Building a billion-dollar enterprise, 15 - Notes in preparation for a really big week.

Tomorrow is going to be such a big day that by the end of it, I may want to sleep for a week.

No such luck.

Early Wednesday morning, I will drag myself out of bed to catch a 7 a.m. flight for Los Angeles. From Wednesday afternoon through Friday night, I will enjoy/endure a whirlwind of meetings put together by my friend Andrew W. Thornhill.

At least, mostly put together by him. The first one, Wednesday evening, will be the regular monthly meeting of the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers West (BADWest). I expect good content from the presentation, but the real purpose is to be in the room with a group of documentary filmmakers. The relationships established Wednesday evening could prove transformative for me, especially if I wind up acquiring 1015 N. Homewood Ave., redeveloping it, and making a documentary about the process.

Anyway, after that comes the whirlwind.

I want to be on my toes for all of it, but the meeting which offers the greatest apparent opportunity will be an informal sitdown with Joseph Collins. Mr. Collins is President and Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of IC Places, Inc., the corporate parent of Punch Television Network, aka Punch TV. Punch is one of the numerous TV networks that sprung up after the transition from analog to digital television left all of America's 1,700 full-service TV stations with four channels, where they had previously had one. According to the press release announcing its first annual stockholders meeting, Punch ended 2012 with 38 partner stations.

I will spend much of the next three days studying the company's annual reports, along with the information on its websites. As with Joe Ciotti in tomorrow's meeting, the word that seems to best describe what I want to do with Mr. Collins is "seduce." I want to make him want to work with me. Not to pitch a specific project. To have him know that Luminaria Productions can offer a variety of projects over the next 2-3 years.

Or as Dov Simens taught me to say in "From Reel To Deal," "I have multiple projects in various stages of development."

Such as? Well, besides the aforementioned documentary on the redevelopment of 1015 N. Homewood, which would also be about Homewood itself, there's:

1. "The Laundry" - a dramatic TV series about the professional and personal challenges faced by staff and residents of a rehab facility/program that boasts one of the highest success rates in the field ("Come in dirty, leave clean"). The idea was hatched by actor-writer Atticus Cain, known around Homewood as William Robinson, who is also our tenant and one of my closest friends.

3. Either a one-hour TV special or a feature length documentary on Naomi Sims, the Westinghouse alum who became America's first black supermodel. This would build on work already done and already being done: Kilolo Luckett and I partnered last year for a tribute to Naomi Sims, and are planning a 2nd Annual Tribute on March 30, which would have been Ms. Sims 65th birthday. That tribute can be a major piece of a TV program/documentary.

4. "The Nature of Love" - a feature film (drama); a married woman unwittingly falls in love with a man who plans to kill her family. Both this and "The Moses Effect," below, are scripts that I have worked on, and need to finish anyway.

5. "The Moses Effect" - a feature film (comedy); a small town is thrown into chaos when the world's most advanced surveillance system enforces every law on the books, including absurd ones.

Did you see what I did there? I skipped #2. That's because if Mr. Collins expresses any level of interest, and if I have any choice about what to produce for/with Punch, the 1015 N. Homewood doc would be my second choice. "The Laundry" would be my first.

Why?

Jobs.

The desire to create jobs is a very large part of my motivation for building Luminaria Productions. And while even a small indie film can create 50+ jobs, my thinking is that a TV series would create more jobs for a longer period of time than a one-time project.

...okay, there's a second reason.

Financing. Which deserves its own post.

Reminders sweet and rude

On Saturday, Oct. 6, Janet and I went over to City Theatre, taking our goddaughter, Catherine, to see her dad, who acts under the stage/screen name Atticus Cain, perform in the City's Young Playwright's Festival.

The festival presented six short plays by middle- and high-schoolers, three in the afternoon and three in the evening. Between the two sets, we all hung out in South Side Works for a while, then Atticus dropped the three of us off while he went to prepare. And Janet, Catherine and I wound up at this place - The Milk Shake Factory:

Image: Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation

As we hung out there for bit, I puzzled over the question of whether The Milk Shake Factory used to be a retail store for Geoffrey Boehm Chocolates, a Lawrenceville-based candy maker that I worked for in the late 70s (I was a delivery driver).

I saw that the shop was full of goods from Edward Marc Chocolatier, and when I read the company story printed on the packages, I was 99% certain that it was the story of the same family that I had worked for. There were two brothers, Jeff and Bruce Edwards, their mom, whose name was Marie but who went by the nickname "Sissy," and her mom (or mom-in-law?), whom I only knew as "Ya-Ya."

