Frank Rich - Interview

Interview, Dec, 2000 by Maer Roshan

MR: Did you start writing in college?

FR: Yes, I was writing criticism there, but I also wrote a lot about politics. I ended up running the editorial page, at the height of the Sixties. One night I'd be reviewing a movie or a play, and the next day I'd be writing an editorial about Vietnam-the split that's existed in my life ever since.

MR: People who were surprised by your metamorphosis into a political columnist don't realize that's how you started out.

FR: The first piece I ever sold professionally was for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times while I was still in college. Eventually, my theater criticism took precedence. And after a while I got bored with that.

MR: Was that because you felt the theater was dying in some way?

FR: Not really. Look, even when I started as a drama critic, Broadway was in a terrible slump, and it never has recovered from TV and the movies. Even when I was a child it was at the end of its heyday; almost every interesting play began off-Broadway or outside of New York. That's just intensified of course. Broadway is big business now. When I left I didn't predict to what extent big corporations like Disney would take over, how completely corporate it would all become. The truth is, it's not a very exciting time for theater these days anyway. [laughs] It's not like I'm dying to weigh in on Aida.

MB: Given the money the corporations have to throw around, why don't they have more to show for it?

FR: Because corporations create theater by committee; they're not interested in innovation, so the chances of a Tony Kushner or David Mamet coming out of a Disney factory are slim. Just as you couldn't imagine Quentin Tarantino or Neil LaBute writing Godzilla or Lethal Weapon 4, you can't imagine Tony Kushner or Wendy Wasserstein writing Aida.

MR: If you were a young writer starting out today, would you choose to go into theater?

FR: I think I'd probably choose television or movies or music before theater. Where are the young David Merricks and Kermit Bloomgardens, the great producers who presented important nights on Broadway, the Arthur Miller plays, the Tennessee Williams plays? Such people do exist, but they're at the networks, or HBO, or at Fine Line and Miramax. Even television is more interesting than a lot of theater these days. Take The West Wing, a high-grade commercial network series. One of the head writers on it is a guy named Peter Karnell, who was once one of the most interesting young playwrights in New York, but he never managed to get a play produced on Broadway--not one! He got great reviews, he had plenty of regional and off-Broadway theater productions, but corporate Broadway doesn't encourage independent voices like his. So he went into television, and I don't think there's anything bad about that. There's always been a back and forth between theater and Hollywood, but now many writers don't come back at all.

MR: Did you have the power while you were the Times theater critic that people believe you did?

FR: Yes and no. It comes with the territory that the Times has great power, though I think its power is greatly overstated. But the power of critics isn't always negative. Sometimes we save things that would otherwise be lost. You look at a show like Copenhagen. Here's a play that got great reviews, that won a Tony, but it's just limping along, playing to half-empty houses. If [Times drama critic] Ben Brantley hadn't liked it, it would've closed.