Why aren't more Broadway shows preserved on film? — Page 2

dramamama611 said: "And while I see the point you are making....the cost factor is far different. A movie you purchase for twenty bucks...it only cost 10 bucks/person to go see it. (A rough average cost). A movie musical will still be approximately 20 bucks, but (likely) over a HUNDRED to purchase a ticket. A family of 4 could go to the moivies for 40 bucks, and STILL shell out 20 for the vid. That same family might/probably would make different choices when the difference is spending nearly five hundred bucks or waiting and paying twenty. And again, I think that with occaissional shows having a filmed version released makes no difference, if ALL did (or many) that's when I think we'd see the difference.



Live theater needs to be live for the most part -- to truly soar. I think we can look at the limited success of the tv versions of musicals lately as proof. They fall a bit flat.



For whomever brought the argument of future audience members, that's a ridiculous excuse for video -- we've kept b'way alive for DECADES without film."

Broadway is alive, but is it reaching it's full potential??? I read somewhere that 4 out of 5 Broadway productions fail to recoup. In what other business is an 80% failure rate considered success??? Just think about it. How many excellent productions have you seen, that have closed before they could find an audience? The industry needs to increase the number of people who attend theatre regularly, and not just when a celebrity is cast or when there is a huge media hype surrounding it. Maybe a little more exposure of what is out there couldn't hurt.

One reason is it might hurt a future movie sale. Ever see a straight play with dozens of blackouts and scene changes? What medium was the playwright thinking about I've often asked myself.

" (Those Lincoln Center archive recordings are not good enough to be accepted by the general public.)"

I disagree. Perhaps this is true of the older videos, but I have seen several newer Broadway productions at TOFT and they look like commercially released videos of Broadway productions. Most are shot with 2 or more cameras and have sound patched in from the soundboard. I know they will never be commercially released, but the ones I have seen are shot with great care and professionalism and are technically very high end.

Stanton3 said: "Why not film them and release the DVD 2 years after the last Broadway performance. We can look at films in theaters knowing that in 5-6 months the film will be on DVD and yet this has not hurt the film business! Barbra Streisand, Madonna, and many others have released DVD's of their concerts and that never harms sales for their next tour!"

2 main reasons come to mind, both articulated before this thread came to its natural conclusion 2 weeks before this post. Shows actually belong to people, and many of those people (a) like me, do not think that filmed shows are good for the theatre and (b) don't want to spend the money to do it, money which in most cases is unlikely to get recouped.

HogansHero said: "Your premise is wrong, for several factual reasons, but this is not the place to get bogged down in false analogies."

I have some questions for you, HogansHero:
1. Do you personally only ever see a specific Broadway show one time?
2. How much money do you assume it costs to film a Broadway show for DVD/Blu-ray release? If you don't know, then how do you think filming Wicked, for example, compares to the cost of filming a TV show, movie, documentary, etc?
3. Quoting you from a previous post: "...in fact a show can only be experienced live. It is the unique essence of live theatre that it cannot be replicated". Do you stand by this opinion when considering if filming a show would be harmful to audience attendance?
4. Referring to your quote at the start of my post, I would be happy for you to bog me down with reasons why that was a false analogy. A thread like this is the PERFECT place to explain why you think a very good and obvious analogy is actually incorrect.

I am looking forward to some excellent, well-considered reasons as to why exposing a larger audience to the "product" of Broadway would actually be harmful to the business model. I am especially interested to read your reasoning as to why Broadway is a special case, flying in the face of all known similar business models across all forms of entertainment.

Many thanks :)

We have a bit of a plan to emulate in Disney and the way that they handled their classics like Snow White and Pinnochio. Some organization created by Broadway should retain custody of all the filmed shows. I could see a subscription Broadway channel which, depending on the show, would not air any film until the show had been closed for a year or two. In the case of shows that never close like Wicked, well, they can experiment.

Just as Disney pulled properties like Bambi out of circulation, for buying and viewing in a theater, for a long time (maybe eight or ten years, memory not that good), popular shows which are frequently revived can be shut down on the channel after a couple of years of exposure to rebuild demand but also to stay out of the way of new revivals.

