At the end of February, The Ladders featured Debra Donston-Miller's article Depression is Making Unemployment Longer, which reiterated the well-known fact that unemployment walks hand in hand with depression and anxiety, and that, in turn, diminishes your ability to get employed.
It's a vicious circle, you know. A person looses his job – that's on its own is a hard blow to his ego. Nevertheless, he gets right on all job boards – Monster, CareerBuilder, etc. – posts his resume and applies to every single opening that matches his qualifications. As time goes by, he keeps lowering his expectations – now applications go out to jobs with smaller titles and lower salaries. Still, the response is not too hot.
Nowadays, the statistical probability of converting applications into a recruiter's or hiring manager's interest is around 2% for high-level financial professionals – CFOs, Controllers, Financial Directors, etc. The national numbers of people not being able to find employment in one, sometimes two, and more years are scary.
While you are waiting for the sparks in the dark, your spirits get lower and lower. You become listless, loose interest in everything – depression really kicks in. The anxiety of not being able to support yourself when the savings and unemployment compensation run out gets overwhelming. You swing between over-hype of appraising your possession for possible liquidation and inability to move a muscle.
Still, you force yourself to apply every day, you do your networking, ask people around. Finally, quantity turns into quality: you've sent out 100 resumes and someone finally called you. You've had a positive response after the phone interview and now you are going for a face-to-face appointment. Anxiety floods you – the workspace environment, which you have not experienced for several months, seems so alien to you.
You are prepared, though – you are a seasoned executive with superior qualifications, a likable person, well-spoken, know how to handle yourself. The interview seems to go well, but there are so many candidates, and you might have said something wrong just because the depression and anxiety ate some of your confidence away. Every day you wait for a call back, but nobody ever does; nobody even sends an email to let you know that you did not qualify – people don't do those sort of polite things anymore.
Now, you are loosing hope altogether: it is more and more difficult to make yourself even to look at the job listings. It seems like staring at the television screen all day without seeing what's on is a better option…
You know what? I am not going to tell you that it will get better. I am not a fortune teller. I don't know it, but neither do you. Yes, it's fucking tough out there! As I always say, we live in a new economic reality. The truth is that you may need to rethink your entire life. But you cannot let the depression eating away your time. FIGHT IT! Do you know what happens with every single day you waste on giving in to nothingness? It disappears and you will never get it back.
The Ladders' article quoted cognitive behavioral psychologist Deb Brown, who suggests creating a routine for yourself as one of the helpful tools. My readers know how big I am on time-management and routines. Whether you are fighting the unemployment depression or job frustration, scheduling your time and filling your day with meaningful tasks always helps. And when you are unemployed, you have an opportunity to do things that you never had time for before: study Spanish with that Rosetta Stone pack you've got for your birthday two years ago; transfer all those home videos onto DVDs, get yourself fit.
You don't really need more than two-three hours a day to look for new openings and apply. Spend the rest of your free time (FREE TIME – when do we have it otherwise?) catching up on your life. And don't be a prisoner of your schedule either – let go of it for a day, when you feel frustrated.
And listen, even if things with employment never get better and some drastic decisions will need to be made, at least you will not need to look back at the long stretch of a complete misery right before that.
Hey you, hard-working people, regardless of your profession, stature, or rank! I am talking to all of you! Beware of "NICE" BOSSES!
You know the type – he always smiles at you, tells you jokes (and laughs loudly himself), asks about your family (sometimes even during first interviews), says "thank you" at the end of the day, declares that he wants everyone who works for him to be happy, claims to keep your opinion in high regard.
This is all BULLSHIT!!! This boss is a liar and a hypocrite! Don't think for a second that because he acts like that on the surface, he really cares and will do right by you in terms of things that really matter, i.e. create material (compensation, benefits, working space) and moral (respect, recognition) stimuli for you to work harder and feel satisfied with your own performance!
In fact, this faux exterior should be taken as a first sign of a shitty character. There is an old proverb that applies perfectly here: "He makes a very soft bed that will be hard to sleep in." The only person such a boss cares about is himself! At the end of the day, all that huggy, phony warmth is just for him and him alone. And because people like that lie to themselves the same way they lie to others, he goes home honestly believing that he is a swell guy and a wonderful boss. He simultaneously pats himself in the back and jerks himself off.
