The Gift Shop

Sunday evening, on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge, coming home from a weekend in the Catskills , an eighteen-wheeler crossed the line between us and laid a long gray crease down the side of my car. No one was hurt. The driver told the responding officer he had changed lanes without seeing me, and he said it without apology, the way you might report the result of a game you had no stake in.

The size of the truck was not the part that stayed with me afterward. The arithmetic was. The man had intended nothing; he wished me no harm and spent no malice, and he simply failed to look for half a second, and the entire cost of that half-second came to rest on me. His inattention was free to him and total to me. I had spent my life assuming that the danger on a bridge was somebody’s recklessness, some active wish to do me in, and the truth turned out to be quieter and more unsettling than that. Nobody has to mean it. Harm of this kind is the byproduct of a large thing in motion while it happens to be looking elsewhere, and it settles on whoever is small and beside it.

I have been turning that ratio over all week, partly because it is the organizing principle of an entire economy I happen to write about and work within, and partly because I keep finding its purest expression in the least likely place: printed in small capitals at the top of a Broadway playbill.

The Masthead

Open the program for Cats: The Jellicle Ball and the list of producers above the title runs past fifty names before it relents. It has the quality of a wedding seating chart assembled by a couple too anxious to leave anyone out, and like such a chart it tells you a great deal about the obligations of the hosts and almost nothing about the event itself. A few of the names belong to people who did substantial work. Most belong to people who wrote a check, lent a face, or opened a door.

A single word, “producer,” rests over all fifty, and it has been asked to carry so many different kinds of contribution that it can no longer distinguish among them. The strategist, the silent check, and the rented celebrity melt into a single noun, and the noun used to carry weight.

What the Number Measures

I devoted my entire Thanksgiving to regressing fifteen years of this, half hoping to expose the Tonys as a contest decided by the size of one’s coalition. The data declined to oblige. The number of producers a show carries barely moves its odds of winning, and exerts even that faint pressure only in the category of original plays. A masthead predicts very little about the quality of a show and almost nothing about its fortunes on awards night.

What the number does reveal, once you stop asking it to measure merit, is how the money was gathered. Even Hadestown, the work of one woman’s decade of writing, rested on four lead producers and gathered forty-five further names behind them; accepting her award, the lead producer Mara Isaacs described those co-producers as a caravan that had “swelled” along the road to Broadway. It is a generous and revealing word. A caravan swells with travelers, not with drivers.

The word became money

David Merrick could capitalize a show across a lunch at Sardi’s with a few friends and a fountain pen. No one can capitalize a twenty-five-million-dollar musical that way, not against the present cost of labor and theatrical rent and union minimums, and so the single backer of the old model has fractured, of necessity, into forty smaller ones.

What interests me is what the solution did to the word. Reduced to its incentives, a Broadway capitalization reveals the producer credit to be the only line on the cap table that pays reliably. No, not in cash. Cash return is a remote prospect; for most participants the financial proposition is a loss agreed to in advance. The credit, by contrast, is delivered on opening night and never revoked. Whatever else the production fails to provide, it provides the noun.

This is not to say the co-producers risk nothing. They risk every dollar they commit, and the great majority lose it. But to have had capital at risk is a different thing from having made a work, and the credit performs a quiet substitution of the one for the other, until the page can no longer tell them apart.

The Tonys, which might have preserved the distinction, instead ratified its collapse. By the awards’ own rules, when a musical wins its category the medallion is given without charge to the author and to two of its producers; every additional producer above the title may purchase a statuette, at a price that has risen over the years to roughly the cost of a good mattress. There is no limit on the number of producers a winning show may carry. There is only a price, and you may, if you are so moved, own several. An institution that sells its highest honor by the unit has already told you, in its own bylaws, how it understands the thing it is selling.

The cost of the unknown

Follow that understanding to its conclusion and you reach the part of this that ought to trouble anyone who cares whether new work continues to be made. A credit is a dividend paid in status rather than cash, and a dividend of status is worth accepting only if the show possesses status to confer: a known title, a star, a credible path to a trophy. A famous property can therefore pay its backers partly in prestige it mints at no cost. An unfamiliar one has no prestige to mint, and can offer only the cash return that, by the numbers, will not arrive.

This does not mean that taste has fled the theater, and I would not insult the many investors who still fund the strange and the unproven for the oldest and best reason, which is that they love it and want to stand early beside it. The tilt is quieter than an exodus, and harder to photograph. A known property arrives at every raise carrying two currencies, the possible profit and the certain credential, while an original work arrives carrying one.

