Month: May 2019

Practical Advice for Actors: Prologue

On May 20, 2019

At last, the time has come to address a hitherto-neglected section of the class: my performers. How ya doin’, performers? I’m about to save you loads of cash and teach you stuff you mightn’t have learned without me. Isn’t that lovely, possums? (Sorry, been watching too much Dame Edna lately.)

Be you a writer, a director, a producer, or any of the important creatives, you’re only as good as the tools you work with, and, for better or worse, one of those tools is your cast. As such, it’s important to understand what they do and what they learn. I’ve acted before — not a great deal, but enough to get the gist — and, more importantly, I’ve observed many an acting class that I thought was horseshit. Naturally, I have some stuff to say about all that.

Now, some may well say, “But you admit your acting background isn’t that strong. What does a producer know about acting? What can they contribute to the discussion, compared to an actual actor?” It’s a valid question.

My answer: a lot of young people looking to break into acting think getting advice on acting from an actor’s perspective is the logical move. It’s not hard to see why; from a purely technical standpoint, someone with a lot of experience at a job is generally the best person to learn from about said job.

But actors ain’t perfect. I’ve met a lot of bitchy actors who preach (in the words of A Chorus Line) that they “won’t regret, can’t forget what [they] did for love” but can’t resist displaying the chip on their shoulder about how their career turned out. I’ve encountered egomaniacal assholes who bullied fellow cast members and weren’t at all honest or transparent about themselves, their technique, or their careers. You’re only as good as those you learn from, and that’s as true for teachers as it is for students. To the more ruthless, you’re not their “work child”; you’re a potential competitor, or even a replacement if they don’t keep their head in the game. Consciously or unconsciously, a degree of sabotage can creep in. And the comparatively innocent may hand down pseudo-psychology practiced on them instead of questioning its appropriateness or worth, to begin with. You don’t want to absorb negative behavior or traits, but they’re not always so easy to separate from good advice. In other words, it might not hurt to hear about acting from an industry professional for whom it’s not their sole focus.

Before I continue this series, let me be clear: all that I say – while it seems common sense to me, and may to you – may not work for you. Read what follows and learn from it, but take it with a grain of salt. Remember at all times that I’m primarily a producer; I’ll never fully understand an actor’s process, except to know I can’t, and that what I say won’t apply to everyone. (Except for stuff about auditions and rehearsal etiquette and such; that would even apply to top talent on my set.) What I ask, instead of merely disparaging it because it may not make sense to you on paper, is that you absorb this practical advice for actors and try to apply it first. That doesn’t seem so horrible, does it?

(Note: Much of the info in this series, including this post, will be derived from a master post at gdelgidirector on November 2, 2016. It has been, and will be, augmented by material from gdelgiproducer, and modified for its present audience.)

Ask Me Anything, Vol. 5

By performingartsadvice

On May 16, 2019

In Random Topics, Writing

Well, the directing proposals are over, and the acting phase begins. (You can kind of tell; in the Tanz proposal especially, I was giving a lot of input that comes from a character-driven perspective, in terms of creating relationships and relatable arcs for the audience to follow, and that usually has more to do with an actor’s need for motivation than a director sculpting their show.) But before I dive into acting, apparently you all had some questions. Well, let’s get to it!

As you may recall, I asked for questions, and you didn’t disappoint. The questions have gotten progressively deeper, much to my surprise, and I’m glad to get the chance to interact with my readers in this fashion. (Again, I’ve rephrased some of these, with the permission of those who submitted questions, to more clearly get at what they meant.)

I’m just kind of curious to know if you had any thoughts as to why Big Fish was so unsuccessful on Broadway. I saw it during the final week of previews in Chicago and loved it. If I recall correctly, it was very well received in Chicago, and the biggest critique was an overlong first act. I will say that I feel like some of the best numbers were cut during the move to Broadway, but that’s just my opinion. When I heard the cast recording and compared it to the songs in Chicago, I felt the songs added for Broadway were frankly too… well, frank. Their melodies weren’t as exciting and the lyrics were too simple, they told us how the characters were feeling or the exposition we were supposed to experience instead of showing us through the music and lyrics. It seemed to me like it lost a lot of its teeth in the move to Broadway. I was just curious if you had a take on the whole deal.

