Never know who your fans (or investors) are

Rico says he'd love to meet some investors for his movie, Zone of Fire, but Patrick Healy has an article in The New York Times about some in New York:

Friday’s show had been over for a couple of hours, but Reeve Carney and Jennifer Damiano were still working hard for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark at Joe Allen’s, the Broadway watering hole. The two young stars were downing fries and sandwiches when a table of tipsy fans came by, one of them calling himself an investor in this $70 million musical.
No prima donnas here, the actors rose gamely: Ms. Damiano listened to a lengthy soliloquy about producing— “Wow” was all she could get in edgewise— while Mr. Carney, an earnest charmer, gushed that he finally felt that Spider-Man would survive and flourish after a long, dark winter. “Tonight’s audience actually didn’t give as good a reaction as we’ve been getting lately,” Mr. Carney told the admirers, “but people are going crazy for the show now.”
A moment later Mr. Carney volunteered that he was not tempting fate with Spider-Man, which will face critics’ reviews after the curtain call. Rather, he said, the creative team has done all it can to improve the show; now the onus is on him and Ms. Damiano, chiefly, to sell it. “The show, in my opinion, is bulletproof at this point,” said Mr. Carney, who plays Peter Parker and performs some aerial stunts as Spider-Man. “I mean, as bulletproof as anything can be. And we want to do right by the people who stood by us, to help this show be seen for what it is.”
Put another way— as the two actors kept doing until closing the restaurant— Spider-Man will no longer draw theatergoers as an object of curiosity or morbidity, as a punch line or grist for dinner parties. Sure, it’s twice as expensive as any show in Broadway history. Yes, it’s been in preview performances longer than any other. (No. 175 was Tuesday night.) Okay, the creative coup d’état in March that ousted Julie Taymor was painful human drama. But all that is past. The show will now rise or fall on whether it’s good, fun, and entertaining.
“When someone says something negative about our show now, I’m like, ‘You’re boring me— it’s not cool anymore to be negative about Spider-Man,” said Ms. Damiano, who plays Peter’s love interest, Mary Jane Watson. “People are seeing us as humans now, humans who survived so much stuff.”
No two people are more bullish on Spider-Man these days than Mr. Carney, 28, and Ms. Damiano, who just turned 20. Nor, arguably, do any others have a right to be.
Mr. Carney, whom Ms. Taymor discovered as frontman and singer for the band Carney, had never acted onstage. He and Ms. Damiano, already a Broadway regular, put in months of rehearsal from last July through November, only to see cast mates injured and the musical mercilessly mocked on late-night shows that their friends and family watched.
Ms. Taymor was unceremoniously given the boot in early March, and two weeks later cast members had a virtually new script in their hands, Mr. Carney said, which meant weeks of more rehearsals. Most weekdays this spring, the two said, they have been memorizing near-daily rewrites of dialogue in the mornings, rehearsing new material from noon to 5 p.m., and performing the old show at night.
“For a while everyone in the cast thought, we’re learning that lesson of just sticking it out, just doing what we’ve got to do,” said Ms. Damiano, who was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical in 2009 for Next to Normal. “Even now I know that when I start my next project, I’ll be really excited for the day when people are complaining in rehearsals, and I’m like: ‘You don’t even know.’ ”
The two stars, who were hired by Ms. Taymor and the show’s composers, Bono and the Edge, generally kept a low public profile through February and March while the creative divorce took place. The subsequent overhaul of Spider-Man has yielded a musical that is earning about $1.2 million a week, as it did under Ms. Taymor— among the biggest hauls on Broadway, but also barely enough to cover the huge weekly running costs for this technically ambitious show.
The creative changes were intended to make the story clearer and more buoyant, in hopes of attracting more people to buy full- priced tickets (the show is discounting steadily) and eventually grossing upward of $1.7 million a week. Only time will tell, and Mr. Carney and Ms. Damiano have been sweating through long workdays to do what they can.
Mr. Carney performed with Bono and the Edge on the finale of American Idol on 25 May 25; huge exposure that did not have an appreciable impact on ticket sales, according to executives with the musical. Its paid advance has fallen fairly low, to about $6 million, said these executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the producers do not comment on ticket sales.
Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for the show, said of ticket sales: “The production never expected an immediate or giant bump in ticket sales from the Idol appearance. What it was about was to introduce the first single from the forthcoming album to an extraordinarily huge audience, and to further the awareness of Spider-Man across the country in an unprecedented way.”
Mr. Carney, for one, said that he believed that audience interest in Spider-Man was so great that the show would ultimately have productions in other cities, and that he hoped to be part of at least one of them (should it come to pass). “This is such a Vegas-style show, I’d love to be a part of that,” said Mr. Carney, whose Broadway contract runs through November. “I’d do Japan, too, if they asked me. I think the producers definitely will do the West End. I don’t know if I’d want to live in London, though.”
Ms. Damiano teased him sweetly. “I’m not tying myself to any future productions just yet,” she said.
But Mr. Carney would not be stopped, saying his wish now was to become the biggest singer-cum-actor since Frank Sinatra. If not Peter Parker in some future city, he said, he would love to play the role of another alter ego, Bruce Wayne, in a Batman musical someday. Turns out that Batman was his favorite super-hero when he was growing up, not Spider-Man. “I’m attracted to dark things,” he said of Batman. “And I like capes.”
Ms. Damiano again needled Mr. Carney, over the “dark things” line; a few hamburger bites later, she tweaked him for “buying stuff all the time” for his nine=hundred-square-foot apartment, like mirrors during a recent outing by the two actors to antiques stores. The ribbing and flirting and descriptions of day-off outings that peppered the conversation led, inevitably, to a question: are Peter and M. J., whose relationship is newly front and center in the musical, dating in real life?
“Well, let’s put it this way, Jenn helped me hang a couple of mirrors over my bed,” Mr. Carney said.
“Reeve! Stop!” Ms. Damiano replied. “Jenn Damiano has the best lips in the biz,” he continued.
“I have nothing to say about this,” she said.
Mr. Miramontez, who invited himself to the dinner as a sort of producer/chaperone, grinned and laughed. No one would confirm a romance, or if the two were conjuring one to abet media attention and sell more tickets.
“We’re all about the love story,” Mr. Carney said, “in the show at least.”