Episode 11 Transcript – Richard LaGravenese

Ken: Hello, Producer’s Perspective Podcast listeners, we are back. I’m going to tell you a little, dirty secret of the podcasting business . . . these podcasts are reordered sometimes well in advance of the day I release them. I know, you are all shocked. This podcast, with my very special guest who I’ll introduce in a second, is being recorded just a few days after one of the biggest entertainment events of the year, the Academy Awards, which is very fitting for my guest today because he is actually an Academy Award nominated filmmaker. His name is Richard LaGravenese. Welcome, Richard!

Richard: Thank you, Ken. A pleasure.

Ken: Richard is a screenwriter and a film director. He was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay to The Fisher King, which is one of my favorite movies.

Richard: Thanks.

Ken: I know someone who wants to make it into a musical, I think, but we’ll get to that. He has also written the screenplays to some other little known films like, oh, I don’t know, The Bridges of Madison County, which was a musical, Water for Elephants, which I hear they’re making into a musical.

Richard: Oh, they are?

Ken: He doesn’t even know! Beautiful Creatures, which he also directed, and most recently he was the director and screenwriter and champion with a capital “C” for the film The Last Five Years, the Jason Robert Brown musical starring Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick. Now, you all know why he’s here . . . here is a Hollywood power writer that is building the bridge to Broadway. That’s what I love about him and that’s why I wanted you to hear from him and his very unique perspective on both sides of the nation. So, Richard, tell me . . . you’re from Brooklyn, New York, is that true?

Richard: Yes, I am.

Ken: You went to the Tisch School of the Arts.

Richard: Yes, the experimental theater wing.

Ken: My alma mater is Tisch as well. So how did this acting major from Brooklyn, New York, end up on the other side of the country writing screenplays? Because theater was a big thing.

Richard: Well, first, let me say I’ve never lived on the other side of the country. I’ve never lived in Los Angeles, so I don’t know why everyone in New York thinks I’m a Hollywood screenwriter . . . I guess because that’s where the business is and that’s where the movies are made . . . but, no, I consider myself a New Yorker, I’ve lived here all my life. What happened was, I was a theater actor/writer and I was part of a comedy act. I had done experimental theater, I was a chorus boy in summer stock, I did all that kind of stuff. And I wrote a one-act play for my partner and I, a comedy act I had, that we did at the Lion on 42nd Street and it happened to be the first date I asked my soon-to-be wife on. And when she saw it she said, “Wow, you’re  a really incredible writer,” and I went, “Oh, really? I don’t know . . .” because I really wanted to be an actor, and she said, “No, you really should stick with the writing.” We dated and then ultimately married and I got a job assisting a screenwriter, a wonderful writer named Neil Levy, who had sold a movie idea, and I knew nothing about film. I loved it, I was obsessed with movies, but I didn’t know how to write them. So I sort of apprenticed myself to him, and that movie took about three years to get made and in the process it was very frustrating, not working with him but working with this real nightmare of a producer named Aaron Russo, who used to be Bette Midler’s manager (I think The Rose was based on him and her). Anyway, during that period I got married, I wanted my life to start, I was frustrated, so I was going to write a screenplay on spec, which means for free, that I would then hand out to try to get a job. This was on the encouragement of my wife, who was supporting us at the time, and that screenplay turned out to be The Fisher King, and I sold it in August-September of 1988. I’ve been working ever since, so I didn’t have to move out there because they knew where I was and when they need me they fly me out there. But that screenplay got everything started.

Ken: And you had never written a screenplay before?

Richard: Not by myself. That was the first screenplay I had written on my own. The other screenplay I sort of apprenticed and Neil Levy taught me how to write a screenplay, but he hired me because he loved my knack for dialogue because he had seen my comedy act, and I wrote skit comedy so it was all based on dialogue.

Ken: So starting out as a playwright and then becoming a screenwriter . . . tell me a little bit about the differences, if there are any, between writing and tackling the two.

