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Speaker 1: Welcome to Strictly Business, Variety's weekly podcast featuring conversations with

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Speaker 1: industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. I'm

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Speaker 1: Cynthia Lyttleton, co editor in chief of Variety Today. My

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Speaker 1: guests are showbiz historians David Mono and Peter Raider. They

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Speaker 1: joined me to help celebrate Variety's one hundred and twentieth birthday,

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Speaker 1: which happened on December sixteenth. We've spent much of the

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Speaker 1: past year digging into Hollywood history to produce our Fabulous

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Speaker 1: Anniversary issue that was published on December tenth. You can

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Speaker 1: also find it online at Variety dot com. As we

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Speaker 1: did this, I became very interested in what the entertainment

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Speaker 1: marketplace was like for everyday people back in nineteen oh five,

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Speaker 1: when Variety got started. Mono is an expert in the

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Speaker 1: history of vaudeville. He's a professor of American social and

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Speaker 1: cultural history at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo Aio. Peter

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Speaker 1: is an author and screenwriter who wrote a great book

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Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen about legendary actresses Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanor Dussay

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Speaker 1: and the birth of the Star system. Hano and Raider.

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Speaker 1: Both paint quite a picture of a vibrant world overflowing

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Speaker 1: with theaters of all kinds back in nineteen oh five.

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Speaker 1: They also both share great observations about how the past

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Speaker 1: has informed the present in the world the Variety has

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Speaker 1: covered for twelve decades in counting and away we go,

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Speaker 1: and now we turn to a conversation with Professor David Mono.

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Speaker 1: He's the author of Vaudeville and the Making of Modern

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Speaker 1: Entertainment eighteen ninety to nineteen twenty five. He has so

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Speaker 1: much insight for us about what the entertainment marketplace was

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Speaker 1: like when Variety was born. Professor David Mono, thank you

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Speaker 1: so much for joining me.

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Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me here.

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Speaker 1: I went looking for somebody who was an expert on

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Speaker 1: the business of vaudeville, and your book Vaudeville and the

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Speaker 1: Making of Modern Entertainment popped up. I was so excited

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Speaker 1: that you said yes very quickly. As we celebrate varieties

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Speaker 1: one hundred and twentieth anniversary, I thought it would be

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Speaker 1: instructive to talk about what was the entertainment marketplace like

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Speaker 1: at that time, particularly in New York where we were born.

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Speaker 1: And of course, if you look through our first bunch

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Speaker 1: of issues. You can just see the coalescing of this

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Speaker 1: entertainment infrastructure, so much of it around New York, Professor,

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Speaker 1: can you sketch the scene if somebody had a dime

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Speaker 1: or two in their pocket and they wanted to go

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Speaker 1: out and have a show, and they happened to live

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Speaker 1: in New York or Boston or a big city where

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Speaker 1: you could find that, what kind of a marketplace was

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Speaker 1: it in nineteen oh five.

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Speaker 2: It's a transforming one. So there's a fairly wide variety

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Speaker 2: of new entertainments and there are lingering older entertainments. You

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Speaker 2: could still go out to see a melodrama if you

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Speaker 2: weren't in New York, possibly go out to see a

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Speaker 2: tent show or a traveling show. If you had a dime,

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Speaker 2: you'd probably end up going to a pretty cheap, lot

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Speaker 2: built theater. You wouldn't get into the legitimate in terms

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Speaker 2: of the conventional theater.

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Speaker 3: Or you go to a burlesque if you wanted to

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Speaker 3: see a burletze show, or you could go out and

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Speaker 3: get a drink in a saloon. But vaudeville was certainly

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Speaker 3: the growing entertainment, and its relationship with variety was organic.

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Speaker 2: We know most of what we know about vaudeville because

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Speaker 2: of the existence of Variety, and A Variety hadn't been there,

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Speaker 2: it would be a much darker entertainment for us. It

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Speaker 2: was covered in the newspapers, but sporadically and usually very briefly.

