Midnight Oil Collective

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As our “Art Restart” interviews have made clear time and time again, artists’ relationship with capitalism is uneasy at best. Should we really allow the market to dictate whose artistic output is valuable? Can and should art be treated like widgets? Or like a new app?

To the second question, Frances Pollock and Keith Hamilton Cobb might answer, “If the artist is up for it, why not?” Frances, an opera and musical-theater composer, is the CEO of a nascent company called Midnight Oil Collective (MOC) that cribs from the funding practices of tech accelerators, which after all are hubs of creativity, to connect creators with money not from nonprofit sources but from private investors. MOC also trains its artist partners to regard their creative work as intellectual property akin to the tech innovations of an inventor. This means that an artist working with MOC learns how never to relinquish the rights to her work from start to finish and also learns how to scale it as needed. The artist does not wait for a producer or non-profit entity to determine if and how the project will grow, turning over the reins to the project in the process; she remains its captain and determines what the project requires in its own startup lab, so to speak.

Keith, an actor and playwright with a lengthy and distinguished television, film and stage resume, is not only on MOC’s artistic board; he is also in the first artist cohort to fund and develop a new piece through the company. He is the director of “The Untitled Othello Project,” a hybrid theater-making-and-education innovation endeavor that brings together creative minds of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to examine and interrogate the esthetic, moral and pedagogical values promulgated by the Western canon, using the Shakespeare play as a jumping-off point. “The Untitled Othello Project” is currently in residence at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT.  

Here Frances and Keith explain why this is the perfect moment for MOC’s brand of disruption in the art world and describe how the company funds and supports the projects under its wing.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• The seeds of what would eventually become Midnight Oil Collective were sown in a meeting just three months after our first pandemic lockdown. What led to that first meeting and what was discussed there?
• How do you find your investors and line up your funding?
• How do you educate them to the artistic process and manage their expectations?
• How much more of a challenge would it have been to develop your project and fund it without MOC’s involvement?
• Let’s say there’s an artist who wants to work with you. How would she proceed? What are the steps?
• How do you ascertain whether the artist really does want to be an entrepreneur?
• What did you take away from going through the incubator? What was particularly useful about it?
• There’s Spark funding to start with. Are there additional methods of future funding?
• How do you like thinking of your work as a business? Was shifting that lens  hard for you to do? How is it helping you in your art and your creativity?
• How are you enjoying being a CEO? Are you still able to attend to your art?
• Why is this model particularly important here and now?
• What kind of pushback, if any, have you heard from other artists and money people?
• When might an arts lover, an audience member or viewer, experience the first project funded through MOC?

Pier Carlo Talenti: I understand that the seeds of what would eventually become Midnight Oil Collective were sown in a meeting just three months after our first pandemic lockdown. Could you describe what led to that first meeting and what was discussed there?

Frances Pollock: I actually have to be the one that answers this because Keith came and joined us ... what was it, Keith? Six weeks or two months in?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: That sounds about right. Yeah.

Frances: I was a doctoral student at the time but early in my doctorate. I was taking a class with Jeanine Tesori on musical-theater writing. When the classes at Yale shut down and everything transferred online, Jeanine kind of made the rest of the semester about just talking about all of the things that we could control and couldn’t control and, “What does this mean for theater?” And “Is there going to be a field of musical-theater writing after this class that we were all a part of?” 

I just remember having a conversation with her in office hours. I believe that we had started talking about some of my fascinations with the field and with inequities that already existed in the field that were obviously going to be exacerbated by the pandemic. I was talking about who organically can participate in the field and just that my heart wanted for there to be a way for anyone who had great stories to be able to organically share those stories on a bigger and bigger stage. Basically Jeanine challenged me and said, “What are you going to do about it?” I think for me, that was the starting moment of, what could we in our position as artists do about the current situation that was not only being expanded by the pandemic but had been there for decades?

Once the George Floyd murder happened and the country erupted in riots and all of the arts institutions started putting forth their solidarity statements, the thing that just wouldn’t leave my mind was, “Nothing is going to change if you don’t address the money.” We can say all these beautiful things, we can put all of these platitudes out there that we stand in solidarity with people who have been historically underestimated and undercapitalized, but if you don’t address the way that money works in our industry, especially how it works in relationship to artists and their work, then we would never get past who can participate organically and who can’t. 

