We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
SHOWMAN
ooo. I was literally bowled over— no figure of speech about it. For six months I was flat on my back in bed and for a long time after that they had my legs in a plaster cast. The cure for that calamity was a script that came into my office one afternoon just after Sam Harris had forfeited it with a long record of rejections from practically every first-rate manager in New York. The author had entitled it "Street Scene." It cost me $6000 to produce and the profits came to a cool halfmillion and the movie rights sold for $165,000 more. At that rate the mortgage on the Playhouse, my theater, could be paid off and everything else cleaned up. Shortly afterward some fast work by transatlantic telephone enabled me to beat the other fellows to securing the rights for St. John Irvine's "The First Mrs. Fraser"— which, with Grace George in the lead, meant a year of gloriously profitable business.
The medicine had been severe this time, but it had turned the trick at last. I haven't looked at a ticker for eight years, and I don't intend to if I live for eighty more. But I don't need the stimulus of a major panic to keep me in the theatrical running. One of these days another "Street Scene" or "The First Mrs. Fraser" will come along and we'll go to town with it and I'll go out in a blaze of glory.
Or maybe it will be some other way. I'm already a radio veteran. I've never been able to see any point in squawking because new inventions make changes in the old business of keeping the box-office open.
277