Benefits include making a lot of money by making the shows available to the public. My opinion is that there is a lot of demand for the Broadway product that isn't being met. For all those out-of-towners who have the time and money to spend a long weekend in New York watching Broadway shows, there are a hundred or five hundred -- who knows -- more that want to see the shows but don't have the money or the liberty. The business model should be sound. After the money is made to cover the filming, all the rest is gravy (subject to royalty payments, of course). If it can't be done profitably, which I don't believe, then you would have to reconsider doing it at all.

Our culture will not be deprived of seeing great moments of theater history. Want to see the original bench scene from Carousel with John Raitt and Jan Clayton? Well it turns out in this case that you almost can since they recreated the scene in a 1954 television show whose subject was Rodgers and Hammerstein. Not like being there on opening night, but a lot better than nothing. The performers, also, deserve to have their performances preserved. Live acting, singing and dancing on stage makes demands on the performers found in very few other places. Thinking of Kristin Chenoweth in the brutal role of Lily in On the Twentieth Century and the way she had to live while doing the show. "Like a nun." Don't the hardest working entertainers in the country deserve a national audience?

I saw Bandstand live a couple of times and in a movie theater once (not a recommended method of distribution). Of course it was better live, especially during emotional moments. But it was still enjoyable and preserved the performances and the Tony-winning choreography of Andy Blankenbuehler. It's for the best that the greatest Broadway highs are only experienced on Broadway. Broadway patrons are paying a lot more for that privilege.

Problems. Of course. But problems eventually are solved and progress is made. I can see many problems involving intellectual property rights. Who owns the rights to the choreography and who owns the rights to the performance of the choreography? Everyone will want to be paid. They'll work it out.

We are now firmly in the digital age where people are finding out who simple and cheap it is to digitize analog content and to store and retrieve the content on demand. Everything is being archived. This will include Broadway, inevitably, perhaps starting out with a small pilot project. There are always Luddites who stand in the way of technical progress, but they only delay and do not deny.

It is sometimes claimed that watching a recording of a show would result in many potential audience members no longer feeling the desire to see the live show. The reverse is actually true – a fact I hoped to highlight by showing that if you enjoy a show, you will return many times to experience it.

You are stating that you feel a show like Wicked, which requires no additional direction, acting, choreography, scoring, etc can only be filmed for no less than seven figures? I am happy to let your statement stand on its own merits. Just make sure to hire me if you ever need a DVD made of your Broadway show.

“Well I don't accept the notion that the analogies are good or obvious” - Not “analogies” – this analogy, singular, is, in this instance, both objectively good and obvious. That is why I asked you the question around this particular analogy, not your opinion regarding analogies in general.

For your implication that movie theatres are dying as a direct result of VHS/DVD/BlU-RAY to be true, it would have to be the case that movie theatres have suffered a major decline from the moment home-viewable copies became available i.e. the dawn of VHS. This is evidentially not the case. The current decline of movie theatres is due to one very simple reason… the more recent decline in the quality of product they are selling.

The analogy is actually further strengthened by the live art form comparison, as the experiences of watching Wicked in your home versus watching it in the theatre are indeed very different… but complimentary. It is strongly analogous to watching a movie in your home versus the experience of seeing it on the big screen, with incredible sound, and shared audience atmosphere.

The scale of a concert is not “completely different”. A concert in front of an audience of one thousand, is comparable to a Broadway show in front of an audience of one thousand. Ticket prices can also be comparable. An artist selling CDs or DVDs of their work is a vital part of the business model that drives attendance to their live concerts. I contest the same would be true for a release of Wicked.

One can expose an audience to the Broadway “product” via film, in the same way one exposes an audience to the “product” of live music, or the moviegoing experience. They are not mutually exclusive, but serve to complement each other.

I signed up specifically to correct you on these points, as I don’t think it is helpful to the future of theatre to have someone espousing such factually incorrect negativity. The future of Broadway will be in the exposure of the product via cast album recordings, television appearances, DVD and live shows. The more people that can experience the joy of Broadway shows, in whatever way they can, is a good thing for Broadway. Please be very clear on that fact.

