Sweetback Stabbers?
Things have turned sour at Sweetback Productions. Founders Kelly Anchors and her husband, Michael Mc-Kune, have been thrown out of the company they launched in 1994 by a board of directors made up of their very best friends. The friends–coartistic director David Cerda, managing director Steve Hickson, and husband-and-wife production team Pauline Pang and Richard Lambert–say Anchors is brilliant and they love her, but none of them wants to work with her anymore. Her directorial style, as they describe it, could be a shtick from their own shows: a mix of Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Crawford at their most unpleasant, with the default setting at “crisis.” So they got together, divided the assets, offered her a like-it-or-lump-it deal, and told her to push off.
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Anchors and McKune got the company name, $3,000, the right to produce a couple of long-standing Sweetback programs (Screw Xmas and Diva Night), and whatever equipment they had stored in their home. The renegade board, who had run the business aspects of the company for the last few years, took the rest of the money in Sweetback’s bank account (about $17,000) and the legal entity with its valuable not-for-profit status (achieved through the efforts of Pang and Lambert). For now, they’ll also keep the Sweetback Web site (created by Lambert) and E-mail list; they say they’ll turn the Web site over after a “transition” period. Cerda has the rights to the signature cross-dressing musical late-night-film parodies he wrote (Scarrie–The Musical, Touched by Jayne Mansfield, and a handful of others), though Anchors claims she should have a share in their biggest hit, The Birds. Cerda opines that they’ve done right by Anchors. After all, he says, “We could have just waited until [her term expired in] July and voted her out and given her nothing.”
For their part, the Sweetback board believes shedding founders is standard practice in the theater world. Cerda couldn’t think of any examples but maintains it happens all the time: “A board of directors will just vote ’em out and they get nothing,” he says. “That’s like the norm.” And Pang spelled it out in an E-mail to Anchors: “It is no longer your choice to give up the company or not, for the company can give you up. It is far from weird; it is part of the unfortunate psychology of theater that founders get separated from the companies they started all the time…and most of them don’t get to keep their name.”
