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[0:10] Ken Davenport: Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Producer's Perspective Podcast. My name is Ken Davenport.

[0:15] Ken Davenport: Thank you so much for joining us. So, sounds like a start of a joke, but you know what Edward Albee, Terrence McNally, and Paula Vogel have in common? This guy. My next guest. Please welcome to the podcast, powerhouse literary agent from WME, Mr. Jonathan Lomma.

[0:28] Jonathan Lomma: Hi. Can you call my wife and kids and say that they have a powerhouse in their family?

[0:34] Jonathan Lomma: I think they quite understand that, you know, and I'm urging them to get out of bed in the morning and get on the school bus.

[0:40] Ken Davenport: Once you've been on this podcast, Jonathan, your celebrity status is going to rise, skyrocket.

[0:45] Jonathan Lomma: I hear that.

[0:46] Ken Davenport: We've actually had very few agents on the podcast, so thank you for being one of the two that have appeared with us today. So, let's start at the beginning. When you were a wee little boy, did you dream about being an agent someday?

[0:55] Jonathan Lomma: No, I really didn't, and I never really considered it. I had been, I hate to say child actor because that means that I should have appeared in some things, but I did a lot of community theater as a kid, some commercials and print ads, and would come to New York to audition for things, and I didn't have an agency. Nobody would sign me permanently because I lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I'd come in on a Friday, take a day off from school, and I would freelance with people, and I read for Steven Spielberg for Hook, and Kirsten Dunst was also reading for him that day. I must have been 12 or something, and she was younger, and she had not gone on to become anything. And her mother said to, yeah, her mother said to my mother, you know, who's he with?

And she said, well, he freelances. He's not with anybody. And she said, well, my daughter's with William Morris. At least that's what I remember happening, and that's the first time I heard the name. And then I went on to continue to act. I went to college. I got into Actors' Equity and Screen Actors' Guild, and I had it in my mind that when I left college, I was going to make a go of it and try to be a costume designer or a director or an actor, just something, something in the arts on the creative side. But by the time it was time to graduate, I had seen many, many people more talented than me start to starve to death, and I began to understand the courage that was involved in deciding that this was going to be your life.

And it was around that time that my mom and dad offered to pay for law school. And partly to please them, well, mostly to please them, and mostly because of how frightened I was to make the commitment as an artist, I went to law school, where I started taking a lot of classes in copyright and trademark. And while I was dead center of the class, totally mediocre, in copyright and trademark and arts-related classes, I would get the best grade in the class. I would routinely be, like, number one or two in the class. And I began to think, well, this is really interesting, because there could be something for me on the business side, because a little bit of talent in our business, you know, doesn't really mean anything.

And my girlfriend, after I graduated law school, I was studying for the bar, now she's my wife. She gave me a book, and the book was something like America's Best Places to Work with a Law Degree. And in the book, I will never forget this, because it was the closest thing to an epiphany I ever had in my life, William Morris Agency Mailroom. And I went back to that time when I was 12, with Kirsten Dunst's mother, and if Kirsten Dunst hears this, forgive me if it wasn't your mom, but maybe it was someone else in the room, talking about William Morris and talking about it with this pride. And of course, by the time I was in law school, I had heard the name William Morris mentioned everywhere, from Woody Allen's Sleeper, to All About Eve, to, you know, a million other movies and articles, and I knew what it was.

And I thought, my God, this is it. I can do this. I can do this. Being a lawyer, a little bit too much in a room looking at contracts. Being an artist, you know, I don't have it. But this is it. And I suddenly knew that very, very clearly, in 2003, I've got to somehow get into the William Morris Agency. And then I began a campaign of talking to everybody I knew who helped me. Dana Amendola, who works for Disney Theatrical here in New York, very, very helpful and kind to me, I remember. Rosalie Joseph, the casting director, who I had had a lot of auditions with when I was a kid and who I kept in contact with, actually agreed to help me out. She worked for ABC. And a guy named John Simpson, who worked for the Recording Industry Association of America in DC, probably wrote the letter that really mattered to the New York CEO at the time, who, like the day he was fired, you know, walked into HR with his plant in a box and was like, oh, my friend sent this resume in.

