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50-426: Tom Eyen (August 14, 1940 – May 26, 1991) was an American playwright, lyricist, television writer and director . He received a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Dreamgirls in 1981. Eyen is best known for works at opposite ends of the theatrical spectrum. Mainstream theatergoers became acquainted with him in 1981, when he partnered with composer Henry Krieger and director Michael Bennett to write

100-494: A Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Lyrics. The original cast album won Eyen a Grammy Award as lyricist, and one of the show's songs, " And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going ", as sung by Holliday, became a hit. In 1984, Eyen sought to duplicate his Dreamgirls success with Kicks: The Showgirl Musical , a collaboration with composer Alan Menken about the Rockettes during World War II . The show never made it past

150-641: A film version of The Dirtiest Show In Town for Showtime , making it the first made-for-cable television movie . The film featured John Wesley Shipp . In 1976, he appeared in Rosa von Praunheim 's documentary film about New York's SoHo theatre and arts scene in the 1970s, Underground and Emigrants . Eyen and Henry Krieger first worked together on the 1975 musical version of The Dirtiest Show in Town , called The Dirtiest Musical in Town . Nell Carter 's performance in that musical inspired Eyen and Krieger to craft

200-411: A graduate programme based on the premise that directors are autodidacts who need as many opportunities to direct as possible. Under Fowler, graduate student directors would stage between five and ten productions during their three-year residencies, with each production receiving detailed critiques. As with many other professions in the performing arts, theatre directors would often learn their skills "on

250-512: A musical about a black singing trio, which they workshopped for Joe Papp with Carter, Sheryl Lee Ralph , and Loretta Devine . The project was shelved in 1978 when Carter took a role in a soap opera. A year later, the project caught the interest of Broadway director-producer Michael Bennett , who asked Eyen to direct a workshop production of Big Dreams , as the musical was then named, featuring Ralph, Loretta Devine, and gospel singer Jennifer Holliday as Carter's replacement. However, Holliday left

300-474: A primitive form of cinema because they were produced by anonymous and amateur male artists who failed to achieve narrative coherence and continuity. Today, many of these films have been archived by the Kinsey Institute, but most are in a state of decay and have no copyright , real credits, or acknowledged authorship. The stag film era inevitably ended with the beginnings of the sexual revolution in

350-639: A satirical response to, and example of, the period's plays depicting nudity and sexual situations. The Dirtiest Show in Town initially ran at the Astor Place Theatre for two seasons, with later runs both off-Broadway in New York and in London's West End . He also wrote the song "Ode to a Screw" with Peter Cornell for the 1971 Miloš Forman film Taking Off . Eyen's other shows in the early 1970s included: According to The New York Times , "Eyen

400-577: A scientific report commissioned by the United States' Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, found that the legalizing of pornography in Denmark had not (as had been expected) resulted in an increase of sex crimes. A study conducted in Denmark in 2003 and later published in Archives of Sexual Behavior found that Danish men and women generally believe that hardcore pornography has

450-481: A show has opened (premiered before a regular audience), theatre directors are generally considered to have fulfilled their function. From that point forward the stage manager is left in charge of all essential concerns. Hardcore pornography Hardcore pornography or hardcore porn is pornography that features detailed depictions of sexual organs or sexual acts such as vaginal , anal , oral or manual intercourse , ejaculation , and fetish play . The term

500-579: A single reel or less, and was illegally made and exhibited because of censorship laws in America. Women were excluded from these private screenings that were shown in American "smoker" houses such as fraternities or other exclusive institutions. In Europe, films of the same kind were screened in brothels. The mode of reception of the all-male audience of stag films was raucous, collective sexual banter and sexual arousal . Film historians describe stag films as

550-401: A synonym for "material which can be legally suppressed". In this Report, the term is used as a synonym for "under-the-counter" or covertly sold materials. This is, in effect, the definition of hard-core applied in the marketplace. It can be argued that because of the confusion about the meaning of the term, which stems primarily from an undefined legal concept, it would be well to avoid the use of

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600-469: A translator. In contemporary theatre, after the playwright , the director is generally the principle visionary, making decisions on the artistic conception and interpretation of the play and its staging. Different directors occupy different places of authority and responsibility, depending on the structure and philosophy of individual theatre companies. Directors use a wide variety of techniques, philosophies, and levels of collaboration. In ancient Greece ,

650-625: Is Back . Eyen's campy and disturbing parody of 1950s women's prison exploitation films, Women Behind Bars , became a major Off-Broadway hit in 1975. Pat Ast first played the lead role of the sadistic matron in drag , followed by Divine . The New York Times called it "an extraordinarily interesting work from one of America's most innovative and versatile playwrights." Eyen followed this success with The Neon Woman , another off-Broadway play starring Divine, in 1978. The New York Times wrote, "His plays are known for emotionally grotesque material combined with sharp satire." In 1980, Eyen directed

