NYT says, “Funny=Money”

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 4th, 2011

And then, a few paragraphs later, they say that funny doesn’t equal as much money as it did in the past. John Bowe profiles Peter Principato of Principato-Young Entertainment, a hot management company formed ten years ago. The profile (available at NYTimes.com with free registration) opens with a description of Principato shepherding three young clients through a typical Hollywood meeting. The realities of the film and television biz are lamented.

Principato, a talent manager, had three clients waiting for him in the offices of Adult Swim (part of the Cartoon Network), with a meeting about to start. At 45, Principato, 70 pounds overweight, dressed in wrinkled Polo and lace-free Converse sneakers, looked less like a budding mogul than a harried soccer dad, rushing to retrieve his kids.

In today’s Hollywood, he told me, trying to find decent-paying work for even the most talented clients had become almost impossible. A few numbers told a sad and weird tale: the 1983 season finale of “MASH” drew an audience of 106 million. In 1987, “The Cosby Show” drew audiences of 30 million. A network show can still draw 15 million, but a cable show like “Children’s Hospital,” starring the comedian Rob Corddry, a client of Principato’s, which is broadcast on the Adult Swim channel, is considered a success with an audience of 1 or 2 million. Where were all the viewers? The Web? Niche programming? The question has no satisfactory answer. What is clear is that the business of getting anyone in Hollywood to pull the trigger on any decision whatsoever has frozen into a Kabuki-like pantomime.

Hasn’t it always been “kabuki-like?” (And why does the Times insist on capitalizing kabuki?) Hasn’t it been a running gag in entertainment circles that– even when rivers of cash flowed through the Los Angeles basin– Hollywood suits were very careful about when and with whom they spent their cash?

Anyway, the story tells how that river has dried up and how folks like Principato are dealing with the fact that “comedy isn’t a one-movie-star business like it used to be. It’s about putting together a team.” He calls them hyphenates– writer-producers, actor-directors. Apparently, Hollywood has become like Alaska– everyone has to have two or three skills in order to make a living. Sounds like things are desperate. How desperate?

Where in the past, a comic manager might support comedians heading out on the performance circuit, Principato supports his hyphenates by helping them to create shows for the Internet with once-unthinkably-small sums of money — $25,000, $75,000.

To which we say: Boo hoo. And we pose the question: How long would it take those comedians of yore to pull down that $25,000 to $75,000 “out on the performance circuit?” (Minus, of course, the 15 or 20 per cent in commissions to managers and agents.) And we hasten to add that these opportunities necessarily lead to other opportunities.

(The takeaway from the article for us is that managers are no longer pushing their clients out onto the nation’s comedy club stages!   Gone are the days when actors and writers– who never wanted to be comedians in the first place– took precious stage time from Los Angeles area comics who actually did aspire to be comedians!)

Anyway, in the next sentence, Rob Corddry’s “Children’s Hospital,” and Paul Scheer’s “NTSF:SD:SUV” are cited as examples of initially low-paying projects that “migrated up the content stream from Web series to popular TV shows.” So where, we ask, is the problem? Sounds a lot like what used to be called “development deals” or holding deals or pilots.  It’s just that it’s now produced in a different economic climate, using new technology and distributed on new platforms.

How long did Corddry or Scheer expect to toil for $25K? (If they indeed started out that low?)

This article might depress some. It makes it appear as though the gravy train has ground to a halt. Some folks read it as a tale of woe– Comedians can’t hit the big time any more, their opportunities to make it in Hollywood have been seriously slimmed down due to dismal cable and network numbers.

We see it differently. There seems to us to be more opportunities. Are they lower paying? Of course they are. But with the advent of the WWW and the reluctance to bet Dumpsters full of cash (or so-called “sick money”) on one or two (or a handful) of comedy stars in the hopes of one of them becoming the next Seinfeld or Romano, they’re placing smaller bets on dozens of comedians. The amount of the bet must necessarily be smaller.

Is the era of “sick money” over? Certainly not. There’s still gold in them thar Nielsens.

But the means by which one reaches the top of money hill are different.

H/T to Paul Hallasy!

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