Could you do me a favor and look at it? And the HR director met with me and I went into the mailroom and then I had five years of getting people coffee and making Xeroxes and they really were wonderful because I had gotten, I knew I was in the door. You know what I mean? So my first day I crashed my mail cart into Harry Belafonte and it was very nice about it. You know, you hear all these horror stories. My only story is how nice everybody was to me when I, when I almost crippled Harry Belafonte, you know, my first day of work.

[5:04] Jonathan Lomma: So five years in the mailroom and then you become an agent. And who are the first clients that you're working with when you get your own desk?

[5:12] Jonathan Lomma: Well, I wasn't five years in the mailroom. I was two weeks in the mailroom. And then Peter Franklin, who was the head of the department at the time, needed a new assistant or another assistant. And most of the people who came to William Morris, I was told, wanted to do movies and wanted to do music. So the fact that they had a guy who was really, really, really excited about, you know, West Side Story and Gypsy was like something, something of a thing, you know? So I worked, it was really for him that I worked for those five years. And then what happened was, is that in the merger with Endeavor, in that shakeup, he left the company and decided to retire. And many of his, what I call blue chip clients were up for grabs.

And so what happened was, was that I got a call one day and it was Arthur Lawrence, who I knew very well because I had been the assistant for his agent for five years. And I really loved him. And he had this reputation, as you know, as this, as this difficult character.

[6:02] Jonathan Lomma: Well, having worked on that Gypsy revival, I know I got a few calls from him myself.

[6:05] Jonathan Lomma: Well, I think it's only a matter of time before I get in a fistfight with somebody who didn't like him, because to me, he was truly always wonderful. One of the first people I met in the business in New York. And I just had the, had an enormous amount of regard for how he could immediately see whatever the issue was, whether it was creative or business, truly one of the smartest people I've ever met. And he called me and he said, look, if Peter reemerges, I, you know, I'm going to go with him. I said, you should. He said, but until that time, we worked very well together. Would you be my agent? And that was, if I had to pick a moment where I saw the, you know, the real thing on the railroad track where the track shifts and now the railroad isn't, the railroad car isn't going off the cliff, it's going somewhere hopefully bright and sunny.

That was the big moment for me because I understood instantly that what a calling card that would be if I was able to successfully meet Arthur's expectations and, and be a good agent for him, what that would mean across the industry and how I would be able to point to that and how others would point to that as a way of saying, you know, he, he can do the job and look who he's doing the job for. So that was the beginning. And that was, I think something that convinced some other people to take a chance with me. Another person who took a chance on me was Terrence McNally. Terrence McNally has a history of finding people who, who haven't quite yet earned it and giving them their shot. I think probably Joe Mantello might say he was one of those people.

I was one of those people. There was absolutely no reason on earth why Terrence McNally should have trusted me with his business. My first year of being an agent, other than that, he had known me as an assistant. We had had many conversations and I think he, I think it was, I don't quite understand it, but I'm not going to look the gift horse in the mouth because of what it, how much it changed my life.

[7:41] Ken Davenport: How cutthroat is it amongst the other agents in town with clients like that?

[7:45] Jonathan Lomma: You know, I don't know the answer to that. And my feeling about it changes from day to day, depending on the situation. I've heard stories that in the old days it was an extraordinarily gentlemanly business and everybody understood each other's turf and nobody encroached. Well, we certainly don't live in that world. I also grew up with stories about certain agents who were these rogue assassins who were always calling their clients and, you know, always trying to poach your clients. And I don't think we quite live in that world. It's somewhere in a gray area in between. I guess I would limit my answer to saying it's not so bad.

[8:18] Ken Davenport: So tell me about your day to day. So what, what is the day in the life of a literary agent?

