Well, the theatre blogosphere has brought up the subject (as it apparently does every few years or so) of self-producing, and with Mr. Freeman's post here and Travis Bedard's suggestion that I offer the "hows" (rather than the "whys") of self-producing, so I think it may be time to quit stalling and offer a very one-sided, Jimmy-centric (in a similar vein to Dave Sim's Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing, which Nosedive Productions cohort Pete Boisvert and I used as our bible for Nosedive for those first few formative years when we decided we were in fact a theatre company and not...

In my introduction to this quixotic and rambling I started talking about how Pete Boisvert and I reunited from high school in the city, got immediately frustrated by our mutual attempts at getting our feet in the door of the theatre world, started talking about putting on two plays of mine, and realized we didn't have the first clue as to how to do that. Here, I plan to continue telling the story of how we put on our first play, while finding ways to seamlessly tie-in practical advice for the aspiring self-producing theatre artist (taking periodic breaks to provide...

I realize, somewhat sheepishly, that my last "Next" tagline for this part of my "Guide to Self-Producing" is a total, or at least incomplete, lie. I still need to wrap up some aspects of staging that first play before getting into nattering about Incorporation and 501c3 paperwork, company-building and flashing forward. As always, I've gotten ahead of myself. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me (albeit slowly over time). For this entry I still need to write a bit about how Pete and I did some (meager) promotional work with our first play, then skip...

Oh, yes. Moving ahead with big boners. Okay, so we got through how Pete and I staged our first play, and how we gave ourselves a production company name (Nosedive Productions) solely for the sake of putting something official-seeming on the postcard and how we ended up just being $300 (or $150 each) in the red, which was perfectly fine by us. Now it's time to jump ahead a bit, and get into how we slowly and inevitably went from being a couple of dorks putting on a play a few months after moving to New York to actually running...

While briefly relaying the hubris we displayed putting on our second show through reckless overspending, I was reminded of the line in Frank Miller's Daredevil: The Man Without Fear origin story miniseries, where Stick is teaching a young, blind Matt Murdock archery. After many failed attempts to hit the target (hey, the kid's blind, what do you expect?), young Matt finally hits the target with his arrow. "Hey! I did it!" Matt exclaims with excitement. Unimpressed, Stick and hits Matt over the head with his walking stick. "Anybody can do it once," Stick growls. The wonderful and sometimes problematic thing...

Thanks for everyone who's commented on this site and emailed me about these entries on self-producing. I'm very glad to see readers are finding value in them. I'll continue to post more. I have no idea how many, but I still need to natter on about such nuts and bolts things as publicity and dealing with cash flow management, as well as offer a few more digressional and semi-philosophical entries on this weird niche. I suppose this entry falls in the latter category. This isn't really a helpful "how to" entry, but it may help put some things in perspective...

SK made my job a little easier for this entry by reposting Mac Rogers' ranked list of things a company needs to do to build an audience from our online dialogue a few years back. Here it is below with Mac's recent addition: 1. Good branding (consisting of a logo, a website, email and snail mail updates, and individual show promotional materials that are tied together by some sort of visual strategy).2. A consistent record of good shows. (I'm being idealistic by putting this at #2.)3. Widening the group of artists you work with. When you see good work from...

Kent Barrett, who just began chronicling his efforts to produce his script, asked me some questions in the comments section of the previous entry, which made me realize I may have missed some points or only dealt with them in a cursory way. Here is our exchange, which I hope will help fill in some gaps and plug in some holes from my previous self-producing entries. (In the same comments section, RVCBard also asks some questions, which I do my best to answer. In addition, RLewis has also been helpful in answering some questions in the same comments section as...

UPDATE: Joshua Conkel graciously explains the nuts and bolts of his company's working relationship with Horse Trade in the comments section, and Sean Williams has posted this entry, which offers his insights to producing shows in the Fringe Festival (his company, Gideon, has done a total of four shows now at the Fringe; according to Mac Rogers, their experiences have been ultimately positive).I'll say right off the bat that this entry in this ongoing quixotic and rambling guide to self-producing is going to cover something that my company, Nosedive Productions, has had only very recent - and limited - experience...

Of course it figures that, after trying to make a habit of posting these self-producing how-to guide entries during the week, but leaving Friday clear for other such nonsense, I do the reverse this week. Ah, well. I am, after all, a blogger, and not to be trusted. Any ole fuckeroo, on with the show...RVCBard had asked me earlier about how to go about getting the right collaborators and my original answer was a little fumbling. I think this is because this falls more in the "alchemy" category than the hard science one. Still, I thought I should expand a...