The people behind the annual Haunted Hayride at Griffith Park are taking a new show on the road after recently scoring a $2 million investment from Mark Cuban on ABC’s “Shark Tank.”
Melissa Carbone, co-founder of Ten Thirty One Productions in Atwater Village, said the company is preparing to turn its haunted campout into a traveling show. It will be staged June 6 at Griffith Park, then move to seven other cities including Houston and Seattle.
Ten Thirty One is using the investment money from Cuban to launch the overnight experience, called the Great Horror Campout. Carbone said the new production caters to the market of horror fans, who are looking for interactive experiences more than ever.
“People don’t want to sit there and clap,” Carbone said. “They want to be part of the show.”
Carbone co-founded Ten Thirty One with Alyson Richards five years ago. Carbone had previously worked in local radio and staged an annual Halloween event at her house that got more popular over the years.
She turned it into a business in 2009 by producing the Haunted Hayride at King Gillette Ranch in Calabasas, before moving to Griffith Park the next year. The event takes place for 17 nights during Halloween season. The hayride generates about $1.8 million in revenue and $600,000 of profit a year, Carbone said. Tickets go for $30 to $55 a piece.
The company produced its first overnight haunted campout in Los Angeles last June at Los Angeles State Historic Park near Chinatown. Carbone appeared in October on “Shark Tank,” and Cuban took an interest in expanding the overnight event to other cities. He invested $2 million in exchange for 20 percent of the company. Carbone said she’s now in weekly contact with Cuban.
The fourth partner in Ten Thirty One is production designer Keith Greco.
Carbone said the campouts will cost about $200,000 to $250,000 to produce at each stop. Horror fans pay for tickets that go for about $160 to $220 for a 12-hour overnight experience. The attraction, which will stay at each stop for two nights, includes horror movie screenings and scary adventures.
Carbone said Ten Thirty One plans to expand the Haunted Hayride attraction to either New York or San Francisco next year.
Medium Shift
People are still tuning into Los Angeles Dodgers games, but increasingly, they’re doing it on the radio. Clear Channel Communications’ KLAC-AM (570), which broadcasts Dodgers games, has seen its ratings skyrocket.
When the team’s season began last month, KLAC doubled its share of local listeners to 1 percent of the total market, according to ratings firm Arbitron. Meanwhile, Dodgers TV viewership has cratered because 70 percent of the market is shut out of watching games due to a carriage dispute.
On weeknights in April, when many Dodgers games were aired, KLAC’s ratings were up 78 percent compared with April of last year, KPCC reported.
TV ratings for Dodgers broadcasts on newly launched SportsNet LA are down more than 60 percent compared with last year when they were televised on cable on Fox Sports Prime Ticket.
The carriage dispute between Time Warner Cable, which operates SportsNet LA, and the other pay-TV operators has shown no signs of letting up. DirecTV and other local carriers have said they aren’t losing enough customers to force them to pick up the channel at Time Warner’s asking price of between $4 and $5 a subscriber.
KLAC executives did not return a call for this article, but it’s likely they aren’t complaining about the TV standoff.
Más Fútbol
ImpreMedia of New York, the parent company of L.A. Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, has launched a print supplement to cover the upcoming World Cup soccer competition in Brazil.
Called Quiero Más Fútbol, the insert began publication earlier this month and is now being included each Friday in La Opinion.
It’s an expansion of a digital initiative by the same name that was launched in December to preview the cup and cover other international matches. The idea was to provide more extensive coverage of the event, with contributions from staff in Brazil and elsewhere.
ImpreMedia, which also distributes the supplement in its New York paper, El Diario, said in a statement that demand for World Cup coverage is apparent since about 25 percent of Hispanics have watched international soccer in the past year. The company has also done research showing that about one-third of its readership has played soccer in the last year.
Comings and Goings
Santa Monica public radio station KCRW-FM (89.9) has hired Jill Smayo as development director and Micah Greenberg as director of business development. … Beverly Hills branding and licensing company Epic Rights has named Juli Boylan executive vice president of global strategic partnerships and licensing, and Lisa Streff senior vice president of licensing. … News site Mashable has hired Judah Wiedre as advertising director for Los Angeles and Southern California.
Staff reporter Jonathan Polakoff can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 226.
