Some plays just don't have sets. Our Town is one that has no set except a table and two archways. Some will do Waiting For Godot sans scenery. As long as the story is good, they aren't that important. This play looks bad even though I can't hear anything. It looks hammy and it also looks like one of those horrible One Man plays where the lead character constantly breaks the fourth wall to address the audience like an asshole.
Yeah, but that's the point. The story isn't that good. It's all situational. I almost wish this had come out during the height of buzz and fanfare. Hearing idiots praise it like they praised the movie would have been grand.
You are right and who knows, they still might so that. Of course, they'll be sure not to include anybody who looks at the camera, points two thumbs down and mouth farts.
A play probably costs very little to produce compared to a movie. Sure, you have to pay the actors and rent the stage, but it's nothing like making a set, cutting film, paying all of the staff, etc. If it's sold out like this, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's making good money.
For those of you who think authors make shitty money, you should meet people the theatre industry. It's no wonder they're all such assholes, they're poor. Theatrical staff, from follow-spot operators to actors and directors make shit in the industry because it just does not make a gnat's cock worth the coin that movies do. An average production every night will consist of actors, the director, the stage manager, assistant stage manager (backstage), lighting operator, follow-spot operator, make-up artists, half a dozen stage hands (those people in black), rigging operator, sound operator, then there's the beforehand people like artistic directors, set designers, lighting designers, key grips and carpenters-- THEN you have the theatre concession staff.... pay rights to put on the play-- all those people have to get paid on time, every time. You have to make shitloads to break even if you're the producer of a play. THIS one could make money, judging by the scarce set, and the fly-by-night looking cast. Depends on the theatre capacity, but I sense it is not a large (or nice) one. You guys did say Broadway right? The street in New York City? It's not a town in Nebraska called Broadway is it?
Close. <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_%28Minot,_North_Dakota%29" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_% ... _Dakota%29</a>
Just because Crown Royal repped me and I'm genuinely interested by the business, I decided to do a little bit of cursory research. Broadway is a general term for the 40 or so theaters with capacity of over 500 people in the Manhattan district in New York. For its size, this actually generates a fair amount of money; last year, 12 million people saw plays and spent just over a billion dollars on tickets. This doesn't count, of course, the merchandising, sale of soundtracks for musicals, and book sales of the plays. Most plays have an eight-performance week. According to this site, a play costs about $2.4 million to produce and $280,000 every week. Musicals cost about twice as much to produce and twice as much to maintain due to the increased number of people involved in the production, extra training, price of the stars, and so on. The Book of Mormon cost $9 million to produce, and it's costing about $600,000 a week to run. However, it's currently making $1.8 million a week. About 20-30% of plays actually make a profit on Broadway. The actors themselves usually make about $1700-1800 a week, or just over $90,000 a year. It's important to note that these people are as good as they can be without being true stars. The actual stars tend to make a good deal more money, but the real potential is to have a career that spans both Broadway and movies. A really good Broadway actor usually has an easy segue into movies, which get you into People Magazine, gazillions of dollars, and the fevered attention of millions of middle-aged soccer moms. Now, this is the very, very, very top of the heap. Everyone else makes basically diddly-shit. Off-Broadway productions (In New York, but not on Broadway) can't charge nearly as much money, and they also don't have nearly as many people at the shows. I Hope They Serve Beer on Broadway is apparently being shown at the 777 Theater. Seating capacity is at 125-147 seats, and the tickets are selling for $50.00 a pop. According to the schedule, they're also doing 8 performances a week, so assuming everything sells out they're going to gross about $55,000 to $60,000 a week. So the pie is a hell of a lot smaller. The play itself looks completely barebones, with no-names as the cast, and it's being played in a shitty little theater. In movie terms, this is Straight to DVD. And, honestly, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm guessing that the play cost about $300,000 to produce. So if they can keep getting people in the seats for three months, they'll make a profit. It won't be a big profit at all, but I think it can break even and even make a few tens of thousands of dollars. And that's the point. No one's in this sort of thing to make money. They're free agents who are doing whatever they can to get experience and references to make it big on Broadway itself. Same thing with the theater crew, the producers, the playwrights, and so on. Making an off-Broadway play succeed is excellent for all parties involved because later on, when they're trying to hit the big time, they can say, "I was in that play. It wasn't even on Broadway, but it still made money." And hey, it's not that creepy-ass ballet that's been making the rounds on the Internet.
