Sunday, May 11, 2008
Convention producers moving forward
WE’VE MOVED! Democratic Convention Watch is now at http://www.DemocraticConventionWatch.com
Obviously convention planning must go on before the nominee is known, and some broad outlines are being put in place:
The Democratic National Convention Committee didn’t wait for candidate input before designing the huge podium to be in the Pepsi Center in August. Good choice. They had the podium design ready in February. “In this world we’re in, where we don’t know who the candidate is as of today, it’s really helped,” said Ricky Kirshner, who has produced every national convention since 1996 for the Democrats. This year, he’ll be joined for the first time by a co-producer. While Kirshner handles the production end, party strategist Mark Squier is responsible for crafting the political messages.
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It’ll mean plenty of business for local theatrical production. In Boston, more than 50 percent of production money was spent locally (the committee will not release any Denver financials). At least one local scene shop will be used, although the contract hasn’t been offered yet, and the convention will use 25,000 hours of labor by local stagehands.Alvarado Construction is doing the Pepsi Center build-out – it gets access to the Pepsi Center on July 7 – much of which involves providing tents and infrastructure for the 15,000 journalists expected. “No matter how good a convention you do,” Kirshner said, “if the media is not happy, you didn’t have a good convention.”- Rocky Mountain News
The blue balloon in the picture shows where the podium will be. I don’t think those seats behind the balloon will have very good sightlines.
Posted by Matt at 11:40 PM 
i thought i read elsewhere that the seats are actually being removed for the build-out, so the sight-lines are a moot point.
If it’s anything like what they did to Boston I agree it won’t matter because there won’t be any seats there. I remember that Kerry and the other major speakers actually entered through the Bruins tunnel to their bench, which if you’ve ever been in that building means they had to remove A LOT of seats to get the set they did.
That was a bit of a joke. There will be a big podium there, and those seats behind the podium will either be removed or curtained off. (They sometimes put support folks there, like the band).