I Like Charade in June/ How About You?

8 June, 2023 at 9:23 pm (charade, dear diary, film)

As is inevitable in this day and age, one occasionally gets involved in a “What was your lockdown like?” conversation.  I just avoided going to a college reunion, and I’m sure much of the smallest of talk would have centered around trading anecdotes about isolation from family and support structures, about juggling parenting, schooling, and work-from-home, of eldest children trying to figure out how much college was actually worth when another Covid variant could cause another stretch of remote learning from within the college’s dorms.  The personal cost of the pandemic has been and will continue to be wildly varied, which makes it both an interesting conversation starter and an easy way to reveal vast gulfs of experience on either side of an anecdote.

My final pre-shutdown experience back in March of 2020 was deciding that it probably was not the better part of valor to venture out to a Welcome to Night Vale performance when I knew the governor was about to declare a state of emergency as soon as the timing was right for a press conference.  But a scant two weeks before that, I’d closed out a weekend of entertainment by walking around the Museum of Modern Art with an old roommate talking about the growing fears of infection and how seriously we should take the burgeoning news coverage.  Prior to that, the weekend had consisted of my first ever attendance at an actual Broadway show and the achievement of a long-awaited dream of visiting the New York Public Library’s Charade collection.

That’s not what it’s officially called, of course.  But, as I’ve previously mentioned, the Library of Performing Arts’ collection of the papers of Charade screenwriter Peter Stone were an enticement that had been hovering over my NYC visits for some time. I’d previously had an opportunity to swing by and plunge into the archives, Scrooge McDuck-stylee, in November of 2017 when I unexpectedly found myself with five hours to kill between planned events.  But I was with company and asking them to wait while I poured over ephemera of little interest to anyone else felt like the height of rudeness (he says on a blog where he’s detailing some of that ephemera). So I put it off until I found myself with another window of time to kill between events and was flying solo. Some people find it lonely and a little scary to travel by one’s self, but I find if one is looking to spend a literal half-day taking notes on contract details and script annotations of a minor ’60s romantic thriller comedy, it’s best not to trespass on another person’s patience. My friends were politely bored enough having to listen to me gush about the experience afterward; to deal with with it in real-time would surely have been unreasonable.

What is reasonable, unfortunately, are the fairly stringent copyright protections instituted by NYPL about the fabulous things that I found there. Obviously, they are aware that they have many, many things in their collection that are not in the public domain, and despite the fact that anyone with a digital camera and a library card could cheerfully make the protected contents of their archives significantly less protected, their policy states that “The Library does not grant written permission for any type of use of reproductions taken by readers“, and that photographs are only for “personal use”. I have read and re-read the permissions policy, and while I would say that the narcissistic ouroboros of non-commercial blogging is much more adjacent to personal use than it is to publication, I understand that this perspective probably wouldn’t stand up against a cease-and-desist notice.  Since copyright is designed to prevent unlicensed reproductions that will stifle, divert, and lessen sales, excerpts or “transformative works” that aren’t going to reduce access to and sales of the original aren’t considered violations. Which is why this post won’t be a catalogue of all the minutiae I’ve teased above. I have instead clipped a portion of an image from the NYPL’s “Peter Stone” image collection of a man in a smart… waistcoat, but changed it enough to hopefully make it something sufficiently Other.  I’m pretty sure that is permissible — and desirable, as something to slightly break up this unremitting block of self-indulgent twaddle with an image — but I’ve been wrong about the legality of Charade-based copyright issues before.

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