The following interview transcript with Sidney
Kingsley has been carefully broken down into
segments involving a variety of topics. Below
each segment is a link to the corresponding
video clip. Please attribute research sources to
Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William
Inge Center for the Arts.
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Professor Drummond at Cornell: Part 1 |
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Drummond, yes. Well he was a
very important figure in the development of
theater in the universities. That may be why
you’ve heard it, because Drummond was a most
fascinating man. I worked with him. Actually
my first encounter with Drummond at Cornell—I
had been very active in theater at the high
school level and so on, and public speaking, and
I expected at Cornell that I would find an open
sesame for that. To my dismay, one of the
professors called me in and told me that my
style, which was a little histrionic, I guess,
didn’t accord with their conversational style
that they were developing. And so, Professor
Drummond had suggested that I ought to go to
Colgate, where they taught a type of public
speaking that Drummond felt would serve me
better. Well I had won a fellowship to Cornell,
and I couldn’t very well afford to go to Colgate
even if I wanted to. But I didn’t want to. And
I assured them that I would not disgrace them.
And before I was through I’d win almost every
prize that they did have for public speaking.
Drummond was…I won the first Drummond prize for
playwriting. So, it worked out very well,
finally.
Wood: So, they were
actually…they were teaching playwriting.
Kingsley: Drummond was teaching
it, yes, but basically he was teaching the
principles that were being taught in the
Eighteenth Century, and he finally – Drummond
was more interested in play production, in scene
design and so on, and the theory of directing a
play, than he was in playwriting. And I think I
derived a great deal from him in that respect,
because I began to design sets and direct and I
was always basically interested in scene design,
which led me very often to sculpture. Later I
became very interested in sculpture. You see a
lot of my stuff around. And they were related.
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Professor Drummond at Cornell: Part 2 |
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And Drummond was a very strange man. He had the
build of a fullback, and he was interested in
football. He would work out plays for the
coach. But his legs had been destroyed by
infantile paralysis when he was a child, so he
walked with crutches. They were very painful.
It was more than pain, it was obviously anguish
to the man. You could see the way he would
crush his crutches as if he would just shatter
them as he swung around the campus. So, he was
obviously a man who was bearing a cross, and he
could never have managed it if he didn’t have
this tremendous passion for the theater which he
developed at Cornell. He built a theater
single-handed at his own expense. It was really
quite a remarkable feat that he did, because we
had no theater there. At any rate, this was the
man…and we all worshiped him. Because when
you’re in love with the theater, usually whoever
teaches it and handles it and produces the plays
assumes a god-like posture to you. So I felt
that way about Drummond. And I had already,
when I was in his classroom once, he gave us a
chore. He said, I want you to make an impromptu
speech, as if you are addressing your class
reunion, twenty years from now. So being an
audacious young man, I said, “Fine.” I made the
speech, “Fellow classmates, twenty years have
gone by since last we sat on the steps of golden
Smith Hall and sang “Far Above. Cayuga’s
Waters” Since then we’ve gone out into the
world; we’ve learned the arts and disciplines of
whatever our pursuits were. And I’ve been
fortunate, as you recall, I worked a good deal
with professor Drummond at the dramatic society,
and so I went out into life and I won—I’ve had
successful plays and won the Pulitzer Prize,” at
which point Drummond almost collapsed. Well,
life is ironic as we know it. And sometimes it
outdoes itself. Five years later it did outdo
itself and I did win the Pulitzer Prize. I was
in Europe at that time, so I wired Drummond and
asked him if he would accept the Pulitzer Prize
for me, which he did. And I often wondered what
he must have thought about at the Pulitzer
dinner and whether he remembered the audacious
young man who had made this prediction.
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Men in White:
The Group Theatre |
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Doris Warner was the daughter of one of the
Warner brothers. And a fellow who was working
at Warner Brothers was very interested in the
play. One day Doris was working at the office
there to find—to learn about theater/films. And
Jake Welk(?), who worked there, said, “You want
to read a really terrific script?” and showed
her the play. She tried to get her father to
buy it, but he wouldn’t. She then, when the
Group Theater had it, she went to her father and
she wanted $10,000 to help her produce the
play. He thought he’d teach her a lesson. He
thought, “Surely she’ll lose it, and she’ll
never do it again.” That was the lesson he
taught her. He lent her the $10,000. She
backed the play, and it was a good-sized hit,
and later MGM bought it and made a film out of
it with Clark Gable.
