Twenty-five years ago, faxes were becoming popular, but there were no websites, very limited e-mail, no industry-wide tradeshows and moving lights were in their infancy. Today, of course, the world is a much flatter and smaller place.
It was the year that Big William Howard Taft was president and little Marie Curie published her Treatise on Radiography; Mark Twain died and Django Reinhardt was born; Jack Johnson ruled the ring and the Titanic was being built.
Oh, and Rosco Laboratories was born.
It was an era where people like him were either cops, priests, criminals or stagehands,” says Rich Wolpert, referring to his grandfather, Bill Wolpert, founder of Union Connector. Given those choices, Bill could have done worse. But instead of turning to a life of crime – or arresting or hearing confessions from others who had – Bill Wolpert worked as a union stagehand on Broadway.
The road to corporate success is littered with the ghosts of companies who have spun out in the ditch or otherwise failed to navigate the twists and turns along the way. Life on the corporate streets can be rough. But every once in a great while, a company comes along and defies the odds of survival. J.R. Clancy, the manufacturer of stage rigging systems based in Syracuse, N.Y., has not only survived for 125 years but has thrived in the theatrical rigging market.
For centuries, alchemists in Europe and Asia tried in vain to transform common metals into gold. The entertainment lamp manufacturing business unit of Philips Lighting in Turnhout, Belgium does it on a regular basis. Using sand, metal, and ceramics, they transform these very ordinary materials into a variety of extraordinary lamps for the entertainment industry, including MSR Gold FastFit lamps.
In 1998, Canadian Jacques Tanguay observed a product at the PLASA trade show in London that he had never seen before. It was a product he felt certain no one in North America was using yet, and one that delighted and tantalized his mind with the possibilities it presented.
In the pristine setting that is northeastern Pennsylvania resides the staging company known as Mountain Productions. The 17-acre spread is an unlikely location for a business in the live event production industry, but from there they have served local, regional, national and international clients in concert, institutional, educational, religious and commercial productions for exactly 30 years. They provide staging, roof systems, grandstands and bleachers, soft goods, production accessories, as well as rigging needs.
There was a time when the reputation of a production company was more important than its profits. Those were the days when a FedEx shipment could fix just about anything and damn the cost. If it meant that the show would go on then the company would survive another day, and the deposit in the karma bank just might yield enough dividends to pay back the loss of revenue. If not, then another hopefully more profitable project would be coming along soon.
John Lennon once said of touring, “It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You’d wake up at a concert and think, ‘Wow, how did I get here?’” A hurricane is an apt description of the touring world; all the elements combine to create an experience that envelops audience and artists alike.
When you think of the great production supply centers of North America — New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Toronto — one place just might slip your mind: Queensbury, N.Y. Believe it or not, from this idyllic setting, many lighting projects around the country are designed, managed and supplied, including theatres, convention centers, performing arts centers and schools in Pittsburgh, Penn., Peoria, Ill., Chattanooga, Tenn. and Columbia, Ga.
“The company is new, but the product is not,” says Jocelyn Roux of Mega-Stage. Mobile stages, he adds, are “something that we know.” Roux is the head designer for the new-to-us stage company, which is based in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec, Canada, just southeast of Montreal.
If you want a peek into the corporate culture of any company, get to know its CEO. For Electronic Theatre Controls, better known as ETC, the CEO is the guy in the Birkenstocks who was once described by a family friend as “the one who talks.” (His brother and co-founder of the company was described by the same friend as “the one who thinks.”) The telling part is that the CEO, Fred Foster, is the one who tells the story. It’s a testimony to the kind of humor and humility you’ll find in this seriously successful man and the company he leads.