Cornerstone Omnibus

I'm working with a preliminary version of the Table of Contents, and I thought I'd pull out a list of the interviews to see what the scope of that part of the project will look like...

I think in some cases people might want to write their own articles, or have that option. In some cases we might use snippets of the Durfee material, but there are some people who will need to be interviewed and then transcribed. First...the straight interviews:

First Impressions of Cornerstone (An Interview Roundtable with Community Partners)

Ensemble Interview: Peter Howard (to talk in depth about rural years, ensemble shows)
Ensemble Interview: Page Leong (LA, joining the company in progress)
Story Circle: Cornerstone in L.A. (Key Community Partners)
“Working With Cornerstone” by A Very Famous Collaborator/Commissioner
Interview with Ensemble Members who have worked on CC’s…maybe just a few paras on each play, a roundtable?
Playwrights on Working with Cstone from the outside: Lisa Loomer, Chay Yew, and?
Interviews with students of I1 & I2
An interview with Community participants of Institute 1 & 2…
Ensemble Interviews: Newer members

...and it's possible that the search for a new AD might make an interesting roundtable discussion. Perhaps even a chain of emails among the Search Committee members?

Here are pieces that could be interviews, but could also be articles or essays by the participants...

“The Cornerstone Impulse” by Bill Rauch OR Interview
“Adaptations” by Alison Carey OR Interview
“Designing Cornerstone” Lynn Jeffries OR Interview
“Finding a Home for Cornerstone” by Leslie Tamaribuchi OR Interview
The Technology of Cstone by Geoff Korf
Stage Managing a Cstone show by ???
The Institute by Paula Donnelly
Education and Cstone by Deb Piver

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So that looks like at LEAST 13 interviews...say 15 just to get a round number. My first problem is transcription. I'd guess that having that many interviews transcribed could cost around $2k. Next up I need to think about articles and play texts. Many articles will be available as e-files, but the older texts and news letters will need to be scanned in using OCR or typed. I think I have a pretty good setup for OCR....

Last night was the Bridge Awards which started with a really fantastic speech by Ben Cameron. Here's hoping he can persuaded to contribute that or something else to this collection. Ben Cobb also contributed a letter from Bill which could easily be part of the BEGINNING section. It was a wonderful evening...easily among the best of these the company has created...mostly because of Alison, Bill, and Chris. Of course I sat there all night thinking, I've got to get this book together...it is needed now....

Continuing on through the Durfee transcripts...which oddly enough were NOT mentioned in the midst of the celebration of Durfee's contributions. They are truly a fantastic resource...I must find out if there are e-versions of them.

The transcripts also reference company newsletters from the early years which might be a great resource. I'll read it all...it's really a lot of fun. I am getting confused though...people whom I do not know are popping up: James and Johnny and Sabrina...sometimes transcribers miss the names. Proper nouns are the worst at 130 WPM.

I am really struck by something that Chris said last night and that Peter says in the transcript: the presence of gays and lesbians in small town America...the connection of Cornerstone to that particular constituency. That another item to hang on to...another one of the important sidebars....

AD interviews are coming up...I'm going to try and attach Omnibus dinners to both days...here's hoping I can get some momentum with this.

Everyone's getting busy with the new AD search and the Bridge Awards. I've had a hard time getting to this today. I'm setting aside at least an hour when Risa and the boys are at Sholem to work on the Omnibus. No matter what, I have that time.

Shishir and I talked about it a little today: I really do have to make the time to sit down with people and talk. So far it hasn't gone much beyond Bill and Lee.

I am enjoying the Oral History tapes...looking into the "beginning" material. I didn't know until now about "Corner Store" as one of the original names...all the nicknames and stories are intriguing. I didn't know that Lynn and Bill met within a week of arriving at Harvard--she said they called themselves the "Bill and Lynn Show." It's also intriguing to see Peter Sellers as a character who was in the atmosphere at the creation, although tough to say whether he wasa positve or negative example (seems like both, The Amazing Dialectical Man, I always like to call him). Bill's Aunt Grace and Dean Wall Flerie (sp? transcribers can't be expected to be great spellers)...a hit and run story..."North Dakota...the Badlands...that's where my stomach dropped out..."

It's interesting because the speakers aren't always ID'ed...sometimes it's like the Cornerstone Super Ego going round and round the stories it remembers about itself.

Lee Lawlor was kind enough to dig out the 27 pounds of transcripts that were done from the company's week-plus sojourn/retreat provided courtesy of the Durfee Foundation. I've started to read them, and it's really a treat. It's fun (knowing the CTC members I do) to "hear" them captured in the transcript, and imagine their new-to-LA and ten-years-younger selves. I read a lot of transcripts in my work as a documentarian, so I'm used to it and to making the leap.

I particularly liked Chris Moore's dry introduction of himself as a Nobel Prize winning chemist, and Page Leong's modest description of her newcomer status.

These pages were one of the suggestions Bill Rauch had when we talked about important source material. I'm also going to be looking for a few articles as well. And then what to do with it all? I'm certainly going to need to use some sort of OCR software to turn those typed pages into e-text...and perhaps some voice recognition software as well?

For now it's a lot of fun just leafing through this material. It's a happy break from some of the other (very heavy) material I've been working on this year. Stalin, the Tet Offensive, the Klan...ahhhh! Cornerstone!

In my quest to get the Cornerstone Omnibus off the ground, I'm opening shop on this Blogosphere. Here's hoping that editing in public will help the Big Book O' Cornerstone be the book it needs to be for all the people who will need it.

I'll be using this space to post updates on the book and its progress, and to solicit advice and comments about its content. I'm going to make proofs of some of it available, but I think I need to think for a bit about what to put out and how to put it out there.

Above all, this is meant to be an open-ended story circle devoted to the story of the Cornerstone source book we're all working towards.

Finally, I think it's worth mentioning my vision for the Cornerstone Omnibus...I am editing this books for someone who probably isn't even even born yet. This book if for some young person who's going to wander through a library (real or virtual), picking through the stacks until the find the story of this amazing company. This book is for that young man or woman who will then go on to create the new Cornerstone for a new theater....

JJF