The Outro

Monty Python’s fourth movie, The Meaning of Life, starts with a short film, The Crimson Permanent Assurance, in which the elderly employees of a long-standing accounting firm recently bought by a new American company rebel and take it over—as creaky, swashbuckling pirates. Similarly, I thought of taking back the Rhino offices after the company moved to Burbank in December 2002. The move was at the request of WEA head Dave Mount, whose desire was that all of the record companies be housed together in the same building complex near WEA. The Warner-Chappell publishing company in the sister building to Rhino’s had the fortitude and profits to resist the uprooting. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the move into a new building with much more space at a higher rent per square foot, Mount was canned, and his replacement relocated WEA to Manhattan, rendering Rhino’s expensive operation unnecessary. Not foreseeing the contraction in the business—with the writing already on the wall—Rhino took much more space than was needed, paying for empty offices.

I wasn’t being totally serious, but here’s what I suggested to Richard. As we could still use the Rhino name for our film company, we rent our now-vacated former offices, with Richard, Gary Stewart, me, and other recently departed Rhinos back behind their desks as though they never left. The marble Rhino logo sign out front was still in place. It was an audacious idea, more funny than practical. But it would have been a futile attempt at recapturing something that was now gone. By following our bliss, Richard and I had created a company greater than anything we could have imagined, but now we, too, had left the building.