It’s not about the money, and it’s not about the fame…it’s about the WORK

Starstruck: a Benefit for “Gentleman Gene” Colan at The Henry Miller Library, Big Sur. The original off-Broadway sci-fantasy comedy, and basis for the Elaine Lee/Michael Kaluta comic book series, presented for the first time in 25 years!

Saturday, August 15: 6:30pm reception, 7:30pm performance. $12.80 advance admission, $20.00 at the door. Silent auction! Libations! United Federation of Freedom Fighters! www.henrymiller.org to make reservations.

Featuring Lance Roger Axt, Victoria Blaszczak, Arden Eaton, Ami-Sue Lawless, David Manchel, Geoff Mutch, and Barbara Smythe, with Lance Roger Axt, Rob Eaton, and David Manchel on SFX. Special guests: Elaine Lee (Starstruck’s creator) and painter Lee Moyer (colorist of the new series from IDW Publishing).

THE FOLLOWING IS AN UPDATED DRAFT OF A POST FROM JANUARY 9, 2009:

First thing: Play it by Ear Productions and AudioComics are now on Twitter! Since I’m part of both companies (and in the case of Play it by Ear, I am the company), both companies are sharing the same Twitter account. Wanna follow? Do ya do ya do ya? It’s www.twitter.com/PibEandAC. Now eventually I’ll be busy enough to splinter the two, but for now it’s two for the price of one.

I’m only now getting into social networking, not for personal use (the exception being Facebook), but to promote Play it by Ear, AudioComics, the NATF, audio drama in general. Whether twitter proves successful, we’ll see; the name alone sounds more peppy than that of the blog; just say “twitter” a few times. It’s jumpy! It reflects its place for people with short attention spans. Now say “blog” a few times: “blog.” Drag it out a little. “Blo-o-o-og.” Note how sluggish you are sounding. “Blo-o-o-o-o-og.” “Oh great, I have to go blo-o-o-o-o-og.”

Alright, comes the segueway: I have a lot of contacts through Facebook. One of them is a gentleman named Glenn Kessler. He was one of the actors chosen by playwright Elizabeth Benjamin for her piece The Field. Glenn’s a very nice guy who actually did a damn good job in the recording studio being a novice to voice-over acting. Years later he would co-create one of my favorite shows on television, Damages. If you watched any of Season 2 you then know he’s one of the FBI agents working in tandem with Rose Byrne. Before Damages, he was Gary, a college professor trying to deal with the strange events happening in and outside of his farm house. Glenn’s come a long way from the farm house. He seems to be navigating through Hollywood with ease.

This post is not about Damages, though. Or social networking. I like my anology above but its not about social networking. Bear with me for a bit:

Damages is a favorite show of my Mom’s. She’s amazed it’s still on the air, because every show she likes usually gets cancelled. Not because they’re bad shows, but because they’re too good, or too smart for the general viewing public. Arrested Development is a perfect example of this. Producers, Network Execs, Advertisers, Theatrical Producers, cater to the lowest common denominator of society, and continue to do thereby increasing the speed of the vicious cycle that allows American Idol and the Real Housewives of Whatever Fantasyland They’re Living In to stay on the air.

The reasoning of course is simplistic. The Almighty Dallah. You know this god. We travel great distances in our bare feet with yokes on our backs to pray at the Dallah’s feet. Yet sometimes for all of our worship the Dallah gives us a good, swift kick up our asses to tell us that our priorities are completely backwards, and yet we still stand dumbfounded wondering what the hell just happened. How many millions are out of work? If money makes the world go round, then why was it damn near impossible to pay for a tank of gas to travel around it, much less drive a few miles to work or the grocery store? When we put so much of our faith in Dallah, society suffers. Nothing new there.

Now to put that into an artistic context, I give you another story. Bob and Rebecca, if you’re reading this, you know of what I speak.

I never did any Equity Showcases during my time as an actor in New York City. Rarely even saw ‘em. Whenever I go back to NYC I try to avoid those shows like the plague, simply because so many of them are being produced for all of the wrong reasons: it’s not about actors and playwrights and directors creating workouts for themselves, putting something on its feet in order to continue practicing their craft. No, what was the true off-off-Broadway ended decades ago. Theatre Genesis is gone. Caffe Cino is gone. Joseph Chaikin has passed on. Most Showcases are now done for the sole purpose of getting agents and casting directors to notice them. The work suffers. There’s nothing new to learn. The agents and the casting directors don’t come. And yet when they should come, when audiences should be flocking to see those truly few quality pieces of work, they go see something else that costs more. In 2002 I house-managed a damn good Showcase in NYC, produced by the aforementioned couple who wanted to put a rarely-done work on its feet and create work for actors who needed an outlet for their craft. Whether agents came or not was irrelevant. One or two did show up, but while I know my friends would have liked bigger house numbers and even more industry people saying “okay, she knows what she’s doing, I want her in my office for an interview,” ultimately that wasn’t the point. It’s because they wanted to do a really good play.

And yet down the hall in a bigger theatre in the self-same complex was an off-Broadway show where the tickets were $50 or more, I don’t remember exact figures, and audience members were turned away night after night, yet the overall quality was no better or worse than my friends’ show. But because it had a bigger price tag, it had bigger audience numbers. All hail mighty Dallah.

Yet I dishonored Dallah by choosing my friends’ show because fame and fortune is, and should always be, a by-product of the work. If you make something about the quality of the work first, and you market it well to those who are looking for great things to see or hear or read, the riches will come in one way or another. If you make something about the money first or how famous you want to get you’ve only failed yourself. Not financially, but spiritually.

Of course, sometimes the emptiness comes not in the soul but in the pocketbook. I posted numerous blogs on the old site regarding the first project my AudioComics company was planning to record. This was before Starstruck and the indie comics company we hooked up with late last year. The original project kept getting blindsided for one reason or another. If you checked out the old blog site you’ll have probably read about some of the trials and tribulations. Well that original project is not happening. Will it ever happen…I don’t know. Never say never. Hell, I’m still holding out for a Buffalo Springfield reunion. And it is a great property with a lot of potential in the audio medium. But right now my partners and I wouldn’t touch the ten foot pole that we wouldn’t touch the property with with a twenty foot pole. In fact, few will outside of a niche audience in the comics community. Why? Because without going into specifics certain people put the Dallah first, last, and in-between with absolutely no room for negotiation, and their asses were handed to them last year. Karma kicking Dallah’s ass? Inevitable. Whereas the people that we are now working with are, and I’m not sucking up to them in any way, I’m being totally honest here, truly fantastic individuals who understand that the money is just one part of a larger picture and everything exists in relation to the other.

When I started Play it by Ear, I wasn’t interested in making money. I was interested in making art. I still am. I try to keep the costs to downloads and compact discs down. Doesn’t mean the work isn’t great. One of the best pieces I have ever produced is The Love Song Of… (co-incidentally, the director of that piece, Eileen Myers, now writes for another show of rare quality, HBO’s Big Love). I simply don’t feel that you should have to pay an arm and a leg for quality audio theatre. Now AudioComics will be a commercial production company, so the goal there is to make money, but there we’re making money by making great audio first. It puts more pressure on us, we can handle it. Bring it on. And while we’ll keep some of the money for ourselves, much of what we make goes toward the next project, toward the studio time, the musicians, the actors, so the bar will be set even higher. Good things can come from that. Great things, even, that can benefit everybody.

The Almighty Dallah has grown big and fat as of late. Time for a diet. And maybe, just maybe, my kind of thinking will catch on. Overly optimistic, hell yeah. But isn’t it worth trying?