It came up from me, pounding my fists on the desk saying fuck subscribers. I’m so tired of subscribers. They drive me nuts; they’re strangling me; I hate them. I don’t care how good they are; I don’t care how much money they bring in. Fuck subscribers! And someone there at the table said well if we’re going to fuck them we should tell them we love them first, and we should figure out a way that we can fuck them but they stay anyway. How could we have it all?
I wonder what happens if you substitute the phrase "investors" in that sentence... oh yeah, it's a Goldman Sachs business model. Seriously though, the real weight of above is this claim:
And ultimately, I had board members say to me that Black Rider was a huge failure. My argument back was no it wasn’t! We lost subscribers for that show, but we didn’t lose them as subscribers. They remained subscribers the next year and they renewed.
Bonus big claim:
Theresa: You would never produce a brand new play [in the Taper], right?
Michael: I would have to be very surprised by a play that had so much value that I could put it into a sixteen hundred-seat house. It would have to come with something—who was writing it or who was performing it that put it at such a level that you knew it could live within that space. But we do new musicals in there obviously.
Bonus sound bite:
I had to change one of the seasons—all three theaters were running September to August—I had to take the Taper and put it on a calendar year, January to December because I couldn’t plan three theaters at once. My head was exploding.