700-463: Is also sometimes used to mean a stage director, most commonly in ballet . A more common term for theatre director in French is metteur en scène . Post World War II , the actor-manager slowly started to disappear, and directing become a fully fledged artistic activity within the theatre profession. The director originating artistic vision and concept, and realizing the staging of a production, became

750-735: Is an art form that has grown with the development of theatre theory and theatre practice. With the emergence of new trends in theatre, so too have directors adopted new methodologies and engaged in new practices. Interpretation of the drama, by the late twentieth century, had become central to the director's work. Relativism and psychoanalytic theory influenced the work of innovative directors such as Peter Brook , Ingmar Bergman , Peter Stein , and Giorgio Strehler . Kimberly Senior, director of Disgraced on Broadway, explains her role as director by saying “I get to take things that were previously in one dimension and put them into three dimensions using my imagination and intellect and people skills.” Once

800-594: Is in contrast with less-explicit softcore pornography . Hardcore pornography usually takes the form of photographs , films , and cartoons . Since the mid-1990s, hardcore pornography has become widely available on the internet , making it more accessible than ever before. A distinction between "hardcore pornography" and "borderline pornography" (or "borderline obscenity") was made in the 1950s and 1960s by American jurists discussing obscenity laws. "Borderline pornography" appealed to sexual prurience, but had other positive qualities, such as literary or artistic merit, and so

850-507: Is the classical American stag film , also known as blue movies , a body of clandestine short pornographic films produced during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. While the exact corpus of the distinctive stag film remains unknown, scholars at the Kinsey Institute believe there are approximately 2000 films produced between 1915 and 1968. Stag cinema is a form of hardcore film and is characterized as silent, usually filling

900-456: The President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography said: [M]ailers dealing in sexually oriented materials define "hard-core pornography" as "photographic depictions of actual sexual intercourse with camera focus on the genitals and no accompanying text to provide a legal defense". This, of course, is not a legal definition.... Some judges have employed the term "hard-core pornography" as

950-666: The Yale School of Drama produced a number of pioneering directors with D.F.A. (Doctor of Fine Arts) and M.F.A. degrees in Drama (rather than English) who contributed to the expansion of professional resident theaters in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early days such programmes typically led to the staging of one major thesis production in the third (final) year. At the University of California, Irvine , Keith Fowler (a Yale D.F.A. and ex-producer of two LORT companies) led for many years

1000-659: The "Frenzy of the Visible" (1989) and Thomas Waugh 's Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-screen (2001). The distribution of hardcore pornography had been widely prohibited in many countries until the second half of the 20th century, when many countries began to allow some dissemination of softcore material. Supply is now usually regulated by a motion picture rating system as well as by direct regulation of points of sale . Restrictions, as applicable, apply to

1050-616: The Stage: From Naturalism to Growtowski , and Will's The Director in a Changing Theatre (1976). Because of the relatively late emergence of theatre directing as a performing arts profession when compared with for instance acting or musicianship, a rise of professional vocational training programmes in directing can be seen mostly in the second half of the 20th century. Most European countries nowadays know some form of professional directing training, usually at drama schools or conservatoires , or at universities. In Britain,

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1100-638: The Theatre of the Eye Repertory, in 1964. The company performed for a decade, and took Eyen's play about Sarah Bernhardt , Sarah B. Divine! , to the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1967. Eyen's work was central to the 1960s neo-expressionist off-off-Broadway movement. The New York Times wrote in 1984, "His plays are known for emotionally grotesque material combined with sharp satire." Eyen

1150-841: The UK in May 2000. The Independent reported in 2006 that Nielsen NetRatings found that more than nine million British male adults used Internet porn services. The study also reported a one-third rise in the number of women visiting X-rated sites, from 1.05 million to 1.38 million. A 2003 study found that one third of all British Internet users accessed hardcore porn. A 2005 study by Eric Schlosser estimated that revenues from hardcore porn matched Hollywood's domestic box office takings. Hardcore porn videos, Internet sites, live sex acts and cable TV programming generated US$ 10 billion, roughly equal to U.S. domestic box office receipts. Berl Kutchinsky 's Studies on Pornography and Sex Crimes in Denmark (1970),

1200-549: The age of 50. Eyen was born in Cambridge, Ohio , the youngest of seven children. His parents, Abraham and Julia Eyen, owned and ran a family restaurant. He attended Ohio State University but left before graduating. Eyen moved to New York City in 1960 to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts . Eyen sought acting roles without success, and worked briefly as a press agent, before he began writing for