[8:23] Jonathan Lomma: I mean, it can be, it can be anything. My two kids didn't want to get out of bed today. They woke up 20 minutes late. I'm trying to keep my temper, but also get everything moving and finally get them fed. Henry realizes he doesn't have his hat. It's probably at school, but it's like 40 degrees today instead of two degrees. So maybe it'll be okay. So I take the educated guess that he can go out the door. You know, I get in at around 10 every day after, after all this stuff is done. And then it's sort of, I've sort of thought to myself on the train home the night before, what is bothering me? And I just go back to what was bothering me on my ride home. And I get back into it, whether it's a, you know, producer who might be playing hardball about the book writer, he wants to write his project, you know, on, on whatever that APC is or whether it's, you know, usually it's rights negotiation, the negotiation for plays, you know, it's a long drawn out process. There's a revival. I've been negotiating now for a major American musical that the negotiation has been going on for over a year.

[9:20] Ken Davenport: A year?

[9:21] Jonathan Lomma: It's been going on for over a year. Yeah. Now the show itself is two years away. So it's sort of like that old rule that whatever time there is to do a job in is pretty much how long the job will take.

[9:31] Ken Davenport: Is this a new problem or is this, when you started as an agent, were things taking this long then or has it gotten worse?

[9:38] Jonathan Lomma: Well, I don't think it's, I don't think it's changed. And, and sometimes it's a problem. Sometimes it's not. If your show is about to go up, you know, and you don't have any clarity on what rights you have and that shows opening in the next three months, we have a big problem. But the aforementioned situation is not a problem because the Broadway musical is three years away or two years away. If it's taking a year to negotiate, often a lot of things that are unclear at the beginning of the negotiation become clear by the end of the process. And then the delay turns out to be good. I don't know that it's gotten any different. I remember when I started around 2003, there were jokes about certain musicals that had opened and closed and the deals had not been signed. And I think that still, that still happens.

[10:19] Ken Davenport: Anything we can do to speed up the negotiation process in general?

[10:24] Jonathan Lomma: Agree to everything.

[10:25] Ken Davenport: Oh, okay. Let me break that down.

[10:27] Jonathan Lomma: When producers make their offer and the author's agents say, no, no, no, no, and change this, that's a great moment. You've been given clarity. You can simply say done and we're good to go.

[10:39] Ken Davenport: I'll have to remember that the next time you call. Seriously, anything about the process? I've often, here, let me throw something at you. You know, when we negotiate with unions sometimes or when there's a big deal, we get in a room. And then when there's an issue, like, I don't agree with this. We don't agree with this. Let, let us come up with a compromise. We're going to go to the next room and we're going to come back. Do you ever think you could do a live?

[11:00] Ken Davenport: In person. Yes, we've done that. In fact, I do that a lot to break through. That's actually very effective. In fact, it's easy in the sense everyone's sitting there looking at each other, you can't hide. And everyone actually wants a deal to happen, right?

[11:14] Jonathan Lomma: Right. Oh, sure.

[11:19] Ken Davenport: How much of an adversarial relationship do you think there is between producer and agent? I mean, that's the big cliché. Producers and agents hate each other, but we were talking before we even got on mic about you loving a producer and sitting in another producer's office. What's your relationship with producers then?

[11:33] Jonathan Lomma: I don't have my Riverside Shakespeare with me, but I'll paraphrase. There's a Shakespeare quote that goes along the lines of, let's fight like cats and dogs, but in the evening, eat and drink as friends. So it can be as adversarial as anybody wants it to be. I know producers who take it very personally when an agent is very hard about what he will or will not accept on behalf of whatever luminary of the American theater that producer is trying to fleece that week. But I know other producers who accept the fact that we're all just doing our job. The producer is trying to get the best deal he can to make his show as affordable to produce as possible. And the agent or the agent's lawyer or the writer is doing their best to be adequately remunerated for the work they've done on whatever the piece of art is that the producer wants.

So, I mean, in my life, I don't think I have a lot of adversarial relationships. And the few that I can think of right now that I can count on one hand, I really think of them as failures. I clearly did something wrong to let a relationship get to the point where some business issue is causing that amount of acrimony. I think for the most part, it's very easy for everybody in our business to enjoy each other. I mean, hey, there was a moment when somebody said, hey, do you want to work in the movies and talk about millions of dollars? Or do you want to work in the theater and talk about dollars?

