Copyright

by

Toni Maria Stickler

2018

The Thesis Committee for Toni Maria Stickler Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Thesis:

Theater Bootlegs: Discourses on Access and Class in Theater Fandom

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Suzanne Scott, Supervisor

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley

Theater Bootlegs: Discourses on Access and Class in Theater Fandom

by

Toni Maria Stickler

Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin August 2018

Abstract

Theater Bootlegs: Discourses on Access and Class in Theater Fandom

Toni Maria Stickler, M.A.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2018

Supervisor: Suzanne Scott

This thesis contributes to the growing field of theater audience studies by focusing on a particular theater fan practice: recording and watching bootlegs. While scholars have extensively researched bootlegs of music concerts, bootlegs of theater have not been studied even though they are a crucial aspect of the contemporary theater fandom experience. This is a significant gap in understanding how audiences relate to theater, especially because theater as a medium is relatively expensive and inaccessible. This thesis frames bootlegs as filling a demand for greater access to professional theater and considers the political ramifications of their circulation. To this end, I examine the construction of theater as a “high class” medium and how prioritizing the “liveness” of theater contributes to its exclusivity. I examine how these conceptions of theater permeate the discourses of theater producers and performers who condemn the recording of bootlegs. Finally, a survey of the community of theater bootleg traders illuminates the tensions that currently exist for bootleg traders as they attempt to circulate bootlegs while avoiding unwanted attention from theater producers.

iv Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... vii

Introduction ...... 1

Scope of Study ...... 3

The Big Picture ...... 4

Material Limits to Theater Access ...... 7

Class and Taste Cultures ...... 8

The Ethics of Bootlegs: Major Discourses ...... 16

Liveness ...... 16

Intellectual Property ...... 18

Chapter Overview ...... 19

Chapter One ...... 19

Chapter Two...... 19

Chapter Three...... 20

Chapter 1: History of Bootlegging and Theater as High Culture ...... 22

Chapter 2: Discourses Against Bootlegging ...... 49

Case Study: Lin-Manuel Miranda...... 61

Chapter 3: Bootleg Trading Community and Practices ...... 73

Conclusion ...... 100

Further Research ...... 103

Accessibility ...... 103

Theater Fandom ...... 103

Piracy as fan practice ...... 105 v Appendices ...... 106

Appendix A: Survey Questions ...... 106

Part One ...... 106

Part Two ...... 106

Appendix B: Example of Copyright Disclaimer...... 107

Bibliography ...... 108

vi List of Figures

Figure 1: Screencap of part of a bootleg list on a trading website...... 78

Figure 2: Example of tabs on a trading website...... 79

vii Introduction

Only days after the hit musical Hamilton (2015) began preview performances at the Richard Rodgers theater on Broadway, an anonymous theater fan posted the following on the blogging site Tumblr: “here I am/patiently waiting for a bootleg of

Hamilton/I mean it's been nine whole days what's the holdup?” Unfortunately for them, their query was responded to by the writer and composer of the musical himself—Lin-

Manuel Miranda. He wrote: “Here I am. The composer. Actively rooting against you.”

This interaction is just one of many instances where performers have called out fans recording bootlegs. Yet, the tone of the original post also suggests that bootlegs are normal and expected—at least in some parts of theater fandom. The desire for access to content that is not easily and legally available often structures how fans are able to relate to theater. Bootlegs exist as an answer to this demand but they are an illicit, underground, and not entirely satisfactory substitute for the actual live theater performance.

Theater fandom, comprised of both those fans who seek out and watch bootlegs and those who do not, proliferates online on the same sites as fans of other properties. A quick search of a popular musical on Tumblr will reveal many common fan practices like fan fiction and fan-made gifsets. However, there is a crucial difference between theater fans and fans of, for instance, a television show. The actual content—the live show itself—is not available online, or at least it is not legally available in the way that TV or films are. Instead, theater productions provide some ancillary content like cast recordings and small promotional clips in order to placate the demand for access to the show.

However, as the confrontation between this fan and Miranda shows, these promotional clips are not always enough for fans, who seek out bootlegs anyway. This desire for access and the mingling of theater fans and producers on social media then inevitably 1 produces conflict. Theater performers regularly speak out against recording bootlegs and insist that the only way fans can experience theater is by buying a ticket and attending a live performance.

This doesn’t stop fans from seeking out bootlegs or from recording them. In fact, there is a longstanding underground online community surrounding the collection and trade of theater bootlegs—both video and audio recordings. This is similar in many ways to the practice of recording and collecting bootlegs of live music concerts—a practice that became relatively common in the 1970s surrounding rock musicians.1 The activities of music bootleggers has been well documented but theater bootlegging has gotten much less attention, and this thesis seeks to address this gap. Audio and video bootlegs of musicals and plays can be found on torrenting sites alongside pirated television and movies, but they are also traded among dedicated groups of theater fans using private emails. Some bootlegs make their way to YouTube before being subjected to takedown notices. The recording and sharing of bootlegs is a particularly controversial practice even within theater fandom itself. In many ways bootlegs serve to democratize the theater experience and allow individuals to see professional theater productions when they never could afford to otherwise. The debate among fans and theater performers on the ethics of bootlegging is inescapably related to how class circumscribes who can experience theater. This project focuses on bootlegs as a way to examine discourses surrounding issues of accessibility in theater and in fandom in the contemporary digital age. Issues of access are inevitably also about issues of class, and thus this thesis examines how theater has come to have a reputation as “highbrow” and how this affects the fan experience.

1 Clinton Heylin, Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, 1st ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 60. 2 In this thesis I examine how bootlegs circulate among theater fans. This requires a special focus on those fans who are most invested in bootlegs: those who record and those who trade them. This bootleg trading community is insular in some ways and does not represent the totality of those who search for or watch theater bootlegs; indeed, there are significant tensions between committed traders and more casual or opportunistic fans in regards to the proper way to obtain and share bootlegs. However, in an attempt to understand these committed theater fans and their desire to record and collect bootlegs, I have conducted an anonymous survey of this population, reaching out to them through their personal websites. This thesis documents how bootlegs are circulated online as recordings of audios and videos are released into the relatively insular bootleg trading community and subsequently disperse through the rest of the Internet.

Beyond simply tracing the circulation of bootlegs online, I ask how fans understand the ethicality of bootlegs and how they justify their decisions to record, trade, and watch theater bootlegs. To understand this, I examine the arguments of those who condemn bootlegs, such as theater performers and creators like Miranda. I trace discourses among and between fans and theater professionals through news articles and social media accounts. My aim is to understand theater bootlegs as part of the everyday decision-making of theater fans and in this way contextualize the criticisms of theater performers.

SCOPE OF STUDY

My goal is not to claim a comprehensive overview of all possible arguments and opinions on the ethics of recording bootlegs. Instead, I hope to illustrate the main discourses that structure this debate and show how these discourses are related to the inaccessibility of theater more broadly. By situating my study within the field of fan

3 studies I consciously focus on the meanings and practices of the fans. While I examine the public discourses of particular theater celebrities and professionals in some depth, my original survey data is collected from fans. Comprehensive research on the opinions of those in the theater industry is outside the scope of this thesis project, although this is an important future area of inquiry. Even within this narrower focus, I do not claim to have represented all fan opinions. Theater fandom, like the fandom for most media objects, is dispersed and heterogeneous.

THE BIG PICTURE

I situate this project on bootlegs as a contribution to the scholarship on theater fandom. There is a small but growing body of audience studies work within the discipline of theater studies, but there is still relatively little work that examines theater audiences as fans, which is surprising given that, as Henry Jenkins notes, one of the earliest uses of the term “fan” was applied to theater-goers.2 In particular, Matt Hills notes that theater studies has “profoundly neglected consumer audiences for commercial theatre,”3 which is largely the population that I focus on in this thesis. Kirsty Sedgman likewise explains that

“it is fair to say that theatre academia has largely resisted either directly studying fan communities, or analysing spectatorial engagement via fan studies frameworks.”4 This

“resistance” is a key point in understanding how academics themselves have added to stigmatizing discourses—which ultimately reflect class biases—that affect those in theater fandom. At the same time, fan studies has focused relatively little on theater as an

2 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Updated 20th anniversary ed (New York: Routledge, 2013), 12. 3 Matt Hills, “Implicit Fandom in the Fields of Theatre, Art, and Literature: Studying ‘Fans’ Beyond Fan Discourses,” in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 2018, 481 4 Kirsty Sedgman, “When Theatre Meets Fandom: Audience Reviews of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” The Journal of Fandom Studies 6, no. 1 (March 1, 2018), 85. 4 object of fandom because of its disciplinary goal to center the “lowbrow” and previously denigrated forms of media and spectatorship. Matt Hills characterizes this gap as

“mutually reinforcing interdisciplinary discourses of exclusion” (emphasis in original). 5

This project draws on key insights from both fields to understand fan behavior and discourses around bootlegs. Interdisciplinary work on theater fans is growing and becoming more recognized by both fan scholars and theater scholars, as panels on theater fans find their place at Fan Studies Network conferences, and forthcoming work on theater fandom will be published in a themed issue of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures and a book collection on the subject, edited by Sedgman. This study adds to this body of work by focusing specifically on collecting and trading bootlegs, and thus takes a perspective that underlines how theater fans exist in the digital age by making full use of the connectivity provided by the Internet. This builds upon the historical lineage traced by Caroline Heim who identifies the trajectory of theater fan communities from the Bowery b’hoys and Matinee Girls to contemporary online fan practices, where fans gather on social media sites and message boards to discuss their favorite shows.6 Heim does not address issues of access in depth, and indeed she somewhat contradictorily emphasizes the importance of repeat attendance to fans7 while also claiming that the

Internet has enable some people to become fans even if they have never seen the show.8

Her emphasis on fans’ ability to “share and negotiate meanings” might be better understood in practice as being facilitated by the sharing of theater bootlegs that allow a common starting point and concrete evidence to sustain such in-depth discussion. I argue

5Hills, 477. 6 Caroline Heim, “Broadway Theatre Fans: Communities of Narrators and Translators,” Popular Entertainment Studies 7, no. 1–2 (September 27, 2016): 39–54. 7 Ibid., 48. 8 Ibid., 50. 5 that scholars working on contemporary theater fandom have to take into consideration how bootlegs modify how fans relate to the ephemerality of the live theater performance.

Otherwise, the picture of theater fandom is incomplete.

An acknowledgement of bootlegs would prevent misunderstandings such as that of Stacy Wolf, who studied fans of the musical Wicked and their discussion on the

Internet. She did not realize for some time that these fans were circulating bootleg versions of the show that facilitated their close analysis.9 It is important for scholars to be able to balance both the importance of the ephemeral nature of theater performance alongside the elevated analysis of fans that would not be possible if they only retained a memory of a live performance. Fans’ deep investments in texts means that close analysis and repeated viewing is highly desirable, and these viewing habits would be very difficult without bootlegs. Wolf acknowledges the economic privilege inherent in theater fans who can afford tickets to see the show, and even acknowledges the potential democratizing effect of bootlegs, but still places a premium on the experience of the actual performance and relegates the discussion of bootlegs to a footnote.10

Kirsty Sedgman’s more recent work has taken up this issue in much more depth.

She recognizes how “one of the significant outcomes of studying the nexus between theatre and fandom has been the question it provokes about access,” which is a claim that structures this thesis as well.11 Sedgman identifies bootlegs, along with other fan practices like online reviews and summaries of shows, as forms of “digital documentation” that “can perhaps offer fans a more equitable platform on which to

9 Stacy Wolf, “Wicked Divas, Musical Theater, and Internet Girl Fans.” Camera Obscura 22, no. 2 65 (January 1, 2007): 64. 10 Ibid. 11 Sedgman, 86. 6 practice their fandom.”12 This study goes further in examining the extent to which bootlegs and bootleg trading can be understood as making theater fandom more

“equitable” between those who can attend live performances and those who cannot. I also argue that if theater fandom always implicates issues of access, it is then fundamentally implicates class issues.

Material Limits to Theater Access

The most comprehensive and long-term statistics on Broadway audiences are provided by The Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry. According to their report, the average ticket price for a Broadway show in the

2015/16 season was $103.11 (the audience reported spending $109). The Broadway

League refers to a “devoted fan” as someone who has been to see more than 15 performances in one season, and by this definition a person must spend an average of

$1,500 a year on Broadway in order to be a fan.13 Defining fans as those who repeatedly attend performances makes sense from an industrial perspective that is focused on fans as the most dedicated consumers, but clearly this definition excludes many people who would consider themselves Broadway fans but cannot attend as many performances.

None of this is to say that other mediums do not have their own class or accessibility issues. However, theater, because of its expensiveness, is a prime example of how class structures the experience of fans and who can claim to be a fan at all.

Another major way in which access to theater is limited is the extreme regionalism of professional theater. The major productions that fans prefer are produced most often on Broadway in New York and the West End in London, and while successful

12 Ibid. 91. 13 Ibid., 32. 7 productions may go on tour, this is still limited to major Western cities. Other areas of the world may have to wait years for a production to appear where they live, and most productions never will make it that far. This regionalism can be seen as contributing further expense to most people’s experience of theater, as travel and accommodation costs can be exorbitant. Of course, there are also many local, smaller, often non- professional theater productions put on in many more places. But fans place a premium on bigger, professional productions, and especially on the originating Broadway casts.

They are usually not content to be circumscribed in what they can view based on where they live. In this way they parallel many of areas of the world where residents cannot legally access mainstream Western TV shows for years or possibly ever.

Class and Taste Cultures

Along with the basic material and physical conditions that delimit the kind of person who can attend a theater show, there are also expectations of behavior expected within theater that establish it as a space for people of a particular class or standards of taste. This includes standards of dress and comportment such as remaining quiet and still.

While organizations such as the Theater Development Fund work to bring theater to those who are typically excluded—including low-income individuals and also people with various disabilities or who are neuro-atypical—they do not change the fundamentally exclusive and inaccessible nature of the theater industry. These social trappings are part of Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital,” which has often been taken up by fan scholars as a way to understand the distinctions audiences make between

“high” culture and “low” culture. Bourdieu argues that these distinctions are primarily used to reinforce class hierarchies. Furthermore, the “taste” developed by individuals is not innate but is learned and also functions to construct and enforce class hierarchies.

8 As an example of how cultural capital is learned, it is illustrative to return to

Hamilton and consider an NPR article by Gene Demby.14 Demby characterizes himself as

“not a fan of musical theater, the kind of not-a-fan-of-musical-theater who pointedly self- describes as such should musical theater come up in conversation.” He describes his discomfort in attending Hamilton by explaining that he was “unfamiliar enough with the ritual and customs of that space to be worried that I might be doing it wrong somehow.”

While I agree with Demby’s overarching argument that this unease is a product of the historical exclusion of black people from theater audiences, these “rituals and customs” are also exactly the kind of class cues described by Bourdieu. Theater attendance is accompanied by specific notions of how a person must act and appear and knowledge of theater etiquette is a kind of cultural capital that is a result of a person’s particular class position.

One result of these taste cultures is that not everyone who enjoys attending theater shows may self-identify as a fan.15 Yet, as Matt Hills argues, this population still displays many of the same activities and emotional investment as those who readily accept the label. Hills sets up a contrast between musical theater, where fandom is acceptable, and

“‘legitimate’ theater,” where fandom is implicit. Hills further writes that musical theater fans have a “cultural positioning homologous to the kinds of film/TV fandom explored in fan studies.”16 This is true to an extent, as I have already discussed the theater fandoms that I explore are likely to engage in fan activities like write fan fiction or make gifsets. In this thesis I am similarly concerned with how cultural capital and hierarchies of taste are

14 Gene Demby, “Watching A Brown ‘Hamilton’ With A White Audience,” NPR.org. Accessed September 13, 2017. http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/03/08/469539715/a-brown-hamilton-a-white- audience. 15 Hills, Implicit Fandom, 479. 16 Ibid., 482. 9 constructed, and I add to this analysis the ways in which actual fans respond to and negotiate these boundaries. I am focusing mostly on the section of theater fandom that

Hills writes is explicit in their fandom, but I suggest that their position in a hierarchy of taste and class is contested. I argue that actual material barriers to access remain that structure how this fandom operates and these barriers cannot be ignored even if the object of fandom is relatively populist and invites explicit fannish behaviors.

Some fan scholars who deploy theater fandom in fan studies latch onto these cues and choose theater to stand in for “high culture.” This is true as well of work that has focused on opera fans.17 Scholars who have written on theater fandom in this vein have focused on subjects like Shakespeare and Chekhov, which in their work are unambiguously classified as high culture. Pearson, for example, includes the subject of

Shakespeare in her consideration of whether those who enjoy high culture products even consider themselves to “fans” at all, or whether the term is too loaded with implications of bad taste.18 Shakespeare is an interesting case study that illustrates, as well, the historical context of what is considered “high culture,” since Shakespeare’s reputation as

“highbrow” was only developed in the academy centuries after it was initially performed for a much more popular audience. I make this connection more explicit by drawing on the work of Lawrence Levine, who traces the process of “sacralization” of theater in the

20th century by which theater came to be understood as “highbrow” in American

17 Anna Fishzon, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 18 Pearson, Roberta, “Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies, and Sherlockians,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

10 culture.19 This cultural status did not always exist, and this historicization highlights the constructed nature of how theater is related to class.

I then connect this understanding to work done by fan scholars on “taste cultures” that structure how fandom operates using a different set of priorities and internal priorities. This allows me to show that hierarchies of taste and class distinctions exist within theater fandom as well. For example, John Tulloch’s work on fans of Chekov plays is extremely useful for understanding how theater audiences can be stratified by whether they are fans of the production or fans of a particular performer, but he does not emphasize how these distinctions can turn into hierarchies of taste.20 For the theater fans that I focus on, their fandom is not implicit, but this does not mean that they are unaffected by discourses of taste. A focus on Shakespeare is very different than the work of Heim and Wolf on contemporary Broadway fandom focused on musicals like

Hamilton and Wicked. It is clear here that high/low distinctions exist within theater as well—perhaps the clearest example being the distinction between musicals and straight plays. The Broadway League report details how the audience for straight plays is even richer and more educated than the rest of the relatively rich and well-educated theater audience.21 There are other distinctions as well, such as the Disney musical or the “mega- musical” which is characterized in academia and reviews as a purely commercial spectacle meant to please the masses in contrast to more “serious” musicals.

19 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1986 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), 168. 20Tulloch, John. “Fans of Chekhov.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007. | Tulloch, John. Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences. University of Iowa Press, 2009. 21 Karen Hauser, “The Demographics of Broadway Audiences 2015-2016” (New York: The Broadway League, 2016), 27, 30. 11 The call for a sustained focus on potential fandom of “high culture” work is not entirely misplaced. This project takes up that call in some ways, but also complicates this approach. The online fans and fan communities that form the basis of this study are perhaps more accurately described as middle-brow. Their status as fans is structured by economic class, and at the same time they are not unambiguously “high class” and are subject to stratifications of cultural capital within theater. I found that the most highly sought after bootlegs focused on musicals, although extensive forays into the realms of more comfortably “high culture” works are not uncommon. Fans who mainly focus on musicals have their tastes criticized, including by skeptical theater academics. This shows how cultural capital and material barriers to access are not precisely correlated, and how subcultures such as fans can develop their own “popular cultural capital” that relies on separate cues.22

It is crucial to remember that even while these fans and their favored theater works are stigmatized in a relative sense, even popular musical theater is still exclusive because the material conditions that limit their access is largely the same as other forms of theater. Popular productions are just as expensive and remote for most people as more obscure or highbrow productions. This means that fan behavior and practices have to adapt to these limiting factors in ways that they usually do not for more accessible mediums. Thus, bootlegs become important to the picture of theater fandom as a response to these issues of access.