Richard: I’m still learning! I’m still learning because my tendency is to write dialogue. I love actors, I love watching actors give great performances. That’s part of the reason I love movies. Learning the language of cinema, the language of the camera, is something that I’m still learning, but I’ve had some great masters to learn from. So I consider myself, in my DNA, primarily a writer. Writing for film, this movie, The Last Five Years, was for me, at this stage in the game, was one of the first times I felt, as a director, that I designed a movie and that the screenplay, because it was Jason’s material, was primarily how I was going to shoot it and how I was going to tie things together and what the production would look like and how their costumes would tell time and what their backstories would be, because I had both characters singing to each other. And it was really a challenge and an opportunity for me to write in the language of camera because I didn’t have to write dialogue except for little bits here and there. This was all Jason’s material and I had more confidence in his material than I’ve ever had in my own.

Ken: That’s hysterical! You’ve worked with some masters, certainly you’ve worked with some incredible directors.

Richard: Yes, I wrote Behind the Candelabra and that was Soderbergh, and Soderbergh’s been a tremendous influence, and Terry Gilliam, and Robert Redford was a wonderful director, Francis Lawrence, Clint Eastwood, who I worked very briefly with, but even in that brief time I learned quite a bit. So I’ve been lucky.

Ken: We’ve talked about the difference between being a writer for screenplays and for theater. What about directing for the stage versus directing for film? Obviously there’s a camera involved. I remember talking Sam Mendes when he was doing Gypsy about American Beauty and hearing so much about the technical aspect of the film and the camera versus how much time they get to spend with the actors. What kind of director are you?

Richard: I love working with actors, that’s my favorite part. This movie, The Last Five Years, I got to do both because it was such a small production, and I had the best relationship I’ve ever had with the cinematographer, Steven Meizler, and so we were a real partnership, and so I got to be on the technical side of it. I felt much more comfortable and had much more fun than I’d ever had before, but working with the actors is my favorite part. In film directing there’s an old adage that says 80% of movie directing is casting, so you do a lot of that work in the casting and then you sort of step out of the way, and when they need any kind of guidance or there are questions or new things come up, new ideas, I encourage collaboration. I love when actors are excited and want to create something with me and they both came up with wonderful ideas. I always wait until I get the take I know I wanted. I feel a click, and then after that I go up to the actor and I say, “I have it, now I want you to do it for yourself. Throw everything away and do whatever you want and I’ll keep the camera rolling until you want to say stop,” because I like them to have their own click as well and oftentimes those takes are wonderful, they’re more spontaneous, you don’t see all of the homework. I love working with actors, I respect them.

Ken: I wonder what percentage of their work a theater director would say is casting, if film is 80%. I haven’t had a director on the podcast yet, so I’ll have to ask them the same question.

Richard: John Houston said that about film, because as a director you’re dealing with so many technical aspects. The thing about film that I didn’t like in the beginning is that the human elements, which are the actors and the performances, are rushed because the lighting, the technical aspects and the camera are what you wait around for, so all the time gets sucked up by that. So, when the actors come in to do their thing sometimes . . . not . . . often, they’re not given their due, they have to rush through, and I hate that, so I try to balance it out so that the actors are taken care of and can give good performances.

Ken: Let’s talk about producers in Hollywood versus producers on Broadway. Certainly you’ve known both, you’ve worked with both.

Richard: I’ve never really worked with New York producers, theater producers. I know them as friends but I’ve never worked with them so I don’t think I can compare.

Ken: What’s the relationship like in Hollywood with a producer? Are they hands-on?

Richard: There are all kinds of producers. It’s an interesting term. Some producers are great in development, creatively. Some producers are great at playing the three-card monte game of how to get a movie through a system and dealing with studios. Some producers come up with ideas and buy books and hire writers and they have their own vision of what they do. Some producers find original material and then just encourage you, they believe in you. There are all different kinds. Then there are some who just raise money and manage the money. “Producer” is a wide term.

Ken: So let’s talk about The Last Five Years, specifically. What drew you to it or when did you first see it or hear about it?

Richard: I never saw the original production. My friend, Todd Graff, who wrote and directed a movie called Camp, about Stagedoor Manor, is a good friend and I would say in about 2004 or 2005 he gave me the soundtrack to The Last Five Years, because I kept hearing about it and I didn’t know it, and I just fell in love with the score. I love the score, it’s so honest and insightful and rich and heartbreaking and funny. It became one of my top ten favorite scores and I would just listen to it over and over and over in between doing work, writing, and it became a sort of reward for me to fantasize about making it into a little movie outside of the system and slowly but surely, step by step, it became a reality.

Ken: Did you know Jason?

Richard: No.

Ken: What was the first meeting like, when you said “I want to make this into a movie”?