Big Fish? Well, that’s reaching back a bit. Let me see… okay, after a bit of thinking, I believe I have your answer for you. Let’s start with the author since that’s where everything begins. In this case, the screenwriter adapted it for Broadway, as I understand, because he always envisioned it as a musical. Well, it’s one thing to envision a film idea as a musical, but quite another to execute it, especially if you’ve never written an integrated musical libretto before. As John August himself put it in a pre-opening article, “I had a pretty good sense of the vocabulary for it but had not been steeped in it.” Problem is, the book is the key to how a whole show works. A strong book — or at least confidence that it’s doing what it’s supposed to — is very important; it anchors the score (specifically) and the show as a whole (generally). If you don’t have a great amount of experience with writing in that form, to use a building metaphor, the house’s foundation is shaky, and the rest is sure to fall. That might be why the overlong first act, and why revisions might’ve hurt it. As a result of the book not being in strong hands, the plot struggled to come across through the music, which is possibly why you saw numbers being cut that maybe shouldn’t have been. (The point you make about “showing” as opposed to “telling” especially irks me. In my estimation, that’s the most common problem with today’s musicals; nowhere does that occur more often than in shows where they’re not confident the book is doing its job. This is simplifying it significantly, but I’ve always felt a book relays the base plot; the songs and choreography give us a glimpse into the characters’ heads. Someone once put it thusly: “If the emotions run so high you can’t find the words to speak, you sing; and if you can’t even sing, you dance your feelings.” If that basic dynamic, or something similar to anchor the show’s style, isn’t there, you’ll get results as you saw with the Big Fish rewrites.) And then there’s the ballooning budget of Broadway musicals. As you might have heard, the $14 million budget of Big Fish is on the low end for a musical on Broadway these days. And making money back so it goes into profits, and is, therefore, a hit, is important. In the case of Big Fish, it’s not a well-known enough franchise to be making money hand over fist. Sure, it’s a fairly popular Tim Burton film, but the fan base isn’t necessarily the kind that pays Broadway prices or, maybe, is even interested in musicals, to begin with.

TL;DR: moderately popular franchise + large budget/prices aimed at making that money back + structural issues/trying to fix those without a firm guiding hand = the real problem.

I was wondering, would it be possible to cast actual teenagers in a Spring Awakening production? (The recent production had a 29 yr old playing opposite a 20 yr old and it showed). I understand the two characters with a sex scene (albeit a pretty tame one) would have to be of age, but since there’s no nudity regarding the other characters would they be able to hire actual teens despite the intense subject matter?

Theoretically speaking? If they’re 18 or older, and they’re professionals who won’t be personally affected by what they’re performing onstage, there should be no problem. I don’t know any casting director or production that would rush to do so, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is the intense subject matter you point out), but it’s not utterly impossible.

Random question but I thought you might know — how do the Equity rules mandating union auditions and things like that work when entire complete productions transfer to Broadway? I saw Wolf Hall in 2015 and in the Playbill, there was a note saying the RSC appeared with Equity permission but it didn’t go into detail.

I hate that I can’t be particularly helpful, but the decisions regarding productions like this are made on a case-by-case basis, determined by the facts presented, and such discussions aren’t shared publicly. I do know that casting calls are often held for these productions, even if the whole cast is transferring, to offer a fair shot to American actors, since Equity’s primary goal is to create work for the locals they represent. (I recall distinctly that such auditions were held in the case of the Des McAnuff Jesus Christ Superstar revival.) It can prove useful, especially if you need future replacements. And as long as one does everything by the book, it’s allowed to bring the whole company over. Then there’s the exchange program, which is a whole other thing… it gets complicated answering this.

What is your most prized theatre-related possession?

Oooh. That’s tough. But I’d have to say my DVD of Jesus Christ Superstar, the 1973 film version, autographed by Ted Neeley (Jesus), Carl Anderson (Judas), Yvonne Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Barry Dennen (Pilate), Bob Bingham (Caiaphas), Kurt Yaghjian (Annas), and Larry Marshall (Simon). It’s been a great pleasure to know the people behind my favorite theatrical work of all time, and I treasure those autographs like my life, especially since Carl and Barry are no longer with us.

Let’s pretend for a sec that you don’t need a big star to have a movie musical success. I know you’re good with the casting. Pick out a cast for the movie version of one of your favorite musicals. No Hollywood stars are allowed.

