spokeswoman, said the details of the
contract with Showtime were confidential and would not be released publicly.
She said the outlines of the agreement had been left deliberately vague to
allow the Smithsonian to consider "on a case-by-case basis" whether a
proposed project competes with its new television venture or not. A Showtime
executive, Tom Hayden, said the deal was not intended to be exclusionary but
was intended to provide filmmakers with an attractive platform for their
work.

One well-known filmmaker, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, said she had been told
recently by a Smithsonian staff member that her last film, "Tupperware!," a
history of the creation and marketing of the venerable food-storage
containers, would have fallen under the arrangement, because much of the
history of Tupperware is housed at the Smithsonian. The documentary, which
won a Peabody Award in 2004, was broadcast on "American Experience," the PBS
show produced by WGBH, the Boston public television station.

"This is a public archive," Ms. Kahn-Leavitt said. "This should not be
offered on an exclusive basis to anyone, and it's not good enough that they
can decide on a case-by-case basis what they will and won't approve."

Margaret Drain, a vice president for national programs at WGBH, said she
feared that public television programs like "Nova" and "American Experience"
would suffer greatly because of the new restrictions.

"These are programs that regularly rely on the collections of the
Smithsonian Institution," she said. "If access is restricted, we are really
going to be in trouble."

She added: "I'm outraged that a public institution would do a semiexclusive
deal with a commercial broadcaster."

–
Lee Wells
Brooklyn, NY 11222

http://www.leewells.org
http://www.perpetualartmachine.com
917 723 2524