Richard: I was holding auditions for a film in 2006, I believe, and Sherie Rene Scott came in and the first thing I said, I just gushed over her about The Last Five Years and I said to her, “I’ve always had this little fantasy about making it into a movie,” and so she introduced me to her husband, Kurt Deutsch. They have a company called Sh-K-Boom Records and Kurt had had a similar idea (I did not know that) and I said, “I’d like to do this.” And he introduced me to Jason, and for a few years there was just the three of us. And Jason and I never believed it was going to happen. Jason was living in L.A. at the time, so any time I went out to L.A. for work I would always set up a lunch or something with him and we’d just have fun, we would just talk about the script. I would write it in my spare time and come up with ideas and he would say, “Yes to this, no to that, try that, something different.” He was wonderful to work with, just one of the funniest, smartest men. This went on for a few years and Kurt was determined to make it happen. He kept on me no matter what else I was focused on, and it started to become a reality. A friend of mine, Janet Brenner, who’s a producer, more in theater, and now in film, I brought her in to help and she brought in Lauren Versel, who is an independent film producer who knows how that system work, because I had never done independent film before, and the three of them became my producing team and they raised the money. And somewhere along the way, before Pitch Perfect came out, I met with Anna Kendrick, who was my first choice, and she attached herself to the movie, which was lucky because Pitch Perfect hadn’t come out yet. I wanted her because she’s Anna Kendrick and because I loved Camp. I just thought she was perfect, and her favorite musical is Parade, so she knew Jason from Parade and one thing led to another and she read the script and heard the score and, thankfully, attached herself to it, and we were able to raise the money.

Ken: What was the budget?

Richard: I don’t know if I’m allowed to say. It’s in the low, low, low single digits.

Ken: I was actually asked to invest in the original off-Broadway production of The Last Five Years, which I passed on, and the funny thing is that I’ve known Jason for years. A quick story . . . he was my vocal coach when I was in college at Tisch.

Richard: No, really?

Ken: The story goes that it was literally my second day of class, singing “Why, God, Why?” from Miss Saigon, and I heard something from the accompaniment that I had never heard before, an improvised something, and I was singing and I turned and looked and saw this moppy-haired kid banging away at the piano. And I can think back and say that’s the first time I ever heard genius coming from a person. I approached him after class and said, “I would love to do something with you’ and he was my vocal coach for a couple of years.

Richard: Cool. That’s really cool.

Ken: So, yeah, I was involved very early on with a lot of his stuff, so certainly I can see why this score would attract you.

Richard: We just saw Parade the other night at Avery Fisher. It was unbelievable.

Ken: I was the company manager for the workshop of that when it went to Toronto, and being around it was just amazing. The score, his music, something gets so inside your heart. But when I look to take a book or a movie and turn it into theater, one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is why the theater? What about this art form is a great way to tell this story? So here’s something that was a very personal story to Jason and done in a very theatrical way . . . two people telling their story.

Richard: In monologues to the audience, not to each other, from different time zones.

Ken: So you looked at this and heard this and obviously were attracted to the score but what made you say, “I can do it in a different way that could only be done on film”?

Richard: Well because I hadn’t seen it on stage. I listened to the score and my imagination went into seeing the songs as playable scenes, as them singing to each other. That’s just how my imagination went. Then I found out that it was a monologue piece, and years later I saw it at the Pasadena Playhouse for the first time, and I just couldn’t help seeing it and being able to make it work. I wasn’t 100% sure, and I know there are many people out there for whom it doesn’t work but I wanted to see something I hadn’t seen on film before. I’m at a point and was at a point in my career where you just get so tired . . . I got tired . . . of worrying about the box office and trying to please everybody and trying to write seeming that appeals to a mass general public and not feeling like you’re doing anything that you really love and that you really care about and that’s more personal. And, even though I did not write this, this is very personal material to me. I relate to it a great deal, Jason has that power with his work. And so I wanted to do it for me, creatively. It’s just something that I needed to feed myself, and I knew that my theater tribe, my musical theater tribe, because my daughter is also a musical theater nut and I know a lot of that generation through her, that there would be interest. So if I could do this on a very low budget . . . I shot it in 21 days . . . that it would be a responsible personal project. I wouldn’t be wasting a lot of money, but I could do it the way I wanted to do it without interference. I wanted to keep it in Jason’s form, I didn’t want to impose a screenplay on it because I felt that if we did it through a Hollywood studio that’s what they would have asked for. And it was the best time I ever had, creatively, and I needed it, I needed to do that . . . something that I hadn’t seen before. It was a risk, and I needed to take it.