When fans record and share bootlegs it is an active attempt to overcome material barriers to their access of media content. This project’s focus on bootlegs thus not only traces how access and class structures fandom, but how fans use technology to actively

22 Fiske, John, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (Psychology Press, 1992), 34.

12 negotiate and resist access and class barriers in the digital age. To this end, I find it useful to draw on the body of work that engages with the practice of music bootlegging, especially of live rock concerts. Work by Clinton Heylin and Lee Marshall documents the tensions between music bootleggers and the music industry with much detail and granularity, and in doing so provides grounded evidence pertaining to the varying levels of agency of individual fans.23

My study hinges on understanding how class and material barriers structure fandom, but that does not mean this is the only axis of hierarchy in fandom. Fans studies as a discipline has historically emphasized the importance of gender as a vector of different experiences and hierarchies in fandom. This is relevant to my thesis because, although I have no concrete demographic information on the gender of the population of bootleg watchers and traders, according to The Broadway League, Broadway audiences have been comprised about two-thirds women for the past several seasons.24 It is correct and important to remember the ways that these practices are gendered, and my focus allows me to go further in understanding how conceptions of class are also implicated in gender hierarchies. Relatively denigrated taste cultures, like those around popular musicals, intertwine classed assumptions about poor taste with gendered assumptions about overly-emotional investments in the work. This is evident when theater critics disparage the shows popular among young women and girls by emphasizing their zealous fandom: one New York Times critic wrote of the musical Wicked (2003) that “its popularity among teenage girls borders on religious.”25 As Stacey Wolf writes, critics

23 Clinton Heylin, Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, 1st ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). || Lee Marshall, Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry, Theory, Culture & Society (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE, 2005). 24 Hauser, “The Demographics of Broadway Audiences 2015-2016,” 16 25 Jason Zinoman, “A Pair of New Witches, Still in Search of the Right Spell,” The New York Times, July 15, 2005, sec. Theater Reviews, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/theater/reviews/15zino.html. 13 “used girls’ fandom to justify their own negative appraisal” because of their perception that girls “could not distinguish between good and bad theater.”26 Similarly, Bourdieu writes about how bourgeois taste is learned as “detachment and disinterestedness,” a focus on the formal aesthetic properties rather than an emotional investment in what is actually being represented.27 This intersects with the association of detached logic with masculinity. Therefore, class implications are also gendered and vice versa, and my goal here is to more firmly emphasize how gendered hierarchies in fandom are also about class. Even while the history of fan studies is rooted in the move of audience studies to reject popular culture as solely based in mindless consumerism and capitalist interests, the intersection of class and gender representations of fans deserves specific attention.

Focusing on bootlegs allows me to better understand the intersections of class and gender and modify current fan studies understandings of these hierarchies. The portion of theater fandom that I am focusing on in many ways to fit into conceptions of

“transformational” fandom, a concept developed by fan theorist obsession_inc and which is linked by Kristina Busse specifically to the practices of female fans.28 Theater fans do engage in transformational fan practices like writing fan fiction, creating fan art, and making gifsets. The idea is that transformational fans use media texts as a vehicle for their own ideas and interests. On the other hand, “affirmational” fans tend to treat the word of the creator of the media text as the ultimate truth, and their fan activity revolves around analysis, collection, cosplay, etc. that upholds and replicates this ultimate truth.

Busse argues that affirmational fandom is largely associated with masculinized fan

26Stacy Wolf, “Wicked Divas,” 43. 27 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984), xxvi. 28 Kristina Busse, "Geek Hierarchies, Boundary Policing, and the Gendering of the Good Fan," Participations 10, no. 1 (2013), 82 14 practices and their practices. She explains the existence of this gendered distinction by pointing out that most media programming is targeted at heterosexual men, and that men would therefore feel less of a need to transform a fictional world when that world caters to their interests.29 This transformational/affirmational binary has been complicated by some scholars, such as Matt Hills.30 He questions the assumption that “fan works that are not self-evidently transformational are simply of no interest” or that affirmational fan practices are necessarily “culturally privileged” and “not at all at odds with forms of industrial power.”31 My focus on bootlegging similarly destabilizes this binary. Bootleg recording, collecting, and trading are fan practices that do not easily fit the gendered binary between transformational/affirmational fan practices. While theater fandom may be understood as feminized, bootlegs are clearly premised on a capture of theater that is faithful as possible—not transformational. The gendered transformational/affirmational distinction is based on an assumption that fans can access the media in the first place.

However, my focus on theater shows how class and geographic factors can limit this access and require fans to do extra work before any of these other fan practices can take place. Access to the work must come before transformational or affirmational fan practices can proliferate. The collecting of bootlegs might look like an affirmational practice as fans seek to build up a comprehensive knowledge of casts and specific iterations of their favored productions, but this practice is clearly not “sanctioned” as the concept of affirmational fandom implies.32

29 Ibid., 83. 30 Matt Hills, “From Dalek Half Balls to Daft Punk Helmets: Mimetic Fandom and the Crafting of Replicas,” Transformative Works and Cultures 16 (February 18, 2014). 31 Ibid. para. 2.2 32obsession_inc, “Affirmational Fandom vs. Transformational Fandom,” June 1, 2009, https://obsession- inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html. 15 THE ETHICS OF BOOTLEGS: MAJOR DISCOURSES

Liveness

The major findings of my project highlight several strands of discourse that are used to condemn bootlegging. The first is derived from notions of authentic performance embedded in what constitutes the “real” theater experience. Theater performances are live events—they are bound by certain temporal and spatial limitations that mean only some fans can regularly watch, much less re-watch, their preferred productions. This strand of criticism of bootlegs relates to how performance and theater are conceptualized as a medium. For Peggy Phelan, for example, “[p]erformance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive.”33 In other words, performance cannot be recorded because it is inherently singular—tied to the one place and time. The moment it is recorded, it becomes something else. Experiences of authenticity in theater depend heavily on the concept of liveness. Performance more generally, and theater specifically, is a live medium, restricting its “true” experience to a particular time and place. In this formulation, authentic theater cannot be experienced via a bootleg recording because the feeling created by theater is fundamentally connected to being in a physical theater itself with a physical audience and performers. Of course, like the idea of authenticity, “the idea of liveness is a moving target, a historically contingent concept whose meaning changes over time” (xii). 34 Auslander further complicates this argument by pointing out how live performance is not neatly oppositional to mediatized forms as some performance studies scholars suggest. 35

33 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London ; New York: Routledge, 1993: 148 34 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. London ; New York: Routledge, 2008: xii. 35Ibid., 47. 16 The liveness of theater performances is still valorized as representing the

“authentic” theater experience. Of course, the way discourses of authenticity are deployed here are political. Authenticity as Auslander uses it is an “an ideological concept and… a discursive effect”36 Authenticity is not something that exists inherently in music or performance. Instead, it is something that people decide discursively. As discussed above, performance studies scholars like Phelan have been committed to this valorization of performance, but arguments about the inherently live nature of theater are also commonly made in popular discourses condemning bootlegs.

None of these discussions of the nature of theater and performance discuss potential video recordings of theater performances, but it is important to note here that the industry actually does record theater productions in some instances. For instance, the

Theater on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library collects recordings of most productions, although access is strictly limited to a single viewing for research purposes only. More accessible are the professional recordings made of musicals for the purpose of distributing digitally and on DVD, such as the work of Broadway Worldwide.

In London, National Theatre Live broadcasts productions to movie theaters around the world, but does not record or distribute those productions. Most recently, Disney has also recorded its musical Newsies and made it available on Netflix. The site BroadwayHD, established in 2015, is explicitly framed as a streaming service for Broadway shows, but their selection remains extremely limited.37 The vast majority of musicals do not become available as DVDs or for streaming, as is evident by the fact that Broadway Worldwide has only recorded and distributed six shows since its formation in 1995. Their most recent offering is Memphis, recorded in 2011. When shows are recorded and distributed,

36 Philip Auslander, “Seeing Is Believing: Live Performance and the Discourse of Authenticity in Rock Culture,” Literature and Psychology 44, no. 4 (1998): 5.

17 it is often not until years after their initial runs on Broadway. These sanctioned recordings, shot with multiple cameras and polished editing, are much different than the unauthorized bootleg recordings of fans which are often of poor video and sound quality and may be obscured by other audience members or other obstacles. Whether or not there is a trend towards more recording by the industry in the future, currently there are very few legal offerings of Broadway shows for streaming or purchase. As long as this is the case, bootlegs will continue to be in demand and have a prominent place in the experience of theater fandom.

Intellectual Property

Bootlegs of theater are illegal to create because their creation violates the intellectual property and copyright of theater creators. Many legal and media scholars have discussed the philosophical foundations of copyright.38 In the United States, copyright is justified by an economic logic—the owners of an intellectual property gain the exclusive right to distribute their work for a certain period of time so that they can make a profit off of their work. Copyright works differently for different mediums, thus theater has a particular relationship with the law. However, I am less interested in the technical details here than with the theoretical underpinnings that justify the copyright regime, which are the arguments that are deployed to condemn bootlegging in popular discourses. Violation of copyright are seen as threatening the economic viability of theater because those who watch bootlegs may be less likely to buy a ticket to see the show in person. In many cases theater performers condemn bootlegs by calling it

38 Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

18 ‘stealing’ outright, and this perspective strongly conflates intellectual property with real property.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter One

In my first chapter I draw on existing literature on bootlegs of live music performance to construct a brief history of the practice of bootleg recording. This chapter will develop a critical comparison between the contexts of popular music and theater bootleg recording, and subsequently the different discourses on the ethics of these recordings. The difference between popular music and theater in terms of “cultural capital” is crucial to me here, but it there is not an unambiguous divide and it is too simple to argue that popular music and musical theater are easily divided into a low/high culture binary. The historical context of theater performances has varied widely.

Hierarchies and distinctions exist within both of these genres, for the general public and also for academics and critics. Further, popular music genres and theater music crossover and influence each other. This chapter will therefore also gesture to the complexity of these social distinctions and how these affect the context of bootleg creation. This I expand my discussion on how economic and cultural capital work between and within fandoms in complicated ways. I also draw on work in music fandom that has explored the experience of live concerts and how technology and live recording affects the experience of music concerts.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two focuses on the discourses of theater performers, creators, and critics in condemning bootlegs and begins to trace a fan response. I connect these discourses

19 with broader legal arguments about copyright and the nature of performance. The evidence for this chapter is culled from news articles as well as celebrity and fan social media accounts on Tumblr and Twitter. Particularly informative are places where fans and celebrities clash and debate. The primary case study is Lin-Manuel Miranda and his response to those seeking bootlegs of Hamilton on Tumblr, but I also draw from the responses of a wide range of other performers in both musicals and plays.

This chapter will also examine the complexities of creators like Miranda attempting to make their productions more “accessible” in multiple ways, including examining the content of musicals like Hamilton in terms of diversity of subject matter and music style (especially the introduction of popular music styles not usually associated with Broadway). I also further examine the introduction of rush tickets and a lottery system, and making the production accessible to local student populations. These wider attempts to make theater more accessible complicate and inform the discourses around bootlegs.

Chapter Three

My third chapter will focus on the original data that I have collected via surveying theater bootleg traders. This survey was designed to collect two kinds of information.

Firstly, I collected factual details on how bootlegs have been traded. Secondly, I asked why bootleg traders do what they do as well as what they think about the legal and moral ramifications of bootleg trading. This chapter will frame bootleg trading as a case study of fan activity and draws on relevant fan studies literature such as the literature on collecting (especially in the digital age) to show how theater fandom is structured differently because of difficulty of access to the objects of fandom.

20 The goals of this project is to use the specific case of theater fans as a way to think about how class—as theoretical concept and an economic reality—affects who can and cannot be a fan. I examine the ways fandom communities reproduces hierarchies based on class and also the actions fans take to counteract these limitations. To this end, I bring to the fore the unauthorized practice of recording bootlegs as a democratizing action that makes theater more accessible to a wider range of people, even if it still does not erase the effects of economic inequality.

21 Chapter 1: History of Bootlegging and Theater as High Culture

The purpose of this chapter is to establish the historical and cultural context of theater bootleg trading. Several parallel and overlapping histories must be drawn together here in order to fully understand the political and social ramifications of the contemporary debate over the ethicality of bootlegs. Theater as a medium did not always have a reputation for being “highbrow,” and the history of how theater came to be constructed as entertainment for the upper classes helps illustrate the context for the inaccessibility of theater today. Part of this cultural status relies on discourses of

“authentic” theater which prioritize liveness in a way that enables this inaccessibility. I draw on Pierre Bourdieu to illustrate how these discourses are related to the construction of “taste,” which as he argues is a product of and enables class hierarchy. I show how this cultural context and the discourses of “liveness” are related to the advent of mechanical reproduction. A history of technological changes illustrates how bootlegs were able to be recorded as well as how these changes inform the accessibility of theater. To this end, I examine the origin of bootleg tape trading in popular rock music and use the history of rock music bootleg recording as a springboard for considering the different cultural contexts of popular music and theater and how discourses of authenticity and liveness are deployed to shore up the exclusivity in both realms but especially so in theater. While I show that these discourses legitimate class hierarchies, I also argue that the construction of theater as “high culture” is not simple or absolute. There are important social distinctions made within the theater genre that create sub-cultural hierarchies as well— some forms of theater spectatorship are more legitimated than others. These distinctions inform what constitutes “theater fandom” or a “theater fan.” Ultimately, I argue that

“fandom” is a still somewhat denigrated form of theater spectatorship that exists in

22 tension with a more reserved, elitist form of theater spectatorship. Relatively populist forms of theater—especially popular Broadway musicals—are more likely to inspire this kind of spectatorship, and these works are also precisely the focus of the theater bootleg trading community. The recording of theater bootlegs must be understood in a context of a relatively marginalized group of the theater audience negotiating access to a cultural form in which many are invested in retaining its cultural exclusivity.

One trader that responded to my survey wrote that “most humans on this planet can't afford to attend NYC theatre.” Bootleg traders are not wrong to claim that theater is reserved for a relative few who can afford it. In fact, there is a history here of how theater, which was a popular form of entertainment in the early 19th century, was consciously turned into an highbrow medium seeking only elite or educated patrons. The history of theater’s cultural status in the United States can also illustrate how the expectations of audience engagement with theater is not somehow natural or inevitable and instead is tied to whether it is perceived as popular culture or high culture. Unlike current expectations, theater audiences historically were not merely passive watchers. In the first half of the nineteenth century—when theater was still a popular medium for the masses—behavior such as talking back to the performers, loud cheering or booing, and stamping feet was quite normal.39 Performances of Shakespeare were fully part of popular culture in the first half of the nineteenth century and audiences were very heterogeneous in terms of class. It was not until the turn of the twentieth century and a concerted effort to exclude “ignorant” audiences that his Shakespeare was captured by

“‘polite’ culture” and became “the possession of the educated portions of society.”40

39 Caroline Heim, “Broadway Theatre Fans: Communities of Narrators and Translators,” Popular Entertainment Studies 7, no. 1–2 (September 27, 2016), 52 (footnote). 40 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), 21, 31. 23 Lawrence Levine documents how “cultural leaders” like orchestra conductors and theater owners gradually were able to exclude some undesirable audiences by restructuring when and where events took place.41 The creation of extremely fancy and exclusive theaters, available by subscription only, and with very high ticket prices, effectively pushed poor people out of theater and opera houses. These cultural leaders were also able to

“discipline and train” audience reactions using tactics like stopping performances in order to chastise the audience for talking or shifting around or by displaying rules about proper behavior in handbills and notices.42 When so many people were shut out of “high class” theater, the poor and middle class instead attended vaudeville shows and then movies which were much cheaper.43 This origin of movies as a much cheaper and “lower class” alternative to theater helps explain why etiquette in movie theaters is different from live theater. These other options developed a more popular culture for the masses while

Broadway theater was left as the exclusive domain for the rich. This shift to consolidate forms of “high culture” helped to retain cultural distinctions and class hierarchies. This history provides context in understanding the current cultural valuation of theater.

The cultural status that theater and theatergoing occupies in our culture is difficult to “prove” concretely and is highly contextual. It depends on what constitutes “high” and

“low” culture in the first place, a question at the heart of cultural studies. Since I have emphasized the exclusivity of high culture, I follow theorists who have placed the creation of a divide between high and mass culture as an effect of the development of technologies that mass produce art. When art is replicated on such a large scale, it becomes more accessible to many. Walter Benjamin argues that this then causes the art to

41 Ibid., 101. 42 Ibid., 187-193 43 Ibid., 234. 24 lose its “aura.” The aura of a work of art is “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”44 Thus, his argument is that the specialness and authority of an artwork is compromised when it is no longer unique and no longer present at only one limited time and space. This means that art loses its aura the moment it is mass produced and thus available and accessible to anyone. Therefore,

“accessibility… becomes a key to cultural categorization and thus a key to help us comprehend how the categories functioned and what they signified.”45 In response to this shift, for an art form to retain its aura and its status as “high culture,” it must resist this accessibility. The maintenance of “aura” is crucial to retain the value many theater academics and performers place on live performance. They argue that each performance is still necessarily unique, and limited to a certain time and space, and performance is thus imbued with a magical significance.46 Mechanically reproduced media forms are artificial in comparison. This distinction is exactly why the discourses that place liveness as central to authentic theater experience are crucial in constructing it as “high culture.”

In considering the impact of discourses of liveness on the exclusivity of theater, it is useful to compare to how liveness is similarly deployed as a marker of authenticity in rock music. Both theater and rock music share an investment in liveness and capturing otherwise ephemeral performances. Heylin writes that “it is only as a live act that a rock band is in its element.”47 As a rock fan himself, he believes that the “magical moments”

44 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, 2nd ed (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 38. 45Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 234. 46 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed (London ; New York: Routledge, 2008), 45-46. 47 Clinton Heylin, The Great White Wonders: A History of Rock Bootlegs, 1st ed (London: Viking, 1994), 399. 25 that reveal “the wellspring of inspiration” in rock music are always live.48 In Daniel

Cavvichi’s study of fans of Bruce Springsteen, live performance is also identified as a major theme of importance for the music fans he talked to, for several reasons beyond the chance to hear new or different music: “the excitement of participation, the feeling of connection with Springsteen, the interaction of fans and other audience members, the rituals, the energy, the empowerment, the communal feeling, the evaluation and discussion.”49 It’s clear that for music fans in general and rock fans in particular, live performance is a crucial part of their appreciation for the object of their fandom, and it’s no wonder then that so many fans are interested in collecting recordings of live performances when the idea of the live performance is invested with magical significance. While bootlegs of live performance are one step away from the true live in- person experience, they are still invested with significance that is distinguished from a manufactured, studio-produced album. A similar investment in liveness also drives theater fandom and the desire for theater bootlegs.

This investment in liveness helps to understand the interest of music and theater fans in bootlegs, but as Auslander argues, liveness is not a “neutrally descriptive term” and it is “important to focus critically on the values often attributed to live performance.”50 Liveness is historically contingent—the ‘live’ can only exist in relation to media enabled by recording technology—and more importantly for my purposes, liveness is also used to distinguish between mediums in a way that leads to hierarchies of value. As Auslander writes, “those who speak to the value of liveness frequently do so in oppositional terms by implying that the characteristics that make live performances

48 Ibid., 411 49 Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps like Us: Music & Meaning among Springsteen Fans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 37. 50 Auslander, Liveness, 63. 26 distinctive also make it superior to mediatized forms.”51 Liveness is also conceptualized as necessarily only available to “a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame.”52 Both of these conceptual aspects of liveness work to make live performance exclusionary and create hierarchies that are often classed. This is true both for rock music and for theater performances. Auslander’s overall point is that there is no stable ontological distinction between live and mediatized performances. My emphasis, however, is on how the investment in live performance remains crucial for many actual rock and theater fans (not to mention critics and academics) and plays an important ideological function in the cultural status of each medium. In the specific contexts of both rock concerts and theater this valorization of the live performance inevitably works to make the media content exclusionary and only available to those with a certain threshold of cultural and economic capital.