1250-454: The birthplace of European drama, the writer bore principal responsibility for the staging of his plays. Actors were generally semi-professionals, and the director oversaw the mounting of plays from the writing process all the way through to their performance, often acting in them too, as Aeschylus for example did. The author-director would also train the chorus , sometimes compose the music, and supervise every aspect of production. The fact that

1300-562: The book and lyrics for the hit Broadway musical Dreamgirls , about an African-American female singing trio. Eyen's career started, however, with experimental theatre that he wrote and directed Off-Off Broadway in the 1960s. This led to his Off-Broadway success with The Dirtiest Show in Town (1970), a musical revue with nudity, and Women Behind Bars (1975), a camp parody of women's prison exploitation films . Eyen died of AIDS -related complications in Palm Beach, Florida at

1350-403: The criteria of a country's movie classification system. The anti-pornography movement often vigorously opposes legalization. In 1969, Denmark became the first country in the world to legalize pornography. In the U.S., legal interpretations of pornography in relation to the constitutional right to free speech differ from state to state and from city to city. Hardcore pornography was legalized in

1400-563: The director was called didaskalos , the Greek word for "teacher," indicates that the work of these early directors combined instructing their performers with staging their work. In medieval times, the complexity of vernacular religious drama, with its large scale mystery plays that often included crowd scenes, processions and elaborate effects, gave the role of director (or stage manager or pageant master ) considerable importance. A miniature by Jean Fouquet from 1460 (pictured) bears one of

1450-504: The earliest depictions of a director at work. Holding a prompt book, the central figure directs, with the aid of a long stick, the proceedings of the staging of a dramatization of the Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia . According to Fouquet, the director's tasks included overseeing the erecting of a stage and scenery (there were no permanent, purpose-built theatre structures at this time, and performances of vernacular drama mostly took place in

1500-460: The fifties in combination with the new technologies of the post-war era, such as 16 mm , 8 mm , and the Super 8 . American stag cinema in general received scholarly attention first in the mid-seventies by heterosexual males, e.g. Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin's Dirty Movies (1976) and more recently by feminist and queer cultural historians, e.g. Linda M. Williams ' Hard Core: Power Pleasure, and

1550-428: The film's release, DreamWorks and the licensee of the musical, The Tams-Witmark Music Library , paid the licensing fees for all non-professional stage performances of Dreamgirls in 2006. As a result, more than fifty high schools, colleges, and community theaters staged productions of Dreamgirls that year. Eyen died of complications from AIDS in 1991, at the age of fifty, in Palm Beach, Florida . A memorial service

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1600-696: The job"; to this purpose, theatres often employ trainee assistant directors or have in-house education schemes to train young theatre directors. Examples are the Royal National Theatre in London , which frequently organizes short directing courses, or the Orange Tree Theatre and the Donmar Warehouse on London's West End , which both employ resident assistant directors on a one-year basis for training purposes. Directing

1650-653: The latter "the main purpose is to stimulate erotic response in the reader. And that is all." Most famously, in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), Potter Stewart wrote: In Jacobellis v. Ohio and other cases, the United States Supreme Court ruled that only "hardcore" pornography could be prohibited by obscenity laws, with the rest protected by the First Amendment . The category of "borderline obscenity" thus became obsolete. The 1970 report of

1700-432: The norm rather than the exception. Great forces in the emancipation of theatre directing as a profession were notable 20th-century theatre directors like Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko , Vsevolod Meyerhold , Yevgeny Vakhtangov , Michael Chekhov , Yuri Lyubimov (Russia), Orson Welles , Peter Brook , Peter Hall (Britain), Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Giorgio Strehler , and Franco Zeffirelli (Italy). A cautionary note

1750-412: The open air), casting and directing the actors (which included fining them for those that infringed rules), and addressing the audience at the beginning of each performance and after each intermission. From Renaissance times up until the 19th century, the role of director was often carried by the actor-manager . This would usually be a senior actor in a troupe who took the responsibility for choosing

1800-512: The project, unhappy that her character died at the conclusion of the first act. After several workshops and numerous rewrites, Bennett decided that the production needed Holliday, and the team rewrote act two to build up Holliday's character. Produced on Broadway in 1981, Dreamgirls was the biggest commercial success of Eyen's career. It was nominated for thirteen Tony Awards , including two for Eyen: Best Book and Best Original Score. The show won six Tonys, including Best Book. It also earned Eyen

1850-543: The repertoire of work, staging it and managing the company. This was the case for instance with Commedia dell'Arte companies and English actor-managers like Colley Cibber and David Garrick . The modern theatre director can be said to have originated in the staging of elaborate spectacles of the Meininger Company under George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen . The management of large numbers of extras and complex stagecraft matters necessitated an individual to take on