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Speaker 2: A Variety was the first to actually review shows and

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Speaker 2: talk about what was being performed on the stages. But

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Speaker 2: it was also the first to carry entertainment business news,

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Speaker 2: so we know a lot about what was happening on

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Speaker 2: the business side from the page of the Variety. Variety,

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Speaker 2: not the magazine, but Variety, which is what's really performed

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Speaker 2: in vaudeville, and one has to distinguish those two. Is

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Speaker 2: a much older entertainment, dates back to the eighteen thirties

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Speaker 2: and eighteen forties, and it was performed in a number

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Speaker 2: of different venues, and it would survive long after Vaudeville disappeared.

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Speaker 2: I think the two golden ages of variety were probably

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Speaker 2: about nineteen oh five to nineteen twenty, and then again

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Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixties and seventies when TV was full

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Speaker 2: of variety shows, and so variety is much longer lasting.

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Speaker 2: Vaudeville was really a business form that organized the variety

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Speaker 2: show and presented in a different format, and so it

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Speaker 2: is a diverse entertainment market. Vaudeville it still starts up

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Speaker 2: in the eighteen eighties because there is an effort across

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Speaker 2: American cities to separate the barrooms from the theaters. It's

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Speaker 2: considered immral to sit and drink and look at a show,

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Speaker 2: and so municipal legislation has passed, and then state legislation

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Speaker 2: has passed across the northeast and gradually spreads its way west,

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Speaker 2: which prohibits drinking and watching a show. And as that happens,

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Speaker 2: owners have to make a decision. Are they going to

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Speaker 2: run a theater and get rid of the drinking, or

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Speaker 2: are they going to stay with a barroom and get

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Speaker 2: rid of the show. And those who made the decision

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Speaker 2: to get rid of the barroom and keep the show

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Speaker 2: needed a new name for what they were doing, and

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Speaker 2: they latched on the name of vaudeville, which was a

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Speaker 2: French name that had been used since the seventeen nineties

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Speaker 2: for a higher class a variety, and that's where vaudeville

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Speaker 2: came from.

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Speaker 4: Burlesque was a quasi legitimate form of entertainment in the

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Speaker 4: nineteenth century, burlesque was originally the term used for a spoof,

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Speaker 4: so that you would burlast the legitimate. So while the

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Speaker 4: legitimate might put on Hamlet, you'd put on a burlesque

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Speaker 4: of Hamlet, in which Hamlet would be paid by a

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Speaker 4: comic character, or very often by a female.

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Speaker 1: So burlesque in the modern sense of it, we think

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Speaker 1: of it as a strip t show, or at least

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Speaker 1: some sort of very sexy, provocative show. But was it

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Speaker 1: still a little edgy.

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Speaker 4: The cane edge here. Initially it was only edgy because

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Speaker 4: they were making fun of the legitimate, which had a

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Speaker 4: certain element of edginess to it. In the late eighteen sixties,

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Speaker 4: burlesque is linked to what would have been called at

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Speaker 4: the time a girly show, because a British troop the

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Speaker 4: British blombs toward the United States and they were a

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Speaker 4: sensation in the United States. It was an all female

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Speaker 4: troupe that put on burlesques of well known plays, and

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Speaker 4: they linked the burlesque form to a display of leg

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Speaker 4: and to a kind of saucy manner because they were

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Speaker 4: considered at the time, I'm sexually provocative. I mean, we

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Speaker 4: wouldn't think of them in this way today.

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Speaker 1: Cal Porter taught us that a glimpse of stocking is

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Speaker 1: something shocking.

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Speaker 4: That's right, and they glimpsed a lot of stocking. And

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Speaker 4: then in the eighteen seventies an American producer by the

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Speaker 4: name of Michael Leavitt decided to get rid of the play,

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Speaker 4: which was always a musical, and to introduce a new

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Speaker 4: format for Burlask, which was a three part format with

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Speaker 4: individual performers in the first two parts and then a

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Speaker 4: farce in the third part. But he kept the girls

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Speaker 4: at the center of it, and the chorus line and

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Speaker 4: the female stars were always the big issue, and it

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Speaker 4: became more sexualized over the eighteen nineties and into the

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Speaker 4: early twentieth century.

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Speaker 1: Give us a sense of what it was like to

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Speaker 1: go to a vaudeville show at say a big house

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Speaker 1: in New.