Discourses of liveness for rock concerts and theater performances depend on the connection of liveness to “authenticity.” Just as liveness is used to imply certain values, authenticity is also “an ideological concept and… a discursive effect.”53 Authenticity is not something that exists inherently in music or performance. Auslander argues that the connection between liveness and authenticity in rock is ideologically meant to differentiate it from synthetic pop music.54 Fans need and value live concerts as a way to ascertain the authenticity of the rock performance.55 I argue that, in a similar way to how rock music and its fans invest themselves in authenticity as a way to shore up their own status in comparison to pop music, theater performances also boost their cultural prestige

51Ibid. 52 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London ; New York: Routledge, 1993), 149. 53 Auslander, Liveness, 82. 54 Ibid., 91. 55 Ibid., 88. 27 using these discourses of liveness as authenticity, except theater goes even further than rock music in disavowing the mediatized. This is in part due to differences in medium.

The visual element of theater is integral to the medium in a way that it is usually not for popular music, even for concerts in which the point is to “see” the artist and whatever visual spectacle the concert entails. As Auslander notes, recording technology has to a large degree divorced the audial and visual experience of popular music, and most people engage with popular music as studio-made sound recordings most of the time.56 In musical theater, the audial and visual elements have not been separated to the same extent, and cannot be separated to the same extent as popular music because of the nature of the medium. Musical theater depends not only on the audial elements of music and singing but equally requires the visual performance of actors to complete the experience and tell the story. Anyone who has listened to the Broadway cast album and then watched the actual theater performance knows that the album is only ever partial—it leaves out much dialogue and often even whole songs. The visual elements and performance— including acting, dancing, costumes, the set, etc.—add important context and visual cues for understanding the music. In straight plays, the sound element generally cannot be separated from the performance at all. Rock music may need visual performance in order to confirm the authenticity of the musicians, but this still does not mean that the visual performance is required for full understanding of the content as is the case for musical theater. In the case of a rock album, the sound recording is the true work, but a Broadway cast recording is always deliberately only a part of the true work.57

56 Ibid., 85. 57 Another important effect of the significant visual experience of theater is that video bootlegs are much more desired and integral to the theater trading community than they are for rock bootlegs. Audio theater bootlegs were and are still traded of course, but the greater emphasis on visuals meant that the development of small, cheap video recording technology had a greater impact on theater trading than it did for music concert bootleg traders who were more focused on the music itself. 28 This difference in emphasis between audio and visual elements only means that musical theater places even more ideological significance on the authenticity provided by the live performance. “Authenticity” for rock music means determining the authenticity of the musicians and their musical capabilities. Determining the capabilities of performers is also important for theater audiences, but further than that the strong connection between authenticity/liveness in theater means that an authentic experience of the medium of theater itself is only possible live. Auslander argues that the ideology of rock is based on distinguishing it from a manufactured pop music. The ideology of theater then is to distinguish itself from all mediatized forms of performance. As Neil

Patrick Harris boastingly said in the opening monologue of the 2013 Tony Awards: “on

Broadway we don’t need extreme close-ups to prove we’re singing live.” This greater emphasis on liveness in theater is also borne out by the statistics that Auslander cites that compare how many people view certain performances in live versus mediatized forms.

For every medium except theater, more people view the mediatized form than not. While he then notes that for people who do watch theater, they watch mediatized forms more often than live ones, the difference in relation to other types of performance still seems to indicate that “the theater audience seems to prefer the live event” at least in comparison to other mediums.58

The divergences in the physical realities of the mediums cannot fully explain the differences in the emphasis placed on liveness and authenticity in rock music and theater.

Instead, the greater emphasis on liveness as inherent to the medium of theater is fundamentally connected to the construction of theater as exclusionary and “highbrow.”

The way that theater is treated as “high culture” in a way that popular music concerts are

58 Ibid., 23. 29 usually not is based on the deliberate historical choices by cultural gatekeepers that I have already outlined. Ultimately, this difference means that the social and political implications for those who record concert bootlegs diverge from those that record theater bootlegs.

It is also important to go to the actual audiences for their understanding of the cultural status of the work they are experiencing and how their deployment of discourses of liveness reinforces these hierarchies. These norms are an example of the difference between the “legitimate way of appropriating culture” and non-legitimate ways, a distinction which Bourdieu argues is based not in inherent properties of the art but in learned behaviors associated with a person’s habitus.59 The habitus of a person is the social space (class) they occupy which teaches them to value certain aesthetics and ways of consuming art. This means that cultural tastes are not natural, but that “art and cultural consumption are predisposed… to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.”60 In other words, a person’s classification of what counts as good culture reinscribes class distinctions. The divergent cultural status between theater and popular music, then, can be explained as a result of and a way to legitimize class hierarchies of taste. For example, Bourdieu finds that the legitimized way of viewing art is through an

“aesthetic disposition,” valuing “form over function” and even over the subject of the art.61 Legitimized ways of relating to art depend on the social context (Bourdieu was writing about 1960s France), but they are always based upon learned dispositions of a particular habitus and social class. The expectations of comportment and behavior when attending theater is a good example of this. One specific example is the difference in

59 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984), xxv. 60 Ibid., xxx. 61 Ibid., xxvi. 30 acceptability of using mobile phones at various music events depending on their relative cultural status.

Lucy Bennett gestures to the fact that the use of mobile phones at more highbrow cultural events is much less acceptable. As an example of a type of audience who would shun the use of technology, Bennett quotes an audience member at the Cincinnati

Symphony Orchestra who disapproves of the idea of tweeting during a concert.62 In another study examining artists who push back against the use of technology at their concerts, Bennett mentions that “this debate has continued with greater urgency… in the domain of theater.”63 At a Kate Bush concert where the use of mobile phones was banned, the audience members who used technology anyway in violation of Bush’s ban were considered by the majority of fans to be “lacking taste.”64 Tellingly, one theme that

Bennet drew from her survey responses to the absence of technology at Kate Bush’s live concert was that it made the experience seem “More theatrical than [a] normal concert”65

While this was only a part of nine out of 449 survey responses, and was not elaborated upon by Bennett any further in her chapter, the coding of this theme suggests a distinct difference between the expectations of audience behavior between normal concerts and theater experiences. A more “theatrical” experience is identified here precisely by the lack of “tasteless” mobile phone use. Even when musicians like Kate Bush do ban mobile technology use during their concerts, Bennet finds that her fans embrace the technology- free experience using the familiar discourses of authenticity and tastefulness. One fan

62 Lucy Bennett, “Patterns of Listening through Social Media: Online Fan Engagement with the Live Music Experience,” Social Semiotics 22, no. 5 (November 1, 2012), 553. 63 Lucy Bennett, “Resisting Technology in Music Fandom: Nostalgia, Authenticity, and Kate Bush’s ‘Before the Dawn,’” in Fandom, Second Edition: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (NYU Press, 2017), 129. 64 Ibid., 139. 65 Ibid., 132. 31 connected their enjoyment to the exclusivity of the experience, saying: “It felt like a more unique and special experience that was shared with just those people in the room at the time as opposed to the whole Internet like a normal gig.”66 This comparison shows how at most normal music concerts mobile technology and sharing with people online is the norm, and how the lack of this is constructed as more exclusive and thus more special, a logic that characterizes a “theatrical” experience. The policing of behavior in theater audiences by ushers and performers is explored more in the next chapter.

Thus far I have considered the cultural status of theater as a monolith in relation to a general or mainstream culture. This is similar to how some of the fan studies literature on theater deploys it as an example of “high culture” with a fraught relationship with fandom or fannish behaviors. Pearson speculates that fans of Shakespeare would actually not use the term “fan” due to its association with non-serious popular culture practices.67 Her overall concern is to interrogate why fan scholars have not studied fans of high culture properties. Tulloch also frames his work on theater audiences as a remedy to how fan studies has neglected “analysis of fans of high-culture entertainment forms.”68

However, this work seems to ignore the significant group of people who do in fact self- identify as theater fans and are engaged with many of the same activities as other contemporary fandoms, such as writing fan fiction or making gifsets. Critically examining why some theatergoers do not consider themselves fans is a worthwhile scholarly question, but research on those who fit squarely into contemporary notions of fandom is also important and provides an important contrast in engagement styles. I

66 Ibid., 138. 67 Pearson, Roberta, “Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies, and Sherlockians,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 98. 68 Tulloch, John, “Fans of Chekhov,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 110. 32 argue that fans of theater must actually negotiate this tension between their denigrated mode of spectatorship and the relative cultural prestige of their object of fandom, which comes with the disapproval of those who perform a more legitimized form of spectatorship.

Nevertheless, it is true that there are important hierarchies that form within the subculture of theater enthusiasts. Here my work is similar to other fan scholars that have adapted Bourdieu to understand how fans develop their own forms of subcultural capital.

For example, Fiske argues that “there are forms of popular cultural capital produced outside and often against official cultural capital.” These forms of cultural capital “play a role in distinguishing between different social formations within the subordinated.”69

Fiske claims that fandom usually surrounds denigrated cultural forms. This is not the case here, but I argue that fandom as a form of engagement can still be denigrated even when the object of fandom is more legitimate. I argue that cultural hierarchies can be based on the mode of consumption of theater. I argue that the fannish mode of consumption as well as the commercial nature of the musicals they prefer result in differences in culture status.

The mistrust of commercialized Broadway theater in a scholarly context is an example of one hierarchy of value among theatergoers, but there are others. For example, issues of commercialization often play out in a hierarchy between musicals and straight plays. One is assumed to be crassly populist or frivolous and the other more likely to be serious art.

Another layer of distinction is identified by Jonathan Tulloch in his study of theater audiences. He distinguishes between fans of a production and fans of a particular performer.70 While Tulloch does not suggest any hierarchy of value in this distinction,

69 Fiske, John, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (Psychology Press, 1992), 32. 70 Tulloch, “Fans of Chekhov,”113. 33 fans who attend theater for the sake of seeing a particular celebrity are often denigrated for being shallow or unappreciative of the norms of the theater.71

Matt Hills usefully modifies Bourdieu to account not just for differences in production of media but differences in consumption and how these variables produce various positionality of media audiences. Matt Hills constructs a quadrant of ways that audiences can position themselves in relation to media products based on two factors: the mode of production and the mode of consumption.72 He describes how an “autonomous- autonomous” position is media created not for a commercial purposes but for the appreciation of a “niche, knowledgeable” audience—in other words, this describes the positioning of what is typically considered “highbrow” forms of art.73 In contrast, the

“heteronomous-heteronomous” quadrant is “commercial culture consumed precisely as consumer culture.”74 In between, “autonomous-heteronomous” describes a work meant for a “specialist audience” but that instead becomes consumed by a mainstream commercial culture.75 “Heteronomous-autonomous” refers to media produced for a highly commercial context but that is subsequently elevated—generally by the interpretations of fandoms that ascribe meaning beyond its commercial origins.76 These distinctions are important in understanding the cultural hierarchy of different types of theater as they fall within different quadrants. Hills characterizes the “implicit fandom” of some theatergoers—those who have strong attachments to theater yet do not identify

71 Heim, 40. 72 Matt Hills, “Implicit Fandom in the Fields of Theatre, Art, and Literature: Studying ‘Fans’ Beyond Fan Discourses,” in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, Wiley Blackwell Companions to Cultural Studies 18 (Place of publication not identified: John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 2018), 480. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 34 themselves as fans—as falling in the autonomous-autonomous category. On the other hand, he states that “self-identified ‘theatre fans’ tend to cluster around commercial musical theatre, placing these audiences in the heteronomous-autonomous sector, and making their cultural positioning homologous to the kinds of film/TV fandom explored in fan studies.”77 While I agree that theater fans focus on commercial musicals, I argue that the positioning of these fans is not easily comparable to TV fandom for multiple reasons.

Theater, even relatively popular and commercial genres like musicals, remain inaccessible for most people in the world. Indeed, the economic barriers to their access are perhaps even greater than for more “legitimate” forms of theater and makes them quite different to much more easily accessible TV fandom. Also, as I have argued, all types of theater are subject to discourses of liveness that emphasize their exclusivity as an inherent part of the medium. Overall, while theater fandom is “rendered implicit” because of “its projection onto only one kind of theatre—the West End/Broadway musical,” this does not mean that theater fandom is entirely free of class based exclusivity.78

The context of the complicated cultural status of various forms of theater informs when and how bootlegs are recorded and valued. I now turn to the history and conception of the practice of bootlegging. Bootlegging of music concerts was always about access and is characterized by varying struggles against the music industry. Bootlegging is an idiosyncratic form of piracy. Examples of more-or-less unauthorized recordings of live performances can be found early in the history of sound recording technology, although the term “bootleg” itself originated in the Prohibition Era and was borrowed from its original application to illegally produced liquor.79 When applied to media content, the

77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 483. 79 Heylin, Bootleg, 6. 35 term “bootleg” does not have a stable definition and is used slightly differently in various sub-communities. What counts as a bootleg or who is referred to as a “bootlegger” shifts depending on factors such as the source of the bootlegged content or whether the bootleg is meant for sale or merely for trading between individuals. In his work on bootlegs Lee

Marshall goes so far as to create a typography of six different kinds of music piracy based on two variables: first, the “scale and commerciality” of the unauthorized media, and second, the “similarity of the copied music to official music industry products.”80 Larger scale and commercial operations are not of interest to me here since theater bootlegs have never taken this form. In his classification scheme, Marshall defines bootlegging as focused on music that has never been released by official channels. He further distinguishes between bootlegging and the practice of music tape trading which grew in fandoms of rock bands in the seventies. He uses bootlegging to describe those who created labels and pressed bootleg records as a “commercial enterprise.”81 These were the individuals who took the initiative to press unreleased recordings into a run of records and later manufacture CDs, all for sale in record shops. This practice is distinguished from “tape traders” who exchanged performance recordings interpersonally and shunned the sale of bootlegs for profit. For Marshall, tape trading is necessarily at a much smaller and interpersonal rather than non-commercial scale.82 Part of this distinction is the implication that most “tape traders” were sanctioned by the bands that allowed the recording, most notably the Grateful Dead.83 The distinction between bootlegging and tape-trading is crucial for many rock fans, but it masks how historically the term bootleg

80 Lee Marshall, Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry, Theory, Culture & Society (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE, 2005), 110. 81 Ibid., 111. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 112. 36 has been applied broadly to all sorts of unauthorized music production and distribution, including to the tapes and recordings created by audience members solely for personal or trading purposes. Further, for theater bootleg traders, commercial bootleg operations never existed and even interpersonal tape trading activities were never sanctioned by the performers, so the distinction between the commercialized activities of “bootleggers” and the strictly non-profit “tape traders” does not apply. Therefore, for my purposes bootlegs do not necessarily imply any particular scale of production or any commercial element.

The distinction that I emphasize is between bootlegs and more common forms of music piracy. Historically, the music that fans have referred to as bootlegs has been drawn from a variety of sources—such as from private recordings of musicians, studio outtakes, or recordings of radio broadcasts.84 For my purposes, I am specifically interested in live music and performances that are captured by audience members themselves using recording technology. In these instances, the recorded event might otherwise be totally ephemeral and there is likely no equivalent legal recording available for purchase (concert CDs and DVDs notwithstanding). This is unlike music piracy as an unauthorized copy of a legal original that is then shared to individuals who did not pay for a legal recording. Fans that capture live performances and then share them among other fans is the point of focus in this thesis. This is why I do not consider sites like

Napster, which many academics have already examined, because it is primarily a site for piracy rather than bootlegs. The legal challenges faced by Napster were based on file- sharing of music, not on independent recordings of live performances. Heylin borrows the term “performance piracy” from Schulthiess to refer to recordings of live performances, as distinct from other major sources of bootlegs such as the acetate air-

84 Heylin, Bootleg, 34. 37 check records which were only accessible to those who had contacts at radio networks.85

Other sources of bootlegs are important to acknowledge in the history of bootlegging because they were a major source of bootlegs during the time before recording technology was accessible enough to make taping live performances relatively easy for audience members. The first rock bootleg, Great White Wonder, featured a range of outtakes and unpublished records made by Bob Dylan for example, was made from unreleased music on a publishers’ demo.86 This bootleg sold well and one of its’ creators subsequently bought equipment and recorded the first bootleg of a live performance at

Rolling Stones concert in 1969.87 I am more interested in the everyday fans themselves who recorded their own bootlegs than I am in the larger-scale bootleg operations because theater bootlegs were never produced at that scale. Even though these businesses pioneered the creation of bootlegs and served as an important introduction for many individuals to the world of rock bootlegs, the history of bootleg trading is largely about the impact of the development of smaller and cheaper recording technology that has repeatedly changed who has the capacity to record bootlegs and how bootlegs circulate among fandoms.

Although the dedicated fan communities around rock music were the inception of many of the trading practices I am most interested in, it is important to note that unauthorized recordings of live cultural performances—including of “highbrow” genres—were made early on in the history of recording technology. For example, early historically important recordings of the New York Metropolitan Opera were made by the

Met’s librarian Lionel Mapleson between 1901 and 1903 by rigging a phonograph on the

85Ibid., 8. 86 Marshall, Bootlegging, 115. 87 Ibid. 38 catwalk.88 To relate the history of early rock bootlegging, I draw heavily on the work of

Clinton Heylin, who has written the most extensive account of this history based on numerous interviews with bootleggers and material from music and trading magazines.

According to Heylin, into the mid-1960s “the bootlegging of operatic performances continued to generate the largest area of growth in the decade before rock bootlegs stole headlines.” 89 These opera bootlegs remained a very small-scale operation and circulated well under a thousand copies and were of interest primarily to dedicated fans and collectors. Heylin also makes reference to collectors swapping between themselves, but notes that this could only occur in the forties after “the miniaturization of tape recorders” made it possible “for concert- and opera-goers to tape performances they attended.”90

Due to the niche interest in these types of bootlegs, a substantial subculture of trading didn’t develop around classical or opera bootlegs. The small scale of production also meant that classical bootlegs were never targeted for legal repercussion by the music industry in the ways that rock bootlegs were later on.91 This meant that one journalist in

1969 would go so far as to claim that “piracy of classical records has become almost an above-ground industry.”92 This small scale meant that classical music was able to retain its niche, relatively highbrow cultural status.

