June 2012

• Cryonics! the Musical

  Posted by gmadmin   |   June 30, 2012

  Ok, not really. But I have cryonics on my mind today for some reason.

  When I was a freshman in college, my buddy Kale and I watched Vanilla Sky and became interested in the subject of cryopreservation. It turned out that the biggest cryonics center in the world is here in town, so we went there for a tour. It was absolutely fascinating, and I ended up volunteering there a few times just because I enjoyed being in such a brainy environment.

  It’s a mind-boggling premise. What if you could freeze your brain and be thawed out sometime in the future? The idea got a lot more attention back in the eighties and nineties and was mostly dismissed because the technology just wasn’t there. But like in all other areas of science, enormous strides are being made, and the issue is worth revisiting. I keep toying with the idea of writing a one-act on the subject. Probably my favorite thing about Go Musicals is my freedom to write about whatever I want. Hopefully others will find this stuff as fascinating as I do!

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
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• Getting the Hang of Things

  Posted by gmadmin   |   June 26, 2012

  I started Go Musicals a few years ago with just Final Vinyl. I put most of my savings into that show and made many expensive mistakes. It’s been a rough few years of learning and adapting. With The Branson Bandit Babes, I totally missed the mark and have basically had to shelve that show (which is a bummer because I think it’s pretty cool). With The Atomic Brain, I think I finally figured out what I want to do with this company. In the past year I have ramped up production drastically, and I think the quality of the work has improved across the board. The music for It’s a Wonderful Life is my best yet, and Night of the Living Dead might top it. By the end of this year, I will have tripled the size of my catalog.

  I plan to keep up this rate of production next year and the year after that. As the catalog expands and improves, I’ll get bolder about investing more into advertising. I’ll start looking to form more partnerships, and I’ll start submitting my stuff to contests, colleges, and community theatres in addition to high schools. In five years I want to have 15-20 musicals, 10+ one-acts, and a few straight plays. By that time I would like to hire someone to help me with sales and advertising so I can focus more exclusively on writing new stuff. Maybe I’ll form some partnerships in foreign markets to translate my shows into other languages.

  I’d also like to start making movies. I think I could adapt most of my shows for around $250k. Film versions of these musicals would make great sales tools, and I think the actors who perform in the stage versions would like to have a copy of the movie.

  I’m feeling so fired up right now! I’ve been staying with a friend in Denver (sleeping on the floor!) and I’m stoked to get home and get back to work! 🙂

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
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• The Girl Who Cried Disney

  Posted by gmadmin   |   June 21, 2012

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvoijEXk2cA
  LOL!!! My friend Alex made this with her sister, Kevynn.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
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• Regulations and Entrepreneurship… The Musical?

  Posted by gmadmin   |   June 5, 2012

  This morning I wrote an email to a friend to follow up on a discussion we had last night. I thought I’d share it here:
  Regarding risk and new ventures, the problem I found when I was looking into financing a movie is that a movie, like many ventures, is very risky, requires enormous capital investment, yet it has a very high potential upside. In theory an entrepreneur can finance such a venture by selling pieces of the upside to unload the risk. If it’s a good value, smart investors will buy. If it’s a bad value, smart investors won’t buy and the project won’t get financed. This is a good test for the entrepreneur, because if an enterprise can pass muster with investors that is a good sign that it is fit. Here we have a voluntary arrangement in which not only is the risk dispersed and the upside shared, but the things that kill most startups – bad business plan, poor management, and under-capitalization – are mitigated by the investors. Businesses formed this way ought to be on superior footing.

  But in reality, that kind of arrangement is largely prohibited by regulations that forbid entrepreneurs from connecting with investors. So instead entrepreneurs finance their ventures by incurring debt – either private debt from family or by securing a loan against a house or something. We end up with businesses that don’t have enough money to survive the dip, don’t have the benefit of investor oversight, and ultimately land the entrepreneur in bankruptcy or defaulting on a debt to family. That’s the profile of a typical small business, isn’t it?

