Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (14 page)

“Don’t you think
you
should write her?”

“It would mean more coming from you.”

“I hardly know her!”

Julie flashed me her most fetching smile, and that night I was typing out “Dear Evan, . . .” Two days later, Evan’s camp sent out a release. Privately, she cautioned us that she might have to bow out somewhere down the line, but at least to the world-at-large, she was still on board.

Julie was demoralized after attending an August 17 meeting between David Garfinkle and Marvel reps David Maisel and Ike Perlmutter (Marvel’s CEO). Ike seemed to have no interest in the show. He had a long successful history taking advantage of companies tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. Julie worried Ike was looking at David Garfinkle and seeing what a cartoon wolf would see: a tie-wearing lamb chop.

But three days later, grasping just how damaging it would be to the Spider-Man brand if the project collapsed, Marvel strongly indicated to David Garfinkle that they were going to put up the money to save the show. David Maisel and Ike Perlmutter convened another meeting with Garfinkle, Martin McCallum, and Alan Wasser (
Turn Off the Dark’
s general manager) to discuss how to move forward. The Marvel reps came with a checkbook in their pocket, along with a pen to write out the number “thirty million.”

“Call me as soon as the meeting’s over,” an again-upbeat Julie told David.

Two hours later the meeting was over, but there was no crisp check in David Garfinkle’s hands. The Marvel reps weren’t crazy about the numbers in the
Turn Off the Dark
ledger, but what
really
spooked them was the vivid display of high-quality, uncut dysfunction. All of Martin’s and Alan’s supressed pessimism toward the project’s viability came spilling out at the meeting. David Garfinkle,
blindsided, stammered his way through damage control. The contrapuntal strains of accusation and counter-accusation filled the air. The Marvel reps closed their checkbook and went home.

What Ike Perlmutter
didn’t
divulge at either of the two Hello-Marvel meetings was that Disney was buying Marvel. Any day now. For four billion dollars. So while Ike was raking David over the coals, sermonizing about the enormity of thirty million, Ike (who owned thirty-eight percent of Marvel stock) was a week away from receiving a personal payday of $800 million in cash and $590 million in Disney stock.

Julie sent a note to Alan Wasser, Martin McCallum, and David Garfinkle urging them to get their shit together.

Enough looking backward and blaming each other for where we are. What’s done is done. How do we pull this Spider-Man back from the brink???? This family has to come together
now
.

Danny Ezralow added his two cents in another e-mail: “I don’t care what it takes. We need to have it be known to Marvel and Sony that none of us are
flakes
. . . .”

Bono found a little money (some of it from a colleague named Michael Cohl). David Garfinkle said it was enough to get workers back in the theatre on Monday (August 31). How much money did Bono find? David said more was coming, but he had just wired the first tranche. A “tranche” is a portion of something. From the French for “slice.” As in “this tranche of pie seems a little small.” Or “David, are you sure more tranches are coming?” Because Monday rolled in. Not a single worker was back in the theatre. Tuesday, ditto, and now the
tick-tock
of the clock was getting kinda loud.

On Labor Day weekend, 2009, David Garfinkle could be found alone in the Hello Entertainment offices, working the phones, and lifting his legs so that the woman from the cleaning service could vacuum under his desk. And where was Martin McCallum? David informed us that after that mess of a Marvel meeting on the twentieth, Martin took a lifeboat back to Australia.

“Glen,” said Julie, “you need to write him.”

“Well, somebody needs to write him, but maybe it should be
you.
”

“It would mean more coming from you.”

“Seriously?”

I wrote him a tearjerker of a plea, but Martin never did respond. And though Martin McCallum is listed as a producer in the playbill, he would never again be seen in connection with
Spider-Man
. But his sanity is still intact, which is no small thing.

Julie was convinced David was on the brink of a nervous breakdown and would wind up in jail before this was all through. He had just secured a five-million-dollar building loan, and he was using it to send a modest number of workers back to the theatre. But he didn’t seem to have any means of raising the rest of the capital, which meant he was just digging a bigger hole for himself.