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Speaker 2: Sure, peanuts not popcorn. Peanuts was with the thing of choice,

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Speaker 2: and people would spit out the shells. One of the

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Speaker 2: reasons Votula is so transformative is that it was the

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Speaker 2: first effort to democratize commercial leisure by making it accessible

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Speaker 2: and by making it inexpensive. So early in the century

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Speaker 2: of a vaudel show, depending on if it was a

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Speaker 2: small theater or a more prestigious theater. A more prestigious

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Speaker 2: theater may cost you fifty cents that a less prestigious

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Speaker 2: theory are dying. By nineteen ten, the more prestigious theaters

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Speaker 2: are charging up to two dollars and they have reserve seating.

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Speaker 2: The less prestigious have gone up to above thirty five cents,

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Speaker 2: so there is inflation in prices. House lights were left

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Speaker 2: on so that the people on stage could see the

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Speaker 2: audience very clearly. There was a tradition of getting up

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Speaker 2: and moving around during the show. You didn't sit quietly

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Speaker 2: through the show. So a vaudeville show was made up

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Speaker 2: of somewhere between ten or fifteen short acts that would

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Speaker 2: last some of them ten minutes, some of them twenty minutes,

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Speaker 2: and an act was on that you didn't like. You

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Speaker 2: could actually get up and leave and come back twenty

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Speaker 2: minutes later. Reserve seating was quite a new thing. The

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Speaker 2: best houses introduced the reserve seating in the eighteen nineties.

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Speaker 2: It was pretty common among the better class of Vaugel theaters.

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Speaker 2: By nineteen ten. The theater was quite segregated. If you

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Speaker 2: were an African American, you could only sit up in

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Speaker 2: the gallery the top layer of the balcony. Children also

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Speaker 2: sat there. Vadna was a place where parents would tell

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Speaker 2: their kids to go after school if they were working late,

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Speaker 2: and they would give them a dime to go and

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Speaker 2: sit up in the balcony and stay in the theater

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Speaker 2: for a couple of hours until they got There was

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Speaker 2: a board next to the stage which announced the next

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Speaker 2: act that would come out. It was all carefully timed

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Speaker 2: because if you wanted to go out to the theater,

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Speaker 2: you needed to know that at eight ten the act

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Speaker 2: you wanted to see was coming. On the business of

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Speaker 2: organizing a Volvo show it was quite complicated because different

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Speaker 2: acts used more or less of the stage, and so

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Speaker 2: theater managers had to organize the show in such a

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Speaker 2: way that they could close the curtains and put performance

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Speaker 2: at the front of the stage while they were setting

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Speaker 2: up the stage behind for the next act. And so

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Speaker 2: singers and comics were always very popular because you could

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Speaker 2: close the curtain behind them while you set up the

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Speaker 2: stage for acrobats, or for an animal act, or for

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Speaker 2: a short play.

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Speaker 1: Can you talk about the booking processes? I know so

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Speaker 1: that in time that circuits developed but in that nineteen

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Speaker 1: oh five, in that right turn of the century, was

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Speaker 1: it a very organized business.

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Speaker 4: Yes.

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Speaker 2: It started in the earliest days of Vautville individual theaters

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Speaker 2: booking their own and performers would correspond with theater managers

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Speaker 2: to say, I'm going to be in your area in

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Speaker 2: two weeks time, have you got anything for me? And

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Speaker 2: so it was a very complicated and hard to work

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Speaker 2: on my business. Already by the eighteen eighties, various theaters

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Speaker 2: are beginning to collaborate together because it doesn't take much

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Speaker 2: to realize that if you can book somebody for three

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Speaker 2: weeks and then put them on a circuit so that

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Speaker 2: they would perform one week in one theater, then moved

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Speaker 2: to the next theater, and then moved to a third theater,

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Speaker 2: and if they were all close together, the performers would

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Speaker 2: be more inclined to accept that than they would if

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Speaker 2: you were just doing an individual booking. And so that's

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Speaker 2: how the circuits started up.

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Speaker 1: If you're a vaudeville performer in these days, will you

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Speaker 1: have multiple shows a day or is it pretty much

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Speaker 1: one show a night.

