A Bigger Umbrella -- At 20 Years Old, The Festival's Growth Parallels That Of Its Producer: One Reel

A financial spreadsheet, big as an unfolded highway map, covers Norm Langill's desk. A handful of color-coded file folders surrounds the borders. His ``IN'' and ``OUT'' baskets sit empty. Only a few papers rest in a third basket, the one labeled ``PROCRASTINATING.''

Langill apologizes for the relative lack of disorder. He confesses that this will not be an exciting time to visit the headquarters of One Reel, the company he helped found. Now's the calm before the storm of Bumbershoot, Seattle's annual end-of-summer arts festival on Labor Day weekend, produced by One Reel since 1980; and the Goodwill Arts Festival, which One Reel helped produce to great acclaim, is several weeks past.

``Right now we're trying to reconcile about four projects,'' Langill said recently, looking up from the spreadsheet filled with columns of revenue figures from the July U.S. tour by Grand Kabuki Theatre of Japan, produced by One Reel. He makes a stabbing motion with his pen toward one of the files. ``Put a stake through them so they stop wiggling around.''

Actually, Norm the Impaler and his staff have more than paper work to put to rest. Several major Bumbershoot acts now have canceled: guitar ace Joe Walsh extended his regrets when a recording session with Pete Townsend suddenly materialized; the British postpunk band Psychedelic Furs pulled out when an internal row led to the departure of their drummer; soul singer Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed when a light fixture fell on him during a benefit concert in Brooklyn earlier this month.

Elsewhere in the One Reel office, Laurie Jacoby is speed-dialing.

``It'd be great if you could book something and know that nothing else would come in the way of getting to Seattle,'' said Jacoby, One Reel booking director. Along with placing a flurry of calls to agents and airlines she found time this day to call Mayfield's manager to make sure a floral arrangement was delivered to his hospital room.

``When you're booking over 400 acts at a festival, forces of nature are beyond your control.''

Indeed. One Reel can't change acts of God or the artistic tiffs that sometimes explode bands. And it can't govern the single biggest obstacle to another long weekend of record-breaking Bumbershoot attendance - the weather.

But Langill and his crew appear to have learned how to control everything else.

For example, for the Goodwill Arts Festival Langill persuaded the Soviet Union's most prestigious ballet troupes - the Bolshoi and the Kirov - to flip-flop their touring schedules so the Bolshoi could open a 1990 U.S. tour in Seattle instead of barnstorming this country in 1989.

Langill expected dance critics and balletomanes to rake the Bolshoi troupe - and many did. But he felt certain the Bolshoi would be a bigger draw than the more critically acclaimed Kirov.

``I don't mean to degrade them, but it's a name like Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse,'' says Langill. ``Kirov will never have that name recognition.''

The Bolshoi, it turned out, gave eight sold-out performances at the Seattle Center Opera House.

``One Reel has this unusual combination of street smarts and arts know-how,'' says Jon Kertzer, who has worked on Bumbershoot since 1988 and this year is coordinating the festival's World Music Stage. Kertzer wound his way to One Reel after working for Seattle underground radio in the '70s and local concert promoters in the '80s.

Promoters adept at bringing Janet Jackson or Bruce Springsteen to the Tacoma Dome ``are driven by the concert,'' Kertzer says. ``One Reel has a much wider conceptual base for what they do.''

Wider and wider, it seems.

In 1988, One Reel added the Fratelli's Family Fourth fireworks and entertainment show to its producing credits. The upstart Independence Day event quickly rose to challenge Ivar's more venerable pyrotechnic display for the title of Seattle's Big Bang. An estimated 50,000 spectators in Gas Works Park and another 150,000 around Lake Union watched this year's Fratelli's show.

This summer One Reel culminated four years of planning by producing the Goodwill Arts Festival, which made the Seattle area a showcase for more than 1,300 artists from two-dozen-plus countries.

``It made sense to work with an existing festival-producing organization,'' says Paul Schell, co-chairman of the Arts Festival. ``We never thought about going out of town. This gave One Reel a big boost in terms of their learning curve and reputation.''

In the wake of the Goodwill Arts Festival, One Reel is considering applying its learning by helping to launch a recurring international arts festival in Seattle.

