It is just after 2 a.m. in the VIP room at "Release," and Martel and Nabiel are hard at work. Of course, to the untrained eye, Martel and Nabiel don't appear to be working -- at the moment, they are chatting up a half-dozen or so rather alluring young women -- but then again, Martel and Nabiel are in the business of knowing people, or rather, they are in the business of being known.
Martel and Nabiel -- who are known only as Martel and Nabiel ("If we were Bob and John, we'd have last names attached," Nabiel says) -- are undeniably skilled in the art of mingling, which is good, since they talk to between 50 and 100 people per night. They smile, touch, lean close, and smile some more, while youngish, slimish, decidedly fashion-friendly VIPs mill about, couples get closer on the dance floor, and singles get closer to becoming couples.
Downstairs, on the five other dance floors spread through the cavernous Folsom Street club Ten 15 Folsom, suit types rub elbows with college types and every other type in between, the air veritably pulsing with heat and light. Out front, the line is over 100 people long at 3 a.m. Taxis come and go by the dozen. With some 2,000 clubgoers forking over $12 a head every Saturday, Martel and Nabiel -- aka Martel Toler, 33, and Nabiel Musleh, 34, aka M&N Promotions Inc. -- are making a killing.
But then again, Martel and Nabiel throw one hell of a party.
Promoters are nightlife's middlemen, collecting the cover charge (and sometimes a cut of the bar) while providing the crucial ingredient for a successful nightclub -- people. Though this isn't always difficult on weekends, it can be a bit more tricky, say, on a Wednesday or Thursday, not to mention the ever-formidable Tuesday night.
"It takes the financial burden off of us as club owners and GMs," says Erica Culp, general manager at Backflip, who uses promoters during the week before turning the club over to a more blazer-friendly crowd on Fridays and Saturdays. "We don't have to pay for the DJ, we don't have to pay for the fliers. We don't really have to pay for anything. We just have to provide them with a space."
"It's kind of the in thing these days," says club owner Harry Denton, who, though he's drawn a few crowds of his own over the years, uses a promoter on Wednesdays at his Starlight Room ("It tripled my business that night"). "When I started in this business, nobody did it," Denton says. "Now there's too many. I get so many fliers and stuff, I bet there's 50 people doing it."
Succeeding as a promoter takes long hours in the office and years on the city's club circuit. The job has its risks -- most promoters make little or no money, and negative cash flow isn't unheard of. But a few promoters, most of whom got their starts in the late '80s, have grown into the business to the point of owning miniature club empires.
The successful promoter is a combination of socialite, event planner, manager, and businessman, and handles everything from striking deals with club owners to hiring DJs to coordinating small armies of flier-distributing subpromoters. Since promoters rarely own the nightclub itself, what they traffic in is more of, well, an aura, or an experience -- or, rather, a particular type of crowd.
"What I tell people to look for is somebody that you [would] invite into your home, people that have a positive vibe," says Gardner Williams, 35, who does "Kit Kat" (Thursdays) at the Endup, where model types mingle with floppy-trousered club kids, and a fur coat and sunglasses seem not at all inappropriate attire at 4 a.m.
"It's all word-of-mouth, it's underground. We print up about 10,000 fliers, about 2,000 passes, and we hit the streets with the passes," says Williams. "We hit all the pretty girls up and get them in here for free and it just attracts the crowd from there."
"I pretty much learned it all on my own," says Sebastien Arseguel, 30, who promotes "Indulgence" (Wednesdays) at the Starlight Room, "Opus" ("attire a step above") at the Iron Horse restaurant on Saturdays, and co-owns Potrero Hill's Lilo Lounge, among other ventures. "It just kind of happened, kind of one of those things where all of a sudden you sit back and realize, 'Wow, that's worked out.' "
But no one packs them in like Martel and Nabiel, who produce a variety of clubs on a variety of nights, own a restaurant (Sushi Groove), are about to open two more, and whose last New Year's Eve party was co-hosted with Bill Graham Presents.
Though they've tapped into a demographic that Backflip GM Culp describes thusly -- "Young, upwardly mobile, beautiful ... not yuppies, although they might be making as much money as yuppies" -- the two say they didn't set out to do so.
"Basically, what it is is just working really hard and not worrying about anybody else," says Nabiel. "It's definitely been really interesting because you meet a lot of interesting people, from the coolest to the wackiest."
