San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Symphony's Binkley brings diverse resume to post




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 8/22/99



A few months ago, television producer John Binkley was two days away from renting his house in Terrell Hills and packing his family off to Scotland, where he planned to spend a year developing a new project.

Then the call came from the San Antonio Symphony. Would he take the job of executive director?

To many, he seemed an odd choice. Symphony administrators usually come from the ranks of symphony administrators.

Binkley had the necessary managerial and fund-raising background, however. And he had something even more valuable - a lifetime of interlinked passions for children, the creative process and social justice.

Binkley was born Jan. 27, 1943, in Evanston, Ill. Three weeks later, his father, an FBI agent, was transferred to Pasadena, Calif. Eventually, the family settled in Alta Dena.

He attended public schools in Southern California through the 10th grade.

"Then my father wanted to try to get me into Stanford, so I went to Exeter. I was supposed to got to Stanford and then law school and business school and become an international lawyer."

Binkley threw away that road map, however, as a result of a sudden event.

"My father died when I was a junior at Exeter. I was 17, he was 46. He was bitten by a mosquito in Italy."

"His death had a big impact on my life. It changed my direction. It spun me around and was the impetus for the creative work."

Binkley did enter Stanford in 1961, but he didn't complete his bachelor's degree (in philosophy) until 1968.

"After one quarter at Stanford I made the mistake of taking a creative writing course. I wanted to write a book, fiction, about a boy losing his father."

He was so serious about that goal that his creative-writing teacher urged him to take a leave of absence from the university to write.

"I spent three years writing and traveling. I worked as a busboy in restaurants. In that period I wrote two unpublished novels."

On returning to Stanford in 1965, he was asked to dircet the Stanford Children's Theater, where he staged "Hamlet" for 10-year-olds and a dramatization of "The Hobbitt."

And he found success with an original play, "No Man's Child."

A student production at Stanford was extended for two weekends beyond it scheduled run, and San Francisco public television station KQED produced the play for national distribution on PBS in 1966.

"It was a heady experience for a 23-year-old. I got paid nothing for it, of course."

"It dealt with topical issues in the '60s - racism, the war. It was aimed at an adult audience, but the roles were children. One scene showed a couple trying to worship a black Jesus. KQED censored it, cut it out - too controversial."

His work with the Stanford Children's Theater led to his directing The Fillmore Project, a theater program for elementary school children in a distressed neighborhood of San Francisco.

He was told to expect eight children; 24 kids showed up.

"I got two more rooms. I picked the two worst troublemakers - the most out of control kids - and appointed them assistant directors. I shuttled back and forth between the rooms."

The Fillmore Project was Binkley's unplanned introduction to political engagement. He had the kids write their own sociodramas, based on their experiences. The first presentation offended parents for being too violent. He had the kids cut the violence in the second show, which proved even more explosive: It dealt with the racist attitudes of white teachers.

"After the second performance my teacher called to ask if I'd seen the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle: '500 parents boycott school.' I'd discovered the power of street theater. It had an impact we didn't intend, and I think it was theraputic."

Binkley cotinued to write during his last years at Stanford, but he couldn't sell anything.

When he finished at Stanford, he decided to do some reading, and his life changed again. He read books by Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, both of whom had recently been assassinated. But it was his reading of Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power" that led him to what he calls "the most important thing I've ever done in my life."

"I read Stokely's book about his experience in Lowndes County, Ala., registering 2,000 black people for the first time."

"Never listening to good advice, I bought a second-hand car and drove down there. I was about 25. John Hulett, one of my heroes, was a black man running for sheriff. I met him and said I'd like to volunteer. He said 'come see me in the morning.'"

African-Americans had registered to vote in great numbers in Lowndes County, but the Ku Klux Klan and other white segregationists had intimidated them to keep them from the polls.

"Hulett said I want to send you into the black churches. I want to use you as a white man telling them to go vote."

"I spoke in one church on a Sunday morning when the church had posted a man with a shotgun on each corner outside. I stood at the pulpit and I could see out of one eye the guys with shotguns through the windows. The Klan came by and drove trucks around in the church lawn to try and intimidate them."

Binkley also served as a poll-watcher in the 1968 election. Before the election, he was jumped and beaten by two white men outside the home of a man who was to give him a list of the dead people who had voted in the county.

Hulett and his forces lost that election. Binkley returned the following summer to establish the Lowndes County Freedom School, a project of the American Friends Service Committee in Pasadena.