But when it comes to serious, important staff… This is the guy who will fight you tooth and nail for every penny of raise or bonus you want to give your direct subordinates at the end of the year. It doesn't matter to him that you only want to reward those who applied themselves the hardest, grew, learned, developed, and that you keep it all within the budget. He'd rather double his own withholdings (for being so wonderful!) than reinforce the merit. In fact, he will say, "Didn't we pay for her plane tickets when she went to her grandmother's funeral?" Yes, we did – you suggested it to be "nice." So, now you think that was in lieu of the annual performance bonus?
And this is the guy who will reply to every great proposal from the members of his executive team, writing the exclamation-point emails: "Thank you!" "Great idea!" "Brilliant!" But he will never green-light the actual implementations. You will see the mean gleam in his eyes every time the life proves you right or someone on the outside of the business confirms that you understand it much better than he does. If that happens, he will enter a crazy cycle, competing with you all the time, even though he is the boss and, therefore, already won by default.
I believe that the best working environments are created not by cuddly fakeness, but by indiscriminate fairness, accommodation of professional growth, and respect of achievements (the principles I myself exercise). If that's impossible to have, I prefer an honest brute instead of a "nice" hypocritical bastard. In this economy (or, as I call it "new reality") only a few of us get lucky and find "better" jobs. The rest must tolerate whatever hateful things they are forced to experience. And that's Ok (there is no such a thing as a "perfect" job anyway), as long as you face the reality with the full understanding of the situation and don't get fooled by appearances.
From time to time I feel a need to come back to the discussion of an emotional burden carried by the accountants who find themselves in the unfortunate position of recognizing and reporting business losses. And I feel absolutely justified doing so, because it is one of the most painful professional experiences. Moreover, it is a reality many small-business CFOs and Controllers have to face with a persistent regularity. Less than three months ago, for example, I wrote about the effect of losses on bosses (upon closing of the second quarter by the companies with a calendar fiscal year). Nobody ever mentions how hard it is for us to be the messengers of news that may translate into budget cuts, layoffs, credit line recalls, and possible termination of business. So, I feel obligated to talk about it.
Imagine my surprise, when I discovered a depiction of the familiar sentiments in a Booker Prize winning novel about one woman's wasted life – Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. I don't know whether Ms. Atwood is acquainted with somebody who shared their experiences with her, or she is that good at getting inside her characters' heads and imagining how it would feel to someone in real life. What matters is that it's very accurate. So, here it is:
"Two and two made four… But what if you didn't have two and two? Then things wouldn't add up. And they didn't add up, I couldn't get them to; I couldn't get the red numbers in the… books to turn black. This worried me horribly: it was as if it were my own personal fault. When I closed my eyes at night I could see the numbers on the page before me, laid out in rows on my square oak desk… – those rows of red numbers like so many mechanical caterpillars, munching away at what was left of the money. When what you could manage to sell a thing for was less than what it paid you to make it… – this was how the numbers behaved. It was bad behaviour – without love, without justice, without mercy – but what could you expect? The numbers were only numbers. They had no choice in the matter."
“To be in the hands of an auteur like [Andrey Tarkovskiy], that would be just brilliant. But I don’t know if those kind of films can ever be made any more. To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe… it just doesn’t happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion. But that’s part of the problem with politics and history and everything today, that people think there’s a right and a wrong, a good and a bad… maybe there just isn’t . . .”
Olde William used the melancholy Jacques to channel his own musings on life, "All the world's stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances, and one men in his time plays many parts…"
Of course, in 1600 this notion wasn't fresh. Shakespeare's mesmerising, rhythmic words only serve as the best description of this behavioral phenomenon. Yet, philosophers of ancient times wrote about it, including the father of dramatic theory himself Aristotle (check out his Poetics).
If you think about it, this makes theater the oldest of all arts. Since the beginning of times, humans put on various situation-appropriate personas and played out their dramas, tragedies, and comedies. The mere understanding that everyone acts, creates a subconscious desire to observe others. The concept of "people-watching" is the most primal theatrical experience. Humans always gathered in designated places (clearings in the woods, forums, public houses, squares, boulevards, ballrooms) to witness the spectacle of "acting in public."
Then, there were those who possessed a talent to turn themselves into different people on cue and had a desire to show it off for the amusement of others. First, they would simply replicate actual events and emulate real people. When that wasn't enough, they wrote fictive situations with imagined characters.
This created a demand for people who could write better stories with multiple characters. The actors playing those characters needed to be coordinated in time and space, instructed on how to understand the writer's ideas… And thus the collective effort known as performance arts were born.