[12:52] Jonathan Lomma: Waivers. Right, exactly. And we all went to the theater. So, I think we should be a little more philosophical and enjoy ourselves. Especially when we all see each other at opening night parties. I mean, we're in the same—it's the same people over and over again.

[13:03] Ken Davenport: Do you think the appetite from buyers like me has changed in the last 20 years in terms of what people are buying or what they're looking for in terms of—

[13:11] Jonathan Lomma: Yeah, I mean, there's trends that I do speculate that when 9/11 happened, something happened besides everybody stopped having black tie openings and resorting to business casual. After 9/11, it was very interesting. Before 9/11, all the musicals, this is just my take, seemed to be, I won't say dark, but there was a lot of gravity. Look at Ragtime. Look at Phantom of the Opera. There was a kind of seriousness to musicals and there were a lot of plays on Broadway that could be very frivolous and fun. You could still get a really great farce on Broadway. And somehow after 9/11, I got the sense that that flipped on its head, that you had every musical had to be like The Drowsy Chaperone, had to be very lighthearted and fun and crazy and kooky.

And the plays, we went through a period of extremely grave subject matter for a good 10 years. And there's a lot of exceptions to this. This was sort of a general trend, I think, that I saw. And now what I've noticed is that that's easing up a bit and not every single musical is lighthearted and not every single play has become grave. It's sort of, there's becoming a lot more variety in each of them.

[14:17] Ken Davenport: Yeah. And what about new plays? When your clients write new plays, do you have any, do they ask you for counsel in terms of what's working now? What are people looking for? Or do you ever try to steer them? Is that, do you think that's part of an agent's job? Like, look, you've got a house payment. You want to support your kids. Here's what the market is looking for.

[14:39] Jonathan Lomma: For the most part, I do not tell an artist that is writing what their soul is telling them to write to be more commercial. And I think that that's not what they want from me. And I, frankly, that's not what I want to give them. I think that could be destructive. And I do have clients who want to write to the market and they make that known. And our conversations are a lot about what can be sold. Do you think if I did A, B would buy it? There's a lot of those conversations, but usually if that is going to be the topic, I let the playwright or book writer or director get into that. For the most part, most of my clients, they're reaching deep into their souls and finding what's there and putting it on paper.

And our business, the theater business, is probably one of the few businesses that can tolerate that. American movies, no one is producing your artistic script that you really searched your soul to write. Business of American movies, somebody said is surprising you in just the way you expect it. We're going to make this movie that's going to be this movie from five years ago, only we're going to change all these various elements around, but we're going to try to hit those same four quadrants, men and women above and below a certain age. I forgot what that age is. I think it might be 22 or something. And for the most part, the American theater doesn't work that way. Most of the things that succeed in the theater, it's because you've literally never seen anything like that before.

And that's what I look for when I'm signing a client or looking at new work. Have I ever encountered this viewpoint ever before? And if the answer is no, that's something to really pay attention to. I mean, if Edward Albee had been writing to the market, you'd never have ended up with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. God knows where that came from, but it's deep and amazing and you really can't imitate it and it didn't come from anywhere. So it sits there like its own island. And most of the great plays, most of the great musicals, they're really their own thing. Very, very unlike TV and film, which is a long progression of derivative works. That's not so in our business.

[16:44] Ken Davenport: Very, very insightful comments. So speaking of new playwrights, how do people get on your radar? So when you say you sign a new client, what's usually the way that that client gets your attention? How do they get in front of you?

[16:56] Jonathan Lomma: There is an agent in my LA office who really cleared this up for me. For the first few years I was an agent, I would come across all kinds of people all the time who were working with my clients who were looking for a new agent. And I would kind of resist that. I thought, well, just because I'm in this situation where I'm working with my client on this project and this other person on the project needs an agent, don't let that be, Jonathan, don't let that be the temptation to just sign that client. And this colleague of mine looked at me and he said, no, no, no, you've got it wrong. Your clients will tell you who to sign in the sense that talent attracts talent. Good work attracts good work.