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Men in White:
Research |
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Some friends of mine were young interns and I
used to visit them. I’d sleep over at the
hospital—occasionally go to a dance with the
nurses, go out, and led the social life of a
young intern at the hospital. Sometimes I’d go
rounds with them. I was fascinated with the
life of the intern. I’d always been very
interested in the biological sciences. If I
didn’t have one already impossible task, I think
I might have studied medicine. But being a
playwright was difficult enough. So I really
learned a lot about it.
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Men in White:
Idealism |
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Something I learned much later—fifty years later
I learned this. None of the actors liked the
play Men in White. They were all a
little left of center. They wanted a play that
dealt more with the social problems of the
time. They didn’t tell me that. They were
actually very nice to me. But none of them
liked the play. This was revealed—fifty
years—the fiftieth anniversary of the play at
NYU, they did the play there. And the group
theater met, and Cheryl Crawford then told us
that they had not liked, the actors hadn’t liked
the play and didn’t want to do it. But finally
Lee Strasburg spoke to them and said look, “The
one thing this play has in common with you…I
know you would like it to be a play more
socially conscious, but what it has in common
with you is its idealism. It’s a play about
idealism. And that is enough for you to
identify with it.” And apparently on that basis
he sold them the play and they did it.
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Men in White:
Predicting Future Advances in Surgery |
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At the time I wrote the play there was no longer
any more research being done in surgery. They
felt that they had gone as far as they could,
and there was nowhere that research could be
developed in surgery. And they didn’t start
doing research in surgery again for six years.
Then when they started doing research, they made
more advances in surgery than in medicine in the
last fifty years. Now in the last scene of the
play, the old doctor tells the young doctor who
is dispirited and feels that there’s no point
going on anymore because he agrees now with
others that they cannot make any advances—and
the old surgeon predicts that in fifty years
from now we will solve many of these problems.
And the fact is at fifty years later, at that
fiftieth anniversary, surgery had made enormous
strides: heart transplants, lung transplants,
amazing things had been done as a result of the
research which was continued six years after the
play had been done. So, whether the play
itself, which was noted by most of the surgeons
in the hospitals, had influenced that or not, I
don’t know. But it may be presumed that it had
some influence.
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The Group Theatre |
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Well the Group Theater was a young group who had
been working together a number of years. They
were a very idealistic group who kind of adopted
the principles of Stanislavski and saw
themselves working in the theater together and
working on a play for a long time—not just the
usual four weeks of rehearsal, but working as
Stanislavski did, for a year on a play. They
had been very much influenced by the work of
Stanislavski. When it was brought to this
country in the lectures of…what was his name
again? At any rate, they thought they found in
that the secret magic word. In a book which he
wrote and which was put together after his
death, Lee Strasburg stated that he had gone to
see this fine actor perform, and he had
recommended it to many friends of his and they
had gone. And the performance wasn’t any good
anymore. It had something that destroyed it.
And Lee was searching for the secret of how you
maintain a good performance. And he thought he
found it in Stanislavski’s method and his books.
So basically, that was what they were working
towards. They were experimenting, working.
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Dead End:
Set design by Norman Bel Geddes |
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He was not a good director, although he had
ambitions to be one. No, this was directed by
me. I directed Dead End, and he produced
it on the condition that he design the set that
I wanted, which was kind of hard for him to
take. He didn’t want to do that set. He wanted
to do an abstract series of levels. He had
done the Greek play, the Greek comedy about
war—what was it? At any rate, he had done it in
a series of levels and he wanted to do this play
that way too. And I said, “No. It must be a
realistic set, as real as a street of New
York.” Well, he had never done a realistic set
and we had quite a battle about it. When he
gave it to the scene builders, he said, “I’m
going on record as saying it won’t work.” Of
course it did work. He did a remarkably good
job of it, and it served all of us very well.
(CU of set model) There was a curtain here, a
small curtain which was usually in front of the
orchestra. So what the kids did was, they would
jump into a net. The stage manager would have a
scoop and a little tub of water. As they jumped
in, he would splash it in the air. Once there
was a very inquisitive fellow sitting in the
front row, and he stood up and looked over the
curtain, and the stage manager was quick and
gave him a scoop of water in the face. So,
everybody was delighted with that.