The money has not lost its taste. The instrument has merely learned to reward the safe thing even among people who possess taste, by letting that thing pay in a coin the brave thing does not have.

The second life of the credit

There is a further consequence, and it is the one I find hardest to set down lightly. A first-time investor raises something north of a quarter-million dollars for a production that happens to win, and from that night forward he is, accurately and permanently, a Tony-winning producer. The standard co-producer agreement granted him approval over nothing and assigned him responsibility for nothing; he shepherded nothing and was shielded from everything, and he prevailed by the accident of having stood inside a structure that other people designed and steered.

None of that nuance survives onto a résumé. The next time he raises money, the title goes to work on someone newer than he once was, who hears “Tony-winning producer” and reasonably concludes that the man knows how to make a show. The credit, earned by proximity, is spent as though it had been earned by skill. What changes hands in that second transaction is something other than vanity. Vanity injures no one. It is a borrowed authority, and it is borrowed at the expense of the person least equipped to recognize the loan.

The defenses

The industry offers several defenses of all this, and each deserves to be stated at full strength before it is weighed.

The first is arithmetic. The forty checks are what open the doors, and the doors are expensive. This is true, and it accounts for the money. It does not account for the word, because one can accept a person’s capital without conferring on them a description of work they did not do.

The second defense is the one I find most honorable, and I will handle it with care, because I make my own small living on the side of it. A co-producer seldom merely writes a check. More often he raises, which is to say he goes to ten people in his own life and persuades them to put money into a thing that will likely lose it, on the strength of nothing but his word and his taste. That is genuine work, and it is arguably the oldest work in the job; before a producer is anything else, he is the person who found the money, and a lead who hands that task to someone with a deeper Rolodex than his own is not cheating but delegating. I would defend the raiser’s contribution against anyone. What I cannot defend is the practice of calling it the whole of producing. The man who raised a quarter of the budget performed one true slice of the craft, and the credit hands him the name of the entire thing. The defense is sound. It earns a credit. It does not earn that credit.

The third defense is marketing. The names above the title, the argument runs, amount to a publicity apparatus the show could not otherwise afford: the founder who delivers the business press, the musician who delivers the fashion magazines. It is a serviceable theory, and on the occasional production it is even borne out. But John Legend’s company joined Cats roughly three weeks before opening, on a show already built and transferred intact from downtown, and whatever a celebrated name contributes in twenty-one days to a finished production, “co-producer” is a generous term for it. When I spoke with people inside these arrangements, the reality they described was not a marketing department but a roster on which more than half decline to appear when the lead producer convenes a meeting about a show in trouble. A publicity apparatus whose members will not return the call is, in the end, a ledger of favors in a more flattering font.

The last defense is the one I happen to believe, and it is worth more than the space the other three require.

The Potlatch

To understand why the masthead has endured, and why it will resist every reasonable reform, it helps to borrow a word from anthropology. Among several Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, the potlatch was a ceremonial feast at which a host distributed, and sometimes deliberately destroyed, a great quantity of accumulated wealth. Status accrued not to the man who hoarded the most but to the one who could afford to give the most away. Marcel Mauss, studying such ceremonies, recognized in them the deep structure of the gift: that wealth surrendered is converted into rank, that the gift binds giver and receiver into a lasting web of obligation, and that a community can run, in this manner, on a currency that is not money at all.

A Broadway masthead is a potlatch. Consider the producer raising capital for a work that will, in all likelihood, return nothing. He cannot honestly promise a financial reward, because the arithmetic forbids it. What he can offer instead is rank: a place above the title, an entry in the permanent record, a seat in the room where the art is made and the tribe assembles. The investor who accepts is not behaving irrationally. He is purchasing belonging, and belonging is exactly the sort of good a gift economy exists to distribute. The very improbability of profit is what lends the gesture its meaning, in the way that a willingness to part with wealth is what dignifies the host of the feast.

Seen this way, the crowded masthead is less a corruption of the system than its fullest expression. It is the mechanism by which an enterprise that reliably loses money nonetheless persuades people to fund it, season after season, by paying them in something more durable than money. The credit is the receipt for a gift, and the gift economy is what keeps the lights burning. I have stood on both sides of this exchange. I have offered the credit, and I have been moved to accept it, and I do not think the impulse on either side is contemptible. It is, if anything, one of the more humane arrangements the commercial theater has ever managed to invent. This is why we have kept it, and why we will go on keeping it long after the sensible objections have all been filed.