I called Julie’s high-powered lawyer, Seth Gelblum, the one who told me to “stick with Julie” back in 2005. Surely he possessed some sort of promising news.

“I don’t see it happening,” he said over the phone. “I’m really sorry. We get people who are interested, and then they look at the numbers, and they run away. And I feel worst for you, Glen. . . .”

Though promising deals kept falling through, David
had
managed to secure . . . a block of tickets for the upcoming U2 concert. The band landed in the Meadowlands with their gargantuan 360° Tour, and on September 24 a van was hired to get some of us
from Manhattan to the stadium. The van crawled through downtown traffic as David Garfinkle talked enthusiastically about the reviews and attendance records broken on this U2 tour. He got a tepid response. He talked enthusiastically about the cast of
Turn Off the Dark
. No response. He fondly recalled the last time we were in a van together heading to a U2 concert. “Tony Adams was in the van that time,” was the only response. It was all so awkward, so pitiful. Under all his perky chitchat about this and that, you could hear in David’s voice
“It’s not my fault
,” and
“I didn’t mean to let you down
,” and
“Please don’t hate me
.” You wanted to commiserate, but you don’t commiserate with “the victim.” The gridlock was so bad, and the social dynamics were so uncomfortable, Teese Gohl finally leaped out of the van and returned to the creeping vehicle minutes later with a couple of six-packs. We still weren’t moving, David was still trying to make small talk, but at least now there was beer.

A week and a half earlier, David Garfinkle had sought to ease the fears of a half-dozen
Spider-Man
investors by escorting them and their families in a stretch limo to the U2 concert in Chicago. There, backstage at Soldier Field, Edge and Bono posed for pictures and assured the investors that, artistically, the show was on solid ground. The investors were assuaged; David Garfinkle could breathe again, for the moment.

Now Julie was pushing through the crush of eighty thousand people at the Meadowlands and marveling at the drawing power of our two composers. There just
had
to be some producer, some savior, who understood what a golden opportunity
Spider-Man
actually was. That we were in this mess felt so unfair. It felt unfair, that is, until U2 featured on their vast cylindrical video screen a tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political prisoner who was just sentenced to imprisonment for three years with hard
labor. At best, she faced the prospect of being under house arrest for fourteen of the last eighteen years. And all for fighting for justice on behalf of her people. And U2 had carved out space in their rock concert to educate the crowd about her.

And I couldn’t find a kind word to say to David Garfinkle in a van.

I was ashamed. I made a point to navigate the after-party with colleague David Garfinkle, with friend David Garfinkle, with good-hearted, put-upon David Garfinkle, the man Julie said a year before was such an endearing advocate for the show she wanted to create (unlike Martin McCallum “who was always carping about the budget”). However, when David tried to press his way through a throng of cocktail drinkers to schmooze with Bono, and the singer shot him a look of undisguised scorn, I made sure my body language was clear—“Oh, I just happen to be standing here, I’m not with
him
.”

Never go to a U2 after-party with
“
the victim.
”

•     •     •

Spider-Man
was, to put it mildly,
an undertaking
. And in Italian, “undertaking” is
impresa,
from whence we get “impresario.” And that was the better word for what the show needed
.
Not just an organizer, but a promoter; not just an overseer, but a ringmaster, a rainmaker, a spin doctor—someone who could get control of the spooked horses and steer this teetering stagecoach safely into Dodge.

When Julie met Michael Cohl for the first time, in an early-October meeting, she was a little thrown. Even though every successful producer had his or her own style, deep down you could tell they were all stouthearted, steel-spined, cold-eyed realists. But Michael?

“He’s . . . well, he’s like an old hippie,” reported Julie. “He’s just
in this T-shirt, with this bushy beard. Very laid back. He’s like the polar opposite of David.”

In August, like most of those in the multimillionaire tax bracket, Michael Cohl was vacationing with his family. He was on a Spanish beach when his cell phone rang with a call from Bono asking him to come in as a producer on
Spider-Man.
The pitch was that the job was “just a part-time” thing. Michael Cohl chuckled heartily over that a year later: “Part-time! He actually
said
that!” The show just needed someone to tidy up the books, and check in now and then. There might be some money in it, and hey—
it could be fun
.