Ken: Since the Chicago revolution we’ve seen a number of musicals . . .

Richard: What’s the Chicago revolution? I’ve read that before. Was it because it was so successful?

Ken: Because it was so successful and because, all of a sudden, we thought, “It can be done again.”

Richard: Yes, I see.

Ken: Because we all knew, here in the industry, there were tons of musicals that were made into movies in the golden age and then it just stopped. Hollywood hated us for a while . . . “We can’t touch musicals.” I think of the way American Idol says, “You sound too Broadway.” I feel like Hollywood had that feeling.

Richard: Because it came the other way. Suddenly, when Lion King came here, suddenly Hollywood was realizing that their properties could be turned into stage productions, so I know it was going that way. I love Chicago, I saw the original also, and I love Bill Condon’s work and Rob Marshall’s, but I didn’t realize that that was a watershed, but I guess it was.

Ken: We’ve obviously seen a number since then, some very, very good and some not so good. Did you study all of those?

Richard: No. I mean I watched them just because I loved musicals, through osmosis as a kid. I’ve watched every musical that’s ever been made. Things will come out that I don’t even mean to come out. When Jeremy is singing “Moving Too Fast” and he’s on a water taxi I’m going, “Oh, it’s Funny Girl.” I didn’t even mean that to happen, it just kind of happened because we had a change. I originally had him on a bicycle going across the Brooklyn Bridge but we couldn’t afford a helicopter so we had to change it. It’s just in my blood, seeing every musical over and over and over.

Ken: Do you have a desire to do more?

Richard: Yeah, absolutely. The last thing I just did, Julian Fellows did the first draft . . . he’s a brilliant writer from Downton Abbey . . . and I just rewrote Gypsy for Streisand and that was a ball, that was like a dream come true, working with her on that musical. It was just fantastic and I hope that that gets made. They’re looking for a director on it, because her singing that score would be historic. But we had such a great time, and also working with Arthur Laurents’s book, it’s such a great book. You have to go back to it, you have to use that as your core, you can’t stray too far from that. So that was that. I’m writing a musical for the stage that I’m almost finished with the first draft on, so I’m getting closer and closer to doing theater. More film musicals? Yeah, sure. They would have to be something cool that I wanted to do, but I’m a little worried about working in a studio system. Having this independence in doing it meant a lot. I wonder if it could work the other way, I don’t know for me, personally.

Ken: You’re starting to get more into theater, writing more theater, and you have a daughter and she’s a musical theater nut. If your daughter came to you one day and said, “Dad, I have a choice. I could have a successful career in Hollywood or a successful career on Broadway,” which one would you want her to choose?

Richard: Oh, boy. I wouldn’t presume to tell her. You’ve got to follow where your heart goes. This sounds so corny. It’s not just where your heart goes but where your personality goes, because you need a certain kind of skin for both. I was just in San Francisco and I was interviewed by the guy who runs ACT out there and there’s a great group of actors out there, really fine actors, who chose to stay in San Francisco and not make the move to New York. And they work all the time because they love the work. There is a life to be had as an actor or an actress where you can work steady and not necessarily win an Oscar or become a famous person, but you can have a wonderful life if you love the work. You have to love the work, you can’t want it for any other reason. Success is a byproduct.

Ken: That’s such great advice. I tell people that all the time.

Richard: It’s really true.

Ken: If you want to be an actor, you can be an actor anywhere.

Richard: Yeah, you can be an actor anywhere. Tennessee Williams had a great quote that I’m not going to say right but it was something along the lines of, “Success is like a shy mouse. If you stare at it, it won’t come out. You have to not pay attention to it for it to come out.”

Ken: When you were growing up in New York, you saw a lot of Broadway shows, obviously.

