THURSDAY : J ULY 02 : 2015
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With $160 million in earnings, Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao is named by Forbes as the second top celebrity moneymaker in the world this year. He is bested only by his most recent opponent, Floyd Mayweather Jr., who cashed in $300 million within the same period, securing the all-time highest annual sum for an athlete. The duo’s 2015 riches are largely due to their highly anticipated and much publicized match, which sold 4.4 million pay-per-views and resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue for both fighters, as well as partnerships and endorsement deals. This is one of the few times in Forbes’ Celebrity 100 history that athletes hold the top two spots. This is also the first time that the list is international and not US-centric, a decision that was made due to the “profound changes in the entertainment world.” “The result is a more accurate reflection of the current entertainment landscape, a 21st century reality where Bollywood’s biggest stars (Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan, $33.5 million apiece) earn more than some Hollywood A-listers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Channing Tatum, $29 million apiece),” explains Forbes’ Zack O’Malley Greenburg. The third and fourth positions on the tally are occupied by musicians. Forbes reasons that this is because of the strength of lucrative world tours that are seeing a growth in popularity in emerging markets “spurred by the rise of the global middle class.” The year’s top musician is Katy Perry, amassing $135 million, followed by the UK’s One Direction with $130 million. Both acts were on tour during the Celebrity 100 scoring period. Radio and podcast personality Howard Stern makes the top five with an estimated $95 million that he earned for being the biggest star on Sirius XM and for judging on TV’s America’s Got Talent. Garth Brooks is at number six, earning $90 million in concert ticket sales. The American country music legend may not be a familiar name outside the US, but he’s huge and very much in demand in his home country. According to Nielsen, he is the best-selling albums artist in the US in the SoundScan era (since 1991); and Recording Industry Association of America data places him in second place on the list of top-selling music artists in the US with 135 million albums sold, after The Beatles with 178 million. Author James Patterson banked $89 million during the scoring period, which puts him on the seventh spot. While his books are not massive worldwide bestsellers, he out-earned every other writer for releasing as many as 16 books a year. The first actor on the list is Robert Downey Jr., who continues to command big bucks – $80 million this year – playing Iron Man on the screen. Tying him is Taylor Swift, whose most recent album, 1989, sold over 3.6 million copies. Rounding out the top 10 is Cristiano Ronaldo. The Portuguese football star’s $79.5 million total is due to a $50 million annual salary from Spain’s Real Madrid plus sponsorship contracts and his own apparel line. See the full Celebrity 100 list here: www.forbes.com/celebrities. Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao
Robert Downey Jr.
Taylor Swift
Katy Perry
Beijing Collective
ImproMafia
MANILA IMPROV FESTIVAL 2015 Still crazy after all these years BY GABE MERCADO
W
ith my phone held up in the air like a magic wand, I searched the hotel room for the strongest signal. I put in the numbers and held my breath, waiting for Washington DC to pick up. I heard the distinct voice of Dr. Mary Tyszkiewicz on the line, a voice I had heard a few dozen times on the YouTube video of her talk on how improvisation might help people prepare for unimaginable disasters. I made my pitch and two months later she made her way to the Philippines on the wings of donations from SPIT (Silly People’s Improv Theater) fans and improvisers from all around the world. Together, SPIT and Dr. Mary rolled out the Heroic Improv program to 15 groups all over the country, including groups in Yolanda-hit Tacloban and Tanauan in Leyte, sharing just how improvisation can help in developing the attitude and the mindset to respond to unforeseen disasters. Admittedly, teaching workshops in disasterstruck towns and cities was furthest from my mind when we started SPIT 13 years ago. I had just wanted an alternative to the kind of comedy that was prevalent in the local scene. I wanted to be a pioneer in a field that I could be good in. I took a workshop, gathered a few friends and SPIT was born. The past decade or so has seen tremendous growth for SPIT. We’ve proudly represented the country at the Hong Kong, Beijing, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Amsterdam improv festivals. We’ve travelled the country, doing shows in state of the art theaters, swanky resorts, smoky bars, massive convention centers, sports arenas and even the dried goods section of a public market. We’ve done workshops and have helped spawn more improv groups so that now we actually have a vibrant local improv community. We’ve shared to countless corporations the lessons non-theater people can learn from the practice of improvisation. While we’ve had much fun and much success, crafting scenes, songs and stories from suggestions our audiences make, somehow the question has always bugged me. What was all of this for? In a struggling country with a population of over 100 million people, just how important is the practice of improvisation in the grand scheme of things? What was the point of being silly, playing games and having fun in the midst of all the serious things going on around us? That was the question bearing heavy on my mind when I made that call to Dr. Mary Tyskiewicz a few weeks after Yolanda hit the Philippines. As an eminent disaster research professional who had just retired from her job at FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management
Agency of the United States), Mary had pioneered a program that bet heavily on the power of improvisation to help citizens think on their feet, make better decisions and practice distributed and fluid leadership in the face of sudden and catastrophic circumstances. Improv training could teach all those lessons AND do it in a fun and engaging manner. We piloted her program in what Mary calls “the benevolent greenhouse” of the Philippines in early 2014 and in May of 2015, an international development organization started talks with us to roll this program out on a wider scale to vulnerable communities in the Philippines. And there, perhaps, is the answer to my question. We improvise all the time! No matter what we do, no matter how we plan, predict, constrict and control, life and nature has a way of throwing a monkey wrench into our best laid plans. Improvisation is important because it teaches us how to be ready for anything and everything, and it teaches us to have fun while doing it. It’s an essential life skill that everyone needs. We’ve seen how Filipinos love fun and laughter and can manage to find something to smile and laugh about even in the most challenging of circumstances. “It’s all just fun and games until someone gets hurt,” my old teacher used to say. But the reality is, people do get hurt all the time. Everyone goes through suffering, everyone goes through grief, each one of us has his own battles to fight. But that shouldn’t stop the spirit of deep play and fun we can use for even the most difficult of battles. The moment we stop having fun, stop being a little bit silly, stop laughing at ourselves and stop finding and figuring out the game that life has thrown our way – that’s the true moment of tragedy. This July 2015, we will be celebrating life and finding the game when 19 groups from all over the world come to Manila for five days of workshops, performances, talks and most importantly of all, fun and games. We’ve got groups from as far away as Poland, Australia and the United States coming over as well as groups from Bacolod and Cagayan de Oro and from our lovely neighbors in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Taichung, Tokyo and Singapore, among many others. We’re all excited to share the fun, the laughter, the insights that improv can offer from July 8-12 at the PETA Theater Center in Quezon City. Have a fun and crazy time with us. To paraphrase an old Apple commercial, “The ones who are crazy enough to change the world, are the ones that do.”