Well, I wouldn’t say I’m really good, but I’m handy now and then. 😛 That said, I’m afraid I can’t do that. This year will mark my fourteenth in the industry. There is no way I can pretend that I don’t need a big star to have a movie musical success, I’m too conscious of reality. But I’ll give you this: a) you didn’t say I couldn’t pick Hollywood names, just not Hollywood stars, and b) you weren’t slick enough to rule out stars from other parts of the industry, such as music and television.

So, with that in mind, here’s who I’d have picked for the 2005 film of Rent. Jesse L. Martin and Taye Diggs were fine for their parts, but I’d have re-cast everyone else. They’d still be on the old side, but it’d be more convincing than mostly OBC plus a couple of newcomers. (Incidentally, these were also all names tossed into the pot when Chris Columbus was casting the movie.)

Aside from Collins and Benny remaining the same, my cast would’ve been Drew Lachey (Mark), Justin Timberlake (Roger), Beyoncé Knowles (Mimi), Jai Rodriguez (Angel), Christina Aguilera (Maureen), and Frenchie Davis (Joanne). Drew, Jai, and Frenchie all fall into the category of semi-famous people who’d also all done the show before. Experience + limited celebrity cachet = good fit for Hollywood purposes. As for the celebs, Maureen was a good fit for Aguilera’s aesthetic at that time in her career, Justin was then looking for serious acting material with dramatic weight (what he got was Shrek the Third and The Love Guru) and it might’ve been interesting to hear the rawer side of his voice, and Beyoncé would’ve torn “Out Tonight” the fuck up; I contend it could’ve been a career-making role in terms of her film work.

Pick a book, a movie, or a TV show you’d like to be made into either a stage play or a musical, and tell us which one and why.

Oh, thank God, an easy one! In a heartbeat, I’d turn Merlin into a stage musical. For those unfamiliar with which particular Merlin I mean… in 1998, this was a 4-hour miniseries event hyped to death by NBC, a sword and sorcery special effects spectacular (I believe it cost, like, 30 million to make) and boasting an all-star cast to end them all, for that day and age — Sam Neill, Helena Bonham-Carter, Sir John Gielgud, Rutger Hauer, Miranda Richardson, Isabella Rossellini, Martin Short, James Earl Jones, to mention just a few. As film treatments of Arthurian legends go (and none can compete with Excalibur), I’d argue this is the most palatable for a wide audience. You get to see the tale of the legendary King Arthur from a viewpoint that was, at the time, rarely explored – that of Merlin, the King’s Wizard. In this film, Merlin’s a creature born of pagan magic, living in a world converting to Christianity. Merlin is beside Arthur as he gains Excalibur, builds Camelot, and is betrayed by his wife, Guinevere. Both are menaced by the plots of Morgan Le Fey, Mordred (her son by Arthur), and their cohorts. Through it all, Merlin tries to keep Arthur from the destructive path set by fate. I watch it and see the musical possibilities there every time.

Thanks for this batch, and remember, I’ve always got time for questions! Coming soon… my lengthy series on acting.

“If I Did It,” Vol. 4: Edging Into Darkness (or, Musicals in Chiaroscuro)

By performingartsadvice

On May 14, 2019

In Directing, Directing Proposals, Writing

My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh… and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
Nikos Kazantzakis, from the book The Last Temptation of Christ

Conflict is part of human nature. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. Humans are finite beings, with free will and independent thought processes; out of primal survival instinct, we seek our own best interests first. We have different needs, feelings, and goals compared to the people that surround us, and when ours clash with those of others, conflict arises, sometimes to the point of violence. In 1673, Samuel von Pufendorf, a German jurist, political philosopher, economist, and historian whose concepts formed part of the cultural background of the American Revolution, said, “More inhumanity (to man) has been done by man himself than by any other of nature’s causes.” The same — or similar — thoughts have been echoed by countless great thinkers, whether they refer to men or women, the ancient world or the present, religion or the state, specific ethnic groups or parts of the world, the roots of dystopian literature, or any number of crises ranging from health care to trusts and labor unions.

