Traveling Salesmen

None of the glittering indie dance kids at Spanish Moon could guess the secret identity of the DJ steering them deep and spinning into the night. None of them knew he was with the government. Tall, lanky and a natural with his hands circling turntables, Othertempo may have been busting out room-shaking dub, afro beat and electro jams, but the fact that 31-year-old Elliott Adams was there at all came down to his new gig as Digital Media Director for Louisiana Economic Development.

Adams and 38-year-old Philip Mann, LED’s Director of Live Performance Development, are the new faces for two progressive tax incentive programs aiming to leverage Louisiana’s cultural economy into big business for the state. With Adams focused on emerging computer animation technologies and videogame development and Mann aggressively curating the state’s live theater performances, the duo’s efforts are meant to complement and build upon the already successful tax credit program for film production. Sherri McConnell, who heads LED’s Entertainment Industry Development department, likens their jobs to sales positions, albeit unusually creative ones.

“Being a salesman for something that doesn’t have value is tough, but something like Louisiana that’s an easy sell, that changes things,” says Adams, who grew up in Oklahoma City. He spent the past decade in Portland, where he recently departed online music distributor CD Baby. “Coming from Portland, that’s probably the most efficient city in America, but in a lot of ways it’s lacking a true culture. Oklahoma is great and has a lot of good things going for it, but it has nowhere near the richness of culture and history that you find in Louisiana.”

Last fall Entertainment Arts opened a videogame testing operation on LSU’s South Campus, and even non-LED events like the renowned Red Stick International Animation Festival have raised regional awareness of the videogame and animation sectors. At CD Baby, Adams brokered content deals with Amazon, Last.FM and Yahoo!, and now he is tasked with attracting new content producers to the state. He lives near LSU, but also works part-time as an adjunct professor at Loyola. And he still DJs every now and then.

Adams was a fan of Louisiana long before he was a Louisianan. A self-described music nerd and history buff, this music professor’s son was a longtime listener of Nick Spitzer’s New Orleans-produced radio series American Routes and an advocate for the documentary films of UL-Lafayette professor Charles Richard.

“When I’d tell my friends from New York and Portland that I was going to be working in Louisiana—and they don’t know the difference between here and Mississippi or Alabama—I’d have to tell them that Louisiana is a place that isn’t yet completely overrun by chain restaurants and shopping malls. Louisiana has that stuff, like every state, but there’s so much real, authentic American culture here,” Adams says.

It is the diversity of culture spanning New Orleans, Cajun Country, Baton Rouge and North Louisiana that made an immediate impression on Mann, who was married at St. Aloysius Church in Baton Rouge.

He actually cast his wife before he married her. As a producer of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Mann met Baton Rouge-based Broadway actress Ana Maria Andricain while casting a production. Mann’s new connection to Louisiana is one that McConnell noted when she courted the Birmingham native to lead “Broadway South.”

“I started hearing that term in 2007, and I thought, ‘What in the world is this?’ because there was nothing else like it in the country, and there still isn’t, in fact,” Mann says. The destruction of playhouses and theaters by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the subsequent forced migration of many theater professionals, served as the impetus for Louisiana’s 2007 legislation offering five ways to earn tax credits on live theater performances and infrastructure. Last spring Gov. Bobby Jindal signed a bill giving incentives to community not-for-profit productions as well. “That’s exciting and unique, too,” Mann says. “That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the country, and these are trying times for not-for-profits.”

When Mann first read the job description to his wife, she thought he had written it. Public policy, theater, music. All of his passions were addressed. So after years producing and investing in Broadway productions and working as a booking agent for Rent and Mamma Mia! in New York City, Mann and Andricain decided to move to Baton Rouge. Since then, Mann has traveled the state and is working closely with the Strand Theatre in Shreveport and the Baton Rouge River Center to bring Broadway to Louisiana.

“There are tons of Broadway producers in the state right now, and more planning to come,” Mann says. “But we need to first make sure our infrastructure is where it needs to be in order to handle the type of productions I want to bring here. The interest is huge; we just need to be in a position to bear that out.”

Last summer Mann helped curate the first annual Irish Film Festival, and he plans to produce a play this fall at Red Star downtown. The bar is just a few blocks from his loft at One Eleven on Third Street. Coming from New York City, he laments the lack of public transportation here, but being a downtown resident, he has been surprised by Baton Rouge’s robust culture.

“The thing about culture in this state—from food to entertainment to literature and traditions—is that it is so prominent in defining what Louisiana is,” Mann says. “It’s more than activities for weekends. It’s part of people’s lives and a real fabric of the state.”

Like Adams, Mann grew up a musician with parents who shared a similar artistic bent. Mann’s parents worked in the theater. In their short time in Baton Rouge both Adams and Mann have cultivated a refreshing outsider’s appreciation for Louisiana and a reverence for the challenges ahead.

“I’m like Elliott, though. If anyone had told me I’d be living in Baton Rouge working in government, in this field, I would have told them they were nuts,” Mann says. “The thing is, I wanted to move into a phase where the type of work I’m doing will have relevance long after I’m no longer doing it. But hopefully we’ll be doing this for a long time.” ledlouisiana.com

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