Other disappointments over the years include Crazy for You, Footloose (''We couldn't give the tickets away in the end'') and Man of La Mancha.įrost says there are no shows where he has been totally ''screwed''. Buoyed by their first success at Sydney's Footbridge Theatre when they made a $70,000 profit on a show, the two young producers, Gordon and Frost, embarked on another, Women Behind Bars. They do it because they love the industry and, if they lose their money, they are not going to be bruised … they certainly sober up very quickly when a show starts losing money.''ĭuring our simple meal - Frost doesn't like to drink during the working day he orders john dory fillets with a side order of chips and vegetables and no dessert - I'm struck by his straightforward, down-to-earth manner.īut it wasn't always so. ''Then there is the other type who can write a cheque straight away for a couple of hundred thousand dollars and it is not a problem. ''There are two sets of people: one says, 'I can make more money investing in a show than I can from investing in the stock market.' They are investors first, that is what they do, and you can pick them straight away. They want two things: to make money and to get close to the romance and glamour of the stage. If there is any resemblance to Max Bialystock, the scheming theatrical producer in Mel Brooks's The Producers - who lures little old ladies into writing cheques for his next play, to be called ''Cash'' - then Frost is hiding it well.īut he has his own theory about the kinds of people willing to put their money into one of his productions. Looking for new investors and encouraging previous ones to back him again consumes much of his time. In fact, during our two-hour lunch, it's hard to get ''Frosty'', as he is known in the industry, to talk about anything else. ''I used to love it but - I don't know - as I get older, as I get grumpier, I enjoy raising money more than all the other stuff,'' he says. But now, he says, he enjoys dealing with investors more than handling the creative side of any new production.
In the 1980s, when he was working with the late Ashley Gordon, and later, when he teamed up with James Erskine at Sports and Entertainment Ltd, Frost was happy to leave the marketing and finances to his partner. Getting a new production up and running involves negotiating the rights for a musical, securing a run in the increasingly heavily booked schedules for Australian theatres and, most important, convincing investors to back a show.
Theatre-lover, romantic, networker, risk-taker … but the most apt tag for Frost is dealmaker. ''It is 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
0 kommentar(er)