A gift economy, however, holds together only so long as its tokens are read by people who understand the ritual that produced them. The shells and coppers of the potlatch signify wealth and honor inside the community and nothing whatever outside it. The difficulty with the producer credit is that it is minted in a word the wider world already owns and reads on its own terms. Within the room, “producer” is a thank-you, a marker of who appeared when the appearing was hard. Beyond the room, the same word is taken as a claim about who conceived the work and who is fit to conceive the next one. The ceremony is sound; the boundary around it is porous. The masthead fails as an export, the moment its honors are carried across the line into the literal economy and spent on people who never agreed to the ritual’s terms.

And the people on whom they are spent are worth naming precisely, because they are not the audience. The audience never reads the title page and is right not to; it could not identify a co-producer and has no reason to wish to. The playbill is a document the industry composes for itself. The honor it confers is redeemed elsewhere: in the next capitalization, in the historical record, in the quiet credential market where a noun acquired by proximity is presented, years afterward, as evidence of skill to someone with no means of knowing the difference.

The Rudin Paradox

The figure who understood the value of the word most clearly is the one the industry would least like to claim. Scott Rudin is a divisive name, and I have no interest in relitigating him here. But on this single question he conducted himself like a lawyer guarding a patent. His offering documents, according to filings obtained by the New York Attorney General’s office, forbade any investor without above-the-title billing from describing himself as a producer of the show in any other setting. He treated the credit as restricted property, granted to some and withheld from others. The paradox is worth pausing on, and I find it clarifying and a little bleak in equal measure: the industry’s most notorious antagonist is also the only party in recent memory to have guarded the title.

His career corrects the gloomiest version of my argument as well. When a production collapses, the trade press does not consult the co-producer list; it names the person at the top and holds him to account, often without mercy, as Rudin’s own reckoning attests. The disappearance I am describing does not occur in the news cycle. It occurs on the page, where the single responsible party is filed among forty others wearing his title, invisible to everyone who does not read the trades, which is to say nearly everyone with a checkbook.

What Hollywood Protected

None of this is peculiar to the theater, which is clarifying, because film contracted the same disease a decade ago and chose to treat it. By 2013 a single studio picture, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, carried forty-one producer credits, and the Producers Guild concluded that the title had become a currency to be bought and traded by anyone with sufficient leverage. Hollywood answered in two ways the theater has not.

It built, first, an arbitration. To claim the “Produced by” credit and the small “p.g.a.” beside one’s name, a producer must submit to a determination in which the director, the writers, and the editors are polled, and only the names that performed the work survive it. The Academy went further, limiting the producers eligible for Best Picture to three and deferring to the Guild’s finding, and it declines to recognize any film that has sold a producer credit as a reward to crowdfunders.

It did something subtler as well, and more to my point. It gave money its own honest vocabulary. A financier in Hollywood does not become a co-producer. He receives a financing credit: a presentation card, a company logo, an “in association with,” a capped executive-producer line, a separate ladder built for capital that does not borrow the producer’s noun.

Hollywood did not emerge clean. The phrase “executive producer” still contains the word “producer,” and large sums of money still wear that title to dinner. But the principle is at least committed to paper: that money is not the same as producing, and is not entitled to its name. The theater never wrote the principle down.

The Decisive Yes

I have been careful not to claim too much for the single producer, because the most obvious version of the claim is false. The producer is not the author. Anaïs Mitchell wrote Hadestown; no producer set down a word of it, and it would be a theft of its own kind to imply otherwise.

What the producer is, is the decisive yes. In any collaborative art a thousand choices travel upward until they reach a person who can pass them no higher, and to produce is to occupy that final position: to choose the work while it is still only a possibility, to assemble the artists capable of realizing it, to defend it against the commercial and logistical pressures that would sand it smooth, and to remain the name affixed to it whether it succeeds or fails. This is not authorship of the text. It is authorship of the conditions under which the text becomes a living thing, and it is a discipline with a mastery of its own. The good producer knows which play, and which director for that play, and which designer for that director. He knows which note to refuse and which week of previews to make the cut. He knows when to extend a run and when to allow a work to close with its dignity intact. He can be wrong about any of it, alone and in public, which is the quality that distinguishes a decision from a consensus.