So if you're in the mix and your clients are working with people who are also wonderful and amazing, you are very lucky to be in that situation where it's so evident to you that a great person needs an agent. Pay attention to that. It's probably counterintuitive to have resisted that, but I did for many years. And now I understand what a gift it is to be around so many talented people. So it's usually from projects I'm already involved with, ancillary people, they might have an agent who's retiring. They might be leaving their agent for whatever reason. And then I look at the situation and begin to consider it. I mean, not only do I have to think that I'm right for them, they have to think that I'm right for them. Did I get that? It's upside down and backwards. It's a little like dating.

[18:21] Ken Davenport: And let's say, and I'm sure this has never happened with any of your clients ever. Let's say that they write something that isn't quite great and they give it to you, or it gets up even, and it's not so good. How do you tell them knowing that you've got to give them part of your job, I would think, is to make sure they have an honest assessment of the piece and its potential. But at the same time, you've got to keep this person as a client. How do you negotiate that?

[18:46] Jonathan Lomma: Oh, that's a tough question. And I think agents and spouses struggle with this kind of stuff, which is here's this person you have enormous regard for. This one isn't as good as the last one, say. That's a really tough situation. First of all, all opinions are subjective in our business. So who really knows? I will say that it's often, and I think this is a good thing. It's often very difficult to get past my own bias. If I represent someone whose work I love, it's very hard for me to even see what you're talking about. And I think that's not a bad place for an advocate to be. When a client gives me a play, I tend to see all the things about it that are the good things about it. And I tend to see just how it fits in their canon, let's say, of their other work.

And I just think to myself, what are the things that recommend this? And that is not bad, because I'm going to talk about it to producers and artistic directors by the dozens and really push for that play. The world will tell us what the world will tell us. The playwright doesn't need me to speculate if this is or is not as good as the last play. The world is going to tell us very shortly what it thinks. And then together, we both may, I guess, accept that premise, this play is not as good as the last play. But even if we did accept that premise, it doesn't change the fact that we need it produced and we need to work on it. He needs to work on it. She needs to work on it during the process. I can't tell you how many things have just grown exponentially in the rehearsal process that was not what it was on opening night. You've probably seen that a few times where something makes an enormous leap in the rehearsal process. So when it's given to me, it's not the end of the road yet.

[20:31] Ken Davenport: Yeah, this is something I think that really separates the pros from the non-pros out there. In every aspect of this business, by the way, from agents to producers to investors, is to have the imagination to see what something can become. Because first of all, you're reading it on a piece of paper. That's not how plays are meant to be.

[20:44] Jonathan Lomma: No, you're exactly right. The idea that, like, you think of Shakespeare thinking that one day people would read his plays in a class. It's the one time where you probably should watch the movie before you read the book, because it's at least a closer iteration of what Shakespeare intended. I think it's a great skill to be able to read a play. It's a skill you probably develop your whole life. It's like reading an instruction manual. It's the instruction manual for the work of art. When you read a novel, you're having the experience that the author intended. When you're reading a play, you are not having the experience. You're trying to cast it in your mind. You're trying to design it in your mind. It's very hard. And the best producers are the ones, as you say, who can read it and understand the potential.

[21:24] Ken Davenport: By the way, that noise you heard was teenagers all over the world rejoicing about the thought of watching movies instead of reading Shakespeare.

[21:31] Jonathan Lomma: I'm a big advocate for if you get assigned a Shakespeare play in class, don't go buy the book. Get a couple versions of the movie and watch it. I think it's, especially when you get Hamlet, you want to sit there and read Hamlet? Or you want to watch Kenneth Branagh's movie? You should watch Kenneth Branagh's movie. It's closer to what the final experience would be. I mean, it's better if your local community theater is doing it.

[22:00] Jonathan Lomma: What should I do first? Should I get an agent? Should I not get an agent? How do I do what your big clients do?

[22:30] Jonathan Lomma: I tried to give notes. I recently had a situation where I went to somebody's reading about six or seven years ago because they had a mutual friend ask me. And I did it and I gave up a night and I went and I spent the next day in the morning, I wrote up some notes and sent it along. And I wasn't going to work with the person. They weren't ready yet. I was just, I guess, being a member of the community. And fast forward seven or eight years and suddenly my L.A. office is all hot and bothered about this great new talent that wrote this spec script that a movie studio wants to buy. And it's this amazing talent. Where have I heard this name before? And suddenly I get a phone call from an agent in L.A. and said, yeah, evidently we have a leg up in being able to sign this client.

