Word: biz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Amos got his backing from show biz cookie freaks, notably Marvin Gaye and Jeff Wald and his wife Helen Reddy, who jointly put up $11,000. Says Wald: "We invested in it for love, but as it turns out, it will probably be a better investment than any we ever made. It could be worth a few million in a couple of years." Amos is in the chips (his two-year-old company grosses more than $1 million a year), but he frets incessantly about costs (pecans and chocolate have more than doubled in price in two years...
...pattern actually takes its shape out of several marketplaces because, in reality, the nations' wages, salaries and other rewards are established not by one system but an arrangement of several. There are different systems for business and industry, for independent professions, for government, for show biz. Each system expresses different values and sets rewards by different standards...
...system seems as bizarre as that of show biz. Sums paid the big stars appear surreal when compared with other salaries. But the trouble is, such comparisons are specious. For in reimbursing a star, whether of stage, screen or playing field, the entertainment industry is not really paying an employee so much as making a capital appropriation. It is not by chance that in show biz a popular figure is called a hot "property." The star actually is the product to be sold. That the price of such properties has soared is not surprising in a personality-craving society...
...workers who have most effectively improved their competitive position by organization - and recently blue collars have won ascendancy over poorly organized white collars in average salary. In all systems, the factor of supply and demand is at work as an influence if not an iron law - even in show biz. The great majority of performers earn meager sums, primarily because of the excessive supply of aspirants. For them, as Economics Professor Clair Vickery of the University of California's Institute of Industrial Relations in Berkeley puts it, a performing job is like "buying a ticket in a lottery...
...anything and moving baseball caps to keep pitchers from walking. Fans can lament the passing of real grass and the batting pitcher, but the Grand Old Game has gone the route of Playboy; the magazine is still around, but the presentation is not quite the same. This is show-biz, folks, less rehearsed and manipulated than TV or the movies, but big-time mass entertainment...