The school's curriculum ranged from literature and history to rural precinct organization. Binkley's teaching tools included sociodrama and creative writing.

Binkley returned to Alabama again for the 1970 election. This time, the blacks won. Hulett was elected sheriff and remained in office for 25 years before moving up to county probate judge.

Binkley spent several years in Pasadena as executive director of the Foothills Free Clinic, established by the Quakers to provide medical and counseling services to 25,000 patients a year, most of them adolescents.

But then: "I decided I needed to make some money."

In 1973 he started a wine distributorship with his brother-in-law in Houston. The business grew rapidly, but, Binkley says, it was rubbed out by unscrupulous competitors in 1977.

"My younger brother was a banker. I was unemployed and had been writing for several months. We were sitting on the beach, and my brother said, 'Why don't you try the one thing that's ever worked for you?'"

Money flowed freely in Houston in the late '70s, and Binkley obtained backing to develop an idea for a television drama in which the actors, all children, would improvise the scripts according to a general road map laid out by professional writers.

His work drew the notice of Norman Lear, producer of "All in the Family."

"Norman Lear is the most brilliant person I've ever met. He's compassionate, intelligent, a man of infinate curiosity and ecumenical mind. He was incredible encouragement."

"He asked me if I would have any objection to his coming to Houston to watch the kids. He took it himself to ABC. They had a deal, but they lost nerve on the improvisation."

All efforts to sell the project in the United States came to naught.

"I told my wife I either had to get out of this country or get out of this business. I went to London. I took my last pennies and set up in the Savoy Hotel and sold two shows in three days, one to the BBC and one to ITV. I hadn't sold anything from 1979 to 1983."

ITV bought the same concept Binkley had shown to Lear and ABC. Binkley wrote, produced and directed the series, which was called "No Adults Allowed." It became the broadcaster's top-rated children's series in 1984.

Back in the States, Binkley sold the same concept to Boston public television station WGBH, which produced the 13-part series for national broadcast on PBS under the title "The Perkins Family." The title "No Adults Allowed" was deemed too exclusionary, Binkley said.

"That show got the biggest teen audience of anything on the schedule."

Meanwhile, Binkley was working on another project that would turn out to be the biggest success of his career. "Fifteen" would eventually run 78 episodes and be distributed to 23 countries.

To fund it, he patched together a joint venture of the Disney Channel, two Canadian broadcasting groups and Houston investors. He said, "That is relevant to the symphony - trying to create money where there was air."

The investors ordered 13 episodes of "Fifteen" in 1986.

"The Canadians made a lot of money on it. Disney tested it, and it tested high. (Disney chairman Michael) Eisner said he didn't like the improvisation. It didn't get reordered."

"Out of the blue, four years later, the Canadians called and asked me to make some more. They offered 50 to 60 percent of the budget."

"I had made nine annual pilgrimages to Nickelodeon. I had to stay in expensive hotels, and each time I got rejected. I called again. I just needed 12 percent. In three minutes, we made a deal. It went 65 episodes. It was the highest-rated drama they'd ever had."

"It was my first show that made the investors substantial money, and the first time that made money for me personally. It was the same show Disney rejected."

Binkley and his family - his wife, Sherrie, and daughters Mollie (now 18) and Liza (13) - moved to San Antonio in 1987.

He had roots here: His father's mother's grandfather had built one of the earliest houses - it's still standing and nicely restored - on Eighth Street in the Irish Flat neighborhood.

In 1993, Binkley started a joint venture with San Antonio media giant Clear Channel Communications to develop children's programming, but nothing came of the attempt.

When that company was dissolved in 1995, Binkley dived into the production of a documentary, "Chldren of War," shot in Northern Ireland, Israel, Palestine and inner-city America over the next four years.

This year he started developing a concept for children age 6 to 10 to improvise folk tales and fairy tales from diverse cultures.

He decided to drop that project in favor of the symphony post, although he did follow through on a commitment to lead a workshop that had been planned for Glasgow, Scotland, over the summer as part of the development process.

As he talked about his life, the episode that most animated Binkley was his experience in Lowndes County.

The civil rights movement was central to the culture, identity and aspirations of the whole nation. A symphony orchestra arouses the passions of the few.

Is is possible for the San Antonio Symphony to so engage the larger culture as to win the passionate involvement of the many?

"That's the key question," Binkley says. "I don't have an answer. I think finding the answer requires a collaboration with the different constituencies that make up a community as complex as this one.

"That's one of the things I find interesting about this job. I am something of a communicator. I cross lines."



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