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Dead End:
Censors |
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We were permitted a three-performance permit at
that point, and we were only going to be there
three nights, and they were going to close us,
and we were saved by a wonderful woman whom I
knew—a very important woman. And the
commissioner of licenses met her at the theater
that night in the lobby, and he was frowning,
and he said, “Would you allow your children to
see this?” She said, “I just bought tickets.
I’m taking my children tomorrow night.” That
saved it. Otherwise they were going to close
it. The end of the third day I had to go down
to City Hall and meet with the borough president
or some people of that sort. Finally I
persuaded them that there was nothing the kids
would say on that stage that they wouldn’t
normally say, although the language was pretty
direct and honest and shocking I guess.
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Dead End:
Reform |
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Well, at the end the President of the United
States appointed a commission to investigate
slum clearance, and then Senator Wagner proposed
a bill—a slum clearance bill—the first in the
United States Congress, which he credited to the
play. So yes, it was ironic I suppose. And the
first command performance in the White House was
of this play.
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Ten Million Ghosts |
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No, that was a failure for many reasons.
Primarily because there was a very difficult but
very gifted young man in it named Orson Welles.
And Orson at that point had written and directed
a translation of a French farce, and I think he
was annoyed with me, because I had written and
directed a play. And there’s one very
imaginative scene which took place: it might be
interesting to talk about that play a little
bit. It anticipated the war, which was
approaching us rapidly. And in it I was
dramatizing a World War I scandal in which the
French and the German munitions makers had
entered into a conspiracy to make sure that
neither of their governments would bomb their
factories—the munitions factories. And I
conceived of a scene in which I used actual war
films, in which we saw men being blown to bits,
etcetera, in film. And the idea was to
dramatize the conspiracy of the munitions makers
within their joint governments. Germany and
France were at war, but they were not going to
blow each other’s factories up. This was a
well-known scandal, which I dramatized. And I
used films in one big scene where we saw they
were photographing the results of some of their
new high explosives. And in this scene in the
dark, Orson took advantage of the fact the
lights were out and made rude sounds. So I had
to scold him for that. Also he didn’t want to
come to dress rehearsal. He said he had a radio
show in Chicago, and I had to go to Equity to
get him to do that.
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The World We Make |
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Well, I was commissioned by the Garment Workers
Union. They had done a very successful musical
called Pins and Needles, and then they
commissioned me to do a play of a book by Millen
Brand called The Outward Room. It’s a
very interesting book about a young woman who
had a very serious problem adjusting to the
world she lived in—she was a sick girl—and I
dramatized that. One of the interesting things
I did in the play was to use one of the most
dramatic episodes of the war, which was the
invasion of Poland by Hitler, and I dramatized
that. Because what had happened at that time
was that England and France had warned Germany
not to invade Poland, but Hitler had done it
anyway. And so the world was soon at war. And
as they invaded Warsaw and bombed it and strafed
the crowds in the streets and so on, the mayor
of Warsaw addressed the world via radio, and
called on England and France to save Warsaw. It
was a very dramatic moment, in which they were
using modern technology to appeal to the world.
And I used that dramatic moment to test the
girl. This was the story of girl who had met a
young man—who had escaped from a sanitarium—had
met a young man, was living with him, was
beginning to adjust. Then the war created its
own neuroses in her, as it did in all the world
at that time.
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The Patriots:
The Genesis |
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Well, it came out of my questioning. At that
time, democracy was being challenged and
questioned and there was a good body of thinking
that it couldn’t stand up to the
single-mindedness of fascism or communism, and
so I determined to write a play about it, to see
if I could find out for myself what it really
was. I didn’t intend to write a play about
Thomas Jefferson. It just happened that way.
The more I asked myself a question about the
meaning of democracy, this great principle, the
more I found myself going back to the early days
of the American Revolution. So that’s how it
came about (CUT) Well I found myself more and
more turning to the letters of Jefferson and
Washington and Hamilton. These men were great
philosophers and they worked out these
principles. That required spending days and
nights at the library—New York Public
Library—and Madge helped me. She would go to
the library with me, because I was in the Army
then.(CUT) It requires an enormous amount of
study so that you know what you’re talking
about. Fortunately, Washington, Jefferson,
Hamilton—they were all great letter writers.
And the volumes are there in the library—volumes
of their letters. And that’s a personal—nothing
more personal than Washington or Jefferson or
Hamilton writing about those events.
