Don Friesen - The Future of Showbiz
There’s this comic, Don Friesen. Brilliant guy. He’s the only person to ever win the San Francisco International Comedy Competition twice. He’s been doing it for a little over 10 years. My wife and I saw him last night. And we both thought - why isn’t this guy more famous?
He’s got the chops. He’s got the material. He does great George Bush and John Lithgow impressions. And yet it’s likely that you heard of him first from me. And that can’t be good for anyone in showbiz. And yet, he’s doing just fine for himself.
Friesen is the very model of a stand-up comic. Stand-up comedy is theatre. If you take a production of, I don’t know, BYE BYE BIRDIE, take out the orchestra, and the songs, and the unnecessary actors, and strip down everything that you don’t need in order to entertain an audience, you might wind up with one person on the stage. A single person, a microphone, and a bottle of water. You got yourself a standup comedian. And it’s true that you may not draw the crowds you would with BYE BYE BIRDIE, but you don’t have the expenses either.
A stand-up can mount a tour with a car and a suitcase. If he gets 30 people to pay to see him, he’s turning a profit. (Friesen had about sixty, I’m guessing.) The comic can tour, the comic can sell CDs and DVDs at the shows, and they can hire themselves out for corporate gigs.
I’m repeating myself from last week here. Minimalism is the wave of the future in this business, because it’s too expensive to pump out blockbusters all the time. You can put your money behind a run of BYE BYE BIRDIE, or you can put the same money into 100 stand up comics.
By the way, if you’re a less savory producer you can put than money into strippers instead. Perhaps the sensible thing to do would be half and half - you know, diversify.
Of course, it’s easy to say this now, because we’re a whole month away from blockbuster season. When SPIDERMAN 3 and PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN 3 come out, they’ll either rake in the bucks or not. I’m basing my whole premise on the idea that THE ISLAND, a science fiction failure from two years ago, wasn’t a fluke. If it was, forget I brought the whole thing up.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:32 am
I agree dude. About the business model that is. Havent seen Don but just went and listened to the clips on his site. Brilliant. A guy like this should have a podcast. In fact I’d love to get him onto G’Day World to chat about the business model.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Hey come to think of it, I *have* heard of this guy before! I did a WHOLE PODCAST with his stuff in it:
http://lol.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/03/05/lol-004/
I didn’t recognize the name. LOL.
April 30th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
If stand-up is the showbiz biz model o’ the future, what happened to the whole stand-up boom of about a decade ago?
Don Friesen, huh? Never heard. Of course I can just superimpose the name of my favorite should-be-more-famous standup Jake Johansen and the article reads the same.
Friesen, Johansen: Dane Power!
May 1st, 2007 at 2:42 am
The great thing about putting your commentaries out early is you get imput you can respond to. By the way, am I quoting Johansen here: “My vegetarian girlfriend complained that I smelled like meat. I said, ‘I AM meat!’” Friesen is like Johansen only 20% less cereberal.
The standup boom is unrelated. For one thing, you don’t need a boom to make money in standup the great thing about the long tail (see Chris Anderson for guru talk about the long tail) is small profits are plenty. And Friesen emailed me yesterday to assure me that he is, in fact, making a comfortable living.
For another, showbiz wasn’t facing the financial crunch that it is now. In the early nineties home video was still a limitless ancilliary market and writers and actors were only dimly aware of how much profit they were bein’ screwed out of. Now DVD sales are declining, contracts are rewritten, and who knows - in today’s marketplace maybe COMING TO AMERICA really WOULD never turn a profit.
Showbiz didn’t need to think minimally when standup was booming.