Move over Netflix. There’s competition for binge watchers. It comes from a partnership between Fullerton-based Grand Central Art Center and Burbank-based KCETLink Media Group.
Even more unprecedented—the first content the joint venture produced is a made-for-TV opera—not exactly standard viewing fare. The entire opera was first released online in 12 episodes, before its June 13 debut, for free streaming on-demand.
And the content is compelling. “Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser,” revolves around a teenage girl who gets caught up in the historic obsession with female visionaries, defined as witch-hunters, early psychiatrists and modern artists.
The collaboration is significant because it illustrates the art center’s innovation and the media group’s nimbleness to capitalize on the trend of episodic content and marshal the resources to make it happen. Total production costs were $1.2 million, or $100,000 per episode.
“The viewing habits that people have nowadays are very different than what we were accustomed to 10, 20, 30 years ago,” said Juan Devis, KCETLink’s first chief creative officer. “Following the model of the Netflix release, you have the entire season, and it’s up to you to decide when to watch and how. … And that’s what we wanted to experiment with.”
Takes Two To Vireo
KCETLink Media Group was formed in 2012 by the merger of KCET, formerly the main PBS station in SoCal, and Link TV, a national satellite network. It’s a viewer-supported nonprofit with content distributed nationally on DirecTV Channel 375, DISH Network channel 9410 and KCET-TV. KCETLink serves 11 counties in central and southern California, from San Luis Obispo to San Diego.
The Grand Central Art Center is part of California State University-Fullerton’s College of the Arts. It also partners with the city of Santa Ana. The center is in downtown Santa Ana and functions as a mixed residential-commercial-
educational complex. The 45,000-square-foot structure includes live-work studio spaces for visual-art graduate students and an artist-in-residence program. John Spiak is director and chief curator.
Arrested Development of Vireo
The artist-in-residence program spawned the incarnation of “Vireo” when performance artist, composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa came for several visits from New York City starting in 2012. She had done research on the topic of hysteria while at Yale University, graduating in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in literature. She wrote the opera with Erik Ehn in 1994, but they couldn’t get it produced because there were too many time-period and costume changes, Spiak said. So they shelved it.
Being in Orange County helped resurrect it.
The art center staff introduced her to people and sites around the county. It was the combination of exploring OC and watching the TV show “Arrested Development” that inspired Bielawa’s epiphany to experiment with the opera as a TV show or internet series, Spiak said. “Arrested Development” was set in Newport Beach. It spurred “Vireo” for two reasons. First, the TV show was viewed as “high-end art with a mainstream entry”—on the Fox network. Second, it featured constant guest appearances, which the composer applied to “Vireo,” with guest musicians from all over the world, Spiak said.
Once Bielawa cemented her intention to do an episodic series rather than a live operatic performance, Spiak contacted his friend Devis at KCETLink.
Devis said he was interested because of KCET’s “Artbound” series, which explores innovation and creativity, along with analysis of art and culture’s effect on society.
“We take deep dives into partnering with organizations or artists that are doing really daring and interesting work,” he said.
KCETLink had already broadcast several opera-related ventures, including two documentaries about operas produced by Yuval Sharon’s Los Angeles-based company, The Industry— “Invisible Cities,” presented at the Union Station train terminal in downtown L.A., and “Hopscotch,” which took place inside 18 cars as they drove around designated routes in L.A. —as well as a live telecast of Long Beach Opera’s “Fallujah,” written in collaboration with military veterans who served in that part of Iraq.
“We’ve been following this trajectory that SoCal has had in the creation of a new type of opera, a multidisciplinary opera,” Devis said.
The plot of “Vireo” travels through time, focusing on historical periods when there’s been a strong presence of men suppressing women’s voices, starting with the Salem witch trials and moving on to the 1950s and 1960s, which witnessed “the highest level of psychologists seeing teenage girls for acting out,” Spiak said.
