The Ordinary Authors of the Bureau of New Plays: Copyright and Reallocating Authority in the American Theatre (1936-1949)

Authors

• Brent Salter, Stanford Law School

Abstract

This Article examines the brief history of the Bureau of New Plays, a nonprofit enterprise funded in 1936 by seven major Hollywood film studios and administered by the Theatre Guild's Theresa Helburn, to identify and develop talented young American playwrights. A study of the Bureau of New Plays provides a window into the authority that playwrights, and particularly younger writers, exercised over the work they created. In one respect, the establishment of the Bureau of New Plays complemented American copyright's general trajectory toward the expansion of the rights of the individual author, and in the context of the theatre the greater legal recognition of the American dramatist. The rhetoric of the Bureau was to advance these dramatist-prioritized authority structures. This Article, however, shows that the experiences of ordinary young authors associated with the Bureau of New Plays were characterized by compromise and subordination rather than authority. What emerges is a bitter dispute over the control of cultural production involving an amalgam of mediators both new and old including film studios, the Dramatists Guild, theatrical impresarios, and non-commercial stakeholders. In the heat of the battle, as cultural production moves between authors, mediators, and various media of creativity, the artistic and economic interests of the playwright author dissolve into the background. An investigation of the Bureau of New Plays highlights the need to scrutinize how creative communities, like the American theatre, have historically organized authority structures around mediators of extraordinary influence. An important story of copyright on the ground today is not the new rights that authors should enjoy in the face of evolving technologies, but the contractual reallocation of these and earlier rights from authors to publishers, producers, and Hollywood studios. The reallocation of authority away from authors lives in the histories of entertainment industries, including the American theatre, and is not a phenomenon limited to a modern age of new technologies.

Disciplines

Common Law | Contracts | Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law | Intellectual Property Law | Jurisprudence | Law

Recommended Citation

Brent Salter, The Ordinary Authors of the Bureau of New Plays: Copyright and Reallocating Authority in the American Theatre (1936-1949), 39 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. 137 (2021).
Available at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/cardozoaelj/vol39/iss1/6