I go to school with a lot of people who do watch Broadway bootlegs occasionally (and no, I am not giving out names and addresses). Even though they have a chance to experience these shows, they do go and try to see shows when they can. I wouldn't have gone to see Waitress if it hadn't been for a friend of mine recommending the show after watching a bootleg. And obviously, professional, legal recordings of shows are a lot better than bootlegs. After watching the Newsies proshot on Netflix the day it was released (after taking a sort of sabbatical from theatre, except for listening to Hamilton), it rekindled my love of theatre, and I have seen Newsies twice since then (at my local community theatre) and been in a pilot production of Newsies Jr. It also got me to go see a Broadway show - I got into Supergirl after learning that Jeremy Jordan was in it, and I specifically timed out my visit to Beautiful so that I could see Melissa Benoit AND Kara Lindsay. It'll be interesting how the filmed production of Hamilton affects ticket sales - I've seen places where it says it could be released as early as 2021, but Hamilton will DEFINITELY still be running by then. I also feel like for some shows that don't get a chance to tour (or in some cases, release a cast album), a filmed production could be really useful. For example, imagine if the Spring Awakening revival, a production that has no tour, no cast album, and a language that can only be conveyed visually, had gotten a proshot. It would've been the perfect way to give the show a lasting life, and now that chance is gone, to the point where some members of the DWSA cast (Alex Boniello being one of them) have admitted to watching their own bootleg on Twitter. While the way to get there is murky, I believe that filming more and more Broadway shows could actually help expand the Broadway audience to more than just people living within a few hours of New York City. (Which I say, as someone who lives within a few hours of New York City.)

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Ethics aside, everyone here is forgetting the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to film a broadway show. It is not the same as the Lincoln Center tapings, it is a whole ordeal.

All of the unions in the theater get paid (high) amounts for their work, in addition to their normal performing and operating costs.

All of this money, let’s says $500,000, not including advertising or postproduction, goes...nowhere? No one knows how much a movie can make on Netflix. If Fathom isn’t behind it, a movie theatre release is out of the question. Then for sale for $15 on Amazon?

The odds of making that 500k back, in addition to the weekly operating costs of the show if it hasn’t recouped, there is the smallest chance this will turn a profit.

I know people wish they would just put a single camera in the front row of the mezz and just press record. In “The song of Spider-Man” tell-all book, there’s a chapter about Julie Taylor BEGGING for the final 1.0 preview to be filmed with a single camera, and it became a gigantic legal disaster, and never happened.

Broadway shows are not being recorded because producers don’t want you to see the show. It’s because they don’t want to pay for it as the risk of return is so low.

@Konsider First, thanks for instigating this explosion of well-written prose. There are opinions at play here (mine included obviously) and they are being discussed, which is a good thing. Second, I think that most of you (I am not getting much company here ) are focusing on an imaginary broad market rather than the market made up of folks like us (viz., people who pay an inordinate amount of attention to the theatre). This leads to assumptions about revenue streams that have no basis.

Re "hiring" you for the DVD, sure. Just make sure you understand that you may make less than minimum wage. Aside from paying everyone mentioned in another post above, before you can end up with a good result, you are spending money on film direction, film lighting, film editing, sometimes set alterations to accommodate filming etc etc etc. You will also of course need cameras and people to operate them, crew,, etc. Make sure you understand what you are signing up for.

Yes TOFT records most Broadway shows, but the product is not something suitable for public consumption. It is an archival record.

Re the dying of movie theaters, I think you need to do more research. Your premise and your facts will need to swim upstream through an awful lot of data and well-studied conclusions.

The scale I was referring to was not venue size or ticket pricing but the recorded sales (that, as I say, are the driving not the collateral media). Rather it is the scale of the recorded sales. When big name acts tour in support of an album, they are looking to climb up the ladder from gold to platinum to double... platinum.) Cast recordings with extremely rare exceptions are not even on the same playing field, and the same would be true of these video recordings (whether sold, streamed, or whatever).

We can agree to disagree, and I certainly am not disparaging your advocacy, but underlying all of this is my strong belief that we do harm by moving in this direction, and as I have explained, that opinion is not based on the linear effect of ticket sales.

@BlueEyes As I said, my issue is with the art form not the linear effect on any particular show. I think the points you make in your first response are directed to the former but not the latter. And I also don't think there is a way of reversing the damage if it does not work out. (Well, maybe there is but we are talking about future generations, beyond even the youngest here.) And I also point you to my comments about defining the market above. I think we assume that the world is as interested in these shows as we are.

