I invited Jacquetta Szathmari to be a regular Guest Writer, contributing monthly. Her journey with the Hollywood Fringe Festival and marketing while across the country should interest many!
Jacuetta’s original Guest Post and bio can be found here. She wrote this at the beginning of her process, so soon we’ll hear about her progress.
Enjoy! -CMJ
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Ever eager, I have already started to get myself together for the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival. This will be the second time for both of us (myself and the fest) and I’m hoping to avoid some of the pitfalls I made last year and replicate and improve upon the successes.
I am doing a new version of the show I did last year. Remember, it was a work in progress. This year I’ll call it – “That’s funny. You didn’t sound black on the phone” 2.0. To be frank, audiences were thin (see the pitfalls section) so it’s not as if have exhausted the material on the total available audience. Plus this year I will have a director, and a completed script—leaving a lot less to chance. Included in this updated version will be the new performance skills I have been developing through workshops at the Upright Citizens Brigade and I might even throw in a set piece for good measure. And there will be blocking, I promise, but no mask work or mime. Maybe even a song. Really. It will still be raw and fringey around the edges but with significantly fewer loose threads. I picked up a lot of great ideas from the many one-person shows at the 2010 HFF and I ready to try some of them out. Except for dance.
I have already started looking for a place to stay, and this time for longer. I fell in love with LA, so I am thrilled about this, and it’s a write-off. The challenge of promoting the show from 3000 miles away proved greater than the comprehensive reach of last year’s twitter/facebook/multiple website ad campaign. My plan this year is to sail into town a week or so beforehand and hit the comedy clubs, improv palaces, cafes, theatres, and gay bars and try to drum up some ticket sales with flyers and word of mouth (my mouth mostly).
I will start booking comedy spots to preview my show in stand-up form. To wit, I am breaking my almost 60-minute show (including ten minutes of rousing laugher and applause) into 10-minute sets. Since it’s easier to get short amounts of stage time in NYC, I will be able to really hone the act and get immediate feedback as well as maximum practice. In addition, I can film these segments and put them up on youtube and try to get some viral action. I will do the same in podcast form. Easier, said than done. In any case, I said I will TRY. When I get to LA, early, I hope to get the sets in to some local comedy clubs as advertisement.
I am also looking into getting a catchier logo. I know the title works, so now I need some imagery to better support it. I collected fliers that caught my eye last year and made note of what design elements worked and will communicate those ideas to a designer.
I came to the renting theatres game fairly late last year and picked some spaces and times that did not work for my show. While LA might not be a late town, my show is a late show and that is when people seemed to enjoy it the most. The show also works better in a small house—it’s pretty intimate. At 4pm in a 100-seater I could have slipped on a peel of banana and not gotten a laugh. Alternatively, the late shows, no doubt fueled by drinks from the bar or the corner store, were pretty raucous. Lesson learned. I am both more comfortable and palatable in a comedy club atmosphere—daytime does not support the funny. Late shows also give me more time to see other performances. Last year I saw about 15 shows. I wish I had seen more.
I am now having and anxiety attack upon reading this and realizing how much work there is to do. Instead of panicking I am going to listen to a cassette tape (I know, right! It was the only available format on Amazon) of Whoopi Goldberg’s Fontaine Why am I Straight. It was seeing this show on cable in 1988 that lead me to this point. Let’s hope it can be as invigorating as inspiring as it was when I stayed up late at my uncle’s to watch it on satellite.
