One World Foundation - August 2012 - Scott & Nancy McLucas
One World Foundation, founded by Ponte Vedra Beach's Scott McLucas, supports artists near and far
Posted: August 10, 2012 - by Maggie.FitzRoy@jacksonville.com
Scott McLucas of Ponte Vedra Beach has lived all over the world.
His career in the early television industry and as a documentary filmmaker took him many places around the globe, and his love of the arts brought him into contact with many creative people.
In 1981, a desire to help worthy artists and their projects led him to start the One World Foundation to support the arts. Through the years, he has produced many plays in New York City, sponsored a promising American ballet choreographer in France, and created a professional symphony orchestra in Vence, France.
Today, the foundation supports many area arts endeavors, and McLucas and his wife Nancy are always on the lookout for promising artists who might merit assistance.
“[McLucas] is a man of great generosity and insight,” said Susan Brandenburg, a professional biographer who is helping him write his memoirs. “He has sponsored a great many artists, dancers and stage performers who ... went on to very nice careers.”
“He is a fascinating and generous man,” said Joe Schwarz, executive director of Players by the Sea in Jacksonville Beach, where McLucas sponsored a play last year.
McLucas was the producing sponsor of Dividing the Estate by American playwright Horton Foote. Foote’s daughter, actress Hallie Foote, came to help with the show.
Together, Schwarz and McLucas established the Horton Foote Legacy Project “to advance and preserve the work and legacy” of Foote, who is “one of the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century,” Schwarz said.
In May 2013, Players by the Sea will stage another Foote play, The Trip to Bountiful. Hallie, whom McLucas met while producing some of her father’s plays in New York City, again will come to the Beaches to lend support.
McLucas grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and graduated from Yale University in 1951. He went to Columbia University for a masters degree in communications and theater. He also enrolled in a television-production training program, the School of Radio and Television Techniques, which led him to early television production in the 1950s.
He worked on several TV shows, including Rin Tin Tin, Chance of a Lifetime, and Conquest, starring Eric Sevareid. He also served in the U.S. Army, where he worked on a documentary for the troops. When he got out, he began producinging his own documentaries, which took him to Europe, where he lived off and on for many years.
McLucas married Nancy in 1987, and the couple lived part-time in New York City, part-time in France. In the mid-1990s, they moved to Ponte Vedra Beach for half the year, while continuing to live in France the other half. McLucas also has lived in Los Angeles and in London.
In the mid-1980s, his foundation leased a theater on West 42nd Street in New York City, and offered it to the artistically promising Irish Repertory Theater for its productions. Some of those shows included Whistle in the Dark, by Tom Murphy, Philadelphia, Here I Come! by Brian Friel, and My Oedipus Complex by Frank O’Connor. McLucas became a member of the Irish Board of Directors in 1995.
His foundation also produced many other shows in New York, and became involved with Horton Foote — who won awards for his screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies — in the 1990s. Foote, who also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, died in 2009, and Schwarz is in Texas this week to help with the opening of a Foote museum in the playwright’s hometown of Wharton.
The Foote Legacy has “been a fun project to be involved with,” Schwarz said. “It’s been a joyful journey with Scott. I owe all of it to his generosity; he’s a remarkable man.”
McLucas finds artists through his own interests. He has represented his foundation as a trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, and was on the board of the Cultural Center at Ponte Vedra Beach for several years. He said he spends $60,000 to $70,000 a year supporting various projects, and is proud that for much of his life he has supported talent worldwide.
Always open to artistic ideas, he can be reached via email at ouvertsc@hotmail.com.
“The foundation is not the kind of foundation where you have to write a grant,” Nancy McLucas said. “Scott comes across a group or an individual that interests him.”
Maggie FitzRoy can be contacted at (904) 302-3394.
Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/community/shorelines/2012-08-10/story/one-world-foundation-founded-ponte-vedra-beachs-scott-mclucas#ixzz23UW5dz8K |
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