The classic poem, “Man was made to mourn: A Dirge,” perhaps puts it best of all:

Many and sharp the num’rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav’n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, –
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
Robert Burns, 1784

But conflict doesn’t just occur with what’s around us and outside of us. As the Kazantzakis quote above attests, especially if one subscribes to moral dualism, there’s also conflict within us. Everything in nature has its opposite — birth and death, love and hate, sowing and reaping, killing and healing, laughter and tears, creation and destruction, pulling away and drawing closer, winning and losing. This is true for human beings as well; much as we hate to admit it, we each have a dark side that balances our light. Joseph Conrad defined it in his novella, Heart of Darkness, as an “inner evil” that can manifest itself when a human struggles with their morals, doing battle with their hidden darkness.

So how do we respond to, as Burns put it, “man’s inhumanity to man”? How do we deal with our inner conflict? I do what many do when confronted with something they don’t comprehend: attempt to analyze and understand it. Everybody has a different toolkit for that; mine just so happens to be theater. Luckily, I’m not the only person who uses this approach, so I’ve got plenty of perspectives to draw from. Indeed, countless writers have tackled the subject of conflict from as many angles as possible. In so doing, they’ve discovered that clichés are clichés for a reason.

Many great experts, often writing for the edification of other great experts (as Anna Russell would put it), have broken down conflict as exemplified in literature into seven distinct types. Each type is not mutually exclusive; stories often have overlapping struggles, containing multiple characters and storylines. However, each occurs often enough to form a common “type.” Most are pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, the types themselves follow, in order from (my definition of) most specific to most abstract. (Also, in the following list, assume that when I say “a person,” it can happen to a group of people as well. It often does.)

Person vs. person — One person struggles for victory over another, about as classic as the conflict in a story can get. (Its instances throughout the literature are so numerous that mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book outlining the archetype of a hero going on a journey and overcoming an enemy.)
Person vs. technology/machinery — Especially popular over the past century, thanks in no small part to increasing mechanization and improving artificial intelligence, a person fights to overcome unemotional and unsympathetic machinery that believes it no longer requires humanity.
Person vs. nature — A person battles for survival against the inexorable, apathetic force of nature.
Person vs. self — A person finds themselves battling between two competing desires or selves, typically one good and one evil.
Person vs. society — A person fights (sometimes successfully, sometimes less so) against injustices within their society. Without this, the dystopian genre wouldn’t exist.
Person vs. fate/god(s) — A person is trapped by an inevitable destiny.
Person vs. the unknown/extraterrestrial — A common thread in sci-fi and supernatural horror, where a person battles against an entity that isn’t entirely known or comprehensible, whether extraterrestrial (in the alien sense) or metaphysical.

If it’s present in literature, it’s also present in drama, and needless to say, the three shows about which I share what’d happen “if I did it” have conflict, both inner and outer, in spades, and they all explore the darker side of humanity, darkness breaching light (or vice versa, take your pick), and — thankfully for the audience’s delicate sensibilities — navigating the twilight of the soul without being so definite as to say there’s no hope of salvation (of whatever kind).

Candide takes in optimism vs. reality, religious hypocrisy, the corrupting power of money, and the uselessness of philosophical speculation; Sweeney Todd covers almost every conflict there is (person vs. person, person vs. society, person vs. self… and that’s just the title character’s arc); and my erstwhile favorite, Tanz der Vampire, is a witty, edgy show that pokes fun at the vampire mythos but also uses it to make important points about, among other things, the excesses of appetite. Though each has a different moral, on a philosophical level all of them explore gloaming, questionable diversions from the light into the shadows, the start of the journey downwards. (Indeed, if one was feeling pretentious, they might say these shows are chiaroscuro, an exploration of light and dark, or — more cheekily — fifty shades of…)

Walking the terminator, so to speak, is no easier behind the footlights than in front of them, but it is a way to safely explore one’s inmost parts. After all, as I’ve stated previously, theater is the act of people gathering together in the dark for a couple of hours to suspend disbelief and assume another guise, to teach us something about ourselves. If we’re not ready to learn, as the Sherman Brothers once put it, a spoonful of sugar (or show biz, in this case) helps the medicine go down most delightfully.

