Quote:
Originally Posted by Mythor  Seems out of kilter to me. |
It
is out of kilter, and it's 100% fucked, but there's not a lot that anyone can really do about it. There's 288 shows and advertising and promoting all of them equally would be pretty much impossible and not really all that intelligent any way. The festival has to run itself like a business otherwise it would quickly run itself wayyyyy into the red and die, and then no one gets to play. Because it has to run itself like a business it has to make cold hard decisions about where the advertising budget goes and if the big name overseas comedians are going to rake in the majority of the cash for the festival (apart from grants) then they're going to get the majority of the support. The little guy gets left out in the cold but that's the way it is - they have to become business savvy very quickly or go broke.
The fact that many comedians are forced to stand outside the town hall for 4 or 5 hours a day handing out flyers in the hope that they'll get maybe a dozen paying customers that night is a symptom of the problem. Flyering is a fucked up way of getting bums on seats but for many shows it's really all they've got. For many performers in the festival flyering is perhaps the only guaranteed way to make sure that the punters stop and consider your show, and at least 80% of the flyers handed out won't result in a ticket sale. There's just a massive glut of shows during the festival. Combined with the fact that we've just had a bunch of other big events (the swimming, the Arts festival, Moomba, the Grand Prix, etc etc) and the fact that Comedy Festival Inc has to put most of their advertising behind the bigger shows in order to stay afloat, the little shows are pretty much guaranteed to get lost amongst the crowd.
The great majority of the shows listed in the guide are probably being produced by the performers themselves and this is a terrible way to run a business. I know from experience - if you're putting together a show you really don't have enough time to properly budget, advertise and promote it as well. I tried to do all that for my last festival show and fucked up big time. What do I know about media relations and advertising? I make silly costumes and tell funny stories. I gave it all I could and I got some excellent media exposure (I was on GMA with Bert for fuck's sake), I targetted all the scifi fan communities and I dragged that damn Optimus Prime costume down to the Town Hall and flyered every damn night but I still couldn't draw much of a crowd. The show was as big and as spectacular and as funny as I could make it and it won the goddamned Best Comedy award in the Fringe festival a few months previously. I honestly don't know what else I could have done with the budget I had.
There's not nearly enough producers or media relations people in this business and this is holding the whole industry back. We need more people who know how to run the shows as a business with an aim towards making a profit. Many shows are just hoping to somehow break even with no real plan of how to do that so they're doomed from the get go. If many of the comedy festival shows are losing money its because they're being produced by people who don't know how to avoid losing money. Creative people are often the worst people in the world to be running a business, especially in a horrifically competitive market like the comedy festival. You can't really blame them for this - there's not enough people around with the financial/organisational skills to properly run a show so they do the best they can. The workshops that the festival runs will teach people the basics but that isn't enough to make a show financially viable, especially when you're competing against 287 other shows in trying to attract an audience.