Word: grauman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...past eight weeks San Francisco has been lapping up a double-scoop, 15-act vaudeville show called Highlights of 1943. Its title is much the most up-to-date thing about it. Produced by Hollywood's fabulous cinemaestro, Sid Grauman, it offers, with crafty candor, the kind of variety show that was pulling them when Grauman left San Francisco 27 years ago. Headlined by Songstress Gertrude Niesen singing a batch of old songs, Highlights includes a trained-poodle act, harmonica players, highflying female aerialists, an impersonator, an oldtime clown, a Gay Nineties troupe, a ping-pong exhibition...
Slight, soft-spoken Sid Grauman, who has long-term plans for San Francisco producing, was born 56 years ago in Indianapolis. The son of a minstrel-show manager, he was carted young all over the country: "I went to a hundred schools, and I never got out of the fifth grade." When still a boy, he went with his father to Alaska, where they "expected to pick up gold in a pail." After a few gleamless months, the father rushed home to a dying child and left Sid with $250, which he promptly lost in a crap game. He picked...
Quitting Alaska a year later with $6,000, Grauman was cleaned out by gamblers on the trip home. In San Francisco he got a job as ticket taker in the city's first movie house (said his boss, "Don't let even the wind get by without a ticket") and was reunited with his father at the ticket window. The two rented a store, fitted it up with 700 kitchen chairs, put on 15 shows a day of assorted vaudeville and one-reelers. "So we wouldn't lose a show, we fed the actors right...
Tent Shows and Temples. In Oakland young Grauman saw a cowboy revivalist vainly holding forth in a tent. Sighed the cowboy: "They don't want the Lord." Said Grauman: "I want the tent." He set it up in the middle of San Francisco as Grauman's National Theater, using church pews for seats, and did so well that he finally built a corrugated-iron edifice around it "and never even lost a matinee in the process." Soon he was operating other theaters...
...Grauman took a show on tour to Los Angeles, stayed there. In no time he had opened Grauman's Million Dollar Theater, the largest and most lavish Cinemansion of its day. Then he bought a Hollywood cornfield and built Grauman's Egyptian, a bewilderingly garish "architectural crazy house." So successful were its showings that in the first few years it ran only eight pictures. In 1927 came Grauman's Chinese, his masterpiece in Hollywood rococo...