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Speaker 2: Most theaters ran between two and four shows a day,

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Speaker 2: depending on how long mooset shows are some of the

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Speaker 2: smaller theaters would run four shows a day because they

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Speaker 2: didn't have enough material, and after nineteen hundred, with short movies,

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Speaker 2: so that you might have five or six acts, and

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Speaker 2: in between those five or six acts, you'd show a

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Speaker 2: couple of films.

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Speaker 1: Like an Edison reel something like that.

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Speaker 4: That's exactly right, and then you'd have the actors come

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Speaker 4: out and they would perform, maybe for ten minutes, and

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Speaker 4: then you'd show another short film. Silent film was regarded

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Speaker 4: as as very difficult for people to understand, and if

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Speaker 4: you think about how images work, you really had to

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Speaker 4: learn the language of film, how events are connected to

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Speaker 4: each other, how the camera moves, how a storyline is constructed,

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Speaker 4: and at the time in the early twentieth centre, producers

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Speaker 4: considered that very difficult for consumers to absorb, and so

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Speaker 4: they broke it up with a singer who would come out,

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Speaker 4: or a comic who had come out, or a juggler

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Speaker 4: who would come out and give people pause and the

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Speaker 4: ability to kind of process what they'd just seen. So

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Speaker 4: that was the beginning of what was called pop flot film,

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Speaker 4: which was a kind of mix of movies and a

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Speaker 4: live entertainment.

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Speaker 1: How did it work with writers? Did the individual act

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Speaker 1: come on and say, here's my segment, here's my skit,

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Speaker 1: here's my show, and they were responsible for writing it

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Speaker 1: and bringing in all the props.

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Speaker 4: Yeah. And this was the value of Variety the magazine,

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Speaker 4: because they reviewed the productions and talked about what was

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Speaker 4: good and what was bad, and so. For people in

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Speaker 4: the business, if you were a performer, I provided you

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Speaker 4: with feedback and suggestions on how you can improve things.

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Speaker 4: For managers, it provided them with ideas about acts that

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Speaker 4: were successful in other places, so that they might go

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Speaker 4: out and contact the agent for that performer and say,

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Speaker 4: I read in Variety that you did really well at

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Speaker 4: the fifty eighth Street theater.

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Speaker 1: What would say a star, maybe not a megastar, but

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Speaker 1: an established vaudeville performer. What could they expect to make

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Speaker 1: a week or a show?

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Speaker 2: Widely divergent. Now, this is a time when if you

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Speaker 2: were a a bank clerk, you'd probably be earning about

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Speaker 2: fifteen hundred to two thousand a year. If you were

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Speaker 2: a factory laborer, you'd probably be earning about a thousand

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Speaker 2: dollars a year. A big vaudeville star, the Annette Kellermann's

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Speaker 2: The Eva Tan Gays. They would be pulling in about

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Speaker 2: two thousand to three thousand a week, and so it

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Speaker 2: was huge salaries for the biggest stars. If you were

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Speaker 2: starting out in pop Flok, a small time performing in

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Speaker 2: between movies, you would probably get fifteen to twenty five

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Speaker 2: dollars a week. Most vaudvillians would perform maybe twenty weeks

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Speaker 2: a year, so but it's still meant that if you

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Speaker 2: were a big vaudeville star, you were forty fifty thousand

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Speaker 2: dollars a year in income at a time when a

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Speaker 2: bank manager might be rinning five.

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Speaker 1: Who were some of the biggest vaudeville stars of the

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Speaker 1: nineteen oh five nineteen tens.

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Speaker 2: The biggest names around nineteen hundred were men. George Froller Golden,

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Speaker 2: who was really the first stand up comic, was the

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Speaker 2: highest paid vaudeville performer. Over the course of the first

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Speaker 2: decade of the twentieth century, they increasingly become women, and

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Speaker 2: it's the women who were in the highest salaries, people

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Speaker 2: like Gavatange, who was for four or five years the

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Speaker 2: highest paid performer in vaudeville, and that kellerman She was

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Speaker 2: a swimmer, an Australian who came and did a diving act.

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Speaker 2: Harry Rudini was always a big draw. The young Buster

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Speaker 2: Keaton was with the Keaton family on Vaudeville.