The pitch appealed to the very things that lured Michael out of bed in the morning. This puckish iced-tea addict (he gave up alcohol years ago) was always receptive to a project that was going to give him “that buzz.” Once a Toronto teenager raised in the thick of the sixties, Michael had remained loyal to his first loves: folk music, leftist politics, and rock and roll. He dropped out of school and test-drove various jobs (including managing an Ottawa strip club) before trying his hand as a concert promoter, booking the seventeen-thousand-seat Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in 1970 for country band Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. The date was such a flop that the twenty-year-old Cohl had to ask the venue’s owner to loan him twelve thousand dollars so he could pay the band. The sign that Michael had found his true calling: This disaster left him undaunted. He continued to book bands, and within two years, he was the in-house promoter for that same Maple Leaf Gardens.

In 1984 he salvaged the Jacksons’ flailing
Victory
tour, and his experience on that job opened his eyes to a new and potentially lucrative way to put a tour together. Call it “cross-collateralization”—treating a tour as one big market instead of eighty separate markets.
In 1989, he had a chance to apply that knowledge while working for his single greatest love: the Rolling Stones. “Best band ever,” he would later insist to Julie, whose loyalty to the Beatles had been intensified by her time on
Across the Universe.
“Sure. The Beatles were great,” Michael conceded.
“But they’re not the Stones.”

Before Michael Cohl became their promoter, the Rolling Stones netted twenty-two million on their
Tattoo You
tour. The Cohl-managed
Steel Wheels
tour? It brought in $260 million. (By 2010, he had refined the model—the Stones’
A Bigger Bang
tour almost
tripled
the
Steel Wheels
total.) The Michael Cohl model for rock tours was born. Other rock groups wanted in, and partnerships with bands such as U2, the Who, and Pink Floyd followed. As
Fortune
magazine would put it, Michael Cohl was now “The Howard Hughes of Rock and Roll.”

But Michael had also dabbled in Broadway, with producing credits for
Spamalot,
as well as the notably unsuccessful
Lord of the Rings
musical. And after taking a cursory look at the
Spider-Man
accounts, he was ready to take a deeper plunge. Which is why he was now meeting Julie in the PRG conference room, along with Bono, Edge, and the chairman and CEO of PRG, Jere Harris.

The auburn-mustached Jeremiah Harris—though looking about as theatrically bohemian as a mid-level executive for General Motors—had more theatre blood in his veins than all the rest of the
Spider-Man
gang combined. His great-grandfather was a theatre manager in England, his grandfather was a company manager for preeminent producer/director George Abbott, and his father produced over two hundred Broadway shows. And that was just on his father’s side. Jere would eventually found PRG (Production Resource Group), a global supplier of lights, scenic fabrication, and anything else falling under the category of “entertainment technology.”

When Tony Adams struck out on his own in 2002, Jere offered him space in his PRG office on Ninth Avenue. Hello Entertainment, consisting of just one desk at first, eventually expanded to occupy one side of Jere’s office. So it was a natural development for Jere Harris to become an early investor in
Spider-Man,
while PRG was contracted to manufacture all of
Spider-Man’
s set elements.

But Jere didn’t just want to save a show he was heavily invested in. He wanted to save the jobs of his colleagues, friends, and relatives who were either helping build the show or were employed as crew over at the Hilton Theatre. And thus it was agreed upon at this meeting in the PRG conference room that David Garfinkle and Hello Entertainment would cede control to Michael and Jere of Goodbye Entertainment. Yes—a bit pointed, that. “Goodbye”—that’s what the new producing entity was called.

But now congratulations were in order: Michael and Jere had just acquired the finest migraines of their lives.

•     •     •

“Turn Off the Dark.” The Hilton had been dark for three months by the time Michael Cohl’s and Jere Harris’s new roles were officially announced (in a press release also announcing the casting of Reeve Carney as Peter Parker). With the show hemorrhaging money in rent payments, Michael and Jere now needed to raise at least another twenty-four million to cover a budget that was hovering around fifty-two million and ticking ever upward.