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The Patriots:
In Washington, D.C. |
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Well, when there was a command performance at
the Library of Congress for the Congress of the
United States and for the Supreme Court, I was
invited to that—very honored of course. I was
invited to sit in the box with the president at
the inauguration of the Jefferson memorial.
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Detective Story:
Staging |
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It’s definitely written as a stage piece, and it
worked. Actually it was an experiment in
projection, because you had a wide expanse of
stage, of people moving constantly. Martha
Graham at that time commented to me on the
physical movement of the play. As a dancer she
saw that at once.(CUT) What was interesting in
directing it was, to make it work, I had to
combine the playwright and the director
constantly. So, very often… For example my
technique for the audience was to make it like a
tennis match, so that if you stood at the back
of the audience you could tell if it was working
if the heads of the audience moved like this,
you see—they would move back and forth across
the stage. I would arrange the physical
movements so that the audience had to follow
them.
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Detective Story:
and Professor Drummond |
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At any rate, this is a portrait of Drummond.
Now, years later, I’m doing a play called
Detective Story, which requires a great many
experimental innovations in direction. I call
Drummond at Cornell, finally get him on the
phone, and invite him to come and see the play.
He said to me, “Sydney, do you have any idea
where I am now, where you’re calling me? I
said, “No.” He said, “I’m in the hospital here
at Cornell. I’ve been here on my back for three
months. The only way I’ll get out of here will
be in a box. I’m dying.” Well I said, “That’s
very difficult for me to believe. But the
tickets will be there for you in your name. If
you can make it, fine. If you can’t, I will
understand.” And he said, “Don’t leave them
there. Don’t waste them.” I said, “They won’t
be wasted. They’ll be there in your name.” And
the nurse got on the phone and said, “He can’t
talk anymore.” And that was the end of that
conversation. Well, the opening night of the
play there was great excitement. It was one of
those plays that there’s a feeling in the air
that something’s going to happen. And I was in
the lobby, talking to some of my guests, when
the box office man summoned me. He said, “We
need two tickets desperately for two very
important people, and there are two tickets I
see here in the name of someone named Professor
Drummond. Can I”—it’s now ten minutes before
curtain time—“Can I release those tickets?” I
said, “No, they stay there in his name. Whether
he picks them up or not, they stay there.” Well
he argued with me, but I was insistent. And so
I left them and about five minutes before
curtain time he summoned me again and he said,
“Hey, I need those two tickets. They’ve not
been picked up now. It’s five minutes before
curtain time. Can I release them?” I said,
“No.” He argued with me and I said, “Don’t
argue with me. I’m paying for these tickets,
and they’ll be there in Drummond’s name, whether
he picks them up or not.” Three minutes before
curtain time, Drummond came clumping into the
lobby on his two crutches, picked up the
tickets, went in and watched the play, and the
next day I had lunch with him and he was
ecstatic. He said, “You’ve really developed
something that is very interesting here. You
could do a Shakespeare play, you could do a
Greek play with this technique.” And he had
observed the technique and was very enthusiastic
about it. And he went back to Cornell to his
classroom, not to the hospital, and taught for
many years after that. So I had a very special
feeling about him.
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Darkness at Noon |
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I’d written The Patriots, and this was
the opposite side of the medal. Kessler’s book
had been called to my attention, and I’d been
challenged to dramatize it, which I did. I had
been to the Soviet Union in 1934. I’d gone with
Lee Strasburg. And I’d had some interesting
experiences there. I didn’t like what I saw.
This was, as I say, another part of the medal in
which democracy had been challenged. At that
time there was a great vogue for a volume called
The Coming Struggle between Communism and
Fascism, and it was noted in that title that if
Democracy wasn’t given a shake, we weren’t
supposed to have a chance. It was all just
going to be Communism or Fascism. As a
political philosophy I felt I had to challenge
that.
Wood: And so that’s where the play, the roots
for the play…
Kingsley: Those are the roots of the play,
yes. And when I was in the Soviet Union, I had
encountered something even more disturbing.
When Lee and I went to Moscow to the theater
festival, they asked me whether there was anyone
there I’d like to meet, and I said, “Yes.” I
was delighted at the opportunity. I wanted to
meet Gorky. And the two people that had asked
me officially began to tremble when I mentioned
Gorky’s name. I was very naïve then. I didn’t
know that at that moment in Moscow, almost
everybody else knew it, that Gorky was being
poisoned by Stalin. Gorky was the enemy.
