Underfoot In Show Business by Helene Hanff Read Free Book Online Page A

“I’ve been looking for the right play for five years. Thanks to you, I’ve finally found it!”
    He took a three-month option on the play. He wanted revisions, and during the next three months while I was rewriting, we met weekly to discuss the revisions over long and expensive lunches. At the end of three months, he read another playwright’s play and realized that that was the one he’d spent five years looking for, and he dropped his option on mine and took an option on the new one. Three months later still, he dropped the second play, having found a third to take an option on and have long, expensive lunches over.
    This man was what might be called a pretend-producer. There were quite a few of these. There was one man who sat in the same office for sixteen years reading plays. He never produced one. If you dropped in at his office, at your agent’s suggestion, he told you he just hadn’t been able to find the exactly right play. But he was still looking—and as a matter of fact, he had one play in mind, a French play, and if the author was willing to rewrite—and if the American rights were available—and if he could find the right adapter for it, which was going to be tough because it was a very special script, but as he’d told your agent, as soon as he got a decent translation he wanted you to read it because you just might be the right adapter for it, he wasn’t sure....
    Producer No. 5 sent for me and when I walked into his office he said: “How-d’ya-do” impatiently, and then before I even found a chair: “The whole thing goes haywire in the second act, you’re going to have to do the whole play over. Sit down, I’ll show you what I want you to do.” This one meant business.
    He told me how he wanted the play rewritten. He was going to Hollywood for two months and he wanted the revised play ready for production when he came back. He asked whether I’d be willing to quit my job and live on the option money, which he would mail to my agent, so that I could work on the play full time. I said yes.
    I was working as secretary to a press agent and I quit the job and went to work on the revisions. The producer sent me a long, encouraging letter from Hollywood but he forgot to send my agent the option money. The night before he was due back in New York, I sat up till 4 A.M. to finish typing the revised draft and put it between covers. At noon the next day I went to his office with the finished play.
    His secretary took my name in. Then she came back. The producer, she said, was about to go into rehearsal with a new play and wouldn’t have time to read mine. But he sent me greetings and wished me lots of luck with the play. (None of us was so sordid as to mention the unpaid option money.)
    Producer No. 6 was a very fine actor who wrote me from Hollywood that he wanted to produce the play and star in it as soon as he completed the film he was making. And he very well might have done so if, three weeks after he wrote to me, he hadn’t happened to drop dead on the golf course of a heart attack.
    And that was the end of the furor over that particular play.
    Since this history was to be repeated, with minor variations, every time I hatched a play (and I had them like rabbits), I learned to understand how producers’ minds worked.
    When a producer phones a playwright and says: “You’ve written a wonderful play. When can you come and see me?” it doesn’t mean he wants to produce the play. But whether it means (a) he wants to meet the playwright, or (b) he wants to rewrite the play himself to make it producible, or (c) he’d produce it if he had the money, or (d) he needs a play in reserve, to hold his backers’ interest till he finds one he really likes, his motive stems from the same economic fact. That fact told me why the odds against me would always be so much greater than the odds against Maxine.
    If you’re a young actress who has never set foot on a professional stage, a producer can take a