1900-695: The role of overall coordinator. This gave rise to the role of the director in modern theatre, and Germany would provide a platform for a generation of emerging visionary theatre directors, such as Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt . Simultaneously, Constantin Stanislavski , principally an actor-manager, would set up the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia and similarly emancipate the role of the director as artistic visionary. The French regisseur

1950-446: The screening, or rental, sale, or giving of a movie, in the form of a DVD, video, computer file, etc. Public display and advertising of hardcore pornography is often prohibited, as is its supply to minors . Most countries have eased the restrictions on the distribution of pornography , either by general or restricted legalization or by failure to enforce prohibitive legislation. Most easing of restrictions has been by way of changes to

2000-483: The term altogether.... There is one genre of sexually oriented material which is almost universally sold under-the-counter in the United States: wholly photographic reproductions of actual sexual intercourse graphically depicting vaginal and/or oral penetration.... A[t] present, distinctions between materials sold openly and those sold covertly have become extremely unclear. From the 1970s, the salient distinction

2050-608: The theatre. He found an artistic home in the 1960s off-off-Broadway Experimental theatre scene, based at Caffe Cino and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company . He gave Bette Midler her first professional acting roles in Miss Nefertiti Regrets and Cinderella Revisited. Both were produced in 1965, a children's play during the daytime and an adult show by night. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , Eyen formed his own theatrical company,

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2100-536: The tradition that theatre directors emerge from degree courses (usually in English literature) at the Oxbridge universities has meant that for a long time, professional vocational training did not take place at drama schools or performing arts colleges, although an increase in training programmes for theatre directors can be witnessed since the 1970s and 1980s. In American universities, the seminal directing program at

2150-419: The workshop stage, though individual numbers from the show have been performed in concert. A film adaptation of Dreamgirls , written and directed by Bill Condon , was released in 2006 by DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures . Two of Eyen's songs from the soundtrack, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going", as sung by Jennifer Hudson , and " One Night Only ", as sung by Beyoncé Knowles , became hits. To promote

2200-468: Was apparently offered and refused the role. Following this setback, Eyen began commuting to Los Angeles to write for television and films. In 1974, he became one of the first well-known writers to write a hardcore pornographic film. He contributed writing to the 1976/1977 satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman , produced by Norman Lear . In 1978, Eyen earned an Emmy Award nomination for writing Midler's first television special , Ol' Red Hair

2250-523: Was arguably permitted by obscenity laws; "hardcore pornography" lacked such merits and was definitely prohibited. In Roth v. United States (1957), the government brief distinguished three classes of sexual material: "novels of apparently serious literary intent"; "borderline entertainment ... magazines, cartoons, nudist publications, etc."; and "hard core pornography, which no one would suggest had literary merit". Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen in 1959 distinguished "erotic realism" from "pornography"; in

2300-470: Was between hardcore pornography and softcore pornography , which may use simulated sex and limits the range and intensity of depictions of sexual activities. For example, William Rotsler 's 1973 classification subdivided the X rating for erotic films: "The XXX-rating means hard-core, the XX-rating is for simulation, and an X-rating is for comparatively cool films." The prehistory of modern pornography

2350-517: Was called the Neil Simon of Off-Off-Broadway at one point when he had four plays running simultaneously." In 1973, Eyen co-wrote the book for and directed one of Broadway's most notorious flops, the Paul Jabara disco musical Rachael Lily Rosenbloom (And Don't You Ever Forget It) , which closed after seven previews. The lead character, a flamboyant entertainer, was inspired by Midler, who

2400-579: Was held at the St. James Theatre in New York City on September 23, 1991. In 1993, Eyen posthumously received the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Award from Ohio State University , where his papers are archived. Theatre director If the production is a new piece of writing or a (new) translation of a play, the director may also work with the playwright or

2450-473: Was introduced by the famed director Sir Tyrone Guthrie who said "the only way to learn how to direct a play, is ... to get a group of actors simple enough to allow you to let you direct them, and direct." A number of seminal works on directing and directors include Toby Cole and Helen Krich's 1972 Directors on Directing: A Sourcebook of the Modern Theatre , Edward Braun's 1982 book The Director and

2500-509: Was prolific, writing, and usually directing, 35 plays at La MaMa alone during the 1960s and 1970s. His early off-off-Broadway plays, other than those noted above, included: The title character in Why Hanna's Skirt Won't Stay Down has been described as representative of the crudeness, exuberance, decadence and profundity of the movement and the period. In 1970, Eyen had his biggest commercial success to date with The Dirtiest Show in Town ,

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