Word: merricks
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Fanny ran for 888 performances and made Merrick and his investors $847,726.74 clear profit on an investment of $275,000. Merrick was in, and he meant to stay in. With a shrewdness and energy that scared his rivals stiff, he moved to consolidate and exploit his position...
Fanny was the big gamble of Merrick's career, and he stood to his bets with tremendous nerve and style. He made three trips to Europe before Marcel Pagnol agreed to sell the rights to his famous cinema trilogy-Marius, Fanny, Cesar. And then Merrick spent three months nailing down the subsidiary rights and three months persuading Josh Logan to go see Pagnol's pictures and three months marking time until he was ready to direct the show and six months working with the librettist and the songwriter and three months signing up Ezio Pinza and Walter Slezak...
...Merrick foresaw the worst: if he did not do something drastic, and do it fast, the advance sale would vanish and Fanny would fold. He did something so drastic that dear old Broadway hasn't been quite the same since. He promptly signed on a raft of new pressagents and launched a promotion campaign three times as vast and ten times as vulgar as anything the theater had ever seen...
...rooms: HAVE YOU SEEN FANNY? Po lice found a statue of a nude woman-Fanny's belly dancer-set up in the Poets' Corner in Central Park. "A wealthy Turk" (who hasn't been seen since) informed the press that he wanted to buy the belly dancer from Merrick for $2,000,000 and take her back to Istanbul. TV and radio broke out with a rash of spot commercials selling Fanny, Fanny, Fanny. Logan himself directed scenes from the play that were presented on The Ed Sullivan Show. And for the first time in history, the Times and Trib...
Crafty Craftsman. In a matter of months he put together the slickest production company on Broadway. On Merrick's permanent staff today there are only two executives (General Manager Jack Schlissel, Production Manager Samuel "Biff" Liff), four assistants, five theatrical technicians. But Merrick has tuned this team to an excited pitch of efficiency that no other production office can approach...