Gideon Productions

The Latest

postcard back

Saturday, August 30, 2003
The front of the postcard is designed to help sell the show to people who might not know us or know the production. The back of the postcard is designed to remind people who are already coming what the dates and times are, and to try to make them happy they are going.

Jordana is the one who thought everyone deserves a brownie at the door. Fine by me, but the 12 bucks is coming out of her paycheck. Posted at 12:33 AM by sean williams

Postcard options

Friday, August 29, 2003
Take a look at these options. It's like they were done by real people!!!

I like them colorized, and I think we have decided to go with the creepy floating head. I mean, it is definitely more what the play is about, and how many times does a playwright have his floating head next to his name on a postcard?

This last option is great, but we're sticking it out with the postcard that makes the most sense, even if it doesn't get as many fifty year old men in trenchcoats.

Posted at 3:52 PM by sean williams

Fearless Leader

Thursday, August 28, 2003
John Hurley is our director. We know him in the same way we know most of our contacts here in New York, he is another off-off-off guy that works all the time and who polishes turds into diamonds across the city.

Actually, that's a lie. Not about the turd polishing, but about the way we know most of our contacts. Most everyone we know went to college where we went. It's not even that they went to school at the same time we did, there is just a hemorhaging stream of people coming out of Carolina, and as soon as they see one of our hats or shirts they cling to us like a cotton compress.

This is John directing Mac in a Carolina shirt...

John has been making less with more for years now since earning his master's in theater at Syracuse. And that's "theater" not "theatre", John is a total roll-up-your-sleeves kind of guy. He apologizes time and again for "micro-managing" the show, but actually he is making each thing funnier, moment by moment. He keeps letting us know right when the beats are, right when the head snaps are funniest, right when the hand on the shoulder works.

Jordi works with me while John and Ehren work the script

My concern tonight, as I was taking pictures, was realizing that we are all obnoxious as hell. I kept trying to get pictures of Jordana and Mac looking normal, but, uh, they always look like they are acting. When all of us are just being normal, we still can't stop flailing around, making silly faces and swinging our arms.

Since tonight was our last night before the break, John went out with us and we had a drink. There was a time, back in college, when the only reason we did shows was as an excuse to drink after rehearsal. Now, we make it about thirty minutes and one mixed drink in and we gotta head home.

I may not update this for a few days, unless some big change happens.

Posted at 12:16 AM by sean williams

Marketing

Wednesday, August 27, 2003
If you are doing a show with gay characters, you can market it at gay functions and in the gay community. If you are doing an Irish show, you can market it at the Irish Rep downtown and at Irish bars, I guess. If you are doing a show about alcoholism, you could let AA know and go to the self help community.

Our show is an homage of 1930s-1940s movies. It isn't a parody necessarily, we don't want you to laugh at the stuff because it's referential, we want you to laugh because a lot of those movies were actually pretty damn funny.

I guess that isn't totally true, we do sort of make fun of melodrama. But for the most part we are trying to tell the story that would be told if Noir plays were still being produced today. So, our marketing is going to be towards people who love those movies, which is really the independent film community.

To that end we have to creat a postcard. Every single show has one, so we do as well. If we can get a stack of postcards and leave them at the Angelika and at Kew Gardens and at indy movie houses all over, maybe people will come in to the city and see our show.

We also are going to try to let people on usenet and other indy film websites know that the play is going up. On the other side, we may do some direct email marketing to people who have signed up to receive play notices.

Spam is tough. People don't even read email invitations anymore. We spend so much time deleting the stuff we don't want that we might just delete the stuff we do. I don't really understand why someone would send me an advertisement for an object I can't purchase, with not traceable roots and offering me something I can't possibly use, but I understand that this is America and everyone needs to let people know that they are selling stuff.

We have a couple hundred email addresses that we can send an invitation to, we just have to be careful not to piss anyone off.

Here are our two postcard ideas:

Posted at 2:02 PM by sean williams

Hardwood and Gym Class

There are thousands of shows going up in New York at any time.

Honestly.

I bet if you live here and you are up on theater and you think you know everything currently running, you aren't even close. How many Shakespeare shows are running right now in New York? If you have two friends in two different shows, and you can name two others, you should bet there are about six you don't know about.

So, there is no real point in killing yourself to get noticed, the combined buzz from all the shows that think they are getting publicized is an unnoticed whisper in this town. The last two times we hired publicists, we wasted every dollar. Not a single seat sold could be attributed to anything any publicist has ever done for us.

So, this time we decided to go it alone. Even if we get nothing, at least that's what we paid for. So while our friends Claire and Dave went about creating a kick-ass postcard for our show, we went down to the theater. We wanted to see if it was as well-suited to the play as we remembered when we decided on it some months ago.

It's an awesome space, first mentioned to me by Rick Gradone, whose company had done a show there and loved it. Like all theater spaces, we seem to be closing the old girl down, she's being turned into a restaurant. I'd like to make it seem as if I care, but as long as we can do one show there that perfectly matches the space, we don't really need to come back and make a home there.

I mean, it seems that a lot of people just try to find a script that is reasonably well written (and usually already done a million times) and then try to find a cast and then try to find a staff and space to perform. We've sort of gone on this kick of matching the material and the talent and the space to a single project. Our director knows this kind of comedy, our script is incredible, our space is perfect for this script, our leading lady is a godsend, and Mac and I... well, we're doing our best.

I don't know if you can tell, we're still on book...