You went to something like a while ago and they remember you and you would have to be the theater point for this person. And it turned out that we were able to sign this emerging talent because of that. I mean, here I thought I was doing someone else a favor. I was doing myself a favor. I mean, and now as a result, I get the opportunity to work with the person now that they're really ready to have the agent. He's a wonderful, wonderful writer and I can't get over that it worked out that way. I still can't get over it even as I'm telling you. So, I mean, I don't know. I think that having an agent in the theater business is a symptom of being a great writer. I think that if you're writing great work and sending it out to all the kinds of festivals you can send it out to and all the competitions that you can get it out to without an agent, eventually, if it's good, it will be produced.

And suddenly it starts appearing on the lists at the agencies of things getting produced that, you know, where you've got someone without an agent. There's that old story about somebody drew the picture of Sleeping Beauty Castle for Walt Disney. And they said, here's where we're thinking of doing it. There'll be a long main street and then here's the castle. And he said, that's great. And they said, okay, I'll cost it out for fabrication. He said, no, no, no, I need to see more drawings. And the artist said, but I thought you said it was okay. He said, well, it is beautiful, but I can't pick from one. And I don't think it's a great idea for any playwright to just get any agent they can. I think they should be in a position to be able to pick between different agents and get a sense of what it could be like, or else you sign with whoever you can get.

Well, now you're stuck with them. What if it's not the right man? You don't want to be in that situation. You want to have to sort of put yourself in a situation where you can make a little bit more of an educated choice. And that means going without an agent a little longer, being your own agent for a while and writing great work and getting it out there.

[25:30] Jonathan Lomma: What if someone said to you, I want to be an agent? How do I get started in 2018? Same path? Harder? Easier? Well, you know, I've often tried to ask myself, who are the people that become agents? And agents are all very, very different people. I'm sure you probably can see that. They're just very different people drawn from all different walks of life. What I see a lot of is a lot of agents like myself are failed artists with a little bit of talent. And Arthur Conan Doyle said mediocrity recognizes nothing beyond itself, but talent can recognize genius, sometimes instantly. And I would say to anyone who wanted to be an agent, how long have you spent in the arts and in what capacity? Because it really matters.

Little did I know all those years I was doing community theater since I was nine, that all that information and all that experience, I mean, I represent some of those plays I was in when I was like 11 or 12 now. And, you know, were you a film major? You know, did you watch the 100 greatest movies of all time, like according to, for instance, Roger Ebert? Did you write essays on them? Are you able to talk about them in a kind of shorthand with people? So much of being an agent is talking about material and knowing material. What kind of agent do you want to be? Is it just because it popped into your mind or is it because you were a theater major and you can really sit there and talk about your theories of the great musicals and what's good and what's bad?

And, you know, one of the things that I found really challenging as a new agent is when you would read material, you had to know if it was good or bad. And that's a muscle that really has to be trained because what you begin to realize is everything else you know to be good, you started off knowing it was good. You know, somebody took you to Sweeney Todd and they said, this is one of the great classics of American writing and Stephen Sondheim is a national treasure. And now you see it and you enjoy yourself and now you know it's great. But what if you had seen Sweeney Todd without knowing that when it was first up? Would you have thought to yourself, this truly is one of the great musicals? Would you have known that? I mean, that's a very scary thing to ask yourself.

[27:29] Jonathan Lomma: Yeah, I used to think anything on Broadway was good just because it was Broadway.

[27:33] Ken Davenport: Me too!

[27:34] Jonathan Lomma: Someone actually asked me when I was a teenager. They said, you went to New York, you saw a Broadway show. Was it good? I literally said the words, of course it was good. It was on Broadway.