The music industry was much more concerned with the growth of bootlegging of popular rock music after 1969. Rock music was from the beginning a more popular and accessible genre than opera or classical music, and in fact rock bands self-consciously positioned themselves in opposition to more formal forms of music. In 1969, the first

88 Heylin, Bootleg, 28. 89 Ibid., 36. 90 Ibid., 34. 91 Ibid., 37. 92 Ibid., 59. 39 major rock bootleg was made from a publishers demo of unreleased Bob Dylan tracks, but the significant demand meant that people were soon recording live shows to get new material using relatively bulky but still portable reel-to-reel tape recorders.93 According to one bootlegger, “at the time there was no problem getting into concerts to tape things

‘cos it had never been a problem before.”94 Manufacturing early bootleg records required individuals to be entrepreneurial enough to record shows or otherwise access never- released recordings from industry insiders, convince an independent company to press their records (and later, to manufacture CDs) despite the murky legality, and then distribute their wares to record shops. While I follow Heylin in referring to these as

“commercial” bootleggers, most were not very profitable and many of the individuals making these records were motivated by the same fannish feelings as others who taped concerts. Much of the history detailed by Heylin focuses on these kinds of bootleggers who, while still tiny compared to the actual music industry companies, worked in a much different way from the interpersonal trading of tapes between fans. They were run as proper businesses, competed with each other, and focused on issues like how to brand themselves through the packaging of their bootlegs. Importantly, a significant amount of financial capital had to be invested in recording technology and getting the records pressed. A bootleg could not be created by a single individual—they had to have contacts at legitimate companies in order to press and distribute their bootleg records.95

At the same time, individuals also recorded live performances in relative isolation, sometimes swapping with other collectors. It took some time for the practice of trading bootlegs to develop into a robust subculture around rock music. This practice

93 Ibid., 43 94 Ibid., 59 95Ibid,, Chapters 3 and 4 40 grew more common as technology grew smaller, cheaper, and gained better sound quality. For example, the cassette recorder was first sold in 1964 and recorded with poor sound quality, but was much improved a decade later.96 According to surveys cited by

Heylin, in 1974 15.4% of people who owned tape-machines smuggled them into concerts to record the live performance, and by 1979 21% of tape-recorder owners did so.97 Heylin writes that the there was a marked increase in audience taping in the mid-1980s as recording technology became able to record better quality.98 There were recordings made of all popular rock acts, but the practice of trading bootlegs was especially cultivated among fans of the Grateful Dead, who were known for their lengthy improvisations during concerts. The practice was able to take root in this context because it eventually became authorized by the band itself. The band encouraged the recording and trading of tapes among fans, as long as it remained non-commercial. The band went so far as to institutionalize the “tapers” by selling special tickets to those who would record the show, and creating a special seating section for these tapers so that they could get the music by directly plugging into the sound board.99 While this may make them seem particularly

“pro-bootleg,” it’s important to remember that the Grateful Dead took these actions precisely so they could undercut the actions of the commercial bootleggers, who they vehemently opposed.100 Their fans (“Dead Heads”) to a large extent accepted and embraced their request to avoid commercial bootlegs, which is part of the reason why such a strong distinction between commercial bootleggers and non-commercial tape traders developed in rock fandom. Tape traders shored up their own credibility as fans by

96 Ibid., 60 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 260. 99 Robert Sardiello, “Identity and Status Stratification in Deadhead Subculture,” in Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, ed. Jonathon S. Epstein (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1998), 127, 141. 100 Heylin, Bootleg, 397. 41 rejecting the sale of bootlegs and instead creating a thriving sub-community of trading and collecting tapes via mail and in-person meet-ups. Other “jam bands” in the model of the Grateful Dead, such as Phish and the Dave Matthews Band, followed their practice.

Trading of live concerts flourished in this context precisely because of rock’s emphasis on live performance and the fact that these bands offered a different improvised performance at each show that was unique enough to justify collecting and appreciating each.

This history of bootlegging and trading was also heavily influenced by the development of copyright law in the United States and its application to sound recordings. At the time when bootlegging took off, anti-piracy laws were relatively lax.

In brief, sound recordings as distinct from the actual written “music composition” were not eligible for copyright protection copyrighted until 1976.101 The push from industry lobbyists like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for this expansion of copyright was a response to the growth of rock bootlegs in the early seventies. This meant that earlier bootleg operations were able to thrive in part because there was potentially legal grounding for some independent labels to record and distribute live music performances even without record company permission. There were other laws that the music industry was able to use to challenge the sale of bootleg recordings, such as “unfair competition” laws, but small-time bootleggers were for the most part able to thrive.102 The music industry also generally decided it was not worth the effort to target fans who traded tapes interpersonally, although industry organizations like the RIAA have waged serious media campaigns against any bootlegging, making inflated claims of

101 Ibid., 125. 102 Ibid, 32. 42 the level of harm done by the practice to the industry.103 It was only after the change in law in 1976 that several bootleggers and record stores were shut down by the FBI.104 Of course, the recording of bootlegs continued, albeit deeper underground than before.

Contemporary bootleg recording and taping is certainly illegal thanks to federal statutes specifically banning bootlegging.105 Overall, the history of specific legal challenges to commercial bootlegggers are less interesting to me than how individual traders respond to the perceived threat of legal repercussions for their hobby. Part of the strong subcultural condemnation of commercial bootleggers in some rock fandoms certainly was influenced by the fear of legal repercussions for their hobby. Many tape traders would add disclaimers to their collection lists that stated that they were for trading only—not for sale.106 These measures of protection are standard for traders of theater bootlegs as well.

The shift to digital technologies and the spread of the Internet profoundly affected the way that the music industries were organized and the recording and trading of bootlegs was likewise majorly impacted. To obtain bootlegs today fans are no longer required to go to record stores or physical meet-ups with other fans. The shift to digital recording technologies both continued the trend of making recording bootlegs easier for the average fan and also facilitated the movement of the communities themselves online.

Fans of the Grateful Dead, for example, used university computers as early as the 1970s to contact others and share information on collecting and trading tapes.107 Over time it became possible to shifting the entire apparatus of trading online as large archives and

103 Ibid., 11. 104 Ibid., 125. 105 Federal statute 18 U.S.C. section 2319A makes the recording of bootlegs a criminal offense, and 17 U.S. Code § 1101 imposes civil penalties. 106 Heylin, Bootleg., 260 107 Katie A. Harvey, “Embalming the Dead: Taping, Trading, and Collecting the Aura of the Grateful Dead” (Tufts University, 2009), 145. 43 quick downloads became possible with greater bandwidth. Online downloads of bootlegs obviously decreased the barriers to access for many individuals. The archives of bootlegs for the bands that sanctioned trading could grow with hardly any limits. The Grateful

Dead is a good example here again because the community of traders developed a huge internet archive of bootlegs that was eventually transferred to the Internet Archive and made freely available to anyone.108 While The Grateful Dead is known for being encouraging of bootlegs, even today many artists are absolutely fine with their live performances being recorded and distributed. A Wired profile of one recorder, for example, notes that “for most of the artists he records, he'll make sure to secure permission in advance, but like an increasing number of touring musicians, the Virginia- based Bachman is fine with audio-obsessed fans like Pier-Hocking.”109 This sort of widespread sanctioning of bootlegs is hard to imagine in the context of theater—even if an individual theater performer doesn’t mind bootlegs, they do not have the leeway to provide permission to record like individual musicians or bands may be able to.

It is also notable that at the same time that the shift online greatly increased access to the bootlegs, some Dead Head traders disliked this change because it reduced the cohesiveness of the community—new traders no longer had to learn cultural norms or make interpersonal contacts in order to create a huge collection because it was all freely available.110 The shift online made also made trading in particular and fandom in general more visible, including to content producers. Obviously increased visibility is a big problem for those whose fannish activities were and are unauthorized. The possibility of

108 Ibid., 168. 109 Jesse Jarnow, “The Invisible Hit Parade: How Unofficial Recordings Have Flowered in the 21st Century,” Wired, November 21, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/invisible-hit-parade-live-concert- taping/. 110 Harvey, Embalming the Dead, 170. 44 theater trading communities becoming “more permeable” as they move online is thus cause for great concern, and bootleg traders must still consciously erect barriers to entry that make the likelihood of industry interference less likely.111 These communities had to stay relatively underground and interpersonal even in the transition online, which meant strategically choosing the sites to gather as a community, to display trade lists, or to use for hosting and sharing download links. Uploading videos to YouTube, for example, is eschewed by bootleg traders because it is too public and too easily searchable by theater producers and others who may antagonize traders. It is the contemporary online communities of theater bootleg traders that are of central concern to me in the third chapter, including how they still have to manage their visibility in an online environment.

The history of theater bootlegs, though less well documented, shows some differing priorities. The earliest known recordings of theater performances are incredibly rare and the product of a single individual. Recorded by Ray Knight, and these bootlegs diverge from music concert bootlegs because they are videos of famous Broadway performances without sound. He recorded shows throughout his life and began in 1931 using a 16 mm home movie camera. Knight “mostly took movies of production numbers because the camera was so noisy and that way he would be less intrusive.” This indicates how the bulk of video recording technology made such bootlegs harder to obtain, which remains true even for current day theater bootleg recorders. It is also significant that

“sometimes he'd get kicked out, or his camera would be confiscated, but he'd just go back the next day and try again”112 This shows that for theater, the risk of getting kicked out of

111 Nancy Baym, Daniel Cavicchi, and Norma Coates, “Music Fandom in the Digital Age: A Conversation,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (NY: Taylor and Francis, 2018), 142. 112 Megan Rosenfeld, “Miles Kreuger, The Musicals Man,” Washington Post, March 19, 1989, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1989/03/19/miles-kreuger-the-musicals- man/96a0c951-b37c-4b45-8129-0c6a4a542904/. 45 the venue was real and there was no potential for asking for permission as there is sometimes for rock music. Knight recorded parts of over 175 shows up to 1973.113 These videos are the only known captures of many performances, which means that they are now considered important to preserve. Part of the reason these sorts of bootlegs are much more unusual is because of the need for the development of video recording technology that could capture the visual aspects of theater—not just the sound. Video recording technology has a related but separate history from sound recording, and even as this technology too has gotten smaller, cheaper, and easier to use, it is still inherently more difficult to hide video recording activity than mere sound recording. The organization of theater bootleg recording and trading into a subcultural community of theater bootleg traders was developed in the analog era as theater fans traded music tapes by mail just as rock fans did. However, the population interested in theater bootlegs was always smaller and never inspired the same sort of commercialized bootleg production by independent labels that existed for rock music bootlegs. Theater bootleg recording has also never had access to the same sort of legitimation from the object of their fandom like fans of the

Grateful Dead enjoyed. Some websites devoted to trading, for example, only allow trading of music by artists who have allow the practice among their fans.114 No theater productions have endorsed bootleg trading in the same way. Theater bootleg trading remains relatively underground in comparison to bootlegs of music concerts, and made difficult thanks to strict policing of behavior at theater performances.

So how should the cultural status of the Broadway musicals that comprise the bulk of theater trading be characterized? Do they occupy some sort of murky “middle-

113 Alex Schmidt, “Musical Theater Museum Struggles To Preserve Archives,” NPR, March 2, 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/03/02/134207970/Musical-Theater-Museum-Struggles-To-Preserve-Archives. 114 For example, etree.org only allows music from Trade Friendly bands. See http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=TradeFriendly. 46 brow” position? I suggest that it is more useful to consider how musical theater is situated in various sometimes conflicting interests—first, of those committed to gatekeeping the experience of theater for only those who can comport themselves with appropriately classed behaviors, and second, to the commercial impulse to provide entertainment for wider, popular audiences. The fans of theater that are the focus of this thesis are oftentimes those who are shut out of attending Broadway theater performances precisely because of their material economic reality. Even those theater fans who can attend performances may occupy a relatively denigrated position because of the way they choose to engage with the work. The context of these relatively marginalized theater lovers in the cultural hierarchy thus frames the actions of those who watch and trade bootlegs. Bootleg trading in this light becomes the practice of those who are fans of an ostensibly “high culture” medium but whose tastes and opinions are less valued because of their class position and their fannish form of engagement with the medium. This relatively lesser position is key to understanding their turn towards bootlegs and understanding bootlegs as being at least potentially politically resistive to class-based exclusion from cultural products and entertainment.

As I have alluded to, theater fandom has in the past decade or so undergone a significant shift—similar to many other fandoms—due to the spread of high-speed

Internet and social media platforms where communities of fans can congregate virtually.

The mainstreaming of fandom has made theater fans more visible and important to the theater industry, and there has been a shift to more acceptance of fannish engagement.

This can be seen in the example of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who connects with audiences via social media and expertly positions himself as a fanboy of both theater and hip-hop.

However, this shift in centering fans is at best partial, and can obscure how theater remains inaccessible and how theater industry insiders like Miranda still draw from the 47 same discourses that have always propped up the exclusivity of theater. These contemporary discourses are discussed in depth in the second chapter.

48 Chapter 2: Discourses Against Bootlegging

In this chapter I will look closer at how those in the theater industry, especially performers, publicly discuss bootlegs and other kinds of illicit audience recording. These arguments are often couched in terms of more general theater etiquette issues, and thus performers usually condemn any mobile phone use, recording, or photography—whether or not this use results in a bootleg that is later shared online. Performers often draw upon the notion that liveness is a fundamental part of theater, which I explained in the first chapter. Related to this, they tend to emphasize the disrespect and the disruptiveness inherent in recording or taking pictures of a production—towards both the performers and to other members of the audience. I also examine the claim that bootlegging constitutes stealing and how this relates to discourses of intellectual property. To this end I perform a discourse analysis of several different theater performers drawn from news articles and their social media. I focus on one particular case when Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the massively popular musical Hamilton, directly engaged with fans asking for bootlegs on Tumblr. While Miranda has enthusiastically embraced many parts of fandom, this moment is an important site of friction that illustrates how the practice of bootlegging is a point where a professed politics of inclusiveness comes into conflict with fundamental issues of inaccessibility of theater.

Conversations around bootlegs among theater professionals, theatergoers, and others are complex and multifaceted, and I do not want to suggest that there is total consensus among individuals in these groups. Particularly, I don’t intend to set up a simplistic binary here between a theater ‘industry’ and audience members. There is a wide divergence of opinion in both groups regarding the ethicality of bootlegs. In the case of many theater professionals, especially, there are important differences between

49 producers, actors, and other creative workers, and many in the theater industry have precarious employment situations that do not easily line their interests up with imagined powerful industry forces. It is also important to note that many performers do not publicly state their views on the matter. It is, however, the words of performers that I examine in this chapter, rather than other kinds of theater workers. Actors are usually more visible and public than other kinds of workers and their words are more often the subject of news articles, particularly if they are famous. And even if the discourses I examine here do not represent the views of all theater professionals, they constitute a major part of a public discourse that functions to normalize and argue for particular theatergoing practices.

Bootleg recording is only one of many objectionable behaviors of theater audiences. The construction of the ‘legitimate’ way of consuming theater is especially illustrated by debates around ‘theater etiquette.’ The concept of proper theater etiquette demands particular classed behaviors from audience members. In the first chapter I examined some of the historical ways that audience behavior was controlled, and in contemporary theatergoing culture the boundaries of acceptable behavior of audience members continue to be policed. For instance, in the program I received when I saw the twentieth anniversary national tour of Rent (2017) at the Bass Concert Hall in Austin, a page was devoted to outlining rules of “theater etiquette” that discouraged many behaviors. This was a standard part of the program for that particular theater, and it is not uncommon generally for theaters or performance organizations to include similar pages in their programs or to publish rules of theater etiquette on their websites.115 The page in my program asked audience members to refrain from “talking, humming, or singing

115 See https://texasperformingarts.org/visit/audience-etiquette for the online version of the theater etiquette page in my program. 50 along,” which is presumably especially a problem for a successful property like Rent which has gained wide cultural penetration by being adapted into a movie. The rules of etiquette also discouraged audience members from “shifting around.” The expected behavior is to be silent and still and take in the work of art in a completely passive manner. Other blogs and op-eds condemning certain audience behaviors are released periodically.116 These types of complaints are summarized in a “Theatre Charter” created in 2014 by theater advertiser Richard Gresham.117 This charter aggressively declares

“WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH WITH BAD AUDIENCE BEHAVIOR!” and demands audiences “respect those on stage” by being “quiet and still” and never checking their phones “for any reason,” among other edicts. The charter even suggests one should police the behaviors of other audience members by shushing them during the performance, although it retains its commitment to a classed version of acceptable behavior by asserting that one should do the shushing “quietly” and “politely,” and of course, “No fisticuffs!”

A central concern in this charter and many other articles is the use of mobile phones in the theater.118 Debates around the use of mobile technology reveal much about classed expectations of behavior and decorum, and they also have direct implications for the recording of bootlegs because this technology is crucial to that endeavor. In my program, the Theater Etiquette page requests audience members to “Please silence or turn off all electronic devices upon entering the hall and refrain from using your phone during performances; the glow from your device is distracting.” The Theatre Charter doubly

116 For example, see Natasha Tripney, “Play by the Rules: Theatre Etiquette,” The Guardian, March 12, 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/mar/12/playbytherulestheatre. 117 “The Theatre Charter,” accessed January 5, 2018, http://theatre-charter.co.uk/. 118 For example, see Erik Piepenburg, “Hold the Phone, It’s Patti LuPone,” The New York Times, July 9, 2015, sec. Theater, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/theater/hold-the-phone-its-patti-lupone.html. 51 emphasizes that theater audience members must “never never film or photograph anything unless specifically requested by those on stage.”119 Much of the condemnation of mobile phones and recording lies in the physical manifestation of the act—the flash of photography, the red light that indicates recording, or the screen glow is “distracting” to both actors onstage and to other audience members. This distraction is emphasized by the actor Benedict Cumberbatch to fans at the stage door after a production of Hamlet where he stopped and restarted the performance. He said “I can see cameras, I can see red lights in the auditorium […] it’s blindingly obvious […] it’s mortifying, and there’s nothing less supportive or enjoyable as an actor being onstage experiencing that.”120 The argument is that when lights are visible in the audience, the actor can no longer focus on immersing themselves in their performance. It is not necessarily inherently true that the screen glow and red lights in a dark theater must be distracting, as performers, in, for instance, a rock concert may easily perform under similar conditions. Implicit in the distraction argument is that the presumed disrespect imbued in the action of using a phone or camera is part of what is distracting. This is suggested when Cumberbatch says that there is “nothing less supportive” an audience member can do than using a phone during a performance. Recording is taken as a sign of personal disrespect towards the actor and the production. Several other actors have also emphasized the “distraction” point. The actor Andy Mientus, best known for Spring Awakening (2016) and the second season of Smash (2012-2013), connects the distracting/disrespectful nature of recording bootlegs specifically in one tweet: “Please don't bootleg shows. It is disrespectful,

119 The Theatre Charter 120 Jess Denham, “Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Beg Fans to Stop Filming Hamlet on Their Phones,” The Independent, August 9, 2015. 52 distracting, and illegal.”121 He also raises the stakes of the action by emphasizing its illegality. In one article, Patti LuPone also emphasized the illegality, distraction, and disrespect of recording and wrote that she should not be expected to “tolerate rudeness by members of the audience who feel they have the right to sit in a dark theater, texting or checking their email while the light from the screens distract both performer and audience member alike.”122 The materiality of the recording device is thus a crucial part of what makes it objectionable. But again, it seems that the distracting nature of the phone is not the only reason why it is objectionable. One planned performance venue, for instance, proposed solving the problem by allowing limited phone use—but only so long as audience members also use screen dimming technology.123 This solution is still insufficient for many people, though, who in a poll about this idea argued that any use of a phone is disrespectful, something not acceptable for anyone who “cares or understands live performance.”124 Again, the use of the phone is imbued with an inherent level of disrespect towards the actors. The level of physical obtrusiveness of mobile phones is not the only objectionable thing about the use of phones or other recording technology at the theater. In a live performance, where the performance and audience is in the same space, it becomes offensive for the audience member to not pay attention, or at least to visibly not pay attention by looking at their phone instead of the performance. This is in contrast with the trend of television audiences being encouraged to live-tweet as they watch, which creates a different kind of communal experience. In fact, when organizations like

121 Mientus, Andy. Twitter Post. February 25, 2012, 8:32 PM. https://twitter.com/andymientus/status/173596152116158465?lang=en 122 Dave Itzkoff, “Rose’s Turn: Patti LuPone Responds to ArtsBeat,” ArtsBeat, June 23, 2009, https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/roses-turn-patti-lupone-responds-to-artsbeat/. 123 John Haynes, “Letter to the Editor: Tateuchi Center’s Executive Director Replies,” Seattlest, accessed March 7, 2018, http://seattlest.com/2011/12/05/letter_to_the_editor_tateuchi_cente.php. 124 Ibid. 53 the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra introduced “tweet sweats” for a similar purpose, they have been heavily criticized by patrons who want to preserve their ideas of proper theater spectatorship.125 In both of these cases of theaters attempting to introduce uses of mobile phones, recording bootlegs is still quite impermissible as they represent the ultimate show of disrespect.

