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Creative Capitalists
Area entrepeneurs generate cash from culture
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Business New Haven
10/13/2003
By: Karen Singer
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The arts and entertainment world is teeming with non-profits struggling to stay afloat while pursuing their creative dreams.
Far fewer choose a for-profit path for products or services aimed at ever more fickle consumers.
Yet arts and entertainment can be profitable. Below are several examples of companies making it work.
Celluloid Hero
Film distributors were skeptical several years ago when Arnold Gorlick pitched his plan for an art-house cinema in Madison. They knew Gorlick from his many years of managing the York Square Cinema in New Haven, but seriously questioned whether enough ticket-buyers would turn up at a shoreline venue to make it worth their while.
Gorlick, however, was confident he had the right audience and the right location. Not only was he able to obtain a U.S. Small Business Administration loan to help finance the $500,000 venture, but he and his film buyer also convinced distributors to take a chance.
Though hardly an overnight success, the gamble is finally paying off.
"All I had was a passion and confidence in my expertise to do this," Gorlick, 56, says of his decision to build the 421-seat Madison Art Cinemas, which opened on May 21, 1999.
"Most people follow film titles — but my mission was to have a significant part of the mature audience wake up and ask, ‘What’s playing at the Madison Art Cinemas?’ and give us the first right of refusal."
He also wanted the facility to look and feel distinctive from other movie houses. So he asked former Moscow theater director (and Oakdale Music Theater designer) Vladimir Shpitalnik to lend a hand. The result is a space featuring bright, bold colors, two big screens, plush seats and an espresso bar serving baked goods and mineral water.
Friends were willing to invest some money, but securing the SBA loan was a critical part of the process.
"It was a harrowing experience," Gorlick recalls. "I had to write a business plan, which I’d never done before, and talk about things like demographics and how much I was going to gross the first year."
Seeking out chamber of commerce and other market surveys, including a BMW study of olive-oil consumption (high correlation to affluence, one supposes), Gorlick found data indicating a potential audience of around 200,000 upscale, arts-oriented people within a 15-mile radius of Madison.
"If I was one town to the west, in Guilford, it would have been psychologically too far from New London, or one town to the east in Clinton, too far from New Haven," he says.
His own research, based on ZIP codes, shows some patrons are coming from even more distant places, including Stonington, Durham, Middletown and Milford.
He has also built an audience with a film club, started three years ago, which previews forthcoming films with discussions hosted by Yale film studies professor Jon MacKay. Titles are not disclosed in advance, and actors, directors and others connected with the film being shown sometimes have been known to turn up at the screening.
The Key Sunday Cinema Club at Madison is part of a nationwide chain and the only one in Connecticut. Limited to 250 participants, club memberships have been sell-outs each seven-series season, and waiting lists have gotten longer.
Gorlick relies on agents Rob Lawinski and Ron Lesser of Manhattan-based Lesser Theatre Service for cinema bookings, but handles advertising and promotions directly with distributors.
He has discounted tickets on slow days, and done cross-promotions with films such as Whale Rider, where audiences could win free passes to Mystic Aquarium and free whale watch trips with a Massachusetts-based company.
Gorlick today has 15 employees, most of them part-time. Three of the most valuable part-timers have pension plans.
"I don’t believe in the idea of a self-made man or woman," Gorlick says. "I’ve stitched together a community of people who are excellent, and participate in my life.
"If you treat people decently, that also happens to be good business."
Gorlick also works out deals with distributors for discounted film rentals for benefit premieres for groups such as the Madison Lion’s Club and Mercy Center, a local Catholic retreat for personal development. The movie house hosts an annual Academy Award night simulcast to raise money for Leeway, the AIDS hospice in New Haven.
Gorlick admits to having more than a few sleepless nights during the first years of the cinema’s existence.
"Two years in a row now we have turned a profit," he says. Now he is thinking about adding a third screen. "Getting back to that zero point took longer than I thought it would. I risked everything — even my home was on the line. But everything came back to me."
Scene — and Heard
An itinerant musician returned home nearly two decades ago to pursue a childhood dream.
"I always wanted to run my own record label," says Phil Rosenthal, a songwriter and performer perhaps best known for his work as lead singer and guitarist for the Seldom Scene, a popular bluegrass group.
Rosenthal, 55, joined the Seldom Scene in 1977, and recorded seven albums with the group. But he grew weary after touring extensively in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
Seeking a new musical direction, the Guilford native came back to Connecticut from Washington, D.C. in 1986, bought a house and with his wife, Beth Sommers, and founded American Melody, a recording company producing bluegrass and folk music for children and families.
The company is based at Rosenthal’s Guilford home, which he spent a year renovating to accommodate a recording studio and office.
He already had plenty of microphones, tape recorders and other recording equipment, stemming from years of collecting recording paraphernalia, and says he "pretty much" self-financed the project.
Even with Rosenthal’s many music business connections, it took a while to generate distributors’ interest in his label.
"A lot of them don’t want to deal with you until you have at least four or five recordings, and preferably a catalogue of ten or 15," he says.
Rosenthal produced the studio’s first album, Turkey in the Straw: Bluegrass Songs for Children, while still with Seldom Scene. But it took nearly four years of spending money on making albums and generating no income before things started to turn around.
Finding distributors, he learned, is no guarantee of success.
"Sometimes they go bankrupt owing you money," Rosenthal notes. "There were times I thought, ‘I hope this is going to work.’"
It is working. The American Melody catalogue contains 22 releases, reflecting hours spent researching original versions of songs, arranging and performing them as well as creating album covers and liner notes. The albums have generated sales as well as accolades from the American Library Association and Parents’ Choice Foundation.