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Speaker 1: Let me wrap up by asking you, I think I

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Speaker 1: can guess what may have hastened the end of vaudeville

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Speaker 1: as a dominant entertainment format. I'm guessing movies had something

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Speaker 1: to do with it, radio had something to do.

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Speaker 2: But tell me basically competition. Vaudeville always operated on fairly

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Speaker 2: tight margins, so that you needed to fill your house

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Speaker 2: to about half full in order to make any money.

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Speaker 2: And as competition grew in the early twentieth century, not

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Speaker 2: just from movies, but also from cabarets that are growing up,

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Speaker 2: clubs that are growing up reviews, and roof gardens like

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Speaker 2: Ziegfeld's roof Garden Burlesque, which is also cutting into the

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Speaker 2: law film market. So all these different entertainments are starting

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Speaker 2: to chip away at the money that you can make

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Speaker 2: in entertainment and.

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Speaker 5: Buds.

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Speaker 2: In order to respond, they moved towards consolidation by shutting

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Speaker 2: down less profitable vaudeville houses and then investing heavily in

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Speaker 2: building huge places like the palace in New York, which

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Speaker 2: we're going to be opulent, and which were very expensive

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Speaker 2: to build, and there's a stock market crash which wipes

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Speaker 2: a lot of them out.

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Speaker 1: Professor Monnell, thank you for helping shed some light on

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Speaker 1: this and what the industry was like when we were born.

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Speaker 1: Really appreciate your time and your expertise.

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Speaker 2: Thank you so getting.

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Speaker 1: And now we'll hear from Peter Rader, the author and screenwriter.

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Speaker 1: He wrote a terrific book a few years ago, playing

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Speaker 1: to the Gods, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duss and the rivalry

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Speaker 1: that changed acting. This great book is about to be

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Speaker 1: made into a movie directed by Michael Soussi. Here, Raider

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Speaker 1: talks about the entertainment marketplace in nineteen oh five and

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Speaker 1: how Sarah Bernhardt was the Taylor Swift of her day.

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Speaker 1: Peter Raider, author and screenwriter, Thank you so much for

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Speaker 1: joining me.

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Speaker 5: You're so welcome. I'm thrilled to talk about this.

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Speaker 1: People seeking entertainment, what kind of options would would have

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Speaker 1: been available to people in New York circa nineteen oh

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Speaker 1: five that Era one variety got started.

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Speaker 5: Nineteen oh five is a really interesting year because it's

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Speaker 5: a year in which emergent technologies are about to revolutionize

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Speaker 5: the world of entertainment. You have, on the one hand,

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Speaker 5: from the emergence of nickelodeons and cities across America that

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Speaker 5: were not quite movies yet, but shorts, but novelty shorts

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Speaker 5: that people would go in and see for five cents,

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Speaker 5: things like magic tricks or a train coming into a station,

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Speaker 5: or foreign capitals like Paris and London or Vaudeville. It

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Speaker 5: would be a series of shorts. You're in and out

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Speaker 5: in twenty minutes, and that was your movie experience of

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Speaker 5: the day.

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Speaker 1: Peter, can you describe what the experience of watching a

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Speaker 1: short film on a nickelodeon would have been like?

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Speaker 5: Back then, Nickelodeons were these little storefronts popping up all

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Speaker 5: over America, medium sized towns, big cities, all over the place.

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Speaker 5: It cost five cents to get in, hence the title nickelodeon,

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Speaker 5: and you would walk into a small theater, maybe house

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Speaker 5: thirty to fifty seats or so, and there would be

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Speaker 5: a projector in the back, but they would project not

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Speaker 5: long form movies, but little shorts, one to three minute shorts.

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Speaker 5: This would be things like novelty street scenes like what

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Speaker 5: was it like to be near the Eiffel Tower with

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Speaker 5: in a horse drawn carriage. Or here's a locomotive train

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Speaker 5: pulling into a station, or here's a magic act or

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Speaker 5: here's some vaudeville or something like that. And they would

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Speaker 5: run the movie and then run another one. So there

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Speaker 5: would be a series of five or six movies, and

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Speaker 5: that would be your experience, maybe thirty minutes long. And

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Speaker 5: then even more revolutionary was that entertainment had come into

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Speaker 5: the home in the form of gramophone recordings. The gramophone