These rules of behavior and etiquette in theaters are enforced in several ways. A particular form of condemnation that recurs periodically is the spectacle of an actor halting in the middle of their performance to directly call out audience members who are being disruptive in some way. This practice actually has a long history, and as Levine documents it was one of the tactics used by symphony conductors as part of their efforts towards the “taming of the audience.”126 When this happens now, this sort of call out is likely to inspire news articles if the performer is famous enough, as with Benedict

Cumberbatch stopping and restarting one of his monologues. The debate over theater etiquette is subsequently worked out in the comments sections or social media response to these articles. Patti LuPone has famously stopped performances to call out audience members multiple times. In her letter to the New York Times Arts section quoted above, it is important to note that LuPone seeks to speak on behalf of both the performers and other audience members. This exemplifies one of the supposed exceptional qualities of theater as a live medium—it’s enhanced ability to build community between the performers and the audience.127 By speaking on behalf of both performers and audience members, LuPone is affirming the existence of the community built between them.

125 Lucy Bennett, “Patterns of Listening through Social Media: Online Fan Engagement with the Live Music Experience,” Social Semiotics 22, no. 5 (November 1, 2012), 553. 126 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1986 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), 198. 127 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed (London ; New York: Routledge, 2008), 65. 54 Calling out audience members who exhibit bad behavior is a way of isolating them out of that imagined community while building solidarity between the performer and the rest of the audience. This same isolating effect is seen when performers emphasize the hypervisibility of people who are use their phones. For example, on Twitter the Dear

Evan Hanson (2016) actor Will Roland also wrote about the distracting and disrespectful nature of people recording, and emphasized “We can SEE you.”128 Similarly, Newsies actor Corey Cott wrote on Twitter: “Hey. I know you think your [sic] invisible, but we can see you bootlegging our show…”129 Emphasizing the hypervisibility of people using their phones bolsters the distraction argument because the distracting nature of the phone use is based on the ambient light from a phone being highly disruptive and noticeable in an otherwise dark audience. It also effectively isolates the offending person from the rest of the audience. The emphasis on performers’ ability to see the audience and everything that they do becomes a policing mechanism where audiences are monitored for bad behavior. This is reminiscent of the metaphor of the panopticon used by Michel Foucault to explain the disciplinary methods of power used in modern societies. The panopticon works as a constant threat of surveillance. Foucault describes how “by the effect of backlighting,” the cages of the prisoners turn into “so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”130 The use of a phone in a darkened theater becomes a self-applied backlight, reversing the position of who is supposed to be visible between the actual performer on stage and the audience member.

128 Roland, Will. Twitter Post. January 13, 2018, 1:53 PM. https://twitter.com/will_roland/status/952267010200793088?lang=en 129 Cott, Corey. Twitter Post. April 2, 2013, 2:33 PM. https://twitter.com/naponacott/status/319170802211762176. 130 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 55 Thus the practice of darkening the theater becomes in practice a policing mechanism that allows for easier surveillance.

According to Foucault the threat of surveillance requires two things: that the locus of power be both “visible and unverifiable.”131 The central tower must be prominent, but the presence of a person watching at any one time must not be known to prisoners.

Performers fulfill these functions only imperfectly—some audience members assume they will not notice when they check their phones. The panopticon metaphor thus suggests that, while call-outs from theater performers may be the flashiest and most public way of controlling public discourse, it is more important to remember the main threat of surveillance in a theater is from the presence of the ushers, the ones who most actively police patron behavior. This is bolstered by references of bootleg collectors to the need to buy out nearby seats for friends in order to keep watch for ushers while the person records the show.

The effect of performer call outs is also to affirm the importance of the performer themselves. As Auslander points out, the notion that live theater uniquely builds community is undercut by the fact that performance is predicated on the separation of the performer from the audience.132 This separation is crucial to the definition of performance and it inevitably creates a hierarchy between the performer and the audience members. The audience members are supposed to quietly observe and focus all of their attention on the performers, who are active and central. Despite claiming to speak on behalf of both the performer and the (good/polite) audience members, the separation between audience and performers is actually bolstered when performers call out bad audience behavior, especially when they use language that emphasizes their unique

131 Ibid., 201. 132 Auslander, Liveness, 65. 56 viewpoint from the stage observing the audience. Overall, the idea that live theater creates community bonds between performer and audience and among audience members obscures the power differentials that remain between the performers and the audience. As

Foucault writes, power works by the application of a “binary division and branding.” The

‘good’ audience members must be defined against the ‘bad.’133 Public condemnation of bootlegs by performers does this work.

The supposed ability of performers to create a community with their live audience also conceals who is kept out of the ‘community’ altogether by the enforcement of community norms that are embodied in theater etiquette codes. These community norms emphasize conformity and a very particular mode of engagement with the work of theater. No excessive movement, no singing, no noisy eating or technology use is allowed—in other words, while proponents of the magic of live theater emphasize the special community of being in a live audience, the actual preferred mode of engagement is to minimize normal human activities and reactions as much as possible. It is preferred that other audience members are actually not noticeable as human beings—only the barest evidence of their presence is desired, and anything beyond that is unacceptable.

Somehow, the basic presence of other human beings is supposed to construct a feeling of community. Indeed, the very liveness of theater facilitates the policing of particular modes of consumption, which is not the case in the context of, for instance, television watching in the home. The liveness itself—the presence of other people—allows for particular types of norm policing.

However, norm-policing clearly does not only occur in the physical spaces of theaters. As made evident by my examples, these same discourses are circulated in online

133 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 199. 57 blog posts and social media as well. For example, performer call outs are increasingly shifting to Twitter, and this can happen even while the show is ongoing or during the intermission. The difference between this and a performer stopping their performance to verbally call out offending audience members is that when the admonishments are made via Twitter or otherwise online, it becomes visible to a whole audience beyond those actually in the theater at the time. For example, Mientus once tweeted during the intermission: “Hey folks snapping pics during this matinee—I'm excited that you're excited but it's not allowed and we can see you. Sit back and enjoy!”134 This is another example of the emphasis on the hypervisibility of people who are violating the rules—in this case, Mientus has ensured that a large number of other people also see the violation even though they weren’t in attendance. This reach to a wider audience is at the expense of ensuring that the message would actually be received by the offending parties, since there is no way for Mientus to know whether his tweet would ever be seen by them.

However, it works to reinforce broader social norms in the theater-watching community.

When a theater performer makes these tweets, it opens up space for other Twitter users to chime in and condemn the bad behavior and relate their own experiences with ‘bad’ audience members.

As outlined above, many of the activities of other humans are for the most part constructed as ‘distracting’ from the performance itself, which is meant to be consumed in a very particular and ultimately passive manner. In this way, the theater etiquette debate is invested in constructing a single ‘authentic’ version of theater performances as I discussed in the first chapter. For example, Cumberbatch relies on the notion of theater as a live medium to make his argument by telling audience members, “I want to give you a

134 Mientus, Andy. Twitter Post. April 2, 2014, 2:41 PM. https://twitter.com/andymientus/status/451444402373001216 58 live performance that you will remember hopefully in your minds and brains… rather than on your phones.” He does not explain further why this is a superior experience. The construction of this as the only acceptable way of consumption ignores other ways of watching theater, ways that are most usefully thought of not as inferior or superior but as providing a different experience that emphasizes different aspects of the performance— ones that may not be apparent in a live theater context. For example, a recording of a theater performance may allow a close up perspective of an actor’s face and the ability to perceive acting choices or nuances that a person in the back of a performance venue might not appreciate. Recordings also allow for repeat viewings much more easily than live performances, and repeated viewings can allow audiences to understand details that they missed in the first viewing. I will expand more on the significance of these affordances of recordings for fandom in the third chapter.

The other prominent theme that runs through bootleg discourse is the emphasis on its illegality. Here I will dig deeper into the actual ideologies that underlie notions of copyright in theater and how they are related to authorship and ownership of the theater work. Performers often call bootlegging ‘stealing,’ as in another tweet from Mientus where he is referring to bootlegs: “I'd love lots of things I can’t have but wouldn't steal them.”135 The language of stealing or theft is a way to raise the stakes of the discourse and emphasize the criminality of people who record shows. This logic depends on equating intellectual property with real, physical property. These arguments are essentially the same as those used to condemn music and film piracy, including the familiar ad campaign by the Motion Picture Association that used the same logic to declare: “You wouldn’t steal a car… Downloading pirated films is stealing, stealing is

135 Mientus, Andy. Twitter Post. April 2, 2013, 6:56 PM. https://twitter.com/andymientus/status/319237037880389633 59 against the law. PIRACY. IT’S A CRIME.”136 This is misleading because while physical property can generally only be used for one purpose at a time, and thus stealing that property prevents anyone else from using it, the ideas that form the basis for intellectual property can be used by anyone without depriving anyone else of their use or enjoyment in any way.137 Therefore, the condemnation of recording as ‘stealing’ relies on the argument that recording shows will prevent theater artists from profiting from their works. People watch bootlegs instead of buying tickets to see the actual shows, and thus theaters lose money. This is not unambiguously true. It’s important to remember here as well that the theater industry is very different from the music or film industries. As I have argued, theater is much more inaccessible. The very inaccessibility of theater means that it is likely that an increase in exposure of theater to new audiences would probably have a much larger effect than the sharing of an already-popular pop song.

The underlying philosophy of American copyright is articulated in the

Constitution, which asserts that Congress has the right “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” This philosophy suggests that the overall purpose of copyright is to benefit society as a whole by promoting science and arts development. The copyright, at least theoretically, is thus not an inherent right held by the author indefinitely, but a limited period meant only to allow that author to profit from their work enough that they continue to produce. The scope of American copyright law has since been hugely expanded, especially since the 1976 Copyright Act, and much has been written on how the original intention of the Constitution has been

136 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car 137 James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2008): 19-21. 60 distorted by these expansions in a way that has benefitted corporations at the expense of the actual development of art and science.138 Nevertheless, the underlying intention of

American copyright law is to exist for a limited time with the ultimate purpose of promoting creation for the benefit of society as a whole. The emphasis on bootlegging being stealing is thus an economic argument, but it is also an argument that bootlegs reduces interest in supporting actual performances and art. Bootlegging becomes a threat against the creation of any theater at all. Thus, we have Mientus tweeting, “Say no to boots. It’s anti-theater.”139 Bootlegging becomes also an activity used to determine who is a ‘true’ fan of theater. If one records or watches bootlegs, they are actually selfish and

“anti-theater” in a more general sense.

CASE STUDY: LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

I now return to the anecdote in the introduction of my thesis, when Lin-Manuel

Miranda directly confronted a fan on Tumblr who was asking for a bootleg. This situation is extraordinary in many ways, and it must be understood in the context of Miranda’s celebrity persona. In 2015, the time of the incident, Miranda was certainly famous in the theater world but his stardom had not yet quite exploded into mainstream consciousness as it did after the massive success of Hamilton. However, he has cultivated a genuine and warm personality, especially on his Twitter. For example, he is known for his poetic and encouraging “G’morning” and “G’night” tweets.140 Miranda has also done a lot to expand the accessibility of theater. Part of Miranda’s celebrity text is his commitment to

138 Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). 139 Mientus, Andy. Twitter Post. April 2, 2013, 4:16 PM. https://twitter.com/andymientus/status/319196774688497664. 140 Ruthie Fierberg, “Lin-Manuel Miranda to Release Book of His Famed ‘Gmorning’ and ‘Gnight’ Tweets,” Playbill, July 17, 2018, http://www.playbill.com/article/lin-manuel-miranda-to-release-book-of- his-famed-gmorning-and-gnight-tweets. 61 progressive politics more generally, and most relevant to me is his work to make theater more accessible. Miranda appears sympathetic to the inaccessibility of theater even while he condemns bootlegs. His attempts to bring theater to a wider range of people can be viewed as an instantiation of his broader progressive politics. One of the initially most visible ways that he addressed this was by adopting a lottery system for cheap rush tickets, which is commonplace for Broadway shows since the practice was originated with the musical Rent. It is crucial to note here that the original idea of offering discounted tickets was a part of Rent because of the shows’ progressive politics. Like

Hamilton, Rent brought contemporary politics and popular music to theater when it first premiered in 1996. The show focuses on a group of bohemians who struggle with paying rent, homophobia, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. The invention of the discount rush ticket system, which later morphed into a lottery, was explicitly initiated by the producing tem of the show as a way for the kinds of people who were depicted in the musical—poor bohemians—to be able to see it.141 The system was explicitly formed as a way to make theater more accessible to poor and marginalized people. Many other musical productions have adopted the practice, but with Hamilton, Miranda went further and expanded the appeal by using the lottery drawing as a place to stage mini pre-shows with various members of the Hamilton cast and other celebrities. These were called #Ham4Ham shows, and he relied on fans to record these and put them online, collating them using an appropriate hashtag and giving those who couldn’t see the show this extra content. This is an example of a really successful use of new media to promote the musical and give fans

141 Logan Culwell-Block, “From Sleeping on the Streets to Swiping on a Screen: The Evolution of Rush Tickets From Rent to Digital Lotteries,” Playbill, September 7, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/from- sleeping-on-the-streets-to-swiping-on-a-screen-the-evolution-of-rush-tickets-from-rent-to-digital-lotteries- com-361078. 62 a sense that they were a part of it even if they lived far away from New York.142 Another example of his commitment to access is #EduHam – his initiative to bring grade school students to see Hamilton and engage with its historical themes in special workshops with the cast. Yet another is his push to pass anti-ticket bot legislation in New York to prevent scalpers from driving up Broadway ticket prices. Most recently: as part of his immense humanitarian efforts to aid Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, he’s performing Hamilton in Puerto Rico, and these performances will include many $10 tickets.

Miranda has also notably embraced transformative fan works to a larger degree than many other creators. He regularly posts fan art on both his Twitter and Tumblr, and even more significantly, he has eagerly embraced fan fiction as well, tweeting that he had read all the Hamilton fic on the Archive of Our Own fanfiction archive after fans on

Tumblr directed him towards it.143 However, Miranda’s enthusiastic embrace of fandom does not extend to those who record or watch bootlegs. Some of the same arguments outlined above were made by Miranda when he directly confronted a fan on Tumblr who was asking for a bootleg in 2015. Some context is likely needed to understand why this was particularly shocking to many in fandom. Tumblr is a microblogging platform that has been home to a significant amount of fan activities and has been “arguably the dominant fan space” for the decade since it was founded in 2007.144 Tumblr offers fans flexibility in posting discussions, fan fiction, fan art, and fan-made gifs and other graphics. Yet Tumblr is also opaque in many ways—for instance, there are no profiles like on Facebook and social connections are not automatically publicized. It is

142 A similar dynamic is in play with the various #Hamildrop releases this year, which involves a new song related to Hamilton dropped every month—such as collaborations with artists like Weird Al or songs that were ultimately cut from the show. 143 Miranda, Lin-Manuel. Twitter Post. December 12, 2015, 5:28 PM. https://twitter.com/lin_manuel/status/675819453167333377?lang=en. 144 Louisa Ellen Stein, “Tumblr Fan Aesthetics,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (NY: Taylor and Francis, 2018), 89. 63 comparatively difficult to find the loose communities of fans that are created via the tagging system. Tumblr is organized through tags and has built up rather specific etiquette regarding their use, but this etiquette is not immediately obvious to those who first join the site.145 These opaque fan practices means that fans perceive Tumblr as being

“less policed” than other sites, which was an important improvement after the wave of censorship that affected the previous home base of fandom: LiveJournal.146 Tumblr remains relatively ignored by mainstream celebrities to the extent that it can be considered a “counterpublic”—a more private fan-oriented space that could be used by fans to do behind the scenes organizing for a more public-facing fandom front on

Twitter.147 In other words, part of the appeal of Tumblr is that it is a space for fandom that is relatively separate from the influence of celebrities or producers.

This context makes Miranda’s activity on Tumblr a not entirely welcome deviation from the norm (at least for some fans). Prior to the interaction detailed here, no one was aware that Miranda even had a Tumblr account. The very first thing that he did with his account was to reblog a fan who asked for a bootleg of the Hamilton audio

(before the official cast album had released) and reply to them. The fan posted: “Here I am. Patiently waiting for a bootleg of Hamilton.” Miranda responded: “Here I am. The composer. Actively rooting against you.” This interaction immediately sets up the power dynamics in play with Miranda’s emphasis on his status as the composer of the musical, going out of his way to “actively root” against a single fan on the Internet. Other individuals quickly jumped into the conversation, with one fan asking Miranda to record

145 Indira Neill Hoch, “Content, Conduct, and Apologies in Tumblr Fandom Tags,” Transformative Works and Cultures 27 (June 15, 2018), para 10.2. 146 Ibid., 87. 147 Natalie Chew, “Tumblr as Counterpublic Space for Fan Mobilization,” Transformative Works and Cultures 27 (June 15, 2018), para. 4.1.

64 the musical “for us poor people.” Other fans quickly condemned the original poster and defended Miranda in the strongest terms. Miranda reblogged the whole conversation again and added a more in-depth response:

Oh, I’ve caused a shitstorm. Sorry. I barely understand Tumblr (I’m much better at the Twitter, I just have an account so I can see the lovely arts n crafts some of you make on here). We’re going to make a really good recording of the show this summer and I want you to hear that. I’m thrilled you haven’t heard a shitty, half- iphone recorded version yet, because I spent 6 years writing this and when you hear it, I want you to hear what I intended. I’m sorry theater only exists in one place at a time but that is also its magic. A bootleg cannot capture it. I’m grateful and glad you want to hear it, and I want you to hear it RIGHT. I ask your patience. This is Lin, by the way. Do I click reblog now? What is th [sic]

Miranda’s reply of, “Oh, I caused a shitstorm” references the debate among fans that his post immediately provoked, including reblogs and commentary from both those who defended bootlegs and those who sided with Miranda and condemned them as immoral. He indicates his unfamiliarity with Tumblr and the way fandom works on the platform—he did not anticipate the response his actions would generate. At the same time, this highlights how Miranda’s power as an immensely successful and popular theater creative makes him directly calling out a fan inherently characterized by a massive power differential which inevitably caused a furor among fandom and inspired

Playbill articles that report on the “Throw Down” between Miranda and this Tumblr user.148 In this first incidence he seems to have been taken off guard by the reaction and somewhat apologetic (“Sorry. I barely understand Tumblr…”) but despite this seeming realization, he later confronted another person asking for a bootleg by responded with a

“:/” emoticon. In this context this emoticon connotes disappointment and annoyed feelings towards the person asking for the bootleg. Once that person posted in an

148 Michael Gioia, “Throw Down! Lin-Manuel Miranda Responds to Tumblr Post Seeking Illegal Hamilton Bootleg,” Playbill, March 27, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/throw-down-lin-manuel-miranda- responds-to-tumblr-post-seeking-illegal-hamilton-bootleg-com-345407. 65 apologetic manner (though on their personal blog, not directed at Miranda), he reblogged them again and responded “…it sucks that you got caught in a Tumblr crossfire because I made a :/ ” Thus, he seems to reach out in a friendly manner to the fan (although only once they had been appropriately repentant), but this seems to beg the question of why he made the post in the first place, since he should surely have been aware a “crossfire” would occur after the same thing happened the first time he posted in a similar manner.

As when performers post on Twitter, here Miranda opens space for other fans to condemn people for asking for bootlegs. This can easily become a pile-on, especially in defense of a creator as beloved by fans as Miranda. When fans react in defense of a celebrity in this way, it is fairly easy for the celebrity to shirk any culpability for the consequences to the individual fan. Public interactions like these between creators and an individuals are never simply between the two of them. Further, Tumblr does in fact have a private messaging function, so it was a deliberate choice on the part of Miranda to make his condemnation public.

In making his case against bootlegs, Miranda also draws on the same discourses of liveness and authenticity discussed in Chapter One. For Miranda, “theater is only at one time and place,” and when a theater production is recorded and watched in some other context than a theater, there is no longer the “magic” that makes theater what it is.

This constructs the live experience as the only true or authentic experience of theater.