So the first conversations around MOC were that. It’s like, “What type of agency do we as artists have? And how can we affect the fields to become a more open, expansive and authentic place for anyone to participate?” 

Pier Carlo: Could you talk about how you find your investors and line up your funding?

Frances: We are supported through limited partnerships. That means that we are a for-profit investor-driven firm, which means that when we invest in a project, the goal is to create a financial return. That financial return doesn’t have to happen immediately. It can happen through multiple rounds of funding, just as in the traditional start-up landscape, but ultimately what we are pushing our projects to think about is, “How do I create a financially profitable and sustainable venture for you, the artist, for all of your collaborators, and then ultimately from the people who helped you get the project launched in the first place, and those would be your investors?”

Keith: I should add that if you look at the portfolio, there’s a great many products that would be more easily recognizable than “Untitled Othello.” We have films and TV shows and plays that any investor would look at and recognize as, “Oh, this is what’s been selling. This is something that could work.” Hopefully they evolve into breakout, beautiful, innovative things unto themselves. 

We had another vertical called “Disruptive Ventures.” This is something like “Untitled Othello,” which is saying, “Yeah, we are theater-makers. We are artists and creatives, but our chief interest is changing the landscape, and that has to be supported too.”

Pier Carlo: Right. It’s the disruption that tech people love to talk about, right?

Keith: Yeah.

Frances: Yeah.

Pier Carlo: But a tech firm, of course, at some point does have to deliver a product that will give a huge return on the initial investment. So how do you let your funders know that they have to invest in a certain amount of process and that the process of artmaking is very different from the process of creating code? Or maybe I’m wrong! How do you educate them to the artistic process and manage their expectations?

Frances: We’re still seeing how closely the tech landscape and the creative landscape can exist together, but the reality is that Keith’s project “Untitled” was invested in less than 18 months ago. And at this point, Keith has done so much work and so much development in getting the pre-revenue work done that he’s actually ready to go to investors and say, “I’m ready to think about what a post-revenue round of investment is going to look like.” And when you look at the lifecycle of start-ups, that is very congruent with what types of progress tech investors want to see.

I think the process of creation is the process of creation. What Keith and I, along with other front-running projects that are the most mature right now, are thinking about is, what does it look like to exist in a post-revenue landscape? For Keith, is there the production that was always an option that we want to pursue, or is it actually more of an educational packaging that we’re now going to put together and start selling to universities?

Ironically, Keith, even in his pre-revenue stage, has been the first project that we’ve had that has created a profit because he’s just been really smart with how he’s built and raised funding. He’s already garnered so much university attention that, even though there was this initial aversion to product, the process that he’s going through has already generated a small profit, which is cool.

Pier Carlo: That is very cool. So, Keith, how much more of a challenge would it have been to develop your project and fund it without MOC’s involvement?

Keith: Huge, because MOC’s initial, what we call the spark investment, was ... . Is it all right to quote numbers here? 

Pier Carlo: I’d say, yes, but Frances?

Frances: [Laughing] Yeah, let’s do it.

Keith: Their initial investment of $30,000 allowed us to begin this process. This process began as simply an interrogation of “Othello,” and I needed to bring together a group of core actors — the core ensemble of that play or those who I thought might be the core ensemble and who might rise to this particular sort of work — and bring them together in a room and read the play, discuss it, then shuffle the cast and put them in different roles and read it again and discuss it. We did that for seven weeks until we created an ensemble that we thought, “OK, we get each other after these seven weeks. We understand each other; we have had some talk about this; can we really begin to buckle down and build a brain trust here?” That was money that allowed us to do that and take us to the next step.

I was at the same time out talking to universities, saying, “I have this new idea. I want your buy-in. I just want you to try this.” And of course, universities are corporations. They wring their hands, and they look at this because it is not a recognizable model. Sacred Heart, I pitched it to them for three minutes and they were like, “Where do we sign? We love this.” They’ve been our foundational partners for almost three years now, allowing us to create this work. 

It’s not enough. We don’t have the amount of money that we need, and we’re perpetually looking for it. They are looking for it; MOC is looking for it; I’m looking for it. It at least allows us to spread out the work. It’s not me alone doing this, because if it were, being that I have very limited business acumen, we wouldn’t have gotten here. 