Wood: Certainly no lack of drama there.
Kingsley: The whole story of Gorky came out
much later. Had I known it earlier I would have
used more of it in the Darkness at Noon,
because it was an important world story that
most of us didn’t know about.
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Lunatics and Lovers |
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That was fun. I needed that. I needed it. I
have a very bawdy vein in me, like the Greek
comedies. I like the earthy Greek comedies, so
I decided to just have a good time and write a
really bawdy play. And it was a great time
working with Buddy (Hackett). We enjoyed each
other very much.
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Courting and Marrying Madge Evans |
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Well there was in Suffern, which is a few miles
away. It was a very nice summer theater. I
used to go there. Once I went there, and I sat
next to a very pretty girl. And the proprietor
of the theater was there and introduced me to
her. That’s where I met Madge Evans and invited
Madge out here with some friends. They came
out, and I think she liked the place, and we
liked each other. We were very serious about
it, but we decided with the War coming at us it
was foolish to tempt marriage, and most of our
friends had had great difficulty with their
children. That was a period of drugs coming in,
so we decided that we would not get married.
Then I went out to see Madge in Maine. She was
in a summer stock company. And the company
there decided that we ought to get married, so
they had arranged, by special
arrangement—because they had to wait five days
to get a permit or something—they hooked it up
with some Justice of the Peace. And that night
after the show, when I went back, they had a
bottle of champagne, and they poured a lot of
champagne and made us drink two glasses in a row
and then they advised me that we were going to
get married. It was practically a shotgun
elopement. So before we knew what had happened,
we were there with the Justice of the Peace and
we were married.
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A Sculptor |
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Well, I love working in strange media. I like a
resistant media, so I’ll work in wood or stone
or copper. (Points to statue) This is
copper, and it was just soldered together. I
work in marble and in clay, of course. Clay
gives too easily. It doesn’t fight you enough.
I like a medium that really fights back. This
was Martha Graham’s favorite piece for many
years. I made it for the evening of…she did a
dance called Clytemnestra, and I did it
for the evening of that dance. We had given her
a party, and believe it or not, it was her first
opening night party. So, it was a marvelous
party, and at the center of the party was this
piece and Martha always declared that it was her
favorite piece of sculpture. So this is my
claim to fame.
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Kingsley’s House |
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As a young man I had fallen in love with some of
those medieval and renaissance paintings where
in the background there was a winding brook. It
seemed to have some very special kind of
mystical meaning for Leonardo da Vinci let’s
say, and the others. And I decided that I
wanted a little house on such a winding brook.
So I spent a great deal of time looking for it
and I couldn’t find it. And one evening I came
home from such a search, and I went to the 21
Club, where I would go for supper and for drink
and to smoke a cigar with a friend of mine there
who owned the place. He came over to my table
and we lit up our cigars and he asked me what
I’d been doing that day, and I told him I’d been
looking for a place in country, but what I
wanted above all was a little winding river, but
I hadn’t succeeded in finding one. He said,
“That’s strange, because last week I visited a
friend of mine who had such a place in the
country, It’s a little house right on a little
winding river—a very low river.“ He said, “I
went, and I sat in the river, and I relaxed and
smoked a cigar, and it was just what you’re
talking about. “And what’s more,” he said, “is
the man who owns it is Ernest Truex, the actor.
And he’s sitting at that table and he wants to
sell it. He has an emergency, and he wants to
sell it now.” I said, “Excuse me.” I got up, I
went over, I said hello to Ernest Truex. I
asked him about the house. He told me about
it. It sounded, just what I wanted. I asked
him how much it was. He told me. I said, “I’m
going to go look at it right now. You give me
your phone number, and when I come back I’ll
call you. If it’s what you say it is, I want to
buy it.” I went, I looked at it. It was a dark
night. I couldn’t see anything except that the
river was a little, winding river exactly like
those winding river s in the medieval paintings,
you can see out the window very often. It was
just like it. That’s all I had to know, and I
bought it. That’s the whole story of the house.
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The Dramatists Guild |
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Specifically the most important thing I suppose
that I contributed was—the Dramatists had never
had a really central headquarters. And the most
important thing I did was to fight to get them a
central headquarters, which they now have, which
is where we might have been doing this today.
So that was a contribution. The Dramatists
Guild is an important organization. It’s
needed. I supported it as best I could.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
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