I adore theater. For me, there is nothing more powerful than the intimacy and the immediacy of a high-quality theatrical experience. No other high-art form can compare to looking straight into Kevin Spacey's eyes when he personifies a dead-end insanity as O'Neill's Hickey; or contemplating the perversity of marriage as lived by Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in Edward Albee's masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; or play after play marvel at the surgically precise dissection of human conditions by Donald Margulies, Theresa Rebeck, or Tracy Letts.
Theater is a wonderful litmus of true acting talent. It's not like the movies, where performing amounts to a series of dress rehearsals with the best one going to print. There are no reshoots or outtakes: it's right here, right now, and then gone forever. From time to time, you witness magic conjured by an actor, whose name you've never heard before. And frequently you squirm in your seat seeing Hollywood A-listers failing to deliver.
Sometimes you get fabulously lucky when, trusting your intuition (and Scott Rudin's impeccable sense of quality), you go to see a tiny production of a three-person play in a small theater on Barrow street, and discover a gem of one of the best contemporary plays you've seen: Adam Rapp's chamber tragedy Red Light Winter.
And, if you are a real theater freak, you may jump on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and hit an artistic jackpot – become one of only 500 people who were fortune to witness the marvel of The Pod Project.
So, are people who create these incredible, unforgettable artistic experiences – the playwrights, the directors, the actors, including the super-stars with household names, adequately rewarded? Let's see.
We will start small. The Pod Project, with its 13 stations, each occupied by a single actor performing in front of a single spectator, was produced on a $20,000 budget. It was financed primarily by the contributions from the creator Nancy Bannon's friends. With just one spectator in each pod at a time, only 13 tickets per performance could be sold ($35 a ticket, if memory serves). They had just enough rent money for a two-week run. With two-three performances a day, slightly over 50% of the investment was recovered. I believe, each actor received about $500 for the entire engagement. After paying all expenses, the creators of this, one of a kind, event didn't get any pay at all.
This type of micro-budget theatrical endeavors are typical for Off-Off-Broadway, with average total budgets of $18,000, of which over 35% is eaten away by the space rental. Set design, lights, sound, props, costumes, hair, and make-up can all be obtained in NYC for about $2,800 (16% of the budget). Some sort of publicity and advertising is a must – another 15% of the funding. You can easily find a qualified stage manager to cover the entire run for about $300. The directors bring home $500 . The engagements are usually short – 2-3 weeks.
For each performance, the actors come on stage and transform themselves into characters, living through love, loss, insanity, obsession, or what have you. 38% of them don't get paid and those who do make about $400. And the author? Most likely, she and her volunteering helpers are the ones who put all pieces together for the sake of showcasing the play. Essentially, nobody makes any money. They do it out of love for their arts and everyone hopes that something will come out of it "in the long run."
Off-Broadway productions are still relatively small, but far more established. They are usually put on in better known spaces (such as Theater Row theaters, Lucille Lotrel's, Peter Norton's, etc.), which, on average, can fit 200-300 of avid theater-goers. With the median ticket price of $65, a limited run (let's say 12 weeks) of a popular play can generate over $2 million in ticket sales. To fill the seats, off-Broadway theatrical organizations try to stage works by playwrights with some cred for edgy, frequently controversial, material, which, in turn, can attract actors with known names. The preference is usually given to psychological dramedies with smaller casts (for economical reasons, if nothing else).
This is how we got such memorable wonders as the NYC revivals of Lanford Wilson's Burn This with Edward Norton and Catherine Keener, Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon with Lili Taylor and Kristen Johnston; world premier of Jonathan Marc Sherman's Things We Want directed by Ethan Hawke with Peter Dinklage, Josh Hamilton, Paul Dano, and Zoe Kazan; the first staging of the two-act version of Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry with Bill Pullman; Propeller Theater's Shakespeare at BAM, and many other notable productions.
Of course, no matter how dedicated to their craft and how tempted to test themselves against the brutal nakedness of the stage, these actors don't work for free (nor should they). In fact, except for some volunteering ushers, everyone involved in an off-Broadway production usually gets paid at least the minimum regulated by their respective unions.
Obviously, the $2 million in tickets sales will not cover a production budget of a play performed 60-100 times. This is why most theatrical organizations dominating off-Broadway are non-profits: The New Group, MCC Theater, The Signature Theater, Second Stage, Playwrights Horizons, Lincoln Center Theater, and BAM. They rely heavily on subscriptions, grants, donations, patronage, and bequests.
