Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/453

 opened;—it was from the manager of "The Pastoral Scene."

I suppose by the time you get this if you have been receiving the New York papers you will not be surprised to hear that the bottom fell out of our business pretty disappointingly. None of us here expected anything of the sort from the way it went at the start and it is only another warning that in this business you never can tell. After those big weeks we started with and even doing fine business the worst week in the year when every one of the best attractions fell off worse than we did just before Christmas there wasn't a man in our office wouldn't have bet all he owned that we were set for a full season and probably two. Of course we realized our advance business had not developed the way it ought to but the way the box office showed up every night right along we were absolutely positive the advance would be coming in strong right away.

Well you can't account for it unless it was just that the public satisfied its curiosity and we didn't have enough to hold them after that. There have been 17 openings in the short space of time since our own and they all hurt our business more or less. Some of them are freak shows that arouse more curiosity than ours but everybody is going to them just now to see if they can guess what they mean and others of the new shows are so raw that if we were getting people in on that account these new ones are so much rawer that they're getting them all. Anyhow the whole theatrical situation is bad, except for a very few. Both of Geo. Ebert's productions are already in the storehouse and most of these 17 new ones will be there soon as well as some of the old standbys.

I hope you will not think our hard luck is due to any lack of effort on my part. I had faith in your play and I