By Michael Miner
“I saw them on-line,” said his father. “You’re going to be happy.”
The accounting firm of Friedman Eisenstein Raemer and Schwartz had added up the votes. The only two members of the Jeff Committee who knew the winners before the ceremony were Joan Kaloustian, who prepared the cards inside the presenters’ envelopes, and Jerry Proffit, the chair of the committee’s Equity wing who produced the awards show. On Monday before the show Kaloustian faxed the names to the Sun-Times. On Sunday night she’d E-mailed them to Playbill in New York. And the previous Friday–three days before the ceremony–Proffit had hand delivered the list to Richard Christiansen of the Tribune. This was an act of tribute: by accommodating the disgracefully early deadline of Tempo, the Tribune’s feature section, the Jeff Committee was acknowledging the paper’s unparalleled ability to put people in seats.
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Kaloustian told Christiansen she was worried about a security breach. “I talked to him at length and expressed my concern that the longer the list was out the bigger the risk was, and I said why we didn’t want to make a habit of it. And I was assured it wouldn’t be an issue.”
Witt said the Jeff winners went on-line around midnight. A director searching for on-line reviews spotted them there and called both the Tribune city desk and Proffit, who immediately called the Tribune too. The city desk called Witt at home, and by 3 AM the Internet had been purged.
Conversation at the advisory committee’s last meeting before the ceremony, Leonard said, swung to the coverage the big night was likely to get. Richard Christiansen would be there, someone from the Jeff Committee said, but it wouldn’t matter–because the Tribune wouldn’t do anything but run the list of winners the committee always gave them in advance.
After all, what’s the alternative to feeding the Tribune the results in advance? Christiansen tells me that either Tempo would have to wait a day before publishing the winners or, if he twisted enough arms, an overnight story would run in Metro, whose editors don’t think the Jeff Awards are “newsy” enough to warrant coverage. And Chicago theater people don’t want their highest honors buried in Metro.
