DAVID GOODIS

David Goodis was an American writer of crime fiction noted for his output of short stories and novels in the noir fiction genre. Born in Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. According to critic Dennis Drabelle, “Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.

In 1963, ABC television began airing The Fugitive, the fictional story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. In the plot, Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the “one-armed man”, the person he believes to be the real killer.

Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC[7] for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin’s law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him, and several groups supported him, including the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case.

One month later, Goodis was dead. After his death the lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts.

The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, “donated his work to the public domain” when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name.

The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, “We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine’s name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.” (425 F.2d 398-399)

By then, Goodis’s main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only “nuisance value” and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law.

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JAY & DEEN KOGAN

Deen Kogan founded Society Hill Playhouse with her husband Jay, in 1960. Together they created the first professionally operated theatre in Philadelphia to showcase the contemporary repertoire, both American and European, and this theatre has served as the model for the younger theatres which have prospered in Philadelphia since the late seventies.

During its forty-nine year history, Society Hill Playhouse has produced hundreds of area premieres on its Main Stage (from Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera in 1962 to Jean Genet’s The Blacks in 1965 to Brian Friels’ Volunteers in 1978 and Freedom of the City in 1979 to Eduardo Manet’s The Day Mary Shelley Met Charlotte Bronte in 1992 to James Sherman’s Beau Jest in 1993 to Rachel Wyatt’s Crackpot in 1996). The Second Space Theatre (also known as The Red Room & Cabaret Theatre) opened in 1986 with William Gibson’s Handy Dandy and counts among its premieres the Manuel Puiz drama, The Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1987, Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild in 1988, and the commissioned work, Lafferty’s Wake by Susan Turlish in 1996 which ended a five-year run in 2001. It now serves as home to BCKSEET Productions, an emerging theatre company, and provides space for many cabaret attractions.

“I said to Jay, ‘Well, maybe we could get five weeks out of it, Kogan said of the production. And we got 10 years.”

Jay Kogan died in 1993. Deen Kogan died in 2018.

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ANNE FRIEDBERG

Anne Friedberg was chair of the Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and President-elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. An author, historian and theorist of modern media culture, Friedberg received her PhD in cinema studies from NYU. She was on the faculty of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where she was the principal architect for a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Visual Studies and the founding director and programmer of UCI’s Film and Video Center.

In 2003, she joined the USC faculty, where she was instrumental in the creation of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate and the Media Arts and Practice Ph.D. program. In 2009, she was named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Friedberg lectured widely in the United States and elsewhere, including invited talks in Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, Vienna, Tokyo, Montreal, Bern, Lausanne, Stockholm, Prague, and at the Guggenheim Museum/NY, Art Institute/Chicago, and Getty Museum/LA. In 2001–2002, she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. During 2005–2006, she was a fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center as a member of the Networked Publics research group.

“Friedberg’s research and teaching interests included: film and media histories and theories, old media/new media historiographies, critical theory/ feminist theory, nineteenth century visual culture and early cinema, theories of vision and visuality, architecture and film, global media culture.”

Her most important scholarly and theoretical work is generally considered to be the recent The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, which synthesized her previous writing about movies, film, and television, and her long experience as a theorizer of forms of visual experience. Therein, she subjected the common linguistic tropes of visual representation, including “window,” “screen”, and “the virtual” to rigorous analysis, analysis that in many cases rendered commonly accepted definitions inadequate. Drawing on philosophical and theoretical texts ranging from the art historian Erwin Panofsky to poststructuralists like Derrida, Friedberg proposed that forms of static-image, moving-image, and computer-modeled representation represented significantly different systems susceptible to rigorous analysis.

She died in Los Angeles on October 9, 2009, at the age of 57.