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Speaker 5: is that big trumpet record player that you see on

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Speaker 5: the RCA Victor logo where you'd get your seventy eight

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Speaker 5: RPM record. It wasn't vinyl quite yet, and you would

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Speaker 5: crank up your thing. There was no electricity involved. It

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Speaker 5: was all mechanical. Rank up your thing, it loads the

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Speaker 5: spring and this record spins for about three minutes, and

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Speaker 5: suddenly opera is in your home. Certainly, the most famous

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Speaker 5: opera singer of the day was Enrico Caruso from Naples, Italy,

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Speaker 5: who was like the Elvis Sinatra of his day. He

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Speaker 5: was super popular. He was selling records at the time

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Speaker 5: in the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions, so

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Speaker 5: he's on his way to become a platinum recording artist.

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Speaker 5: And that's the technology that was about to disrupt the industry.

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Speaker 5: But the legit theater, that's where you went out and

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Speaker 5: saw mass Most of the nineteenth century plays are about melodrama.

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Speaker 5: They're about gods and goddesses and kings and queens, and

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Speaker 5: in the case of one of the most famous plays

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Speaker 5: of the time, which is Camille, it's about sort of

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Speaker 5: a love struck courtesan who's going to commit suicide or die.

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Speaker 5: She's going to die of consumption. So they were larger

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Speaker 5: than life plays, and yet the world was changing and

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Speaker 5: playwrights were starting to write about everyday people, and Ibsen,

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Speaker 5: of course, was perhaps the most famous of those. He

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Speaker 5: wrote famously A Dolls House, which was about a woman

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Speaker 5: trapped in a loveless marriage, and that was a very

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Speaker 5: subtle play and it required a new type of acting.

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Speaker 5: The grand dum of the theater at the time was

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Speaker 5: Sarah Bernhardt. She was arguably and to this day, the

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Speaker 5: most famous actress that ever lived. Everyone knew Sarah Barnhart,

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Speaker 5: whether you had seen her in person or not, you

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Speaker 5: had read about her in the newspaper because she invented

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Speaker 5: the culture of celebrity. But she was very canny. She

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Speaker 5: was her own producer, she ran her own company, and

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Speaker 5: she knew that the performance didn't end when the curtain

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Speaker 5: went down. It continued after hours, the after party, the

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Speaker 5: dinner party, and in the morning papers.

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Speaker 1: What put her on the path to becoming really the

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Speaker 1: first entertainment star.

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Speaker 5: Sarah Bernhard has such a fascinating biography. She was the

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Speaker 5: illegitimate daughter of a courtisan who was essentially an escort

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Speaker 5: and a high end cortissan who would be with kings

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Speaker 5: and princes and very wealthy patrons. But she came into

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Speaker 5: the world in Paris, France. She was French, and she

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Speaker 5: absolutely became determined to seize her own destiny, and she

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Speaker 5: did it relentlessly. She had so much charisma. The way

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Speaker 5: she died on stage is legendary. She would take two

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Speaker 5: minutes to fall, spiral down to the floor, shrieking, and

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Speaker 5: in most of her place she did die. She often

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Speaker 5: played tragic heroines who would die. But what really drove

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Speaker 5: her success was that she realized at some point that

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Speaker 5: she had so much fame she actually could seize her

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Speaker 5: own destiny by running her own company. That was unprecedented

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Speaker 5: for a woman to be running her own company, but

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Speaker 5: Sarah did it, and she did it brilliantly. She spent

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Speaker 5: exorbitant amounts of money on costumes and the staging and

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Speaker 5: the sets. I mean, she was always on the verge

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Speaker 5: of bankruptcy and she would always rebound.

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Speaker 1: How big of a troop would she have typically traveled

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Speaker 1: with in her heyday?

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Speaker 5: Sarah famously owned a train car, so she had the

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Speaker 5: Sarah Bernard Express that she would hook on to, you know,

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Speaker 5: various trains and travel across the country, and it was

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Speaker 5: pretty much full. So I would say her entourage was

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Speaker 5: in the thirty to fifty maybe a half dozen to

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Speaker 5: a dozen of those would be actor. She also created

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Speaker 5: this idea of merch, so one thing that she did

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Speaker 5: was sell these souvenir collectibles called cabin cards, which were

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Speaker 5: photographs of Sarah Bernhard doing eccentric, exotic things like sleeping

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Speaker 5: in her signature coffin, which she liked to do, or

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Speaker 5: wearing a bat hat, which was a hat with literally

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Speaker 5: a taxidermied bats sitting on it, and various other things.

