Hi Everyone,

The following article appeared in this morning's NY Times online.

Cheers
Dave

David Harvey
Conservator
Los Angeles, California
__________________________

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."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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