I wouldn't use "straight to DVD" as analogy for off-Broadway plays. It's closer to indie film- you can have an indie that's really well done and takes advantage of the fact that it isn't a hugely bankrolled Hollywood movie, or you can have an hour and a half of diarrhea.
That's actually a much better way of putting it. An indie film doesn't have to be made for a wide audience, so it has much more freedom to explore other content that doesn't have the same appeal to large amounts of people. Off-Broadway is the same thing - you don't have to invest $5 million in the hopes that your experiment will catch on and make a small profit even if your play is exploring weird content. I will say that Tucker has refrained from his usual "This is groundbreaking stuff that will revolutionize the industry" prattle. He knows that this is pretty small potatoes. The more I look at it, the more charmed I am by it. Call me a romantic, but I love the idea of people escaping mainstream norms and making a vision. I am extremely dissatisfied by the direction that movies have taken in recent years, (Yay, yet another comic book action movie with comedic elements in it) and I root for anything that isn't just Fahrenheit 451-esque Abandon All Thought Ye Who Enter Here. Will most of it be complete garbage? Yep, and I will not be surprised at all if IHTSBIH on Broadway is an hour and a half of circle-jerky theatrical diarrhea. But I dunno, maybe they can capture the essence of Tucker's message on stage. They have my interest.
Can you clarify what you mean exactly? Do you wish that big-budget action movies had more compelling storylines and subjects? Or that movies with compelling story lines and subjects got big budgets? As far as I know the movie scene generally has not taken a dive in recent years. There are still great movies being made in every genre, right? Am I such a philistine that I've missed the decline of film over the past ten or twenty years? Not trying to nitpick your argument, just generally interested as I was not aware of this.
I guess it's just that there are a lot more big-budget action movies than there are big-budget drama / suspense movies. There used to be a lot more variety in what was in theaters, and now a lot of is the same sort of brainless action-with-some-comedy. I understand that it's played out for a movie to take itself too seriously and be all gritty and nihilistic, but it's frustrating to have all emotional involvement in the characters be taken out by a gag in the climax of the movie. More No Country for Old Men, less Avengers.
I mean, it's not that hard to avoiding losing $5 million. In fact, I do it every day. True, but understated. The number of NEW plays on Broadway is very small, since stuff like the Producers, Cats, the Book of Mormon, etc. exists. And even the ones that don't run continuously often are on a repeat run. And "new" Broadway plays are often plays that performed well elsewhere and are now getting a shot at the bigtime. So this means that most plays, no matter how good, have to start off-Broadway. It's like judging them as straight to DVD if the major studios only put out 20 new movies a year and movies were expected to earn their way to theaters by way of several good DVD runs.
Tucker's reaction to the play: Spoiler For whatever reason I can't get a direct link to that post from tuckermax.me, so I just copy copy/pasted it here.
At least he isnt critical about it. My guess is the reason he didn't like it is because it doesn't make him out to be a hero and he hoped it would, like the movie. When the film was being made, remember how he would talk about that guy "nailed" the part. I thought the character from the movie was thoroughly obnoxious and I was rooting for him to lose. But he didn't, because he was the "good guy" of the story.
Sounds to me just like adaptations of Shakespeare plays where the words are the same, but one director's take on it doesn't look or feel anything like another take. Maybe he understands on one level that's what is happening here, but as he said he can't process it because his perspective is so unique. Now I really do want to see it, or even just watch one scene. Someone in the audience needs to secretly film it and put it on youtube for those of us who can't just jaunt to NYC.
I can get what he means after seeing 20 different versions of Shakespeare plays growing up. It is easy when you add some music here, and just say the exact words differently. Same action, same words, just like if you shot a movie in color vs black/white.