Miranda acknowledges that this makes theater exclusionary by prefacing his argument with “I’m sorry,” but for him this is simply the nature of the medium. This shows the power of these discourses when they are normalized. Performers may acknowledge that they are exclusionary, but if theater is conceived as inherently only at one place and time, then there is little that can be done to change or make theater more accessible.

66 Miranda deploys some strategies here to soften the blow of his criticism—in contrast to the righteous rage of actors like LuPone. This is in keeping with his friendly and genuine celebrity image, especially on his other social media like Twitter.

Importantly, Miranda does not emphasize economic loss or call bootlegging ‘stealing,’ likely because it would be disingenuous considering the massive financial and cultural success of Hamilton, along with his own personal significant financial and professional success.149 Instead, he, like LuPone, positions himself as wanting what is best for fans and theater audiences. He posts, “I want you to hear it RIGHT.” Yet this rhetoric can also betray the power differentials at play by coming off as paternalistic—as many fans would point out, the difference for them is not waiting for a time in order to experience the production the “right” way, but between seeing a bootleg version or never seeing any type of production at all. In summary, Miranda condemns bootlegs for multiple reasons.

Firstly, the generally poor video and audio quality of bootlegs does a disservice to the artistic work of those who created a musical and distorts their intentions. Secondly, even if the bootleg quality is good, the authentic experience of musicals is live and in-person at a theater, so bootlegs can’t capture the “magic” of it anyway.

Miranda is an important case to study not just because he has responded so directly and at some length to fans on the subject of bootlegging. These interactions must be understood in the context of Miranda’s overall image as a celebrity because of how they represent a deviation in his normally highly accepting behavior towards fans.

Miranda’s condemnation of bootlegging, then, is in contrast to his seeming embrace of other forms of fan transformative activity, although this apparent close monitoring of fan

149 Michael Paulson and David Gelles, “‘Hamilton’ Inc.: The Path to a Billion-Dollar Broadway Show,” The New York Times, December 21, 2017, sec. Theater, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/theater/hamilton-inc-the-path-to-a-billion-dollar-show.html.

67 content is also a level of scrutiny that many fans would rather do without. Miranda is effusive in his fannish enthusiasm but remains at a distance from actual contemporary fan practices. He self-consciously performs himself fumbling to understand the interface of

Tumblr and the tropes and memes that fans circulate. He calls the Hamilton fandom on

Tumblr the “Arts n Crafts Section” and speaks to them as a monolith from which he clearly sets himself apart. This is especially clear when he uses the term to criticize, as in another blog post he makes criticizing bootlegs that he ends by performing a dramatic exit and saying “See ya later, Arts n Crafts section.” When he initially created a Tumblr, he shared a link the second explanatory post that he made there on his Twitter, and he does this in such a way to highlight his ambivalence towards Tumblr by saying: “My second tumblr post. Probly [sic] my last, because what is going on even?”150 Here

Miranda betrays his unfamiliarity with Tumblr conventions in general and apparently the very idea that a theater fan would argue that watching a bootleg was not ethically wrong.

When he reblogs the posts of fans who disapprove of bootlegs, he shores up his argument and social credibility. For example, later that year on his Tumblr he reblogs a post that claims to direct to a Hamilton bootleg, but actually links to a 1:00 YouTube video loop of a line from the show where King George says “Awesome! Wow!” in a sassy, sarcastic voice. This is similar in some ways to when celebrities retweet fans discussions of new work instead of promoting it directly themselves—this reinforces the social connection between celebrity and fan at the same time that it encourages a particular kind of behavior.151 Like other times celebrities call out audience members, this also serves to build community norms and standards by holding up a model of acceptable

150 Miranda, Lin-Manuel. Twitter Post. March 27, 2015, 2:17 PM. https://twitter.com/lin_manuel/status/581535601364619264?lang=en. 151 Elizabeth Ellcessor, “Tweeting @feliciaday: Online Social Media, Convergence, and Subcultural Stardom,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (2012): 54. 68 fan behaviors and condemning unacceptable practices. Doing this by promoting the words of fans makes Miranda seem more authentically connected to his fan base and eases the sting of his confrontation of other fans. Unlike on Twitter, Miranda does not interact with other celebrities on Tumblr, in large part due to the fact that there are relatively few celebrities active on Tumblr. The consequence, however, is that Tumblr is a place where Miranda is solely broadcasting to an avid fanbase, which emphasizes the power differential between them. The overall effect is that, despite Miranda’s attempts at interaction with his fans, Tumblr feels mostly like a place where he oversees his most creative fans and makes sure they don’t step too far out of line.

In a broader sense, Miranda’s skill at speaking to different audiences makes him one of the most likely candidates to push for theater to become more inclusive and accessible, and I discussed above the in many ways he has committed himself to this work. However, this means that his condemnation of bootlegs is couched in a negotiation of his work to make theater more accessible, and shuts down one apparent avenue of industry change. As Brian Herrera argues, Miranda’s ability to bring together popular music and Broadway is a key aspect of his appeal and innovation.152 In the first chapter I highlighted how the relative cultural status assigned to each was divergent, but this skill of Miranda’s may make him uniquely suited to challenge the cultural distinction and hierarchy between the two genres. Ultimately, his ability to weave together the conventions of the two can help “broaden the audience for both.”153. In particular,

Miranda shines a spotlight on race and the way in which non-white actors have been looked over on Broadway and historically in America. The balance between the two genres is key. That Miranda is able to successfully embrace the norms of theater is

152 Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Miranda’s Manifesto,” Theater 47, no. 2 (May 1, 2017): 27. 153 Ibid., 28. 69 important. If, as I have argued, theater is still constructed as “high culture” in many ways,

Miranda’s competencies in theater convention is particularly useful in shoring up his status as an auteur. His auteurship then becomes recognized as literary “genius”—which can be seen in his winning not just multiple Tony Awards for his work, but also a Pulitzer

Prize and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant.

The way Miranda has been able to draw together disparate worlds makes him perhaps uniquely able to address the inaccessibility of theater—especially as a product of a lack of cultural capital, but this potential is in contrast to the moments when Miranda is then in conflict with fans. His condemnation of bootlegs and the way that he appears to go even farther than most theater professionals in policing fans’ behavior on sites like

Tumblr. The embrace of fandom means a greater ability of producers to control the correct type of fan behavior. Extra content like the #Ham4Ham shows can be turned around as evidence that fans should not ask for more or turn to bootlegs because Miranda has already given them so much more access to content than is usual.

Ultimately, we must question how far Miranda has been successful in widening the audiences of Broadway productions. Despite all of Miranda’s charitable work, it’s become a bit of a cultural joke how difficult it is to get Hamilton tickets, and there’s still anecdotal evidence from critics and others who have seen the show that the audience of

Hamilton remains very white and affluent. For instance, Gene Demby wrote on his NPR that when he saw Hamilton, “the actors onstage seemed to make up the majority of brown people in the house.”154 He was profoundly aware of his status as an outsider and connects this to how black people were historically barred from theater. This all sets up

154 Demby, Gene, “Watching A Brown ‘Hamilton’ With A White Audience,” NPR.org, accessed September 13, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/03/08/469539715/a-brown-hamilton-a- white-audience.

70 some of the contradictions between intent and reality of access to theater that I’m interested in. Miranda has done a lot to bring his work to as many people as he can, but this doesn’t actually change the fundamental nature of the industry as a whole. To be utterly cynical for a moment, we also should be cognizant of how this work to bring

Hamilton to others has worked well to raise his own profile as a celebrity and ultimately benefit him economically. Hamilton is a good example of the negotiation between progressive politics and the inaccessible nature of theater. The content of the musical itself is concerned with widening the audience of theater and Miranda is also actively engaged with making the musical more accessible to wider audiences, this is in tension with how actually obtaining tickets to see Hamilton has been and remains notoriously expensive and difficult.

In this chapter I have discussed some of the different discourses condemning bootlegs and attempts at monitoring and enforcing those norms. However, it is clear that these strategies are not entirely successful because theater bootlegs are still recorded and circulated on the Internet with some regularity. It is clear that many performers (though perhaps not all) are deeply troubled by bootleg recording. At the same time, is bootlegging a big enough problem that the theater industry is going to tackle beyond call- outs from individual stars? The theater bootlegs that go up on YouTube are often taken down, but plenty stay up for long stretches of time. Plus, there’s a whole underground community of bootleg trading that is sufficiently under the radar that they do not regularly receive cease-and-desist letters like other more prominent violators of copyright do, even while people in the theater industry use notions of copyright and authorship to condemn bootlegs. Is this due to the traders’ success in hiding their activities, or is bootlegging simply not viewed as a large problem by the industry? In any case, keeping the current status quo means that there will continue to be bootlegs and, with the 71 convergence between fans and creators on social media, there will continue to be conflict and negotiation over ideals of access to content.

The theater industry and individual stars like Miranda are aware of the problem of accessibility and in fact have taken many steps to expanding the audience for theater.155

This is at least in part a business and marketing decision, as theater of course need audiences to be profitable and survive. However, it can also be read as an instantiation of the generally progressive politics of theater workers. To what extent do these programs meaningfully expand access to theater, and are people ever right to ask for more? How would we even evaluate such a question? The standards here are, of course, subjective.

The fact that so many of the people I’ve talked to seem frustrated with their inability to ever see a Broadway show seems like an important problem, one that won’t go away by just telling them that this is the way it is. All these efforts at expanding the theater audience are still based on the idea that theater must be experienced live and in person.

Even if audiences also agree that this is preferable (and many do), the reluctance to record shows means that their efforts at being inclusive will always be partial at best.

This means, of course that the demand for bootlegs will persist in spaces like Tumblr.

Indeed, the answers to my survey of bootleg traders indicates that Tumblr is a prime place for theater fans to become aware of the existence of theater bootlegs and the trading community. I delve greater into the practices of these traders in the next chapter.

155 See for even more examples: Logan Culwell-Block, “How Broadway Is Building Its Audience By Gaining Theatregoers Nationwide,” Playbill, June 14, 2018, http://www.playbill.com/article/how- broadway-is-building-its-audience-by-gaining-theatregoers-nationwide.

72 Chapter 3: Bootleg Trading Community and Practices

In this chapter, I examine the online community of theater bootleg traders and collectors and discuss their specific practices and beliefs. Daniel Cavicchi writes that for music fans access to concert tapes prior to 1995 “was not closed but it took some doing; websites and search engines opened that up by making resources (archives, files, people) more visible.”156 This shift in visibility is similar for theater bootlegs. While the bootleg trading community is still a relatively small population, the spread of high-speed Internet access—especially the ability to upload and download large files such as video bootlegs relatively easily—has made theater bootlegs more accessible and the number of people watching and trading bootlegs has subsequently grown in a similar fashion to other fan communities. A robust community of theater bootleg traders has developed online and has existed at least since the nineties. This chapter is based around answers from an online qualitative survey of sixty-eight bootleg traders who I reached out to via their bootleg trading sites and a LiveJournal community for theater traders. Their responses show that bootleg traders are invested in notions of liveness discussed in previous chapters and subsequently argue that bootlegs cannot reduce the demand for live theater.

I also argue that while the demand for bootlegs is driven in part by lack of access to theater, the trading community is not necessarily structured to promote democratic access to theater. Traders’ desire to protect themselves against legal repercussion by keeping a low profile can result in fannish gatekeeping. Like other fan communities, traders have developed norms and hierarchies that often restrict access to newer fans even as more and more people become aware of and desire to watch bootlegs.

156 Nancy Baym, Daniel Cavicchi, and Norma Coates, “Music Fandom in the Digital Age: A Conversation,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (NY: Taylor and Francis, 2018), 142.

73 Many more people watch bootlegs than actively collect and trade them, and may find video bootlegs uploaded on YouTube and piracy sites, or occasional videos and audio bootlegs posted freely on the blogging platform Tumblr where they are searchable by the tag of the musical. The people that I surveyed were bona fide bootleg traders who have built up collections, the details of which are often displayed on a personal trading website. These traders do not necessarily have the same motivations as the wider population of casual bootleg watchers—people who google or torrent one or two shows now and then, or people who ask traders for gifts on Tumblr and via their personal websites but never build up a collection of their own. This “participation continuum” is present in other fan communities and for other fan production—for instance, in her survey on television watching Rhiannon Bury found a quarter of respondents read fan fiction while only 13% wrote it and posted it online.157 While it is indeed important to study the fans who do not become involved in fan communities, this is not the focus of this chapter. The larger population of bootleg watchers is a much more indefinite population and harder to reach. I cannot make definite claims about this broader population, who may only occasionally watch bootlegs or have a passing interest in theater. Further research may usefully consider whether this population has different opinions on the ethicality of bootlegs than the focus of my study—committed traders, most of whom I was able to contact because of their public trading sites. Focusing this project on the trading community in particular allows me to study those with the highest stake in bootlegs and examine the structured community norms and logics that arise when the object of fandom is specifically bootlegs. This allows me to focus on the political ramifications of how bootlegs are created and distributed. Indeed, I have found that many

157 Rhiannon Bury, “‘We’re Not There:’ Fans, Fan Studies, and the Participatory Continuum,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 126. 74 of the bootleg traders are frustrated with the wider spectrum of theater fans who want to watch bootlegs without committing to building a collection or respecting community norms. This friction, which I will discuss in more detail below, illustrates the conflict between the ideal of recording bootlegs to bring a show to a wider audience and the practical difficulties that arise from the fact that they are illegal to record, which requires bootleg traders to maintain a low profile.

I distributed my survey through two avenues. The first was through LiveJournal, a blogging platform, on a community page dedicated to traders. The community is used by traders to post their interest in particular bootlegs and connect with other traders who might have what they want. I made my own post on this community with my survey link.

The second way that I contacted traders was through the emails or contact forms provided on their personal trading sites. I distributed the survey link to 493 people this way. I received sixty-eight responses overall, but did not require participants to answer every question if they did not wish to do so; therefore, some questions received less than sixty- eight answers. The survey I sent to traders consisted of ten questions.158 Five were informational—including details on how long had they been trading and how they got started. The other five questions asked for their opinions on the trading community and the ethicality of recording bootlegs. I did not ask for any demographic information, even though it would be valuable to know if, for example, people who watch bootlegs tend to be a particular gender or nationality. I decided not to ask due to an overabundance of caution, taking a cue from traders themselves. I did not want any risk of traders being possibly identifiable to law enforcement or others. The point of this study is not to get bootleg traders shut down, but to understand the norms of the community and the

158 See Appendix A for survey questions. 75 political ramifications of their practice. For the same reasons, I will not provide the URLs to any individual trading sites here.

The people who answered my survey have been trading bootlegs for anywhere from several months to over twenty years. They discovered bootlegs from various sources—Tumblr, LiveJournal, email lists, offline friends, or by using search engines.

Naturally, the traders who began trading many years ago were more likely to find the community of traders through sites that were popular at the time, while more recent traders often discovered bootleg trading from references on Tumblr. It is difficult to estimate the size of what I am calling the trading community. I personally viewed approximately 454 unique trading sites—the personal websites used by traders to list the details of their collections and invite other traders to initiate a swap—though many of these sites appeared to be defunct or hadn’t been updated in years. Other people keep their collection lists private and can only be contacted through email. These people were thus more difficult to contact, but through the trading sites helpfully linking to other traders, I found forty-eight emails in total.

Theater bootlegs are created and circulated online in a variety of contexts.

Sometimes they are circulated only among friends, and sometimes they are uploaded to sites like YouTube (although these are vulnerable to takedown notices) or are available to torrent on sites like Pirate Bay. The focus of this chapter, however, is on the relatively smaller and more insular community of theater bootleg traders who have developed elaborate norms around the creation and circulation of these bootlegs. Theater bootlegs also used to be traded (and in some cases still are) via regular “snail mail”, but the practice has largely migrated online due to the shift in recording to digital video and audio files and the ability to more easily store and share these files using hosting sites like

Mega. This turn to digital media allowed the practice of trading bootlegs to become much 76 easier in many ways—traders no longer have to pay for postage or wonder if their DVDs were getting lost in the mail. It is the online trading of digital files that comprise the focus of this chapter.

The trading community is based upon trading of audio and video bootleg recordings of professional theater productions. The greatest emphasis in trading is on

Broadway and West End musical productions, although touring productions and international productions are also well represented. Like music concert bootleggers, the goal of musical traders is to curate and grow large collections of bootlegs, including many versions of the same production during different performances or with different cast members. Often, a trader will develop their collection with a focus on a particular favored performer or work, comparable to concert bootleg traders who follow a certain band. However, in general traders find it necessary to collect a wider spectrum of shows in order to have resources to trade for particular bootlegs that they want.

Many traders have their own personal websites, most made via the Weebly website builder. This builder is free and relatively user-friendly, with most of the trading websites sharing a handful of pre-generated formats. While some traders kept their lists on Tumblr blogs as well, it is not easy on Tumblr to organize bootlegs lists into site tabs and drop-down menus, which are a standard feature of the Weebly sites. These sites serve as place for traders to list what bootleg recordings they have and provide contact information and rules so that other traders may initiate a trade with them if they are interested in part of their collection. The structure of the sites is fairly standardized across individuals. The various tabs will include long lists of everything in their collection, organized alphabetically and including information on the cast and date of the performance, and sometimes an evaluation of the video quality. While the details and level of organization varied, an example of a section of a bootleg list is seen below. 77 Including the date and the cast information, technical information about the file is also listed—the files in this screencap are in VOB format, which is preferred by traders because these files can be burned to DVDs. This particular example is very detailed, including notes on the performances of the cast and whether there are any video obstructions. This example also shows that this trader has two different bootlegs of The

Addams Family musical and notes the differences between the Chicago and the

Broadway versions of the show. This detailed information is valuable for traders who wish to collect and compare various performances. For popular, long-running musicals, traders will often own much more than just two bootleg recordings.

Figure 1: Screencap of part of a bootleg list on a trading website.

The trading sites also usually contain tabs for “Rules” and for the contact information of the trader. Typical rules include “Be polite” and “The person who initiates the trade must send their files first.” The screencap below gives a sense of the usual organization of a site, with separate tabs for audio bootlegs, musicals, and plays. 78

Figure 2: Example of tabs on a trading website.

The “Traders” tab is of particular interest. Of the 454 sites I examined, 162 traders included lists on their sites to other individuals that they consider “good” traders. These lists are constructed so that others can find new people that they might like to trade with and can be assured of their reliability. A much smaller number of sites—less than fifteen—also included a “bad” trader list to point out individuals who were rude or who scam traders out of their bootlegs instead of trading fairly. Once I discovered a few traders’ sites, I was able to use these lists to find many others, and then use the list of traders on those sites to find even more, and so on. The starting point of the sites thus affected my sample of traders, and was a site that I originally stumbled onto myself while using my personal Tumblr. Some of the traders listed on sites do not have personal sites of their own and instead keep their collections private and only communicated to other traders through email. I stopped collecting contact information after identifying five hundred traders.

To learn and understand the norms and practices of theater bootleg traders, I have examined a range of online sources. The first is the individual websites of the traders, of which I personally examined around 454. Another rich source for understanding the often-opaque norms of behavior in the trading community are the “How-To” guides or

“FAQ” pages provided by a small number of traders. These documents are consciously designed as informational tools to help those new to the trading community make sense of the standards of behavior and special terms used in the community, and are thus extremely useful in understanding community norms. Other useful sources for the

79 community were the discussions among traders on social media sites like Tumblr, Reddit,

LiveJournal, and forums dedicated to musical theater such as the Broadway World message board. These spaces are where traders discuss and debate their own community and norms and are especially useful in understanding sources of friction in the trading community.