Richard: The first thing was movies. I was a movie nut when I was a kid, mostly, and then, when I was 12, my parents took me to see Follies. That was my first Broadway musical and I flipped out. I remember having to explain the second act to my mother . . . “He didn’t forget the lyrics, he’s having a nervous breakdown,” “Okay, I understand now.” And then I used to sneak into the city to see plays and to walk up and down the theater district. In those days, when you’re 13 or 14, you could hop on the train and do all of that. So New York, for me, was always the dream. I never had any desire for Hollywood. Being in New York, getting across the river, was my dream. I don’t know, movies just seemed so impossible for a kid from Brooklyn who’s father’s a cab driver who knows nobody. How does that work? But theater felt real. I remember being at ETW working with Anne Bogart and a group of us, outcasts, and I never felt more creative in my life. That was the first time in my life I experienced what it was like to be creative, and it was such a high.

Ken: Obviously, as you’ve lived here and you’ve seen Broadway, even though you haven’t been working on it, for the past couple of decades, how has it changed or how do you think it has changed?

Richard: I don’t think I’m saying anything new but it’s got a little more top heavy in terms of needing names and stars to attract. I wish there was more of an Off-Broadway. When I was a kid, playwrights were allowed to have their failures and to have their medium sized hits so that they could have their bigger hits. Now, you sort of have to come out of the gate having a masterpiece, or you fail. That’s the sad things about New York. You have to go to regional theater, I guess, to develop your skills and your talents a bit more because here the stakes are so high, the money, the rentals and all of that stuff, so it’s constricted it a little bit in terms of the talent that we can draw here to bring new material. There’s nothing wrong with having name actors, as long as they’re good actors, to come and do stuff. Sidney Lumet once said to me that one of the reasons he always shot in New York was because the wealth of talent here is just constant. There’s always new talent coming out, and I’m proud of the New York actor scene, there’s really amazing actors here.

Ken: So if there’s a son of a cab driver listening to this podcast right now that said he wanted to be a writer someday on Broadway or in Hollywood what kind of advice would you have?

Richard: Write. I think what happened for me was that it was that thing of work and preparation meeting opportunity. I worked on a screenplay on and off for two years and the writer’s strike happened and I couldn’t sell it and when the writer’s strike was over suddenly everybody was reading scripts and the scripts that they were reading were surprisingly more for the marketplace and this original script kind of caught their eye because it was something they hadn’t expected. Today, I would never be able to pitch or sell that script. It was just about timing, I think.

Ken: Where did that idea come from?

Richard: It was the ’80s which, for me, was a really ugly decade, for many reasons, especially the early half of the ’80s was really tough. The time that we were living in, I just felt that it was really narcissistic. There was cruelty in the air and a real narcissism and I wanted to write something about that. So all I had was the idea of a narcissistic man who, by the end of the story, does a selfless act and that really was the whole spine of it and then it just took me about three or four drafts with completely different stories to find out how to tell it.

Ken: Do you think it would make a good musical?

Richard: I have worked with a couple of people who wanted to. I hesitate because one of the reasons I think it’s so great is because Terry Gilliam directed it and he directed it away from sentimentality and the problem with putting music to that, or a certain kind of music, is that the story could easily slip into being very corny and sentimental so it would take a really specific composer/lyricist team.

Ken: You are now writing for the theater. Do you think you will direct for the theater?

Richard: I would love to direct for the theater as well, absolutely.

Ken: Would you do your own work?

Richard: I would love to do someone else’s. I’m looking right now for revivals, but of plays that aren’t usually done. I feel like they always revive the same plays, like The Heiress and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Really? There’s got to be other stuff out there. There’s got to be gold out there that hasn’t been mined, and that’s what I’m looking for. If you’ve read John Lahr’s book, the Tennessee Williams biography, it’s unbelievable. It’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read about a writer, and there’s about 20 years of Tennessee Williams plays that were completely trashed by critics for many reasons but you never know, there might be one thing in there that could be revived, that the time is now. I mean I’m going back to the ’30s. I don’t want to direct my own play, I would like to have a great director to learn from, and I think you need an editor, you need an outsider, but I would like to direct a play that’s already written.

Ken: It’s interesting, in film it’s more common to see a writer/director combo, you do that a lot.

Richard: Ever since the mid-’90s, yeah, that’s been the scene. But I didn’t start that way. I really just loved being a writer, I never had any intention of directing. It became a necessity after a while because we’re at the bottom of the food chain now more than ever, and we have no power. If you write an original and the studio buys it, they own the copyright. They can do anything they want with it. If you do an adaptation, they can do anything they want with it . . . hire any director, rewrite the script, as they do often . . . so you have no control and they don’t really respect you as much as they do a director because a director, when they say yes, a movie can happen. A writer just creates the thing. Then, of course, everybody’s second job is writing so everybody gives you notes. No one tells producers or executives how to be executives but they feel the need to tell us how to write. So it’s a whole hierarchy that’s just difficult.

