Fund-Raising Squeaker Saves LATC--for Now

The Los Angeles Theatre Center may go down in history as the Pauline of stage companies: Every time it’s in peril and tied to the tracks, someone comes along to save the day.

Artistic director Bill Bushnell called a press conference Wednesday to proclaim that the strapped nonprofit organization met its announced goal of taking in $500,000 during its August “Save the Theatre” campaign. A flurry of last-minute phone pledges solicited on Labor Day actually put LATC $2,000 beyond its half-million-dollar goal, according to Bushnell. On the final day of the campaign, the theater company only had $493,000.

The $502,000 in “Save the Theatre” monies (including a $50,000 contribution that actor Danny Glover phoned in during the campaign from Africa) have gone to pay the light bills, meet payroll and keep the phones turned on.

The Spring Street stage company still has about $1 million in outstanding debt, however.

According to Victor Bremson, an LATC fund-raiser Bushnell has dubbed Crisis Consultant, the next three weeks are crucial. If LATC can make it to Oct. 1, Bushnell told about two dozen reporters, operating money should then be available in the form of corporate and individual grants to keep the doors open through the rest of 1991.

Hence, the segue from August’s “Save the Theatre” campaign to September’s all-new “Create the Future” campaign.

Beginning Saturday, Santa Monica’s National Public Radio outlet KCRW-FM (89.9) will air up to 18 minutes of “Create the Future” spots each day, aimed at drumming up support for a gala Oct. 7 international food fest titled “6th on Spring.” Tickets to the sixth anniversary celebration at LATC’s four-stage headquarters in the old Security Bank Building at 514 S. Spring St. will cost $125 apiece or $250 for preferred seating and the ticket purchaser’s name printed on the program. In addition to KCRW, several other NPR stations are also being solicited to run the commercials, said Bushnell.

Public television has also been drawn into the new campaign, with WNET-TV’s “Great Performances” taping of an original LATC production, “A Bowl of Beings,” scheduled for this Saturday. Bushnell could not detail when the play might be aired over PBS, but did say that LATC secured a “substantive five-figure figure” from the New York-based public station for the rights to videotape the play. In addition, he said, LATC has a profit participation arrangement with WNET for future exploitation of the play.

The backbone of the campaign, however, is the same as “Save the Theatre”: telemarketing and telephone solicitation. In what Bushnell termed a “new and innovative marketing based on ‘total database’ market thinking,” the phone solicitation crews will be selling a two-for-one subscription plan for the upcoming season to subscribers who contributed to the “Save the Theatre” campaign.

Asked whether the crisis campaigning might not be a tool to keep the LATC plight uppermost in potential contributors’ minds, Bushnell responded that LATC is not the only arts group struggling to stay afloat. He pointed to a recent announcement by the Los Angeles Philharmonic that it has its own $1-million deficit.

“Arts all over America are in crisis,” he said. “We’ve just come out of the closet, so to speak.”

By the end of the fiscal year next spring, several large grants, such as a $200,000 contribution from Arco, should kick in, ending the current crisis mentality, according to Bushnell. Once the company is safely beyond September, the $1.65 million in operating funds needed to see it through the current fiscal year, ending April 30, 1992, will have been “identified and in place,” he said. In the meantime, the nonprofit corporation’s long-term objective is to look beyond next April and begin raising approximately $2 million, or 75%, of the 1992-93 budget, in addition to looking at ways to pare down LATC’s $1-million debt.

Yet another fund-raising gala, highlighting the work of the Latino Theatre Lab, is scheduled for Oct. 28, but by then the short-term cash-flow problems of September should be either solved--or not.