Fundraising in OC Challenging
It was two years ago when the Grand Central Art Center and KCETLink sealed their deal. The responsibilities were split based on who had the capacity to pull them off. Bielawa and the director of “Vireo,” Charles Otte, formed Single Cel LLC, based in New York City, to manage the production side of the opera. KCET offered to take care of the post-production, promotion and distribution. There were also a lot of in-kind resources and time donated to bring the opera to fruition, Devis said.
“It’s a huge project for us,” Spiak said, “Probably the biggest one the art center has ever realized budget-wise.”
At the time, Single Cel only had resources to produce the first two episodes, Devis said.
Everyone participated in fundraising, which proved challenging, Spiak said.
“A lot of people were pretty tentative about helping support the process in OC specifically,” he said. “I think it’s because they haven’t experienced something like this. We’re not a trusted commodity in terms of developing a project like this.”
Donors who did step up to the plate included Jeff van Harte, president of CSUF’s philanthropic foundation, who lives in San Francisco; Doug Simao and his wife, Kate Peters, members of CSUF’s philanthropic board who live in Orange County; and Dan Black, a member of CSUF’s philanthropic board who lives in San Francisco. Spiak said he can’t disclose how much they donated.
The major donors came from outside OC because OC is still conservative in its perspective of the arts, Spiak said.
“We see this at different museums around town,” he said. “There’s a great amount of wealth in Orange County, which has the potential to build up (the) county for the better and to strengthen these institutional voices to a regional and even national level, which can only serve to strengthen the Orange County community.”
Donor and fundraising parties, as well as grants and awards, enabled the $1.2 million production total to be reached, Devis said.
KCETLink is in talks with some national and international distributors that could partially monetize the project, he added. It’s already available on KCETLink’s channels on Apple TV and Roku.
Awards
“Vireo” garnered the 2015 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Multimedia Award. The first two episodes premiered on KCET in early 2015 to gain validation and to inspire funding for the subsequent 10 episodes, Spiak said. The ASCAP award is more about recognition but also provided $500, a KCETLink spokesperson said. The art center itself was awarded a MAP Fund Grant for 2016. New York City-based MAP, a national art philanthropy, supports original live performance projects that embody a spirit of deep inquiry. The MAP Fund award was for $39,200. A couple of the episodes were shot with live audiences. One was a circus scene shot at an abandoned Oakland train station. The episode starred renowned opera singer Deborah Voigt.
Different Locations
All of the production aspects dovetailed with the goal of creating a different type of distribution model, Devis said.
“Normally, with proscenium-based operas, you go and pay money and see them, or they get taped and shown in their entirety,” he said. “We wanted to produce an opera that was segmented into chapters.”
Production began in February 2015 at Santa Ana’s Yost Theater, the county’s oldest theater, built in 1912 during the vaudeville period. Later episodes were shot at far-flung locales, including Northern California’s redwood forests and New York’s Hudson River Valley.
More OC Connections
The heroine is played by soprano Rowen Sabala, who was a student at Santa Ana-based Orange County School of the Arts when she was selected and during the production of “Vireo.” She’s now 18 and just completed her first semester at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Maria Lazarova, who plays Vireo’s mother, is director of the Orange County School of the Arts’ classical voice conservatory; Sabala was one of her students. The school’s middle school choir is also featured in the production.
One upcoming screening is June 21 at the Plummer Auditorium, part of Fullerton College, and part of Fullerton’s Day of Music. It will be a full screening of all 12 episodes.
For a “second screen” experience, there’s a wealth of information about Vireo, interviews with the cast and crew and behind-the-scenes content at kcet.org/vireo.
Synergy with Netflix
Ironically, “Arrested Development” and “Vireo” ultimately took the same on-demand streaming trajectory. When Fox canceled “Arrested Development” after three seasons in 2006, Los Gatos-based Netflix licensed new episodes and distributed them exclusively on its video streaming service in 2013. Netflix reportedly has commissioned a fifth season of the show to premiere in 2018, according to news reports.
