From Lenin to Lennon

Our TV pilot was back in business. This was our last chance, so I tried to make sure that it would be reviewed well and that the sponsor would get the kind of attention sponsors want. I had frien...

http://www.showbizred.com/?p=128

Some things have a life of their own. Jim McGuinn worked very hard showing our TV pilot around town and talking it up, but he was getting nowhere until about a year and a half later, when we went...

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I was unemployed after getting laid off from US Steel, and didn’t know what I’d do for a living. A friend I’ll call Dave, whom l‘d met in a poker game when he was a fundrais...

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The Orchestra Hall people had none of the problems I’d expected with the incongruity of playing folk music on their stage. Richard Dyer-Bennet had played there, Robeson had played there, the We...

http://www.showbizred.com/?p=122

The meeting with Leo Burnett: twelve guys in black suits. l’m not sure they always wore black suits, but I think when they wanted to bury a project they all dressed alike. I had the feelin...

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Brian Epstein had told me to set up three separate press conferences before the Comiskey Park concerts. The first would be for television crews, the second for the print reporters, and then all t...

http://www.showbizred.com/?p=115

Being the innocents we were, Jim and I started setting up showings of our TV pilot on our own for the ad agencies. We rented the Gate of Horn and showed it to J. Walter Thompson, who loved it. Th...

http://www.showbizred.com/?p=125

I had imagined that the risks involved in introducing lesser-known artists could be lowered by combining them with established acts. I thought the audience would be more inclined to take a chance...

http://www.showbizred.com/?p=121

Years later I brought the Rolling Stones for a concert at the Rosemont Horizon, an arena I had put together outside Chicago. The Stones, whose show was more outrageous by an order of magnitude th...

http://www.showbizred.com/?p=114

I think what made show business interesting to me, at this point, was that it was one of the last corners of this overdeveloped capitalist economy that you could go into with no knowledge and no ...

http://www.showbizred.com/?p=123