If you haven't been cruising around on Twitter, you might have missed the 140-character-at-a-time dramatic argument between @StyleWeekly, @aarondotson, @LaDIFF and @myself about news that Richmond's new performing arts center had kicked former Times-Dispatch theater critic Roy Proctor's almost-completed manuscript about the center to the curb.
Cue tears here.
This week, Proctor tells his side of the story -- and the entire staff of Style Weekly (and another former Times-Dispatch interloper) take a comprehensive look at the performing arts center's imminent unveiling.
It's all interesting stuff, but four pieces stand out to me as interesting for those interested in history and drama -- Ed Slipek's history tour of the facility; Scott Bass' history tour of the politics; Don Harrison's dead horse interview with the former Carpenter Center director (who makes great copy, and offers solid advice on how not to do this again -- if you have $90 million); and Roy Proctor's blow-by-blow on writing a rejected manuscript.I'll just focus here on Proctor's Back Page tale of a coffee table book gone awry:
My manuscript, which was in its final edited form by mid-July except for a final chapter detailing the grand opening, will not be published.
No possibility could have been further from my mind last summer when foundation functionaries Susan Fitz-Hugh and Erin Rodman approached me about writing a book. We clicked like gangbusters. We laughed a lot. I went home, wrote a lengthy book proposal discussing options and e-mailed it to the foundation. We met again. Fitz-Hugh, a member of the foundation’s board of directors, and Rodman, on staff as marketing director, assured me we were on the same track. We laughed some more. Fitz-Hugh and Rodman hired me on the spot. No restrictions were placed on the content. No foundation oversight was mentioned. I was given freedom to write to my highest journalistic standard. My mandate, according to our contract, was simply to “write all written portions” of the book except for a one-page foreword. By early fall of 2008, I was deep into research.
Perhaps I should have smelled trouble when the foundation declined my request to share some architectural drawings with Preprint Design Services, the Richmond Times-Dispatch department that the foundation had engaged to design, edit and manage the book.
More interesting -- to those with the patience and curiosity to work their way through it -- is the complete back-and-forth between Proctor and the CenterStage PR team about the disputed manuscript. All it does for me, as a reader who has worked as a journalist and a corporate PR hack, is make me wonder why in the name of Walter Cronkite either party allowed the process to get to such a ridiculous point of collapse.
Here's my quick summary of the back-and-forth:
CenterStage PR: We don't like, we don't like, we don't like.
Proctor: I don't care, I don't care, I don't care.
In the end, what is clear to me is that their objectives weren't aligned -- CenterStage wanted a Christmas gift for their donors and patrons that made people feel good, and needed a good PR writer to spin that sugary story without much ado. Proctor, a seasoned journalist and gifted critic, came to the project as a journalist, not a spin doctor.
And pardon me as I roll my eyes about Proctor's reliance on the Times-Dispatch's on-again, off-again coverage of the CenterStage project -- "Newspapers, with their day-in-day-out, on-the-spot, you-are-there reporting, are an incomparable source for the kind of writing we’re dealing with here," he writes. -- in lieu of actually interviewing the principals behind the CenterStage fiasco. (I'm sure that manuscript would have been turned down, as well.)
Read the whole exchange. It's serious fun. (Unless you're the author or the client, I'm sure.)