In addition to that, there’s belief. There’s belief of my colleagues at MOC who look at this and say, “Hell, yes.” There’s belief, and again, purely by luck, of people at Sacred Heart across several departments saying, “This is what we want to do. We believe you. Come, do this.” There’s some kismet, no doubt about it, but without the buy-in of it, without them having said originally when I described it, “Yeah, we’d like to work on that too. Let’s go” … .

Pier Carlo: Let’s talk about the nitty-gritty. Let’s say there’s an artist who wants to work with you. How would she proceed? What are the steps?

Frances: We do an application process, and this is to assess whether or not the creator is serious about wanting to try an alternative way of funding their work. We ask that creators have full drafts of their work, like every creator does. They always have screenplays that have been sitting on hard drives or musicals that have been sitting in their desk drawer for years and years. We say, “What is your big ambition? What is the thing that you want to stay up and burn the midnight oil over? What is the thing that, if it got its shot, would change culture and change the world?” That’s what we are interested in.

We work with all of these incredible artists who have that piece, and for whatever reason they’ve been told it’s unproducible. It’s too big, it’s too loud, it’s too dangerous, it’s too noisy, it’s too cumbersome, it’s too feminist, whatever. Those are exactly the pieces that we are looking to support.

And it’s so funny. We work with all of these incredible artists who have that piece, and for whatever reason they’ve been told it’s unproducible. It’s too big, it’s too loud, it’s too dangerous, it’s too noisy, it’s too cumbersome, it’s too feminist, whatever. Those are exactly the pieces that we are looking to support. 

So an artist will come to us and apply, and we say, “Are you serious about being an entrepreneur? Because if you’re not, then you’re going to have a tough time in our system.”

Pier Carlo: So clearly you have to make an aesthetic/artistic-potential judgment about the project itself, whether it serves your artistic goals and cultural goals. But then how do you ascertain whether the artist really does want to be an entrepreneur?

Frances: We do a series of interviews, and I’m going to be honest. It’s still an iterative process because the idea of the artist entrepreneur is something that’s a little bit of anathema to, I would say, the mainstream scene. I mean, it is and it isn’t. I would say that the best businessperson right now in the country is Taylor Swift. She is the premium example of the artist entrepreneur. But in terms of the artist who has been educated in the academy, we still get a lot of questions of, “What does that mean?” 

What we do is once an artist is accepted into our pipeline, before they receive any kind of funding from us, they receive four months of incubator education. That incubator education is to start to very intentionally peel apart places of bias, try and give the artists some very foundational tools of thinking about how they’re going to scale their artistic assets. We educate them about how we’re going to form a legal structure around their IP, how they’re going to both own and manage the structure, what it means for MOC to do our initial equity investment into that structure.

Pier Carlo: Does MOC have any ownership of the project?

Frances: The project is assigned to an LLC, and then MOC becomes a member on that LLC. We don’t manage the project in any way, we have no artistic say over the project, but we are a minority owner in the entity.

Pier Carlo: Keith, did you go through the incubator or an early version of it?

Keith: Yes.

Pier Carlo: What did you take away from it? What was particularly useful about it?

Keith: You know, it’s an interesting question. If you had asked me right after the incubator, I would’ve said, “Nothing. This doesn’t jive with how I think.” [Pier Carlo and Frances laugh.] But then getting into iterating around this project and building it, I began to see where it all made sense. Because MOC and “Project Untitled” started pretty much the same time, we are growing in the same ways.

Pier Carlo: Right. You’re on the same learning curve.

Keith: That’s right. I took a great deal from what I saw my colleagues in the administration of that organization doing, and I apply it to this. I have an ongoing sort of practicum going that some of our other artists don’t have. It would be interesting to ask them what they’re taking away because I don’t really know. I haven’t really assessed that. I’m learning as I go and realizing in retrospect, “Oh, that’s what this was about. That’s what this moment in the incubator was about.”

Frances: And I think that Keith points to something that’s really a crucial part of this process, which is that MOC is not a collective of artists in a traditional sense. It’s a collective of businesses being built together. In the same way that the tech space builds cohorts of businesses through incubators and accelerators that are able to lend support and solidarity and resources, MOC is doing the same thing, where every single person is on their own journey but they are all building their businesses together at the same time.

Pier Carlo: So the first round of funding is S30,000. You called it the Spark?

Frances: Yes.

Pier Carlo: So there’s Spark funding to start with. Are there additional methods of future funding?