Within the theater bootleg trading community, the original file is called the

“master” file, and the person who recorded it is also called the “master” of that particular file. There are a relatively large number of people who record audio masters, and they often dedicate a tab on their site to list these. However, there are a vanishingly small number of individuals who record video bootlegs of the highly in-demand current season of Broadway shows. Twenty-eight people in the survey said that they recorded their own audio masters, but not video. It is obvious that recording video is much more difficult to do discreetly than recording audio, and therefore recording video carries a greater risk of being removed from the theater. Recording video also requires more technical knowledge. As one respondent wrote, “video is too complicated and too risky. However, to record audio, all I have to do is open the voice memos app on my phone, set it to ‘do not disturb’ mode, and set it on my lap with my playbill, and I get a very clear recording of the show.” This method of recording is in contrast to the rock music bootleggers who can be obsessive about sound quality—for example, Jesse Jarnow notes that the music recorder who he profiles “goes far beyond recording on an iPhone. Tonight, Pier-Hocking is running a pair of MBHO KA100DK omnidirectional microphone capsules (via a 603A capsule attachment) into ‘a home-brewed’ PFA phantom power adapter by way of a set

80 of newfangled ‘active’ cables, wired up by a colleague on a web forum for live- performance recording aficionados.”159

The number of video masters is only getting smaller because of controversies regarding the online dissemination of these bootlegs, which will be discussed later in the chapter. This chapter is not intended to be a how-to guide for recording bootlegs, so I will not delve deeply into the specific mechanics. I am more interested in the much larger population who trade and disseminate the bootlegs once they are released by the masters.

This dissemination is controlled by these masters in a way that gives them significant power. Since video bootlegs are so highly in demand, the masters who record them have developed specific dissemination practices. They tend to announce in advance the availability of the master on one or two relatively private trading communities. The master usually asks for payment to get a bootleg directly from them in order to try to recoup the expenses and risks of recording the video. As I discuss later, this becomes a point of contention between traders, some of whom disapprove of buying or selling bootlegs for moral or legal reasons. I would emphasize that most collectors do not buy bootlegs directly from masters but instead wait for the bootlegs to filter through the community so they can then trade for it. Additionally, the payment is framed not as a way for the master to profit but as a way to subsidize their own need to travel and buy tickets for the shows they watch. This practice could be considered similar to fans paying for fan crafts or published fan zines. 160 Nevertheless, some traders do frown upon this practice— thirteen responses to my survey indicated they disapproved of buying or selling bootlegs.

159 Jesse Jarnow, “The Invisible Hit Parade: How Unofficial Recordings Have Flowered in the 21st Century,” Wired, November 21, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/invisible-hit-parade-live-concert- taping/. 160 Bethan Jones, “Fifty Shades of Exploitation: Fan Labor and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (March 15, 2014), para. 4.2.

81 Access to bootlegs is access to the object of fandom and thus theater fandom itself. This means that masters have a huge amount control over access to fandom. This power enables masters to attach stipulations when distributing their bootleg. One common rule used by masters is asking their bootlegs not be traded for a certain period of months until a specified date—these bootlegs are labelled “Not For Trade” or “NFT” during this time period and the date after which they can be traded is thus referred to as the “NFT date.” This system is designed to increase the number of people who will buy directly from the master as well as attempt to protect the master from legal scrutiny by obscuring the date that they actually attended and recorded the show. After the NFT date has passed, those who bought the bootleg are free to trade it with others and it subsequently will slowly disseminate through the community. In order to keep a low profile, the masters also request that their bootlegs not be posted on easily accessible public sites like YouTube. This practice of dissemination has been the subject of much recent controversy as newer traders disrespect the NFT dates or otherwise violate established community norms. The 2018 Mean Girls musical is a recent example of this—almost immediately after a master released the first bootleg of the popular new show, it was uploaded onto YouTube against the wishes of the master. That master then informed traders that they would no longer release bootlegs because their desires had been disrespected. These tensions will be explained and analyzed further below.

I designed my survey of traders to understand the general motivations of traders while also attempting to understand these community politics. To this end, the questions are all open-ended and qualitative in nature. My research goal was to understand trading as a practice and to begin to identify the most common experiences and opinions of traders. One of the basic questions I sought to answer with my survey was what motivated people to collect and trade theater bootlegs. When asked why they enjoyed 82 trading and collecting, many respondents answered that they enjoyed seeing the same show with multiple casts, or seeing all of the performances of a favored actor, things that less dedicated theater watchers would likely not care so much about. Several others wrote about the satisfaction of collecting something in itself. As one trader put it, “Some people collect stamps or fancy rocks, I collect bootlegs.” As this quote suggests, bootleg traders can be compared to collectors of other items, especially of other fan collectors. Bootleg traders is less dependent on material objects than the comic book collectors studied by

Lincoln Geraghty.161 They are also somewhat less dependent on money to create their collections—although some musical bootlegs are sold, there is no instance in which their value reaches even hundreds of dollars, much less into the hundred thousands or millions for some rare comic books. A major reason for this difference is that the sale of bootlegs is illegal, and this comparison shows how the illicit nature of bootlegs affects fan activities. Despite these differences, there are ways in which collectors of bootlegs are also quite similar to other media fan collectors. Geraghty argues that collecting is not just about economic capital, but is also a display of fans’ “hierarchical status” within fandom.162 This is true for bootleg traders as well—the collections of traders become signifiers of their reputation, especially if they become known for having a large collection of a particular show. Geraghty also explains that beyond collecting objects,

“keeping them, organizing them, and displaying them is by its very nature about the process of distinction and accruing capital.”163 This takes a particular valence for immaterial objects like bootlegs which exist only as digital files. Traders display their collections on their carefully designed websites in curated lists, often including

161 Lincoln Geraghty, “Class, Capital, and Collecting in Media Fandom,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 212. 162 Ibid. 213. 163 Ibid. 218. 83 screenshots from the video and as much technical detail and context about the bootleg as possible. This organization helps bolster their subcultural capital within fandom by present the trader as highly knowledgeable about musicals. Being knowledgeable about a range of shows is an important part of theater fandom that bootlegs facilitate. One respondent captures this well: “when I began trading, it was about seeing productions running across the country from me, and feeling ‘in-the-know’ and therefore part of a community which I longed to join. When I watched the Tony Awards each year, I was able to weigh in with my opinions.”

As I alluded to in the second chapter, bootlegs (and more generally recordings of performances), allow for a different kind of viewing than live performance which subsequently enables different fan activities. For example, being able to replay a performance allows a greater possibility to pick up on nuances missed the first time around. Camera work can facilitate close-ups and close viewing of details that inform the performance. This facilitates close analysis of the text. The replay-ability of recordings allows fans to look up and confirm contested details with concrete proof. One respondent to the survey wrote that one of the reasons they recorded audio bootlegs was because

“sometimes I want to remember a certain line, or a certain plot point, so I go back and listen.” This ability to check plot points is crucial for enabling fan discussions.

A recording also provides the base material for a range of fan remixing activities like giffing and fan videos. Bootlegging as a practice is troubling to some standard constructions of fandom in fan studies. It is not an example of “transformative” fan works like fan fiction or fan vidding which have been so widely defended by fan scholars as working as critical commentary of the media that they remix.164 They therefore cannot be

164 See Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, eds., The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014) for various ways to interpret fan fiction, including “as interpretation of the source text” and “as a sociopolitical argument” (8-9). See Francesca Coppa, “Women, Star Trek, and the Early 84 so easily defended from a copyright standpoint, since the transformative nature of fan works have been a key component of scholars arguing for their legality as an example of

“fair use.”165 However, bootleg recording does have some connection to these activities.

After all, if the content is not legally available in any way, many transformative fandom activities are extremely curtailed. As Alexis Lothain points out, fan vidders rely on the non-transformational work of file sharers for the basic materials to build their fan vids.166

Similarly, bootlegs serve as material for the common and popular practice of making gifs out of media content to share on Tumblr, where otherwise only a few legal promotional clips are available. Fans certainly do work and create under limited conditions, but having access to the entire work in the form of a bootleg broadens the possibilities of creativity.

Beyond the basic motivations of traders to collect and watch bootlegs, I was interested in how they conceived of the ethics of bootlegs and how this affected their behavior. Instead of asking baldly whether they thought bootlegs were ethical, which I feared might be too much of a leading question, I asked instead what they thought about performers and creators who condemned bootlegging. I hoped that this would help root the answers in actual existing discourses around bootlegs like the ones I analyzed in the second chapter. The survey responses indicated that many traders had obviously considered the ethicality of bootlegs in great depth. Many traders pointed out that theater access is limited by financial or geographic factors. However, when traders say that access to theater is limited by these factors, this often is an indication of a specific kind of

Development of Fannish Vidding,” Transformative Works and Cultures 1 (September 15, 2008) for how fanvids work to “comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals” (para. 1.1). 165 Rebecca Tushnet, “Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal 17 (1997 1996): 654. 166 Alexis Lothian, “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 132.

85 theater they desire to access. Bootlegs of professional Broadway productions are the most sought after by traders, in particular new productions. The survey respondents represented places from all over the globe, but most often referred to the difficulty of getting to New York to see the shows they wanted to see. Because of the specific type of theater that fans desire to consume is so localized, geography becomes a large barrier to access. The need to travel and book accommodations to see live theater requires huge costs.

The focus on Broadway and West End work neglects the potential availability of local or amateur work that is more accessible to traders. As discussed above, for traders who desire to collect a wide range of performances, these forms of theater are insufficient to fulfill their interests in a production. If fans with geographical or financial barriers are limited to accessing only local productions, they are also barred from fandom itself in many ways. This is because fandom is predicated on mutual interests in particular media texts. If some individuals cannot access those texts, their participation in fandom discussions is heavily curtailed. As the trader quoted above noted, watching bootlegs means that they are able to have opinions on the shows honored at the Tony awards, and thus participate fully in a touchstone event for theater fans.

However, different segments of the audience have different motivations—some watch bootlegs just for any access to a theater show and some are committed to building large collections of shows. My survey seems to have captured more of the “collector” type of theater fan, who may still desire bootleg recordings even if other options become available—although they would still very likely also be interested in accessing those legal options. This is evident by the fact that these theater fans indicate that they would and do watch live theater performances when possible. Even if professional recordings were made and distributed, they might be made many years after a production first opens. 86 Alternatively, instead of recording stage versions of theater, productions are adapted into movies in the manner of Phantom of the Opera (2004) or Les Misèrables (2012). Some productions are never popular enough or make enough money to justify a professional recording from an economic standpoint. All of these variables make access to specific and particular theater productions extremely difficult, even if “theater” in a general sense is more widely available. For traders, their desire for theater is based precisely on the specifics of who is performing and where. Collections depend on such specifics. What the respondents to the survey emphasized often was how they enjoyed their ability to compare and contrast performances by different casts of the same production. For traders, one production of a show may not be enough to satisfy their love and interest in that show.

Despite the fact that traders may be motivated to continue recording bootlegs even if there were legal alternatives available, these traders also indicated that they would rather be able to see shows live and in-person when possible. The traders I surveyed overwhelmingly agreed with the argument that the live experience is preferable. “I don't know a single bootleg-listener/watcher who wouldn't MUCH rather pay to see a show live,” one respondent wrote. As another respondent put it, “Yes, theatre loses something very important when it is no longer live, but that doesn't mean there is no value in what is left.” Those who watch bootlegs are actually in agreement with many of the conceptions of live theater that I have previously discussed. They agree, for instance, that the live performance is almost always preferable to watching a recorded version, especially a bootleg of dubious quality. However, they use this to bolster their argument that bootlegs do not harm the theater industry, since given the chance nearly everyone would watch a live performance if they could. For instance, one respondent argued that “Bootlegs are not something many people watch instead of going to see shows—it is what they watch 87 when they have no ability to watch the show in any other context.” Due to their position as highly dedicated theater fans, many respondents could not believe anyone would not want to access theater in any way possible. If this is true it means that bootlegs do not damage the profit that the theater industry creates and does not constitute ‘stealing’ in the way that bootleg critics mean it. For such dedicated collectors of theater, at least, bootlegs should be understood not as “competitors to official releases” but as

“complementary goods.”167 Similarly to bootlegs of music concerts, this means the economic impact on theater productions is likely negligible.

Traders also argue that bootlegs allow individuals to discover shows and performances they otherwise never would have even known existed, and possibly become motivated to save and travel to see those productions when they can. Even if they can’t attend shows, they may support the theater by purchasing merchandise. As one person wrote, “Bootlegs are the ultimate promotional materials for shows.” Another respondent wrote that “I wouldn't have gotten majorly into theater without them, and then I wouldn't have intentionally traveled to NYC twice just to see Broadway shows.” These quotes show the value of simple exposure to theater. Because of the expensiveness of theater compared to other forms of entertainment, audiences are less willing to bear the financial risk of seeing a show that they are not sure that they will enjoy. A bootleg of a show might serve as a starting point to either bring a show to a person’s awareness or as a way to assure consumers that they enjoy a show enough to spend money and time on seeing a live performance.

Despite the convictions of traders that bootlegs are ethical, they are nevertheless very aware of the potential legal repercussions of their activities and much of their

167 Lee Marshall, “The Effects of Piracy Upon the Music Industry: A Case Study of Bootlegging,” Media, Culture & Society 26, no. 2 (March 1, 2004), 173.

88 community norms are structured around avoiding unwanted attention. I have found little evidence of actual legal prosecution of people who record bootlegs—only one person out of sixty responses to a question about avoiding legal repercussions wrote that they had ever been contacted by a representative of a production and “angrily asked” to remove their bootlegs. Nevertheless, traders are highly aware of potential legal repercussions and structure much of their community norms around keeping a low-profile. Due to the illicit nature of the activities that the trading community is organized around, an important community norm is to minimize mainstream attention, especially for the individual masters who regularly record new Broadway shows when they premiere. On the sites of individual traders, it is standard to include a copyright disclaimer, usually featured prominently on their front page.168 These messages cite the “Internet Privacy Act of

1995” that supposedly prevents any law enforcement officer from entering the site or prosecuting any copyright claims. This disclaimer is a hoax that was developed sometime in the early 2000s at other sites where pirated media, games, software, and other products were offered.169 It is unclear how this language became standard to include on trading sites or who initiated this, but it obviously dispersed among almost all traders as they created their own sites and became a standard that they simply copied-and-pasted in order to mimic the customs of other traders. While this disclaimer was nigh-universal on the sites that I visited, four responses to the survey mentioned that while they used the disclaimer, they were skeptical that it actually was an effective deterrent, with one person writing “I’m pretty convinced it doesn’t actually do anything.” Overall, while traders were careful to stay anonymous, and some were more cautious than by using VPNs or not

168 See Appendix B for an example. 169 Jon Healey, “Some Web Sites Are Posting a ‘Keep Out’ Sign to Law Enforcement,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2002, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/nov/19/business/fi-dvd19. 89 posting on trading communities to avoid attention, there is not a large sense that the bootleg community is being targeted for legal repercussions. One respondent wrote that

“I don't hear much about people's sites getting shut down or people getting prosecuted for trading, so I don't worry too much about legal action.” This person and others believed that the real risk was in recording videos within the theater.

It is this desire to keep theater trading private that has generated some fandom controversy for many of the respondents to my survey. One of the most illuminating questions from the survey was when I asked traders what they liked or disliked about the community. In response to a question about what traders disliked about the trading community, the most frequently mentioned issue was people who disrespected masters’ rules by ignoring NFT dates or uploading bootlegs to YouTube. This reveals key tensions among traders that reflect the precarious status of trading as a practice. These tensions arise because of the contradictory nature of bootleg trading. Bootlegs are desirable because they provide people with the ability to access theater productions they otherwise would never have been able to see. However, the illicit nature of bootlegs means that traders need to be discreet about their activity to avoid unwanted attention. Furthermore, in order for the trading economy to work, bootlegs must be kept relatively rare instead of being freely and publicly available to all.

Only one response reported that they had been contacted by people affiliated with shows and asked to take down particular bootlegs, and they complied with these requests with apparently no further action against them. Three others mentioned that the danger of recording and trading particular productions could be more risky than others because

“certain shows are known to attract more legal trouble.” One respondent wrote that “I keep watch for news/rumours that a particular production is on the witch hunt for traders.

If I do, I take out the specific shows from my list.” Productions that were new and 90 currently running seem more likely to be aggressive in combatting bootlegs. This sort of

“witch hunt” is useful within the first few months after a show is released to scare traders away from recording bootlegs of particular shows, even if it would be impossible to stamp them out entirely.

Traders and especially video masters have developed fairly strict customs to help protect themselves against unwanted attention. This includes the NFT dates that I discussed above. This desire to avoid mainstream or legal attention is a consistent theme throughout the discussion posts and FAQ pages that I have read. As one trader explains:

“Remember that bootlegs are illegal, so theater producers might want to sue everybody who trades/sells/records bootlegs. Even if they don't win, people who record shows will record and release fewer bootlegs, if they don't stop recording at all.” This trader then explicitly connects this threat to a request to traders to not use YouTube, and if they do use the site, to make the video private and delete it if it gets too popular. This community commitment to minimize attention from mainstream sources creates a cultural environment where posting bootleg videos to YouTube violates community norms. While

YouTube is a familiar and easy-to-use platform for sharing videos to a wide range of people, these features make it very unattractive to the bootleg trading community. It is difficult to control who can and cannot view videos on YouTube because it is available to watch for anyone who has the link to the video. Control is extremely important for traders because exclusive access to certain videos is the very basis for trading. If a new and popular bootleg is uploaded to YouTube, it is immediately accessible to a wide range of people and thus becomes less valuable for trading for those who have the video. The relatively accessibility also means that videos on YouTube are much more likely to attract the attention of theater companies or celebrities. Because they are more visible they are more vulnerable to takedown notices, which have become a standard part of 91 YouTube. All this pressure makes the sharing of videos via YouTube a taboo for many theater bootleg traders. A currently contentious issue in the trading community is over rules placed on master recordings. Sixteen survey respondents wrote that they disliked the portions of the community that did not follow rules about not-for-trade (NFT) dates or not posting bootlegs on YouTube. Seven of those individuals framed the issue as a problem with newer or younger traders. One person characterized this as a split “between the old school and new school,” with new fans “trading NFT videos before the dates and posting them in public places like YouTube and Tumblr.” People who buy a bootleg from the master are supposed to respect the NFT date and keep the bootleg to themselves until then. However, many bootlegs have been “leaked” before the NFT date has passed.

Bootlegs of recent shows like Mean Girls (2018) have been posted to YouTube in defiance of the masters’ wishes and long-standing trading etiquette almost as soon as they were available to buy. When these dates are not respected, the masters threaten to no longer record shows. Indeed, four traders that responded to the survey said that there were fewer masters than there used to be several years ago because their rules were not respected and they faced unwanted visibility when people uploaded their bootlegs on public sites like YouTube. Whatever the real factors, there is at least a perceived shift in the community that as bootlegs have become more widespread, the increased attention has come with downsides.

Another related tension within the trading community is over the sale of bootlegs for money. This is a familiar controversy that also exists in other fandom contexts, but takes on specific meanings when it comes to theater bootlegs. Masters who record video take on quite a lot of risk and often sell their bootlegs on DVDs in an attempt to recoup their costs—and they emphasize that they never make an actual profit off of this. This seems reasonable to many traders or at least an acceptable evil. On the other hand, some 92 people will sell anything in their collection for a few dollars, and this is much more controversial since these sellers do not even have a tenuous claim to owning the product that they are selling. Other traders refrain from selling or buying bootlegs as a strategy to avoid legal consequences. Thirteen responses to the survey mentioned that they disliked parts of the community that bought and sold bootlegs. Here the language of intellectual property creeps back into the vocabulary of some traders, one of whom wrote that selling bootlegs is “simply making money off a property that isn’t yours.” This is a particular manifestation of fan studies debates over the monetization of forms of fan labor and fan works. The illicit nature of bootlegs strongly affects the context of payment for fan labor in the case of bootlegs. As a type of fan labor recording bootlegs are currently less at risk of co-optation since theater performers and productions publicly condemn their creation—recording bootlegs actually comes with the risk of being alienated from the industry, rather than increasing access to it in the case of the fan sites studied by Bertha

Chin.170 If it becomes more mainstream to record theater productions, it is less likely that fan lab or will be exploited and more likely that they will simply be displaced by professional recordings. However, as discussed in the first chapter, the conceptualization of theater as an inherently live medium hinders professional recordings from every gaining traction.

