PART III

 

This is the final part of my trilogy on show business which began with a view on a current event of some import in California… the first time in over 60 years that the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America simultaneously went on strike. That strike in 1960 had a major impact on my fledgling career while this current dispute is one I view from the distance of my warm Island off the coast of Miami, Florida.

I have written that I do not often write about the business of the business of making shows. Well, here I go again, and this time not just about Hollywood, streaming and striking, but a look at East side/West side comparisons: show business on stage AND screen. A look (more of a glance, really) at Broadway and Hollywood.

I have tried producing on Broadway… seemed simple enough: I loved the idea that it was one theatre in one town. No need to traipse all over the country in a vain attempt at counting the money. There, on Broadway, it seemed all one had to do was come up with a good show, put it together in something approximating a professional manner, promote it, count the empty seats, subtract that number from the total in that theatre, then multiply the remainder by the price of the tickets. Do that for eight shows a week for the run of the engagement, subtract your costs from your gross and, like the man wrote… “everything about it is appealing…”

Not really.

You think you are producing that fabulous show that you have sweat blood developing for all those years before being ready for the Big Time in the Big Apple, but it is not you who rents the theatre, makes the deals with the unions, rents the hammers, and buys the nails. It is not you who sets the price of the tickets, and it is not you who counts the money. The company manager does all those things, and he does it while simultaneously doing the same for up to a half dozen other companies.

This last thing is where it gets dicey, for when the theatre owner, who has known your company manager a lot longer than you have ever thought of being on Broadway, asks this functionary “how’s it going?” -- a very large keg of undesirable things are revealed.

This is especially true, when the company manager responds with that infamous comme ci, comme ca gesture, then follows it with a “not to worry wink” since he has another show he is managing that will be ready to fill the owner’s theatre with less than a month’s notice.

The very guy you employ, who counts the money, who dictates the price of the tickets, and when to release them to the discount booths, has (it turns out) little or no interest in the success of your show. He does not have a piece of it. No pride of authorship or ownership. He does, however, have a personal stake in keeping the theatre owner happy, ensuring the probability of always having a venue for that next show, whatever it is.

Finally, if you are not a known commodity, with a track record of hit shows in the past and the promise of more in the very near future, if you are not part of that elite Broadway “community,” well… the word for what you are comes from the early circus days: RUBE. A country bumpkin whose bones deserve to be picked dry just for having the audacity of coming into the big tent with a dream.

All that, and there’s no popcorn. Seems the rustling bags distract the live actors on stage. Hard to make the big bucks without popcorn.

The other side of all this is out West in Hollywood, California.

Turns out, it, too, is a rough racket.

The American movie business began in the arcades of New Jersey and New York. The nickels and dimes that were charged made this all-cash business easy prey for those who specialized in extortion and/or tough guys offering “protection.”

That was the precursor for the business that made its home in California. It was not a game for sissies. Hollywood was born in a tradition of flaunting the rules, if not the law. Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Hal Roach, and others like them came to Southern California to make films, not because of the weather but because of the proximity to the Mexican border… allowing them to sidestep the goons hired by Thomas Edison attempting to enforce Edison’s copyrights regarding the making and projecting of motion pictures.

Samuel Goldwyn, the Brothers Warner, and the rest of that crowd were not exactly college educated philosophers or dealers in the dramatic arts. They were rag merchants, tough guys who learned to make a buck any way they could. They are the ones who became the purveyors of just what it was little boys and little girls should look like, and how they should dress, and maybe even how folks should vote.

In the more than a century since The Squaw Man, movies have become the common denominator between generations. It is where young boys begin to learn how to kiss a girl, and where we (at least we used to) learn how to smoke. Everyone knows (even though it is wrong) that martinis are to be shaken and not stirred. (Sorry, James, it bruises the gin… but then, what do you know? You order “Vodka martinis.”) It is a fair bet that most Americans have never seen the Taj Mahal in India, but almost everyone knows it when they see it… most likely because they have seen it before… in a darkened room, with a flickering light behind them and a silver screen in front of them.

If, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, I had read every book in the famed Doheny Library… that record of excellence would be severely diminished if I returned to the campus today. I would soon discover that all those books read in the mid-1950s would only account for 10% of the total in that library today.

Many, if not most of the things that were important all those years ago are all too often relegated to footnote status for today’s undergraduates. Yet these young scholars go to school for the same number of years as we did and accumulate the identical number of class credits over those four years that it still takes to graduate. How, you may ask, do they ingest all that additional material?

The answer is they don’t. It is not possible. How then will they communicate with the people of another generation who have the power to employ them? It is not exactly the Tower of Babel, but it is close.

The new student bodies don’t attend football games the same way their elders did, that is assuming they go at all. Attendance is down, and not just in the Ivy League. There is competition in the stands from smart phones and streaming, plus the class work is so demanding, who has four hours to “waste” in a stadium for a game of questionable merit (at least for this new generation)?

What will these soon-to-be graduates have in common with the rest of the populace who outrank them in age and likely in status? If you guessed the movies, we are on a similar wavelength.

There may be fewer bodies in the student body section of today’s football stadiums, but there are more students than ever attending cinema classes… and not only in universities but in high schools and middle schools all over America.

Filmmakers in South Korea, Australia, Israel, Ireland, and India are linking up with those in the European capitals and Hollywood. It may just be the thing that brings us all together again.

Hooray for Hollywood…

or wherever.

Barney Rosenzweig