Frances: Yeah, of course. My job as the person who’s managing the investment side of things is to help the artists understand all their different options in seeking further funding. And so, again, we’ve just now gotten to the place where projects are even remotely ready to start thinking in that direction. But what that’s going to look like is asking the artists, “Are you looking to build syndicates of investors to invest in your work?” This is where the part of the process that I love — the business, legal and finance — all coalesce.

Pier Carlo: Where did you learn all that? [Laughing] I mean, you started this when you were getting your doctorate in composition! Where did all this education happen?

Keith: They’re prodigies. I’m with you, Pier. I watched these people take on three incubators and accelerate three accelerators.

Pier Carlo: I know there’s a relationship between composition and math, so maybe that’s part of it.

Frances: We have a lot of support, and there’s a lot of people, especially at Yale, who we can go to and say, “We’re trying things this way. I think it maps onto the tech space in this way. What do you think?” I’ve done a lot of reading. We have a lot of great advisors, a lot of great mentors. We taught ourselves what tech does in the investor space. How are they successfully funding innovation? And then we said, “There’s all of these parallels over here in the creative space. Why don’t we just try and structure and apply them to developing creative intellectual property?” 

Because at the end of the day, it’s all IP, right? Whether you’re going to create something and form a patent around it or whether you’re going to take something that has a copyright that you can form an entity around, it’s all intellectual property. So it’s just been doing all of that translation for the last four years of, “This is how this exists in the tech space. What if we could create a similar structure in the creative space?”

Pier Carlo: Are you also teaching artists how to pay themselves?

Frances: Yes, very much so. 

Pier Carlo: Because I know so many artists take whatever funding they’ve received and put it all in the program and don’t build in a salary for themselves.

Frances: It’s so real. What we try and teach all of our artists is that they’re running a business. This is something that we are still trying to empower and build a culture around because it’s going to take a while before artists fully realize that when they have an LLC, that is a business, and that business can be as big as any other business that you see anywhere in the world. And you can do anything with that business. 

But what we’re seeing right now is artists who continuously want to treat everything like it exists in the nonprofit space or has historically fit in the nonprofit space. Or they want to take their intellectual property and they want to hand it to a producer or license it away. The natural impulse for an artist is to get rid of control as quickly as possible. And so it’s almost like a lot of therapy that we have to go through, which is like: “We’ll sit with you. We’ll show you how other businesses are built. We will build it with you. We can find investors with you, but you need to be able to sit with it and understand that you are the manager of this LLC. You are making the decisions. It all comes down to you. It’s not up to us. The power is in your hand.” 

I think that just because of the way that artists have been trained to think about their work, it’s a really tricky frame to re-contextualize.

Pier Carlo: Keith, how do you like thinking of your work as a business? Was shifting that lens hard for you to do? How is it helping you in your art and your creativity?

Keith: It remains hard for me. I am the poster child for what Frances was just describing, and I’m constantly slapped in the face with, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to handle this. I have to administer this. I have to abide by these laws and these rules.” And I’m evolving. It’s a learning curve. If left to my devices, I’d want to sit in a room and just do the creative work. That’s all I really wanted to do. 

I’m applying the tools as best I can, and I screw up. I mean, everything outside the box, Pier, comes up against roadblocks. Something as simple as dealing with my accountants. I explained to them what this is. “I just started a company. I need you to help me with this.” They talk to me like I’m an idiot because this is not something they want to spend their time with. What’s inside the box, that’s what they went to school to do, understand. They do not want to put their heads around a new model or do any of it differently, so they see me coming and they’re annoyed. Compare that to the lawyers at the Yale Law School that MOC has gotten involved with who looked at this and said, “I see exactly what you’re trying to do, and I’m here to help you.”

Pier Carlo: Frances, how are you enjoying being a CEO? Are you still able to attend to your art?

Frances: I very much enjoy being the CEO. I think that — 

Pier Carlo: I can tell. [They both laugh.] That is made evident, I’m happy to say.

Frances: Good. I don’t think that there is anything more fulfilling than tackling this problem right now, especially with the world as it is, and I’d love to come back to that in just a minute. But in terms of my composition, my compositional life is richer than it’s ever been because I simultaneously get to push my projects forward and the things that I find fascinating forward, but I also get to collaborate on all these projects that are all around me.

