Does the Netflix series, “13 Reasons Why,” glorify teen suicide? How can the streaming service better warn audiences about sensitive topics?; Why Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in L.A. was built for theater but didn't stage a play until now; Brett Berns makes "Bang! The Bert Berns Story," a documentary tracking his father's legendary career in the music business.
LA architectural landmark by Frank Lloyd Wright becomes a stage
About a hundred years ago in Los Angeles, scores of people would gather for Easter Sunrise Service on a small flattop mountain northwest of downtown. Musicians would perform while folks prayed and celebrated in the olive groves. But an heiress to an oil fortune wanted that land for herself.
So, as the story goes, Aline Barnsdall bought Olive Hill and helped secure money to move Easter mass to the spot we now know as the Hollywood Bowl. Barnsdall then hired the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house and theater complex atop her new purchase.
Barnsdall didn't live very long in the house, and she and Wright could never agree on a design for the theater, so it was never built. But now, the property is about to host its first theatrical production.
Barnsdall’s home is more famously known as Hollyhock House. The 1920s-era masterpiece is the centerpiece of Barnsdall Art Park, which is located at the junction of Los Feliz, Silverlake and East Hollywood. On a recent day, a troupe of musicians and actors are rehearsing a play to be performed inside the landmark structure.
“It’s both terrifying and amazing," says Kate Jopson, a theater director with the Circle X company and Just TOYS Productions. "Because there are both a lot of restrictions and a lot of inspiration. There are already so many beautiful lines and movements that sometimes all you have to do is place a person there and the image of it is amazing.”
The production is part of Wright’s 150th birthday celebration this year. Wright properties across the country are marking his sesquicentennial with performances and public events. At Hollyhock, L.A. audiences will enjoy a site-specific production of “Fefu and Her Friends,” penned by the powerful Cuban-American playwright, María Irene Fornés.
“You are in Fefu’s house," Jopson explains. "And Fefu, she is an eccentric woman, a fairly wealthy woman. She is trapped in a life that isn’t as stimulating as what her intelligence is. She’s brilliant, but has nowhere to put it and she is festering on the inside trying to find a place to put it.”
With only 12 performances and 20 tickets a night for sale, audience members will experience the show exactly as Fornés intended. An all-female international cast spreads out across the Hollyhock grounds to tell the story of how a group of women confront societal pressure.
“At one point all the women divide up and they find these little intimate pockets," Jopson says. "So, Fornés in the '70s — before all these immersive or site-specific shows that have become fairly common to have scenes happen at the same time — she wrote this piece to have these four scenes happen simultaneously.”
Jopson believes Hollyhock is the perfect backdrop for this classic feminist text by Fornés because the playwright and Aline Barnsdall both mirror the strength, smarts and sass of the women who come together in the story.
"[There’s] text from the play where they say where women are like live wires, they have this energy about them," Jopson says. "And so you can do a lot, be very productive, but there’s always a need to feel like you have to prove yourself to someone or prove that you are worth something in a way that sometimes men don’t have that.”
To mount a show inside Hollyhock House is no small feat. This is a National Historic Landmark and is on the path to becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site. To put that in perspective, there are only a tiny handful of other places in the entire Southwest with that distinction. Yosemite National Park, the Redwood Forest and the Grand Canyon are among the elite few. Hollyhock House curator Jeffrey Herr says the upcoming play allows the building’s history to finally come full circle:
"Aline Barnsdall was educated in Europe, her father and grandfather’s oil money saw to it that she had the finest of everything. And she became interested in avant-garde theater and she wanted to produce. So she hired, or commissioned, Frank Lloyd Wright to provide that theater for her to be able to do the kind of work that she had seen in Europe. She was the original Silverlake hipster! Although I don’t think she would have tried to be or intended to be, but it was just who she was.”
It took Barnsdall about four years to find Olive Hill. She had tried Chicago and the Pacific Northwest, but it was here in L.A. that she fell in love with this remote locale and its dramatic views.
According to Herr: “There were some bungalow tracks around the base of the hill, but more to the east there were lemon groves and, of course, there [were] the studios — some of the small, but soon to be major studios. The Disney Studios were over on Hyperion where the Gelson’s is.”
In the end, Barnsdall and Wright fought over the designs, timelines and overall construction of the house and theater colony hybrid. While Wright was distracted with building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Barnsdall grew impatient and fired him. Shortly thereafter, she gave a 12-acre portion of the land, including Hollyhock House, to the City of Los Angeles. The theater complex was never built. Her dream was dashed, until now, when members of the Circle X Company and Just TOYS production began rehearsing for their upcoming show inside the residence.
“The house became alive," muses actress Julia Ubrankovics. "The energy is just lighter. We have a relationship to these pictures. We have relationships to these books, and to the carpet. And we touch it and we sort of bring life back to it and the house gives a lot.”
Ubrankovics says there’s a certain poetic justice in Barnsdall finally getting what she paid Wright for all those years ago — a living, breathing home for theater.
“It was a museum," Ubrankovics notes. "And now it’s a house — with a purpose.”
“Fefu and Her Friends,” runs May 6-28 at Hollyhock House. The show is nearly sold out, but to help with restoration efforts on the Hollyhock guest house, there are two special fundraiser seats available at each show.