Ken: It’s a massive difference in how the two industries treat their writers.

Richard: Massive, yeah. In theater, and in television, the writer is more the lead, more in control of their work. I don’t know why the film industry doesn’t respect us to do our job correctly. They don’t trust us, I don’t know why. If we’ve proven ourselves, even after so many years they still insist on telling us how to do what we do.

Ken: I’m sure there’s been at least one point in your career where you’ve sat back in a dark screening room and watched one of your films and been like, “Oh God, that is not what I wanted up there.”

Richard: Oh yeah.

Ken: How does that feel?

Richard: It’s a heartbreaker. For me, personally, it breaks my heart because I really fall in love with what I’m working on and I’ve done mostly adaptations for Hollywood and I only pick them because I fall in love with the material and I have some personal connection to them so it hurts. It hurts.

Ken: Is there a specific example of one that really disappointed you?

Richard: Oh yeah, more than one.

Ken: We’ll leave it at that. Do you have a favorite of all of the properties that you’ve worked on to date?

Richard: Behind the Candelabra. I’m very proud of that one and I love the way it turned out, and Matt and Michael, they weren’t just fantastic actors who did an incredible job, but for the four years that we were trying to set up the script . . . because I wrote it in 2008 for Steven and no studio wanted it because they said it was too gay . . . all of those years, Michael and Matt would publicly say that they were doing the movie and that kind of loyalty? They’re just wonderful, wonderful guys.

Ken: It’s confidence and strength like that from actors that changes the industry and the world, which that movie is helping to do.

Richard: Oh, absolutely.

Ken: Okay, one last question. I want you to imagine that you’re granted one wish. Your fairy godmother comes down and says, “I’m going to give you one wish.”

Richard: Oh, it’s dangerous.

Ken: Yes, just one though, and you can change just one thing about Broadway . . . or Hollywood, I’ll give you both, I only give everybody else Broadway, but since you work on both sides . . . you can change one thing, soothing that keeps you up at night, that frustrates you, whatever it is. Now, you can also think about this as a theater goer, because you’ve seen lots of shows. But you can only change one thing and with the snap of a finger that fairy godmother will change it overnight. What would that one thing be?

Richard: Create a viable Off-Broadway community where there are theaters, where playwrights can do their work and there’s a way to be profitable, where rents are easy to manage, where were can maybe have a company . . . in New York it would be great if we had a theater company here in one of them . . . just a way to broaden our theatrical spectrum away from the big budget blockbusters and star-driven stuff that Broadway has, which is wonderful, but it’s limiting, and it would be wonderful to have an Off-Broadway community again. I remember being a kid and even a teenager and looking at the ABCs and sometimes the off-Broadway ABCs were larger than the Broadway ones and it’s gone. And I don’t understand why. People try to explain it to me . . . because you can’t make money Off-Broadway and the rents and the thing and the that . . . but I don’t understand, with this city and the theater lovers that we have here, why we can’t. There’s the Atlantic, there are some places. I love St. Ann’s Warehouse.  We need more places like that.

Ken: If this podcast were taped in front of a live studio audience they would have just gone nuts at that idea because I think everyone knows that the real art of the theater that’s missing is the viable Off-Broadway community.

Richard: And New York, of all of the cities, we really should make an effort to try and make that happen.

Ken: I get afraid that there are a lot of kids of taxi drivers out there that want to write for the theater that are great writers that get sucked up by Hollywood because there’s nowhere here for them to write.

Richard: Yeah, and a lot of them and us are going to TV, which is great, it’s become a great medium, but there’s nothing like the theater.

Ken: And that’s why we’re very thankful you’re coming home to us and also building this bridge. Thank you so much for being here. Everyone out there . . . go and see The Last Five Years. Remember, supporting movie musicals mean more of them, which is great for everyone. Don’t forget to scribe to the podcast at TheProducersPerspective.com. We’ve got some great guests coming up. Thank you again, Richard.

Richard: Thank you, Ken.

Ken: We’ll see you all next time.