The business is a family affair. Rosenthal’s daughter, singer/songwriter Naomi Sommers, recently released her debut CD, Flying Through, on the American Melody label, and both Sommers and his son, jazz musician Daniel Rosenthal, have performed on several other company CDs. A small coterie of musician friends, including Connecticut-based percussionist Jeff McQuillan and fiddler Daniel Tressler, are regulars on the label.
American Melody has a Web site, www.americanmelody.com, where music may be sampled and ordered online.
Rosenthal adds a couple of new releases to the American Melody catalog each year. Recent entries include CD versions of old recordings such as "Grandma’s Patchwork," with Jonathan Edwards, and The Paw Paw Patch: Favorite Folk Songs for Children.
The output is enough for Rosenthal, who says he has not lost money on any release. "The most expensive part of an album is studio time, but for me it’s just my time," he says. "I’m kind of a perfectionist, and busy with other things."
Those things include presiding as engineer at recording sessions with folk, classical and other musicians who pay an hourly fee to rent his studio, and teaching mandolin, guitar and banjo to several students.
Rosenthal still performs with Bluegrass Union, a band made up of friends and family members playing mostly in Connecticut. Over the years, he has visited public schools "to spread the word" about bluegrass music, and has taken part in benefits, including one he organized at Guilford High School following the September 2001 terrorist attacks to raise money for the Red Cross.
"I like the fact that all these things revolve around music; it keeps it interesting," he says.
Rosenthal admits the business aspects of running a company are those he likes least.
"I know I would probably be a lot more successful if I had a bigger staff," he notes. "My wife and I pretty much do everything and probably don’t get as much accomplished."
He tries to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. When he saw a Billboard magazine story about Wal-Mart selling bluegrass music, for example, he tracked down the buyer mentioned in the article. The contact led to a contract for Wal-Mart distribution of This Land Is Your Land, which became one of American Melody’s top-selling CDs.
"If I sell 10,000 that’s good, and 20,000 is a bestseller," he says. "But I can sell a lot less than that and break even."
Self-promotion does not come easily to Rosenthal.
"Putting on the salesman’s hat is something I’ve gotten better at," he says. "I prefer it when people call me."
Sometimes they do. Rosenthal recently struck a licensing deal with a caller who wanted to use several tracks from A Folk Song Christmas for a forthcoming album from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Over the years Rosenthal has dabbled in commercial-jingle and voiceover work, and says he would like to do more.
"It’s an ongoing struggle," he says. "I’m always wondering how can I take it to the next level, to get it to a broader place nationally?"
Rosenthal acknowledges the best-selling and multiple Grammy-winning soundtrack for the 2000 film Oh Brother Where Art Thou? generated music industry interest in "the commercial possibilities" of the bluegrass genre.
"It’s sort of like jazz," he says. "Popularity may wax and wane, but there will always be that core audience. So it’s possible to keep making a living at it."
No Pooh-Poohing
These Platters
Bobby Fantarella has parlayed a youthful pastime into a profession.
While growing up, he enjoyed serving an entertainment emcee at family gatherings.
Fantarella now runs Hot Roc Productions, a Woodbridge-based company providing deejays, bands, comedians and other entertainment services for weddings, bar mitzvahs, parties and corporate events.
"We’re a full-service company for the tri-state area, doing everything from backyard picnics to black-tie weddings," he explains.
The 40-year-old Fantarella started Hoc Roc 15 years ago out of his Milford home as a way to capitalize on the expertise he had acquired working as a deejay and band booker for local clubs. In 1989, he moved the company to Seymour, where he had built rehearsal space. Hot Roc relocated in 1996 to Woodbridge, where Fantarella built another rehearsal space that functioned briefly as a recording studio.
"We stopped that about four years ago, because it was branching out too far," he says. Nowadays the studio is used mainly by deejays and bands such as Funkestra, Three Peace and the Navels, working on material for events booked by Fantarella.
He occasionally rents it to others, including local doo-wop legend Freddie Paris, lead singer of the Five Satins ("In the Still of the Night") and Joey Melotti, Michael Bolton’s music director, who was there recently rehearsing the Bolton band for a Foxwoods gig.
Fantarella has financed his growing business through bank loans and a salary earned while working in a variety of positions at his brother’s printing company, which owns the Woodbridge building where the company is now based. He gave up that job about four years ago to devote all his time to Hot Roc, which he then set up as a limited liability corporation (L.L.C). It had been a sole proprietorship.
The sluggish economy has not been especially bad for business, according to Fantarella, who says most new clients come via word of mouth or have attended events his company arranged.
"It probably has downsized weddings, which may have fewer people," he says. "There are certain things they can cut back. You really don’t need to have that $400 cheese platter. But you really don’t want to cut on entertainment."
Fantarella takes pride in his ability to work within budgets large and small, ranging from those who can afford only a few hundred dollars for a deejay to others who are willing to shell out several thousand dollars for a huge band and lightshow. His Web site, www.hotroc.com, has links to videographers, bridalwear stores, limo services and a party-goods supplier.
The Internet generates a lot of tri-state traffic, Fantarella says, as well out-of-state people planning weddings and other events in Connecticut.
Giving back to the community is important to Fantarella, who provides entertainment and equipment for other fundraisers.
"I ask all my deejays to do at least one benefit a year, and I donate the equipment free," he explains.
He prefers working with small groups such as homeless shelters and softball leagues because "I like know where the money is going.
"I don’t do the big ones any more."
Lately Fantarella is looking to expand his business in a new direction.
"We’ve been doing sound and light reinforcement for small shows, but we’re getting into tent and stage lighting and may do another L.L.C. with a New York company we’re working with," he says.
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