'BANG: The Bert Berns Story': Uncovering the legacy of a legendary R&B producer
In the early 1960s, an ambitious young songwriter named Bert Berns began making a name for himself in New York City.
One of his first hits was "Twist & Shout," made famous by The Isley Brothers and The Beatles.
The success of “Twist & Shout” and other hits led to a staff producer job for Berns at Atlantic Records, where he wrote and produced a string of R&B hits. He soon started his own label, Bang Records, with acts that included a British band named Them. The band’s singer was a lad named Van Morrison, and Berns wrote their hit, “Here Comes the Night.”
Berns lived and worked fast because he knew he didn’t have long to live. A bout of rheumatic fever as a child left him with a weak heart. When he died in 1967 at the age of 38, he left behind a wife and three kids. His oldest, Brett, was only two years old when his father passed away.
Brett Berns has now made a documentary about his father’s life and career. It’s called “BANG: “The Bert Berns Story.” Brett recently chatted with The Frame host, John Horn.
Interview highlights:
On when he learned about his father's legacy:
My mother was the star of our lives growing up because she had this amazing run with Bang Records — the second incarnation with Paul Davis and Peabo Bryson and artists like that. So it wasn't until I went to college and went through the army and the copyrights came back to the family [that] I realized, Oh my god! — the depth of his legacy. I also realized how obscure and forgotten he was in the history of American music.
On his father's involvement with the criminal side of the music industry:
I think it was like the Wild West back then. But instead of cowboys and indians, it was gangsters, hoodlums and record men. You had to be tough to work in that realm. But the mob were everywhere back then as well, so it wasn't just my dad that was a great mob story. But no one was more mobbed up than my father in that era. And it worked out okay for him. He was living on borrowed time and he had the charisma of a Bill Clinton, so they were attracted to him as well.
On his father's illness:
People with rheumatic fever like Bobby Darin, they knew it was a death sentence and so you either lived like there was no tomorrow or you curled up in a ball and waited to die. My dad did the former.
On Bert Berns' prolific career despite passing away at the age of 38:
He was a late starter. He was supposed to be dead by the time he was 31, when he had his first hit record. So that seven-year run, I think it was the ticking time bomb of a heart that just drove him to keep doubling and tripling his success. It really happened that way. One minute he was a $50-a-week songwriter, and the next minute he was a staff producer at Atlantic [Records] and the next minute he had his own record label. I mean, it was just meteoric.
On his father's work at Atlantic with Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler:
[Wexler] says, "If I knew where [Bert Berns] was buried, I would piss on his grave." Jerry Wexler was the great hero of my father's story as well. If it wasn't for Ahmet and Jerry at Atlantic Records, the Bert Berns story would not have been the same.
On his contentious relationship with Jerry Wexler:
It was really a love relationship, like a father-son. He was best man at [my father's] wedding and he was my godfather. So it was really [bad] at the end [when] Jerry Wexler wanted to sell the label. Ahmet didn't want to sell, but Jerry got his way. And he needed to take Bang Records with him because Bang was such a big part of their success at the moment.
On Berns' and Wexler's writing credit on Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love":
Solomon Burke always said this was [an] old song from the church and it was his song. He said that Jerry Wexler put his name on the song. I heard over time that he accused my father of also putting his name on that song. But of the three of them, my dad was really the principle songwriter. His first gig [was] as a songwriter. I find it hard to believe that my father did that to Solomon. Solomon loved my dad anyways. But the thing about my dad as a songwriter is, he wrote half of these songs on his own. He didn't have a permanent songwriting partner like Goffin and King or Leiber and Stoller. So half the songs he wrote on his own, and half with everybody from Jerry Wexler to my mother.
On the autobiographical nature of his lyrics:
Joel Selvin, the author of the Bert Berns biography, said that my father wrote his pathology into his music. Knowing he was going to die, his songs were deeper and more soulful. They were all these songs about crying — "Cry To Me," "Cry Baby," "Piece of My Heart," "Heart Be Still." The songs were deeply autobiographical.
On getting interviews with elite musicians for the film:
We started getting people like Cissy Houston, Solomon Burke and Ben E. King into the film. We thought if we got the heroes of the guys like Keith Richards, Paul McCartney and Van Morrison that it would be easier to get them in a film with a no-name director and with no distribution behind us. It was a process. A build-it-and-they-will-come kind of approach. But I always joke, the hardest interview for me to get was not these legends of rock 'n' roll, but my mother. She really held out on me and made me wait for that interview.
It was years of begging and then I had to show her a semi-completed version of the film. When she saw the quality of the film and who we'd gotten in it, she decided to jump on board.
On what he learned about his father making the film:
There were so many revelations, not just the autobiographical lyrics and not just the depth of the mob story. The real revelation for me was twofold. One, how deeply obscure he was; and the next one was how great he was. When you look at the totality of his legacy — songwriter of standards, consummate record producer, label man. He was the tip of the spear of the uptown soul, contemporary soul music revolution. The first American producer to work in England. When I look at the totality of his legacy, I really can make an argument that he was one of the greatest of all-time.
My dad said, My children will know me through my music. It was something he would tell my mother. It was really his prescient prediction and my children — his grandchildren — are also knowing him through his music.