Langill's more immediate passion is the Furusato Theater Caravan, a traveling company based in Tokyo. Under One Reel's aegis, the group will create a bilingual musical based on the lives of U.S. and Japanese farmers, then tour both countries. Langill sounds confident that the tour will be another success.

One Reel's history is not without setbacks, though.

Paid solely to write the script for the Goodwill Games welcoming ceremonies, One Reel watched from the wings as a succession of producers was hired and fired.

``I can't say what I wrote and what happened there at Husky Stadium were the same things,'' Langill says. ``I don't think it's a process we'd do again.''

Then, of course, there was the time One Reel almost let Bumbershoot slip off its hook.

That was 1985. Ewen Dingwall, then director of Seattle Center, awarded the Bumbershoot contract to Media One, a local concert producer, believing Media One could cope better with the festival's crowds and turn a bigger profit on the four-day festival. After an intense battle, the City Council awarded Bumbershoot back to One Reel.

Since then, Bumbershoot has continued to be One Reel's bread and butter.

Last year's festival drew 220,000 spectators; 85,000 people streamed through the Seattle Center gates in a single day. This year's 20th-anniversary event - with perhaps the most impressive lineup yet (see related stories) - carries a $1.64 million budget, not counting in-kind contributions. One Reel, a nonprofit corporation, plows any profits from Bumbershoot back into the event.

In 1979, the last year the city produced the event, Bumbershoot patrons paid $8 or $9 for individual performances by second-tier ``national'' acts. The event managed to lose $60,000 on a $100,000 budget.

In 1980, One Reel won the contract to produce the event and took a bold step: It cordoned off the Seattle Center grounds and charged only $2.50 per day to enter, with no other admission fees.

Since then, attendance has mushroomed. The visual-arts component of the festival has increased tenfold. And literary arts have become an important element.

``We sort of joke about it,'' says Jane Zalutsky, who heads One Reel's marketing and promotion. Her office also serves as temporary warehouse for cartons filled with Lego bricks to be used to build a plastic city on the Bumbershoot grounds.

``What if we didn't do any promotion? How many tens of thousands of people would show up on Labor Day weekend just by instinct?''

That will remain speculation. This year, Zalutsky says, Bumbershoot will use between $300,000 and $400,000 of advertising time to trumpet the festival, supplied free by local radio stations that sponsor parts of the event.

Six-figure sums that are business-as-usual today make the early One Reel seem like a hokey, harebrained venture hatched by a group of near-kids. That's pretty close to the truth.

Langill and a dozen or so other unemployed local actors banded together in 1972 and created a portable theater company they called One Reel Vaudeville.

``We all wanted to be famous,'' recalls Louise DiLenge, One Reel vice president and, besides Langill, the only remaining original member of the group. ``Our only other goal was to earn some money and make it through the summer.''

They wrote their own plays and took them on the road around Washington and Oregon. Their first paying gig, Langill recalls, came after a 10-show run at Seattle Center.

Langill cashed the $7,000 check into single dollar bills, then carried it back to his confederates in a prop wooden strongbox.

``It was so little money at least we were going to have fun distributing it,'' he remembers. ``We divvied it up like bandits.''

One Reel went on to produce the now-defunct Science Fiction Expo. It opened the dormant Showbox theater and put swing bands and elaborate floor shows on stage. As it became more and more a producing organization, One Reel dropped the ``vaudeville'' moniker.

``We shortened it so it's even more vague,'' says Langill, who originally settled on One Reel when he ``just had to think of a name in about one hour so we could complete some forms.''

From harebrained . . . to high-powered.

If the weather cooperates, this could be another record-breaking year for the festival. Which raises the question: How much bigger can Bumbershoot - and One Reel - get?

``You can't double the size of the festival,'' says Zalutsky. ``You would be squished.''

A proposed Seattle Center redesign might create more open space and the possibility for larger yet uncrushed Bumbershoot crowds. On other fronts, One Reel views a recurring Goodwill-like arts festival as its best chance for long-term growth.

For now, though, Norm the Impaler must drive more stakes through more wiggling files. And return to his spreadsheets. The clackety-clack sound of an adding machine will soon drift out his office door.

``We didn't start out as administrators,'' Langill says. ``It just turned out we had a knack for it.''