On the other hand, Broadway productions are all for-profit (not to be confused with profitable) enterprises. The commercial scheme behind a Broadway machine is not much different from a standard business model: develop a show's idea or acquire/opt a play, attach possible talent, pitch the project to investors, fit the budget to the obtained capital, hire the team, conceptualize PR and advertising, and go to work with a purpose of selling enough tickets (from discounted mezzanine for Wednesday matinees at $65 to premium seats at up to $350 per ticket) to generate a satisfactory return on investment.
The profitability concerns start at the bottom – at the playwright level. According to one of the most prominent of American stage writers, Tony Kushner, "no writer can make a living writing for stage." If you are writing for Broadway and live in New York City, no matter how good and lauded you are, you will not make enough even to cover the rent. If a writer is a member of the Writers' Guild (WGA) he must be paid at least the minimum prescribed by this union: currently $63,895 (my God, I know secretaries who make as much). It appears that the highest contract payment in 2012 season was around $120K. Of course, if the writer has a powerful agent, some royalties will be added as well. Then the total earned will depend on the length of the play's run.
Just like the fiction writers, many playwrights supplement their income with teaching. Some succeed writing for television and the big screen (David Mamet, Alan Sorkin, Alan Ball, Theresa Rebeck, among others). And good for them: not only that they make more money there, but they also access larger audiences (successful plays, on average, are seen by maybe 100-200 thousand people). But the painful truth is that, while the best of stage writers are busy in Hollywood, they are not writing plays. Thus, the great American Drama suffers.
Broadway directors are members of a union as well – the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, which dictates the minimum contract fees of $62,280. All Broadway directors' contracts include royalty clauses. Unlike the writers (who, if they are very prolific, are most likely to write a play a year), the directors can stage more than one project in a span of 12 months, thus multiplying their revenues.
Again, the very medium of the theatrical experience, the actor, who has the guts to come on stage in front of a live audience and forget himself in the tribulations of someone else's life, is the lowest paid stage asset. Still, those who get to be on Broadway consider themselves lucky. Not only because they do get paid (the minimum guaranteed by the Actors Guild is $1,600 per week), but also because this is their chance to be noticed by the theater-going casting professionals and to establish contacts with other actors and playwrights, who may move to Hollywood and remember them one day… Hey, this is the profession they chose, might as well try to make a living out of it.
As I mentioned, many actors, who started on stage and became big stars, from time to time come back to experience the raw test of theater. Of course, their agents and managers would never let them work for $1,600 a week (they need to keep their own 10-15% cuts lucrative too). But, comparatively speaking, they are willing to go on stage for peanuts (such is the power of theater!).
As this "post" has now officially reached the size of a long e-mag article, I cannot go through all the data I've got about stars' theater-vs-movies compensation. Just a few examples then. In 2006, Julia Roberts headlined 12-weeks run of Three Days of Rain ( a disappointment, to say the least). Her pay rate was $50,000/week, or total of $600,000. At the time, her salary for a lead role in a feature (average shooting time 3 month) was $15 million.
In 2009, we were blessed to witness the phenomenon of an Englishman Daniel Craig and an Australian Hugh Jackman eerily transforming themselves into two gritty Chicago cops in Keith Huff's A Steady Rain (playwrights LOVE that rain-on-stage effect). Each of them was paid $100,000/week over a 16-weeks run. By then, Daniel Craig has already achieved the status of possibly the best James Bond of all times and finished shooting his second 007 installment, Quantum of Solace – reported salary $7,200,000. Hugh Jackman just completed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which he turned from human to mutant and back for a paltry sum of $20,000,000.
Of course, it is not economically proper to compare theatrical and cinematic financing, especially when it comes to blockbusters: they differ in the most important factor, which drives all the numbers – the size of the audience. The only stage productions that attempt to match the international multi-screen reach of the film industry are the Broadway cash cows, better known as big-budget musicals.
They are deliberately intended for long-runs and cater to the endless rivers of out-of-town visitors. How long a run? Just to give you an idea: according to NY Times calculations a $65 million production (Spider-Man, the most expensive musical to date), housed in a 2000-seat theater, will need to survive for at least 4 years before it recovers the initial investment.
In their mass appeal and risky investment undertakings, Broadway musicals are similar to the big studio movies with high gross expectations. It is no wonder that many of currently running musicals are based on movies, and many successful stage spectacles are transferred to the silver screen (the latest, Les Miserables, is to open on Christmas Day). And that brings us to the next installment in this series.
The Frustrated CFO 