They were Greek, with Ya-Ya having come over from the Old Country in..Lord knows when. And they exhibited the energy that some associate with Mediterranean folk - when I first started working there, I thought the company was in crisis because they all yelled so much. I finally realized that that was simply their way. They'd yell at each other and then I'd turn around and they'd be laughing with each other, just as loudly.

They were Christians, and like many in the late '70s, were involved in the charismatic movement (as was I). And again, they were as demonstrative in their faith as they were in everything else.

The brothers, Jeff and Bruce, were only a few years apart, but somehow were as different as they were alike. Jeff, the older, was more the hard-charging businessman; he wore suits and spent most of his time in the office, when he wasn't out on sales calls. Bruce was more inclined toward gentleness; he wore a baker's apron while he stirred massive batches of batter for varieties of candy and oversaw the workers on the production lines (who I recall as being all middle-aged women). Jeff viewed the Book of Proverbs as essential reading for business; Bruce read Brother Lawrence's "The Practice of the Presence of God" and wanted more of what Brother Lawrence described.

All of these memories arose in my mind while I loitered in The Milk Shake Factory, and with them, feelings of affection rose in my heart. I had loved these people, and would love to reconnect with them.

That desire lingered with me, and last Wednesday night, at something like 1 a.m., I decided to see if Google would yield a way to connect, or even just current information about the Edwardses.

I typed something like "bruce jeff edwards pittsburgh," and one item stood out from all the others that Google tossed up: an obituary for Pastor Bruce J. Edwards.

That was my friend whom I had loved so long ago, suddenly gone.

Glad to learn that he had become a pastor, confident that he had found the work gratifying and had served others well, saddened that I had missed the opportunity to connect with him, I gathered myself enough to write a note in the online guestbook.

And tried to absorb fully the import of this fact: he was 60 years old.

So am I.

So, been to the movies lately?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation since 1995 has totaled 48 percent. That is, what cost $1.00 in 1995 cost $1.48 in 2011.

That's an overall generalization: some things have gone down in price, and some things have gone up, but by less than 48 percent. And some things have gone up by more than 48 percent. Way more.

Like movie tickets.

According to a piece in the Chicago Tribune, headlined "Movie ticket sales hit 16-year low in 2011," movie tickets prices have risen more than 80 percent since 1995.

So is anyone surprised that people are buying fewer tickets? Really?

Last Thursday, I returned from 10 days or so in Louisville. Usually when I'm there for an extended visit, I'll go to a movie with family members. This time, I didn't. Janet and I stopped at a theatre once, but we didn't see anything showing that we wanted to see badly enough to part with the necessary cash.

I know people who have sworn off movie theatres on the basis of economics. Again, with an 80 percent increase in ticket prices during a period in which overall inflation has been 48 percent, does this surprise anyone?

Better question, perhaps: who cares? Or more precisely, who cares enough to change anything that they're doing?

Hollywood studios charge movie theatre owners to rent movies. Do they care enough about ticket sales to change anything they're doing, or do they view theatrical exhibition as merely a prelude to DVD sales and rentals?

Theatre owners certainly care, but do they care enough to do the most obvious thing to do when sales of an item decline - i.e., reduce the price? Do they trust their market enough to say, "At the right price, we'll sell more tickets, enough to cover increasing expenses?"

Atticus shared with me yesterday his idea that a smart studio/production company would have theatre owners cut the ticket prices for their releases, while offering them 15% of sales.

Are any Hollywood studios that smart? Hmmmm........

My friend Atticus Cain has a problem with musicals. He believes the performance of a play should be like an argument between two people in a restaurant: it makes you uncomfortable, but you can't stop watching (I don't whether he invented that analogy or picked it up in his voracious reading of people like David Mamet, whom we both admire). And part of the reason that you can't stop watching is that you don't know what's going to happen next. Pain (for public arguments are painful) and unpredictability make the drama.

What would happen, he asks, if suddenly one of the people in the argument started singing?

Well, of course, the drama flies right out the window. Suddenly the situation is manifestly unreal. It is visibly a performance for your entertainment, and there is no pain, nor is there unpredictablility, because everyone knows what will happen next: the singer will finish the song, singing the same notes that he or she sings in every performance.

An argument in a restaurant is entirely improvised; a musical is entirely not. Thus a musical cannot be a drama.

But this just ocurred to me: what if a musical were largely improvised? What if the music employed were jazz, which relies on improvisation. Could a jazz musical be genuinely dramatic?

And I thought, "Let me write that down."