It matters that all of this now wears the same title as the man who appeared in March, and the harm is not a question of etiquette, so let me state it plainly. When the craft of producing and the act of writing a check become indistinguishable on the page, the craft becomes invisible, and an invisible craft is one that can be neither rewarded, nor taught, nor defended.

It cannot be rewarded, because reputation is the currency by which a good producer earns his next good project, and reputation depends on the world’s being able to tell who did what in the work. A word that means everyone conveys nothing, and the credential floats free of the competence it once certified.

It cannot be taught, because the young person entering the field reads fifty producers above a hit and concludes, reasonably, that producing is the assembling of money, since that is the only version of the role the page makes legible. The apprenticeship that once carried taste and judgment from one generation to the next has lost the very name it would apprentice to.

And it cannot be defended, because a vocation the public can no longer see commands no constituency. When the press and the audience and the next generation all take “producer” to mean a person who raised or contributed money, the actual art of producing quietly forfeits its claim on anyone’s attention. No one rises to protect a craft that no longer owns a word.

The harm of the diluted title is therefore not that it gives offense. It is that it erases standards, its training, and its very visibility, beneath a noun stretched across so many people that it has ceased to mean any of them.

The Tell

I should come clean about where I am standing while I say all this.

I have never been handed the credit I have spent these pages dissecting. I have raised money for shows, and the closest any of them came to Broadway is that they were performed indoors, in the same city, for audiences who had in several cases heard of Broadway. I am not the prosecutor in this matter. I am, if anything, a guy outside the building with his face against the glass, narrating the buffet.

And I have friends inside. Good ones, people with sharper instincts than mine, who raised a meaningful chunk of money for a show, were handed the word, and are now, permanently and accurately, the thing I am still trying to become. I do not begrudge them a syllable of it. They did a real and difficult thing, and most of them know exactly which part of the job they did and which part they did not. The grace runs both ways, or it should.

What I feel watching it is not envy, though I have searched myself for envy the way you would pat down a coat for your keys, and I want to be honest that I checked. It is closer to impatience, and to a frustration that is more principle than appetite. The title I want to earn by doing the entire job is being handed out, in good faith and with real warmth, for doing one part of it well. I do not want the line above the title. I want the thing the line is supposed to certify. I want to find the play, and fight for the play, and sit in the room at one in the morning deciding whether the second act lives, and be the decisive yes, and be the name they come looking for when it all goes wrong. I want the whole of it, including the parts that can ruin you.

I am aware that there is something faintly ridiculous about an unfunded purist composing four thousand words on the sacred meaning of a credit he does not possess. I have made my peace with the ridiculousness. The argument is right anyway, which is the inconvenient thing about arguments.

The Repair

The objection to repairing this is a serious one: strip the prestige from the money and the money departs, leaving only the brand-safe productions I have spent these pages lamenting. The objection is also answerable, because the prestige need not be stripped. It needs only to be relocated. Keep the carpet, the photograph, the party, the line on the website, the entire apparatus of belonging the check was in truth purchasing, and withhold only the single word that denotes authorship. Hollywood is the proof that capital still arrives when it is summoned by an honest name; money flows toward “executive producer” every day without once laying a finger on “Produced by.”

There is already a vocabulary for what these contributors are. They are angels, the lovely old word, or financiers, or in association with. And if the theater should want a term with a little shimmer to it, I will offer one I coined some time ago and have never been able to abandon. The créditeur: credit and auteur joined, the author of his own credit and of nothing else. No one writing a half-million-dollar check will accept it, because it was designed to needle him, and that refusal is itself the measure of how much the word it would replace is worth.

On the Bridge

I have carried the bridge with me through all of this, and I can finally say why it lodged where it did. It was not that the driver looked away. People look away; inattention is only mass in motion, and the theater runs on a surplus of both. It was the second half of what he said, the part where he turned to the officer and admitted that the fault was his. One man, one wheel, one acknowledgment, offered without the intercession of a publicist.

That admission is the thing the masthead is built to render impossible. Not because the co-producers who financed the cargo should answer for the accident; they financed a load and went home, and the trades will find the driver soon enough. The fault lies with the document, which takes the one person who was steering and files him among forty-nine others wearing his exact title, until the word that ought to point at the driver points everywhere, and a word that points everywhere points nowhere at all.

The man in the truck could be found, and he owned what he had done. A name standing on its own can be held to account. We have spent twenty years arranging the page so that ours never has to stand on its own, and we have called the arrangement, without apparent irony, a marquee.