On the Beat
Will piracy take book publishing the way of the recording industry? Met veteran Laciura gets a TV acting gig in HBO's high-profile Boardwalk Empire.
by BRIAN KELLOW
It's always hard being a Luddite, but in this age of galloping technology, it's tougher than ever. Recently, I sank into a black mood after attending a symposium, sponsored by the Authors Guild, on the future of eBooks. I know one of the panelists, JANE FRIEDMAN, CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, was telling the truth when she observed of the current state of book publishing, "I don't think we're in a transition. I think we have to face the fact that we are in a revolution." Often, I walk by my local Barnes & Noble and see that many of those comforting windows filled with books are now occupied by an HDTV screen and posters peddling the Nook eReader. This kind of thing is a little hard to handle for those of us who grew up on old movies about authors strolling past bookshop windows and stopping dead in their tracks as they saw a display of their very own books. I won't pretend to be remotely sophisticated: seeing my books on display in store windows has never failed to give me a huge thrill. But the digital age in book publishing has arrived, and it's up to authors to face it and make it work as well as we possibly can.
Still, I'm afraid that book publishing is day by day being pulled into the same black hole that the music industry dropped down years ago. Over the past decade, so many composers I know have seen their already far-from-princely incomes further decimated by online piracy — and they're made to feel that they're twirling on another planet if they object to it. I'm glad that Apple and Google Editions are posing a challenge to Amazon's arbitrary cut-rate pricing (and cutthroat policies) on books. Still, piracy remains a serious threat to authors' income levels.
Where music consumption is concerned, we've been living in the Land of the Lawless for a long, long time. A composer friend of mine recently told me that a chamber piece he wrote several years ago is being used as background for a number of European real-estate company commercials. And what's to be done about it? Not much, really. Most musicians don't have the time, temperament or financial means to combat this sort of lunacy. So, gradually, they accept it. They may even begin to believe people who tell them that the important thing is that their music is being heard. It's hard to imagine that there was a time, not that long ago, when divas grandly refused to sign pirated CDs because they wouldn't make a penny from them. Today it's all about exposure. Access. (What is it about that word that sets my teeth on edge?) Artists no longer have much control over what happens to their work, and that's what's scaring them.
But today, we aren't supposed to be concerned about the people who are producing art, or about their ability to go on producing it. We are supposed to care only about how it's consumed. And we have to make it as easy as possible for people to suck up their consumer goods. Why should they have to walk three blocks to a retail store (where, after all, they risk getting mowed down in the crosswalk by a FreshDirect truck), stand in line (where at least they can make good use of the time by checking their iPhones) and receive change from a clerk (who quite possibly might be carrying some communicable disease)? Amazon's marketing reps constantly tell authors that we're foolish to worry — that the advent of Kindle will only enhance our revenue stream. But surely it's only a matter of time before piracy blights publishing just as it has the music industry. It's the equivalent of shoplifting from a Barnes & Noble — but we're all being encouraged not to think of it in the same terms.
For years, ANTHONY LACIURA was one of the most popular and visible artists on the Met's roster of distinguished comprimarios. It was a time when opera's vivid character roles were entrusted to vivid character actors; today, they're usually tossed to members of young-artist programs who simply don't have the seasoning to handle them. Laciura was a memorable Chernikovsky in Boris Godunov, Spalanzani in Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Triquet in Eugene Onegin and Valzacchi in Der Rosenkavalier, among many other roles. MARTIN SCORSESE thought so, too. The director of some of the most electrifying films of the 1970s, including Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, Scorsese caught Laciura's turn as the doddering Count Hauk-Sendorf in a 2001 performance of The Makropulos Case. When it came time to cast Boardwalk Empire, a Scorsese-produced HBO series based on the life of notorious Prohibition-era political boss Nucky Johnson, Laciura was asked to come in for an interview. By last spring, Laciura had begun filming on Boardwalk Empire. (HBO has committed to twelve episodes, the first of which airs September 19.)
In the series, the master manipulator Nucky Johnson has become Nucky Thompson. (The source material is New Jersey Superior Court Judge Nelson Johnson's non-fiction book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City, but the series makes no pretense of sticking to the facts.) STEVE BUSCEMI stars as Thompson, and Laciura plays his Austrian-born driver/barber/ general factotum Eddie Kessler. At the initial casting interview, Laciura was asked if he did accents. "Do I do accents?" he replied. (Laciura has more than a little of the Borscht Belt about him; I could easily picture him among the old-time comedians gathered at the Carnegie Deli in WOODY ALLEN's Broadway Danny Rose.)
Laciura is having a terrific time on his first TV series and hopes it will lead to more of the same. Scorsese himself directed the pilot episode. "He's amazing," Laciura says. "His eye — the things he sees, the details he picks up on, are incredible. He watches you work and then says, 'Do more of that thing you were doing in rehearsal' — and it may not even be anything you were aware of. I'm so excited to have this chance, I can't tell you. That's the great thing about being in this profession. You think you're done with it, and then something like this comes along, and a whole new chapter opens up." 
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