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Play-Full Firm Finds Disc's Fringe Benefits

January 29, 2002

While production titans like Wayne Paige and Bruce Sturgill tout the advantages of DVDs to businesses, Gary Cole sees DVDs heading for the fringe.

Fringe theater, that is. Loosely defined as aggressively independent and frequently local small-stage productions, fringe theater plays the lead in Cole's latest venture. Cole, a former CIA agent and Ball Janik attorney, has started StageDirect Inc., an enterprise that identifies fringe theater productions nationwide for release on video and, starting later this year, DVD.

StageDirect's four-person staff finds productions it deems worthy of distribution ("Our artistic director, Jeff Meyers, is an alternative weekly junkie: He reads the equivalent of Willamette Week in a dozen places," Cole said), then works, during taping, to preserve the production's intimacy.

It sells digitally shot and edited videos and DVDs through its Web site, employing a twist on the "just-in-time" inventory tactic by dubbing the products after orders are placed.

"We have very little inventory," said Cole, a co-founder of CoHo Productions and a player in the Portland theater community.

Along with the Web site sales, Cole hopes to market the productions to television networks, video and DVD rental stores and in-room hotel entertainment services. StageDirect, Cole said, is demonstrating the product in rooms in downtown Portland's Avalon Hotel & Spa.

--Andy Giegerich

© 2002 The Portland Tribune, excerpted with permission.

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