While the fan labor that goes into bootlegs may not be exploited by commercial interests, there is also concern about fans monetizing bootlegs for themselves. The sale of bootlegs for the personal profit of masters provokes controversy among the traders. This practice is framed as a way for masters to cover the cost of tickets, many others still dislike the practice. As one put it, “I just feel that it spoils the nature of trading.” For

170 Bertha Chin, “Sherlockology and Galactica.tv: Fan Sites as Gifts or Exploited Labor?,” Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (March 15, 2014), para. 6.2. 93 some beginner traders, being able to buy bootlegs might be relatively easy way of starting a collection that they can then use for trading, but it also goes against the ideals held by some traders that bootlegs genuinely broaden access to theater. One person wrote “we're all in this community because most of us can't afford to see these shows in person, so why make people pay?” Traders with these values might emphasize the need to generously gift bootlegs to new traders just starting to build their collections, and also may view this as a responsibility they need to pay forward since they were similarly helped when they started out. Paying money for bootlegs thus may corrupt this process of initiation into the community.

While some traders might be relatively stingy, thirty-eight responses indicated that when they were first starting out, they were reliant on gifts from other traders to start their collection. Some respondents also indicated that they therefore felt obligated to give bootlegs to new traders in turn. While it is therefore tempting to view theater trading as a type of fan gift economy, this is not exactly accurate. Karen Hellekson emphasizes that fan gift economies function by the practices of giving, receiving, and reciprocity.171

These practices initiate and build social connections and community. In a trade these roles are not implied. While trading can initiate social ties, trading is not like gifting. It is explicitly framed as an agreed upon and equal exchange, with no further obligation for social ties beyond that single trade of bootlegs. Further, many of the bootlegs that traders are exchanging are not even created by themselves and thus do not represent the same kind of “skill and effort” that goes into other fan projects or works.172 Even when the bootleg was recorded by the person, it is not necessarily their own skill that determines

171 Karen Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009), 114. 172 Ibid. 94 the quality or value of the bootleg. Some of the characteristics that may make a bootleg more desirable include high audio and video quality of the bootleg, whether it is a very old performance or a very new performance, whether it features an understudy performance or a performance where something unusual happens such as an actor mistake or set difficulties. These factors are not entirely controllable by the master. The valuation of bootlegs in these ways is different than in a typical fan gift economy because it is much less focused on the creation of social ties—such as creating a fan work catered to the taste of a particular person. The value of a bootleg is much more dependent on the material factors of the video. The ‘quality’ of a video or audio is dependent on fidelity to the original show, not the ‘transformative’ or creative ability of the creator. Nevertheless, there is some disagreement among traders about the practice of selling bootlegs. Those who disapprove of the practice may conceive of their interactions in more of a “gift” mindset—and may especially emphasize their desire to gift bootlegs to new traders and be motivated to increase access to theater through bootlegs. The bootleg trading economy thus becomes a complicated social interaction with some viewing it as more transactional and some more based on a common social goal.

This tension between the goals of different traders underlies other fan controversies as well. It is in the interest of some traders to keep some bootlegs relatively inaccessible so that they are worth more when traded. In the survey, eight respondents mentioned the use of distorted trading ratios as something they disliked about the community. One individual wrote that “there used to be a serious problem with people marking recordings as ‘rare’ and demanding wildly uneven trades for them -- particularly noticeable when they were actually fairly common recordings that a lot of people had.”

An example from one site that I looked at states that traders’ preferred exchange rate:

95 1 Video = 1 Video 1 Audio = 1 Audio 2 Audios = 1 Video 1 Video = 2 Audios Limited trade = 2:1 Very limited trade = 3:1 Rare = 4:1

This practice is another example of how traders attempt to control the flow of access to bootlegs and how traders must balance between being open and keeping some bootlegs rare and thus more valuable as a trading piece. The respondent wrote that this problem has “gotten less frequent over the years.” This suggests that this practice was an ineffective and artificial way to control the value of bootlegs, briefly adopted by some in the hopes of increasing their abilities to trade for what they want, but ultimately abandoned when those people realized consistent standards of value were impossible.

While the artificial creation of rarity in this example creates problems, my examination of trading sites shows that some basic ratios—such as two audios being worth one video— are fairly standardized across the community. This is another factor in making trading feel more like a transaction than a gift. It’s also important to remember that the

‘economy’ of trading is dependent on the relative rarity and value of particular bootlegs, and this is why community norms around privacy and caution must be understood not only as a defense against legal sanction but also as a way to ensure the continued value of bootlegs for trading. Many of the tensions within the trading community thus occur because of the friction between these incentives and a genuine desire for bootlegs to be more widely accessible.

The opaqueness of in-group norms of traders prevent many people from understanding them or even knowing of their existence. This means that once bootlegs filter through the most committed traders to more casual fans, they may not know not to share those bootlegs freely and widely, or they may not care about those rules of 96 etiquette. Thus they may post them on YouTube—to the great consternation of certain masters and long-time traders. This controversy shows how the norms of the community do not necessarily revolve around making theater accessible to the masses. Instead, there is a need to tightly control who can access the bootlegs. The opaqueness of the community is justified as a necessary precaution against potential legal action, but the conventions that must be mastered also serve to create hierarchies of who actually can access bootlegs. Keeping bootlegs under tight control and off of popular sites like

YouTube makes them rarer and thus more valuable in the informal trading economy, which bolsters the position of established traders who are committed to the bootleg trading system. Technical competencies in understanding which file types and hosting sites to use are an important part of being able to participate in the trading community.

Thus, theater bootlegs cannot be simply celebrated as broadening access to theater (to say nothing about the potential costs to theater performers and other theater industry workers), but must be understood in the context of the insular communities within which they most often circulate.

Theater bootleg traders, then, cannot be held up as a simple model of activism and advocacy. Theater bootleg traders do not usually articulate any political goals, and their actions and norms create their own hierarchies of access to content. Political advocacy is not any sort of primary goal of traders. There is a tension between the desire for greater access to content and the need to not draw unwanted legal consequences. However, when asked directly in my survey, many traders could easily articulate political implications of their actions. It is possible that the traders who cared most about the ideals of access were also the most eager to take my survey in the first place. The arguments that these traders made are very similar to arguments made publicly on platforms like Tumblr—these arguments are likely familiar to most bootleg traders. Bootleg traders must balance 97 between their love of theater and performers with the way that many of those performers condemn bootlegs as unethical and “anti-theater.” Thus they have developed strong rationalizations to justify their actions as ethical and ultimately not harmful to performers or the theater industry.

My examination of the theater trading community indicates that it is a mistake to assume it is some sort of utopia that always prioritizes open access to content.

Nevertheless, the concerns of those who trade bootlegs are real and not likely to go away any time soon, which means the circulation of bootlegs will also continue to fill the demand of people who cannot afford tickets to professional theater productions, or at least cannot afford them as often as they desire. The illicit nature of bootleg trading means that it can only ever imperfectly fill demand—and norms against watching or sharing bootlegs remain quite strong, if contested. It seems that even those who enjoy collecting bootlegs deeply desire a legitimate, legal, and affordable alternative.

Professional recordings of theater shows would absolutely be of much greater quality than that of bootlegs. Their sale would be much easier for consumers who do not want to deal with the technical details so important for many in the trading community.

The bootleg community exists in the tension between the demand for greater accessibility to theater content and the illicit nature of the activity that fans take to satisfy this demand. Trading itself requires bootlegs to be relatively difficult to attain so that the economy of trading can continue to function. If a legal alternative option exists, the demand for bootlegs would presumably be reduced. But for these traders, it might not cease entirely, since even a professional recording only captures one particular performance, and much of the appeal of trading is in collecting many different versions, casts, and actors in order to compare interpretations. Yet, as many traders emphasize, those people who are so highly dedicated to theater that they are interested in multiple 98 different interpretations of one production are always also going to want to attend live productions and buy legitimate merchandise when they are able. The bootleg traders in this survey support the position that trading bootlegs does not reduce the profit of theater productions.

99 Conclusion

The current importance of theater fandom is illustrated by the example of the musical Be More Chill (2015), an originally little-noticed production that now is one of the most anticipated Off-Broadway debuts of 2018—all because the cast recording went viral online. It was first produced at the Two River Theater in New Jersey, and ran for only a month and attracted no huge amount of success—at least not enough for it to be picked up by a commercial producer.173 A year and a half after its run, it began getting traction online. Since then, the cast album has been streamed more than 100 million times, and the Off-Broadway run was announced in April 2018.

In the New York Times article detailing its rise, Elisabeth Vincentelli reports that fans created an animatic version of the musical and a cosplay lip-synch performance to fill in the void of only having the cast album. The production seems to have been relatively engaged with fan activities from early on. The lead actor was quoted as saying

“I was getting tagged in fan art, then I started noticing people were writing fan fiction about my character.”174 While he was “dumbfounded” by these fan activities—which could be generously interpreted or not—the proliferation of these common fan practices shows that The current website for the new production of the show features fan art taken from Twitter and Instagram, so fan activities are clearly more and more taken for granted by theater companies and used as a way to build hype for their shows.

Vincentelli also argues that people searching for videos of the Broadway hits

Hamilton or Dear Evan Hansen would then discover Be More Chill from the recommended video column of YouTube. This is plausible, if hard to prove—but what

173 Elisabeth Vincentelli, “How an Anxious-Adolescent Musical (No, Not That One) Found Its Fans,” The New York Times, April 14, 2018, sec. Theater, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/theater/be-more-chill- iconis-salazar.html. 174 Ibid. 100 videos, exactly, were they watching? A quick google search reveals that something titled a full bootleg of Be More Chill was posted on YouTube and subsequently removed for copyright infringement. There are also several smaller bootlegged clips still available to watch.

YouTube is not the only place online where theater fans congregate. Be More

Chill was the second biggest musical fandom on Tumblr in 2017 according to the statistics published by Tumblr’s content team on their Fandometrics blog.175 A search on

Tumblr shows many gifs and detailed and open references to a bootleg. Even if a bootleg is not necessary for a musical to become popular, a bootleg becomes a priority for many people who discover the show and once available becomes integral to fandom discussions and understandings of the show. It would be a mistake to discount bootlegs as a factor that contributed to the musical’s sudden rise in popularity.

If this example of musicals going viral becomes a trend then it will be even more important for fan and theater/performance scholars to address how the medium of theater is being impacted by online fanbases in a ways that do not exactly mirror other media fandoms. In any case, those working on theater fandom cannot ignore the importance of bootlegs and the discourses around bootlegs as a major part of the experience for many fans. While theater may be ephemeral in one sense, ephemerality is modified by context—bootlegs exist, and many fans watch them and rewatch them, gaining at least some understanding of the visual performance of their favorite theater shows. These videos provide something more concrete for fans to attach themselves to and collect.

175 “2017′s Top Musicals,” Fandometrics, Tumblr, November 29th, 2017, http://bway.ly/tdrds#https://thefandometrics.tumblr.com/post/168016811864/tumblr2017-musicals. The ranking is based on the popularity of particular “tag” that users use to categorize their posts, and takes into account these factors: 1) How many posts were created that contain the tag 2) How many times that tag was searched for 3) How many times a post using that tag was reblogged 4) How many times a post using that tag was liked

101 Studies of theater fandom in the future should not underestimate the popularity of bootlegs.

However, bootlegs must also be understood as coming with their own problems— they are likely to be low quality or incomplete, and recording videos comes with a risk of being kicked out of a theater. Furthermore, digital bootlegs have their own issues with ephemerality. If one trader or master recorder disappears, entire collections of theater bootlegs may become no longer available. Digital bootlegs are vulnerable to copyright claims and Most notably, in 2012 the site Megaupload, the file hosting and sharing site used by many traders, was shut down by the FBI for copyright infringement.176 Theater bootlegs were not the main cause of the seizure as more typical piracy of content like music and movies was also rampant on the site. Yet many traders lost all or part of their collections due to this, and learned how they had to protect their collections on external hard drives or other backups. Issues of access are not entirely solved by bootlegs when they can become unavailable or subject to copyright claims so easily.

At the New York Public Library, the Theater on Film and Tape Archive is a collection started in the 1970s that records all Broadway and many Off-Broadway and regional theater productions for the express purpose of preserving these works for theater researchers. Access to this collection is extremely limited to those student and academics with specific research needs. Even these academics are limited in the amount of times they are allowed to view the material. Some of the videos in this collection are in fact bootlegs, and comprise the only historical record of some productions. Further attention should be given to bootlegs as potential archives for theater, and to the process of collecting as preserving history.

176 Sam Biddle, “Feds Kill Megaupload,” Gizmodo, January 19, 2012, https://gizmodo.com/5877612/feds- kill-megaupload.

102 FURTHER RESEARCH

Accessibility

This project has not done nearly enough in theorizing the intersection of piracy and disability theory. One respondent brought up another dimension of “access” to theater—accessibility for people with disabilities or who are neuro-atypical. This person preferred to collect bootlegs because the loud noises and lights of a live show would disturb them. They pointed out that while theaters do occasionally put on disability- friendly shows, these shows occur only four or five times a year. This makes it even more difficult for those with disabilities to see theater, and professional recordings give them a way to access theater in a way that they can control the context and suit their personal needs. Rules of theater etiquette discourage any behavior outside the norm. This also affects other populations that I have not specifically studied—such as parents with children.

Theater Fandom

As Matt Hills argues, fan studies needs to pay more attention to “implicit fandom” of all sorts. The specific history of theater and how it became a “high class” medium means that many theater enthusiasts have been able to sidestep the stigmatizing label of fan. These fans should certainly be given more consideration than I have here. But theater fandom is not entirely implicit, and theater fans readily borrow conventions, practices, and language from other media fandoms. Theater fandom is interesting in part because of this hierarchical breakdown between an elite and popular interest and reputation of various aspects of the medium. It would be valuable to understand if this kind of negotiation happens among fans of other mediums or properties, and how that ties back to issues of medium, access, and class. Theater of all types remains fairly unique as a 103 medium in remaining very expensive and inaccessible—even the shows that are

“populist” in terms of content. A focus on theater shows how it is important not to theorize class only as producing “taste cultures” but also in terms of the material reality and everyday choices of fans.

The changing relationship that the theater industry has with theater fans deserves more attention than I give it here, especially beyond the public opinions of performers.

The perspective of other workers and makers of theater was not an emphasis of this thesis, but their opinions on bootlegs and other facets of theater production are invaluable. More focus should be given to promotional strategies used by theaters and producers—for example, the way in which rush tickets have become a standard industrial practice, and how social media accounts for productions are used to engage with fans. It is especially important to be cognizant of shifts in content and promotional strategies as the theater industry converges with Hollywood. So called “megamusicals” or Disney franchises may fairly be criticized in terms of artistic merit, but the cultural value of the work itself—which is always subjective and dependent on class—should not prevent the rigorous study of the mode of its industrial production or of the meanings made by the audiences and fans that appreciate those productions. If certain types of shows continue to dominate the landscape of Broadway theater, it is important to understand why. In this way fan studies scholars can bring interdisciplinary value to the field of theater and performance studies.

Meanwhile, abandoning the actual content of theater is not advisable. Further research into theater fandom could examine if some musicals are more likely to inspire a dedicated following than others. I only briefly discussed the appeal of a show like

Hamilton, which features contemporary music and a non-white cast as a way to broaden the appeal of theater to new audiences. Taking another look at Be More Chill, we see a 104 high school drama-comedy with a lead character who struggles with social interactions and mental health issues, in the same mold as the hit musical Dear Evan Hansen (2016).

Are these relatable characters more appealing to young or fannish audiences? Indeed, if many of these musicals are being made and marketed for young people, then maybe questions of access need to be reframed around what adult is (or is not) actually paying for their tickets.

Piracy as fan practice

Fan studies also has much to gain from a greater focus on piracy as a fan practice, while making sure to ground these practices in their specific everyday contexts. Being specific about the kind of piracy in question is important, even if industry tends to collapse them together. These practices are directly implicated in questions of how fans access content and how they become fans of properties. As seen in my examination of the theater bootleg trading community, the kinds of ethical distinctions that fans make are bound up in how they conceive their own fan identity and how they relate to other fans and to the makers of their fan object. The specific community of theater bootleg traders that I focus on in this project is just one of many examples. Different motivations exist for transnational fandoms—for example, fan subbing of anime occurs must be understood in its own context but the two fandoms could be usefully compared.177 Questions of access allow fan scholars to more clearly understand class and economic factors that influence all sorts of fan behavior.

177 Hye-Kyung Lee, “Participatory Media Fandom: A Case Study of Anime Fansubbing,” Media, Culture & Society 33, no. 8 (November 1, 2011): 1131–47.

105 Appendices

APPENDIX A: SURVEY QUESTIONS

Part One

Approximately how long have you been trading bootlegs?

How did you initially find the trading community?

Why did you decide to begin trading bootlegs, and how did you get started?

What different venues, online or otherwise, have you used to trade bootlegs?

Has the way you’ve traded bootlegs changed over time?

Part Two

What do you enjoy about collecting or trading theater bootlegs?

How do you relate to the broader trading community? Do you like or dislike particular aspects of the community?

Do you record bootlegs? If so, why? If you don’t record bootlegs, why not?

What do you think about theater creators or performers that condemn bootlegs?

What strategies do you use to avoid legal action against you for trading bootlegs?

106 APPENDIX B: EXAMPLE OF COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER

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111 Piepenburg, Erik. “Hold the Phone, It’s Patti LuPone.” The New York Times, July 9, 2015, sec. Theater. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/theater/hold-the-phone- its-patti-lupone.html. Rosenfeld, Megan. “Miles Kreuger, The Musicals Man.” Washington Post, March 19, 1989. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1989/03/19/miles- kreuger-the-musicals-man/96a0c951-b37c-4b45-8129-0c6a4a542904/. Sardiello, Robert. “Identity and Status Stratification in Deadhead Subculture.” In Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, edited by Jonathon S. Epstein, 118–47. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1998. Schmidt, Alex. “Musical Theater Museum Struggles To Preserve Archives.” NPR, March 2, 2011. https://www.npr.org/2011/03/02/134207970/Musical-Theater-Museum- Struggles-To-Preserve-Archives. Sedgman, Kirsty. “When Theatre Meets Fandom: Audience Reviews of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” The Journal of Fandom Studies 6, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 81– 99. https://doi.org/info:doi/10.1386/jfs.6.1.81_1. Stein, Louisa Ellen. “Tumblr Fan Aesthetics.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott. NY: Taylor and Francis, 2018. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=5122937. Tripney, Natasha. “Play by the Rules: Theatre Etiquette.” the Guardian, March 12, 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/mar/12/playbytherulestheatre . Tulloch, John. “Fans of Chekhov.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Tulloch, John. Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences. University of Iowa Press, 2009. Tushnet, Rebecca. “Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law Symposium - Using Law and Identity to Script Cultural Production.” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal 17 (1997 1996): 651–86. Vincentelli, Elisabeth. “How an Anxious-Adolescent Musical (No, Not That One) Found Its Fans.” The New York Times, April 14, 2018, sec. Theater. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/theater/be-more-chill-iconis-salazar.html. Wolf, Stacy. “Wicked Divas, Musical Theater, and Internet Girl Fans.” Camera Obscura 22, no. 2 65 (January 1, 2007): 39–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2007- 003. Zinoman, Jason. “A Pair of New Witches, Still in Search of the Right Spell.” The New York Times, July 15, 2005, sec. Theater Reviews. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/theater/reviews/15zino.html. 112