Jordana Davis, who is leading this show to wherever it ends up going, is miraculous. In real life she is an incredibly soft and sensitive woman, in this show she becomes hard as nails, her character barely recognizes pain around her and stops for nothing. She becomes the kind of woman... well, she becomes the kind of woman who laughs when she realizes she has kicked someone in the balls...

and then goes straight to sleep during each break

For the 934th consecutive day, our friends have really blown us away. Claire and Dave are busy building a better postcard, and Ehren still shows up to rehearsal full of great ideas and attention to the script that the rest of us aren't always so good at.

Our director has an agreement with the Astoria Performing Arts Center to let us use their space for free, another way we are keeping costs down. We had considered going with a different director that we knew had access to free space, and hired John instead. The free rehearsal space was not part of the agreement, but we'll take it.

I'll try to detail a couple of our marketing schemes tomorrow. For now, I've got to sleep... Posted at 12:32 AM by sean williams

The Magic Of Theater

Tuesday, August 26, 2003
We have employed our friend Ehren as rehearsal stage manager. He was willing to do it for nothing, but we got him a monthly metro-card as payment. He has been really enthusiastic about our first three rehearsals, and is committed in that way that only people new to the theater can be. He also has a lightning fast and ironic wit, so when he came up to me at the end of our rehearsal on Sunday and said, "I just witnessed the magic of theater", I assumed he was kidding.

He wasn't.

"That was a well-written scene, performed by two actors. Then the director started working with them, and he changed some stuff and had people move and suddenly, half an hour later, it has transformed into something really magical." He stared at me with a big grin on his face and then added, "and I was here to see it!"

I've been thinking about whether or not I could give up acting all together and go into production full time, and it is easier and easier lately to think of doing just that. Ehren is right, when you are there for that moment, it can be just as good as being on stage.

Tonight was full of those moments. We asked our good friends Claire and Dave if they would handle the postcards and poster for the show. They are both people of just incredible talent, and they are also, like Ehren, two incredibly wonderful people to be around. More on that in a moment.

We went to the Columbia campus just as the sun was preparing to set and took some pictures of our leading lady. Obviously, the sun was perfect.

Then she changed into a gown and we got some pictures of her with a gun. I'm actually really uncomfortable with guns, and this prop is as close to a gun as I ever want to get. But man, there's something about a great looking lady with a gun that does an American's heart good.

Claire and Dave are going to take these images and turn them into a film noir poster that will be a thousand times better than anything we could come up with. But that's only part of it. While I did Jordana's hair, Dave made us dinner. And the whole time we were doing this shoot, the two of them kept cracking me up and making Jordana feel comfortable despite being ogled like crazy. The Gideon Producers made a decision some years back only to work with people who were awesome, I think it's even in our laws somewhere, and Claire and Dave are as awesome as you can get.

Posted at 2:28 AM by sean williams

Who we are

Monday, August 25, 2003
A friend in the theater once forwarded me a list of jokes about being a small theater producer, which tell you two things, a) there are people out there who will make a list of jokes for any purpose and then forward them and b) some of my friends suck.

One of the jokes was "Your living room couch has been on stage as often as you have." Now, this isn't true for me, it's actually my coffee table that has been in almost every play I have produced, but the point is pretty sharply observed. When you produce theater in New York, or anywhere, you are bound to become committed to it in ways you would never have guessed.

Gideon Productions is putting up The Lucretia Jones Mysteries at the Gershwin Hotel, starting September 20th, 2003. I know this to be true because I am one of the three producers of the piece and although, as of now, my coffee table will not be appearing on stage for this particular show, I will. And that is generally how it works in the city, nearly every single producer under a certain level of success is actually just creating opportunities to show off their acting or writing or directing.

Our company is a little bit different. There are three of us; Jordana Davis, a director, actor and, most recently, burgeoning writer who works at a law firm during the day, Mac Rogers, a playwright, actor and independent theater gadfly who spends his days as a loan supervisor at a bank, and me, Sean Williams, an actor who spends most of his time trying to get work as a studio musician and, weirdly, often succeeding.

With the three of us, it would seem we could write a musical, get a loan for it, straighten out the contracts, record the tracks, and produce the damn thing for the thousands of contacts we have made. We assured our investors that this was exactly what we would be doing when we raised the money to start our company. In truth, Mac won't be able to approve a loan for us for thirty years, Jordana works mainly in real estate and begging for work from other musicians doesn't really give you a rolodex of theater contacts.

That being said, we've done pretty well so far. Three years, some fifteen odd pieces of theater produced, and the company still has money. For New York, especially spanning the attacks of 9-11 and the economy tanking, that aint so bad. Check out our other shows at www.gideonth.com

So, why should you care about our new show? Well, producing in New York is always hilarious, and this show is really well written and well directed (and hopefully well acted), but the real reason you should read this is because we have secrets. We think we might be able to get away with something doing this show, and I will be documenting the whole thing.

See, most New York theater is done on an Equity Showcase code. That requires that production companies limit their spending at $15,000. Most producers I know try desperately to shave off costs, to cancel set pieces or PR ideas in order to get under that figure. A lot of them just spend the extra couple grand and keep it off the books. We're not going to do that.

We're going to run the show for three weeks at the Gershwin Hotel. Our total budget? $2500.

So, come back and visit, and I'll explain as we go. I promise, even if the show is a total failure, it'll be hilarious reading about it.
Posted at 11:02 AM by sean williams