  Even worse, the current regime is discriminatory. It’s one thing for a college graduate from Paradise Valley to get loans from family, or even to get investors because they can satisfy the pre-existing relationship requirements. But where does that leave the South Phoenix mechanic who wants to start a body shop but has no access to capital? In a free market, the mechanic can compete for investor dollars, and investors will reward her based on the soundness of her business plan and experience. But the government deems people too unsophisticated to make those decisions on their own. In the interest of protecting investors, it strangles entrepreneurship.

  I’m of the opinion that progress and prosperity are created by entrepreneurs. A competitive environment has a lot of natural friction for entrepreneurs to overcome in their bid for investor dollars; adding more friction comes at a great cost to society, I believe. Now of course we want to protect grannies from being defrauded, so some investor protections are necessary. But like in so many other things, we go way, way too far: we maximize investor protections without any regard to the costs to progress and development. What should be a small correction becomes the overriding principle. And the net actual effect is that there are whole dead zones in entrepreneurship. Middle and low-income communities, ventures that require moderate (say, between $100k and half a million) start-up capital, ventures that provide good returns but don’t scale up in the way that would attract venture capital… These areas are anemic when they should be the most dynamic. On the investor side, ordinary people don’t have the privilege of participating in the private equity market – where they can actually bring their intelligence to bear in finding good deals – and instead they are stuck competing on the public exchanges where they don’t stand a chance at outsmarting the professionals. Where we should have a market of small companies competing for investor dollars, instead we have none – all in the name of protecting grandma. And do the protections we have actually prevent the Bernie Madoffs and AIGs of the world? Of course not lol.

  I came across a parallel example recently talking with someone who works for Medtronic. He said the company is totally dysfunctional and everyone there knows it, but they have virtually no competition. The only companies he said that can make medical technology are Medtronic, Johnson and Johnson, and some other company. The reason is that nowadays companies have to spend literally upwards of a billion dollars on clinical trials in order to bring something to market. Well, consumer protections are important, and nowhere are they more important than in the medical field. But these things come at an invisible cost in innovation, prices, progress, and lives that could have been saved… A billion dollars is probably ten times too high a burden; what we should do is ask ourselves how much less safe we would be if the burden for bringing a medical product to market were a hundred million. Might that strike a more optimal balance between market competition / innovation and consumer protection? Might tort law pick up some of the slack? But unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way… The general interest of society is not represented as well as the special interests of J&J and Medtronic. I guess my point is that there is some validity to the general spirit of these laws – protecting the little guy from predators. But in everything there are trade-offs, even if the costs are the invisible counter-factual – the progress that could have been. And we should take seriously, on principle, the question of how much we want the government to impinge on our freedom to enter into voluntary arrangements in the spirit of protecting us from ourselves. It’s a bit like living under police rule because a small minority of people are criminals, in my opinion.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
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• Summer 2012 – busy busy busy!

  Posted by gmadmin   |   June 4, 2012

  I just want to share an update about the shows I’ve promised to have finished by 2013. It’s a Wonderful Life is so close to completion I can practically taste it. The demo music should be completely finished within the next three weeks. I’ve decided to work on Night of the Living Dead next because I want to try to get it ready by Halloween if possible (though that’ll be pushing it). After that will come Hipster. Note that the songs are already written and I know how they’re going to go. There’s just a long, laborious process between having a song in your head and having it on CD. But I’m working on ways to speed things up, and so far it has been pretty successful. I am totally confident that I will have everything that I’ve promised ready in time for Spring productions. Hopefully some of it will be ready much sooner. 🙂

  So far I haven’t had much of a response to “Gene Autry in The Phantom Empire!”, which is a bummer because I think it’s an awesome show.  It’s the only show I’ve done where I’m not creating original music, so it was obviously ready much faster than the others. All the songs are authentic cowboy songs from the 1800’s. I initially planned to write new songs, until I started looking through the American songbooks and I realized there was no way I could outdo the classics. The lyrics to some of those old cowboy songs give me shivers. They probe into the deepest mysteries of life in a way I never would have expected. I hope I can figure out how to stir up more interest in that show, because it’ll be a real shame if nobody gets to see it.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
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