Click here to check out my Candide proposal. (Note: This was previously posted at gdelgidirector on May 25, 2018. It has been modified for its present audience, incorporating material from a post at gdelgiproducer on July 23, 2014.)
Click here if you’re interested in my ideas for my Sweeney Todd proposal. Before you do, though, bear this in mind: one must do bad work before one can do good work. Not just one piece of bad work, but tons of it – sometimes hundreds of hours of rough material can be found behind every successful play, movie, TV show, album, book, whatever. Everyone, no matter how good they are now, had to start somewhere then. This is where I started. As I’ve said elsewhere, the idea of Sweeney staged as a flashback playing on a never-ending loop in Toby’s traumatized mind, whilst confined to an asylum following the show’s events, is brilliant. It’s become less so with time, as everyone and their brother has since beat that dead horse six feet underground; unfortunately, like the Shake and Bake commercial, I helped. So, though the idea’s no longer particularly original, attempt to restrain eye-rolls and guffaws, and to suffer gladly the thoughts of a young man who had more aspirations than credentials. In retrospect, the other big idea is interesting enough on its own without the asylum conceit; today, I’d concentrate on that instead, to the exclusion of the madhouse. (Note: This was previously posted at gdelgidirector on August 27, 2016. It has been modified for its present audience.)
And click here to access my proposal for Tanz der Vampire. It’s my sincere hope that this (and its introduction in particular) makes up, in a small way, for my teasing about how working on the show was a low point in my career. (Note: This was previously posted at gdelgidirector on July 26, 2016. It has been modified for its present audience.)

Well… this wraps up my series of artistic directing proposals. I hope you’ve gained something from these examples. If nothing else, I hope this helped you understand how to flesh out your ideas on paper, the better to explain them in person. (Coming up next: a master class in practical advice for actors.) As always, thanks in advance for reading, and I welcome comments on the proposals!

Ask Me Anything, Vol. 4

By performingartsadvice

On May 6, 2019

In Random Topics, Writing

Three more proposals and the series on directing is over; I’ve completed two of them, and the third should be done shortly. But… an ask popped up among recent questions for the AMA segment that I consider vitally important, so I’m going to get right to those instead of pushing ahead on the last proposal post.

(Quick backstory: As you may recall, I asked for questions, and you didn’t disappoint. This is the third installment. Again, I’ve rephrased some of these, with the permission of those who submitted questions, to more clearly get at what they meant.)

Hello! I recently appeared in a community theater production of We Will Rock You that sold out all five of its performances. (Yay!) But at Sunday dinner, my dad, who already isn’t a theater guy and doesn’t get it, couldn’t understand why we were unable to simply add a sixth performance: “You’re not doing Queen, you’re not representing them, so why not just do it? They wouldn’t care.” The more I tried to explain why that wasn’t feasible from a rights holder’s perspective (or the POV of someone who controls stuff like this), including pointing out that someone from the agency might be in the audience, the more confused he became, insisting that adding one more show would just be money in their pockets, they shouldn’t care since we weren’t pros, and that it wouldn’t make any sense for them to check out such a small production. I did my best, but he still didn’t get it. So my question is, can you break down how theater rights work in a way that makes sense to non-theater people?

I’d be glad to break that down for you; this is one of the absolute basics, but lots of folks get it wrong or don’t understand it so well if they’re not in the field. Once a show’s professional run (i.e., a Broadway production, national tour, something like that), also referred to as a “first-class” production, is over, someone has to grant the ability to stage performances of that show to the secondary market (i.e., community, summer stock, or dinner theaters, schools and colleges, religious institutions, etc.). People can’t just run out and do a show; the authors need to be paid for the use of their work. But the authors (and their managers, agents, and so forth) also already have a job: creating — or making it possible for their client to create — new stuff. They can’t be bothered with requests to present old material, or they’ll never get anything new done. So they place their show with a licensing agency like Music Theatre International, Concord Theatricals (which, as of this writing, controls four major licensors: R&H Theatricals, Samuel French, Tams-Witmark, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Musical Company), Theatrical Rights Worldwide, Dramatists Play Service, or Broadway Licensing, and that agency takes care of those requests — deciding who may perform the show (including monitoring productions they didn’t sign off on, so yes, sometimes reps from the agency or the authors will come out to a small town to investigate), where it may be performed (sometimes a title’s restricted in specific places to prevent competition between smaller shows, or between a smaller run and a pro run), how it may be performed (you agree to perform the show as written to protect the authors’ rights, and changes to the show are prohibited; if someone’s dumb enough to make changes that big, the agency will, again, send a rep to check it out), and how much they’ll charge to allow you to do it — and rents out the materials needed to perform the show.