I understand that you are proposing a process to resolve issues, and not just pressing the record button. To repeat myself, the primary issue on which I am "dug in" is the long term damage to the art form. What we should be selling [and this is what the League spends a fortune selling] (because it is true) is that this is one of those rare instances in the digital age that prompts you to get off of the couch and (would that it were more so) put down your smart phone. The message of making these shows available in recorded form is "nevermind." Finally, and again I am repeating, your assessment of the movie business is way off. (Two more movie theaters (3 screens) just shut down within recent days.) I don't know what planet has large screen theaters thriving because of video; not this one. (Yes, the blockbusters that require big screens were an exception, at least until this dismal summer, but remember that theatre pieces do not benefit from that sort of expansiveness, or the corresponding appetite for special effects etc. In fact, theatrical effects fall flat in film.)

Have I convinced any of you?

Konsider said: "You are stating that you feel a show like Wicked, which requires no additional direction, acting, choreography, scoring, etc can only be filmed for no less than seven figures? I am happy to let your statement stand on its own merits. Just make sure to hire me if you ever need a DVD made of your Broadway show."

You're seemingly breaking it down to what you think it costs to capture a show on film, which at minimum includes recording two shows and then a separate performance without an audience for close-ups and onstage camera work that they wouldn't be able to get with a paying audience in attendance.

But I believe every union involved from the actors to the stagehands to everyone else also earn a specific amount in cases where the show is filmed, since you are essentially asking them to capture their work in perpetuity, and in an arena where there is no back-end. Most filmed shows are unlikely to recoup, so everyone who has contributed to the show gets paid out up front.

Now you have footage of a show but there is still editing, mixing, and everything else. Then marketing costs when it is released as well as trailers, promotions, and on and on...

You seem to be taking the cheapest part of the process (putting cameras in the theater and shooting the show) and thinking it is the hurdle, when in fact, it is the easiest part of the puzzle to sort out. It's the rest that is tricky.

@haterobics I agree with you obviusly but would just add that there are a myriad of other costs associated with the physical shooting (before even reaching the collateral costs you discuss) other than just flipping on the camera and pointing. A product for release to the general public cannot be shot the way film school students would should a class assignment. For example, theatrical lighting rarely works on film without alteration, and obviously you can't just record the ambient sound in the room. I remember a TV commercial shoot once where there was a delay because there were some costumes that didn't read right on film. The list goes on and on and I obviously don't have the technical awareness of most of what lurks below the surface. Suffice it to say, it is naive to think this is just something that can be done with ease (or inexpensively).



@BlueEyes You think this is inevitable; I don't. Neither one of us can prove our opinion so I'll just leave it at that.

That EY study is irrelevant to my point, and beyond dubious at best. First, it is funded by the folks seeking the very result they paid for. Second, the sample (people who go to the movies at least once a year) is not one that translate into sustainability for theaters, and basically states the obvious, which is that people who go to the trouble of going to the movies also watch movies at home. Duh. This is quintessential lying with stats. Third, the baseline is a fraction of what it was pre-VHS, HBO, etc. (Your suggestion of a "long ago victory" will come as news to virtually anyone.)

Most of the rest of what you write is either conjecture that I do not agree with, or wrong. (I will not drag through all of it but your effort to make the theatre less robust than it is flies in the face of the data. The Fabulous Invalid is not going anywhere.

OlBlueEyes said: "And the Broadway business model does not work, or at least is on very shaky ground. Steven Baruch solicited my investment in the Off-Broadway revival of Smokey Joe's Cafe (not because we're good friends; I just got on his mailing list) and I did my research. Only 20 percent of musicals recoup. As an investment it is so risky that the SEC requires most to have a net worth of a million dollars, not including the value of your home. It is more like a donation in exchange for a lottery ticket that you might strike gold with Hamilton or Book of Mormon."

More than 20% of shows in recent history have recouped. 75% of all small businesses fail - even though Broadway is a multi-billion dollar industry, each show is essentially a new small business. So it's not really that the Broadway business model doesn't work, it's that investing in any start-up is risky. And the SEC requires investors to be accredited in a whole host of industries, of which Broadway is one.