One of the coolest things that you’ll see once these projects hit a public marketplace is you’ll see my name in all of these different little spaces in the credits. Sometimes it’s like “music written by” or “scores arranged by Frances Pollock.” I’ve never more actively been a professional composer than I have been in this environment, being able to contribute the talents that I’ve garnered through the academy to building out these creative assets that are going to eventually turn into large-scale initiatives.

Pier Carlo: Why is this model particularly important here and now? 

Frances: One of the most interesting parts of this job right now is the creative economy very broadly, especially in the storytelling space, is at an inflection point. We’ve seen this with the strikes in Hollywood, which still continue to this day, which have kept Hollywood at an absolute standstill. We’re also seeing the struggles of the nonprofit theater sector as most major theater companies across the country are reckoning with shifting donor patterns and audiences not coming back after the pandemic and just not being able to keep up with their operational bottom line. At the same time, institutions are divesting from arts and humanities. What we’re seeing is an opportunity to completely just reimagine the way that all of this is done.

I think in a time when so many people have so much fear, especially professional artists and professional arts makers and cultural architects because the old way is failing, I have so much hope because I feel like we’re at a place where we can’t ignore these problems any longer. It’s just a matter of time before everyone is demanding a new way of doing this, because art is not going away. Theater’s not going away. Film’s not going away. Especially theater has endured forever. It’s kind of the foundation of our human capacity for exchanging ideas. But we do need to find a different way of doing it.

Pier Carlo: What kind of pushback, if any, have you guys heard from other artists and money people?

Frances: Well, I joke now that there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not simultaneously called an evil capitalist and a stupid artist in the same breath. [All three laugh.] And I’m like, “You pick one. I can’t be both. You can pick one. If I’m both an evil capitalist and a stupid artist, I think that you’re missing something.” It’s just overcoming the biases that artists have against business and finance and legal structures, and it’s overcoming the bias that legal types, business types and finance types have against artists. 

I joke now that there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not simultaneously called an evil capitalist and a stupid artist in the same breath. And I’m like, "You pick one. I can’t be both. You can pick one. If I’m both an evil capitalist and a stupid artist, I think that you’re missing something."

So we get pushback all of the time against this notion that it can be done differently, but it doesn’t stop the fact that... . I mean, what is the statistic, that 82% of SAG actors can’t afford the health insurance offered by the union. And it doesn’t change the fact that arts graduates are coming out with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of student-loan debt and immediately leaving the field. 

So I just have embraced that duality of the evil capitalist or the stupid artist.

Pier Carlo: Please, you have to have a joke business card that has both titles on it. 

So when might an arts lover, an audience member or viewer, experience the first project funded through MOC?

Frances: Well, we’re already starting to put out the proof of concepts that our artists have made in a variety of public settings. I would say on a small scale, you can already start to see some of the fruits of all of our labor. 

Pier Carlo: I have to admit I don’t think I understand what that means, putting out a proof of concept on a small scale for an arts project.

Frances: Yeah, again, it’s more of this translation game for us. See, it all comes back to what is working, what are the funding models that work. In the tech space, the industry standard recognizes that creating MVPs, a minimum viable product, is a great way of attracting funding partners and strategic partners and selling early models or attracting early users to your venture. So we encourage our artists to think similarly. “What are you going to create that’s going to attract those early funders, allow people to understand the full scope of your project?” Really that’s what we encourage those early checks to be used towards: “How do you show traction? How do you build your network of supporters for your project?”

Pier Carlo: So it’s kind of the beta model.

Frances: Yes, exactly. Last year at the Yale Innovation Summit, we were able to put on a full workshop of Anthony Davis’ musical “Shimmer” in partnership with Schwarzman Center, so 100 people saw that. They got a beautiful recording that they’re now sending out across the country. Keith has invited events all the time with “Project Untitled” in which he allows people to see into the process of interrogating some of the work that he’s doing. And this coming spring, we have one of our shows, “Stargazers,” going Off-Broadway. That’s going to be a traditional run in partnership with Page 73 Productions. 

Those are instances where audiences get to see the first glimpses of the early investments. And it’s really, really exciting for us. It’s really exciting.

Pier Carlo: All in three years.

Frances: Oh, it’s not all in three years. It’s all in 18 months

Pier Carlo: 18 months, that’s right. That’s astonishing.

Frances: Yeah. We opened our fund last June, and these are all investments that we have made.