Geoff Ortiz’s letter in last week’s Malibu Times is, like so many of his public utterances, full of memory lapses and selective truths. It is true that several years ago, I agreed to step down from the Board of Malibu Stage, but it is equally true that when the new Board was formulated about two years ago, I was invited back on the Board by Ortiz himself – and the proof of that is that I have been regularly attending board meetings since that time as copies of the minutes, had they been properly kept (which they haven’t), would duly confirm.
Both Ortiz and Bridgeman were told of my intention to deliver a catalogue of infractions describing Ms. Bridgeman’s mismanagement of the company over the past seven months, weeks before the November 6th meeting. I personally told Bridgeman about it in a telephone conversation and Ortiz, to his face, at the last board meeting I attended on September 17th when, in fact, I had copies of the catalogue ready to present to the Board. I refrained from distributing them because Ms. Bridgeman was not present and I felt it would be unfair to make these accusations without her being able to defend herself; a moral nicety that in no way affected her attack on me – in absentia – on the meeting of November 6th. I still have the copies of that catalogue along with a parcel of corroborative E-mails and memos (including material from Ortiz himself) and fully intend to distribute them to the Board. If anyone in the press or anywhere else would like to see a copy, I shall be glad to oblige them.
Jackie Bridgeman is by no stretch of the imagination merely a “volunteer” at Malibu Stage as Ortiz contends. Several years ago, she was deliberately removed as a board member. She so flagrantly outraged the then Board of Directors that she was “kicked upstairs” to be “President Emeritus” because it was the easiest way to keep her away from meetings. After the dissolution of the last Board, she connived her return by co-opting old friends and dependent cronies onto the Board and has now turned the Chairman into one of her “creatures” as well. Mr. Ortiz is a broker who on several occasions has publicly declared that he knows nothing whatsoever about the theatre. He does know about ‘money’ and it is his high regard for people of affluence which keeps him in thrall to Ms. Bridgeman; a woman who has alienated more people in Malibu than there are acorns in the Angeles National Forest.
In presenting me with my letter of dismissal (i.e. wrongful termination/breach of contract), Mr. Ortiz sank to the deception of pretending he was joining a Fund-Raising Sub-committee meeting that I had convened at a local coffee bar with three members of the present Board. His underhanded ploy did rile me, it is true, but he was just as threatening to me in return, using the kind of cinematic language that Clint Eastwood employs when confronting a malevolent “varmint” in a western saloon. His use of the terms “insult” in previous correspondence is what any Jeffersonian democrat would call unvarnished free speech. Mr. Ortiz is not used to “unvarnished free speech”; his is buffed to a high varnish, which might, by some, be called mendacity.
My greatest concern for the theatre, which I founded and created, virtually single-handedly, is what will become of it in the hands of people like this.
Charles Marowitz
Founder, Malibu Stage Company