[27:43] Ken Davenport: Yeah, and my dad would have said the same thing. You know, of course it's good. It sold this many copies. Or of course it's good. It got mentioned in the paper. But we have to be a little bit more discerning. And so I would say, you know, what is your quest when you want to be an agent? Do you feel like, in my case, and this is true of many agents I know, certainly a lot of the ones that I work with at WME, do you feel a calling to be an advocate for a writer? I mean, I have to tell you, it's like, everything begins and ends with the writing. When you're young, you like actors. You begin to buy into this idea of the auteur director, Scorsese, you know. But finally, somebody wrote all this stuff.

That's what it really starts with. And it's a real high for me, and I know other agents, to know that you're sort of the gladiator defending these voices that are just going into a room with blank pieces of paper and coming out with oftentimes world-changing material. I think that as an agent, you know, if you want to be that kind of advocate and you have a grounding in the arts in some way, either through your studying or through your own failure at WME, I think you're well-placed to be an agent.

[28:51] Jonathan Lomma: All right, my last question, my infamous genie question. I want you to imagine that that genie from Aladdin comes to visit you and thanks you for being such an advocate for the artist and the playwright and grants you one wish. What's the one thing that drives you so crazy? You're such a nice guy, you get along with everyone. What makes you mad, angry? What would have you flip this table over, and you'd ask this genie to wish away in an instant? You know, there's a lot of things I think that are wrong. There's a lot of things wrong. One of them is the lack of female minority voices on Broadway. That's something that everyone has been talking a lot about this season, and that's a huge problem.

I think we might get there, fixing that one, eventually. I think there's a big tide toward that. No, my biggest problem happened when I was about seven or eight years old. There was a Broadway musical called The Grind, and it is a seminal American musical. Not like Cabaret or Sweeney Todd or West Side Story. It was directed by Hal Prince. That was the musical that behind the scenes gave us something that you and I call the royalty pool. And for those listening who don't know what a royalty pool is, a royalty pool was a new way that theater business in 1985 discovered about how to pay the writer of American musicals and plays. Before 1985, an author was paid on the gross, something like usually 6% to 10% of the gross, depending on what their agent or lawyer could negotiate for themselves.

If you had a playwright who wrote a play, and the break-even on the play was, just for the sake of this example, $300,000, and that play made $200,000 on any given week, and they were in at 6% of the gross, that playwright rocks away with $12,000 for that week. When the investors and the producer are all grumbling that there's no profits that week. But the playwright was thought very much of as an artist, like the actors. The actors are paid regardless of how the play does. The curtain puller is paid regardless of how the play does. In fact, sometimes plays don't even have a curtain, but the curtain puller is paid because of union rules. But that is neither here nor there. The playwright was thought of as someone like the stage manager, or the actor, or the person who worked in the bar at the back of the theater.

Their work was done, they were remunerated on a weekly basis, regardless of the commercial success of the show. That's pre-1985, that's pre-The Grind. After The Grind, the playwright is in the position of an investor. Now the playwright is taking a risk in writing, just like the investor is in investing, and just like the producer is in producing. So now the playwright is only paid on a musical or a play, most of the time, 95% of the time, in success. Yes, there's a weekly guarantee if the play is not breaking even, but the first thing you do, and every producer does, is ask us to waive royalties. So we've gone from a situation where a playwright on Broadway, a Broadway playwright could make a really good living writing plays, and that served as an incentive to keep writing plays.

Now, post-1985, because of the royalty pool, we are in a situation where the playwright is only remunerated, really, in success. And in failure, it's sort of a wash, and the idea is, well, you know, you took a risk of that three to five years it took you to write that play, and it really didn't pan out, and hopefully, you know, it'll do well in stock and amateur. And that's probably why people say, you can't make a living, but you can make a killing. Well, I'd get rid of royalty pools and go back to gross participation. We could talk about this subject for another hour and a half. But I will say the only thing is the producer now takes that same risk with you, in that we're in the royalty pool as well, and we waive our royalties, and we're stuck with it. We actually don't share in that stock and amateur in the future, because it goes to the investors before it comes to us. But I don't care about them.

[32:35] Ken Davenport: And on that note, I want to thank Jonathan for coming today. Seriously, thank you so much for being here. Thanks to all of you for listening. We'll see you next time.