USC Think Tank to Explore Entertainment and Culture

USC’s Annenberg School for Communication will announce today that it has established the Norman Lear Center, a multidisciplinary research and public policy center that will explore the implications of “the convergence of entertainment, commerce and society.”

Lear gave a financial gift for the development of the plan and has now made a $5 million pledge to the center, saying it is “a gift to my kids and their future that the USC Annenberg School has elected to explore so seriously the impact of entertainment on news, information and other aspects of our culture.”

The formal announcement will be made by USC Annenberg Dean Geoffrey Cowan and Associate Dean Martin Kaplan, who will be the center’s director.

“I think it’s a very exciting initiative,” said Cowan, who has known the influential TV producer for more than 20 years and at one time was his lawyer. “It will be wonderful for the students and will have an impact on our society.”

Lear, the creator and producer of such classic television series as “All in the Family” and “Maude,” and founder of People for the American Way, which works to defend 1st Amendment freedoms, is a member of the USC Annenberg Board of Councilors.

“One of the things we are convinced of is that the concept of entertainment--the need to entertain--is affecting every aspect of society and the world,” Cowan said. “We think this is a way of thinking about a lot of terribly important issues, and in a way that a school in Southern California [is] uniquely capable of.”

The need for the center, Kaplan said, isn’t only dictated by the development of such new technologies as the Internet, but also by “the conquest of all domains by entertainment. [We need to ask] what the cost or the price of that is.”

Kaplan said that the center will be doing research “on all relevant topics. We’ll be having conferences and will be hosting public events. We hope to be affecting public debate among people who are politicians and lawmakers. We’ll be creating a forum in which the entertainment industry, people from academia, social commentators and critics can all come to the same place and worry together and understand some of the issues together.”

More than 25 USC scholars, teachers and administrators are on the center’s advisory panel. The center also will work with the schools at USC that offer entertainment-related courses and programs.

Projects include “Entertainment Goes Global”: a three-year round-table co-sponsored by the Pacific Council on International Policy; “Celebrity, Politics and the Public Sphere,” a two-year multidisciplinary series of seminars and studies; and “The Ownership of Creative Property in the Digital Age,” a program co-sponsored with the School of Fine Arts, the Law School and the Artist Rights Foundation.