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Speaker 5: She liked to dabble in the occult and do things

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Speaker 5: like ouiji boards and stuff that was very popular in

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Speaker 5: the time. So she played with all aspects of her

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Speaker 5: personality to sort of magnetize and draw people in junkits.

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Speaker 5: She also pioneered the idea of junkets. She would do

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Speaker 5: thirty interviews in a day. They would just be back

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Speaker 5: to back to back, and then she would give them

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Speaker 5: all unique photograph and usually it was sexy and saltry

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Speaker 5: or whatever. With all of her exotic menagerie. She literally

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Speaker 5: had alligators as pets, and cheetahs and chimpanzees who wore diapers,

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Speaker 5: and parrots and all sorts of things in her entourage

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Speaker 5: that she would add to her photographs.

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Speaker 1: As you've said, this woman was so ahead of her time.

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Speaker 1: She would have taken social media and she would just

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Speaker 1: own the world today.

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Speaker 5: She was a prototype for people like you know, Liberachi

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Speaker 5: and Lady Gaga and David Bowie the idea of be

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Speaker 5: eccentric and out there and that actually is fascinating to

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Speaker 5: the public.

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Speaker 1: Pete. As I recall at the end, Sarah was playing

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Speaker 1: after having one of her lower legs amputated. If I'm

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Speaker 1: not mistaken, Yes, she.

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Speaker 5: Was so indomitable that she continued performing after one of

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Speaker 5: her legs had to be amputated because she had gangreen

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Speaker 5: and she famously played Hamlet. She started playing male roles.

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Speaker 5: For decades she was playing male roles, but she did

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Speaker 5: a Hamlet even after. She continued to tour with Hamlet,

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Speaker 5: even after her leg was amputated. So she wore, you know,

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Speaker 5: this black tunic or whatever, and she would sort of

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Speaker 5: hop about the stage. She refused prosthetics, just positioned furniture

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Speaker 5: so that she could lean over here, do this over there.

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Speaker 1: Listeners, I cannot recommend enough if you're interested in this stuff,

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Speaker 1: go seek out Playing to the Gods. It's so well written.

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Speaker 1: And this project of yours started as a screenplay then

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Speaker 1: became a book. It's been in development for a long time,

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Speaker 1: but I understand that there's some movement on it.

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Speaker 5: There is, indeed excitingly, it is going into production with

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Speaker 5: two Oscar nominated actresses attached. Can't quite announce who, but

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Speaker 5: they are just awesome. And the script was adapted by

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Speaker 5: Grammy and Emmy winner Michael Sussi, who did Greg Gardens famously,

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Speaker 5: and Shannon McIntosh, who is crentin Tarantino's Producers producing, along

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Speaker 5: with Bronson Green, who was Oscar nominated for the help.

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Speaker 5: We really have an incredible pedigree who are bringing this

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Speaker 5: to the screen. What we're going to production in twenty

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Speaker 5: twenty six Sert.

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Speaker 1: Thank you for coming on and help being a little

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Speaker 1: part of Variety celebrating are pretty awesome. One hundred and

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Speaker 1: twentieth anniversary.

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Speaker 5: You're so welcome. Happy Birthday, Variety. This was a lot

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Speaker 5: of fun.

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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Be sure to leave us a review

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Speaker 1: at the podcast platform of your choice. We love to

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Speaker 1: hear from listeners. You can also send feedback on Strictly

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Speaker 1: Business and other Variety podcasts at podcastset Variety dot com.

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Speaker 1: Strictly Business is about to take a winter break. We'll

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Speaker 1: be back with a fresh episode on January ninth, when

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Speaker 1: we'll be at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas,

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Speaker 1: where Variety is hosting a two day event looking at entertainment, technology,

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Speaker 1: and the world of creators. Have a wonderful holiday and

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Speaker 1: New Year, listeners. Blessed bus All