[SML] elite production?

[Alex French]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 10:18 PM, herrick goldman via Stagecraft
<stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:
> Right?  And kristi I get all that but it's still a pipe and drape hmi show..
> I looked at their site that's all they do. Except puddle..   I totally get
> the rush job cost and heck.if the govt is paying....  But still that's what
> 8 crew to set up in 4 hours?  And what would be a $3k rental in NYC?

My $.02 in addition to the comment so far (probably more knowledgeable
than mine... my lighting design credits stop at Kofi Annan and the
Dalai Lama, and those were very low profile college campus events).

Poking around all the documents I could find linked, it isn't really
clear what the scope was... the Sole Source Justification document
says something like "stage, drapery, audio/visual equipment".  When
you see that sort of vagueness on that sort of form, it might mean
pipe and drape, or it might mean a U2 tour.

In this case it might easily include none of, or all of...

Dozens of motors and trucks full of truss
Hundreds of lighting instruments + accoutrements
A few trucks worth of generators
Temp power distribution equivalent to a small convention center event
A few trucks worth of AC
Drapery covering every inch of the room (gym?) as well as hallways,
separate press areas, etc.
Sound reinforcement, maybe starting from scratch, rigging speakers, etc.
Independent sound apparatus to support broadcast

Or maybe it was just a little bit of pipe and drape.  I can't really
guess.  Instead of "was Elite paid a reasonable amount of money for
what it did?", a more reasonable question might be whether the value
added by these things was worth that much.

But going down that road, I bet we'd quickly find that this $100K
pales in comparison to the other costs associated with that 18 minutes
worth of speech.  And that this speech probably wasn't particularly
expensive in comparison to the support costs around POTUS on any
average day (I have no specific citations to support that, but would
be interested if anyone else does).

Alex French