If you want to present a show, you have to find out who handles it, contact them (go to their site, look up their number, any means to get in touch), and fill out an application with details like the number of performances and roughly when they’ll happen, the ticket price you’ll set, the number of seats in the auditorium, etc. Based on that, the agency calculates a royalty — a percentage paid to the authors, through the agency, from the money made from ticket sales — and they send a quote that encompasses that royalty and the rental fees for using the materials. If you agree to that, you’ll be asked to make a security deposit, you’re sent the authorized performance materials (script, score, band parts), and you’re licensed to begin. After the production, the materials are returned and you get your deposit back (unless it’s a newer agency like TRW, which lets you keep materials), and the agreed-upon royalty is sent to the agency.

Now, as to your dad’s specific question… when you fill out the application, you have to tell them the number of performances and an approximate time frame. If it starts selling out before the first performance or just starts selling rapidly enough that an extension looks like a good idea, it’s my understanding (after several phone calls to agencies to confirm) that, before or during a show’s run, you can contact them, extend the license, and you’re fine as long as you pay for the additional performances the license now covers. However, once the terms are agreed upon, there’s no going back on them. If a theater only agreed to five performances, and the five performances are up, they can’t just go ahead and do a sixth; there’s a little leeway sometimes if it’s only one or two added performances and there are no forthcoming restrictions on the title, or if there’s an “act of God” situation (they’re willing to work with you if, say, a blizzard hit and you lost power for 48 hours), but generally, you’ll have to apply again, and you can never do it without clearing it with the licensing agency first.

Hi! I know you’re not so much into Elisabeth, but I wanted to ask you… what do you think could be changed for the show to work on Broadway or the West End? Be it in terms of the music, the book, the characters, or even the scenic aspects.

I’m sorry to tell you, but I don’t think an English-language Elisabeth’s commercial possibilities lie in the direction of Broadway. (Maybe the West End, but that’s a stretch.) The score sounds dated, the show’s tone is the definition of a hard sell, and the title character — and her surrounding history and lore — is not as well known in the States as in Europe (compared to, say, Queen Elizabeth I or Marie Antoinette, she’s a mere curiosity, if anything and the type of Americans who buy tickets generally don’t consider history lessons entertainment), and it doesn’t help that each new production in Europe or Asia seems to have slightly different songs and running order, so every time a new production opens, a new recording comes out. If a producer was trying to “get into it,” they wouldn’t know where to begin. The only things that might help it sell (and that’s a very big “if,” so to speak; even if they made these choices, it still might not last 10 seconds on 43rd St.) are a hot well-known female star in the lead, buzz-generating, amazing, must-see staging that glows in the dark, and settling on a single working version of the show, perhaps combining all the best elements of previous productions or choosing whichever version crosses over the best. (I have a candidate for the latter: the Stuttgart version, or “Dutch/German version” if you will, included exposition for things that went unexplained elsewhere [such as giving adult Prince Rudolf more stage time and explaining who he is instead of tossing him directly into Death’s grip], stylish designs, and great direction of character instead of head-scratching symbolism as in Vienna. This version might have the best chance of crossing over to America.)

And a second question, you’ve worked with film right? Could you tell me a little bit about your experience in that field?

I’ve indeed worked with film, but my experience is limited. It’s about to grow because my unit is transitioning more into that field, but there’s not much I could tell you that you couldn’t learn elsewhere from experts. Sorry! I’ll grant this, though… more specific questions about film might yield a more satisfying answer.

You mention “all currently in development.” What are the projects you are working on?

First of all, let me explain “all.” People tend to think that in entertainment a producer keeps their focus on one project and sees just that project through to completion, following which they move on to the next. A producer who does that either has a hit that’s consuming lots of their time, or they’re not a very good producer and won’t be at it for much longer. In a business with a 99% failure rate, in the words of the legendary dance teacher Luigi, you can “never stop moving.” Further, entertainment in any field is legally deemed a high-risk investment in the U.S., and in the State of New York in particular, so potential investors generally like to spread the risk to avoid losing their shirt. With that in mind, at any given time, my team develops packages of multiple projects, usually 3 or 4, for the investor to pick and choose. The immediate priority, of course, should it happen, becomes whatever deal “closes” first. As for what projects I’m working on, that changes at a given moment and people steal from general descriptions of ideas, so I tend not to divulge too many details to anyone except interested investors. Are you one? Get in touch! 😉

I don’t want to linger, so that’s all for now, but keep asking questions, they’ll pop up in the next installment, and look out for the last set of directing proposals coming soon!