Theatre Design & Technology - Feb 1967 - 7

The myth that has done the greatest harm to the theatre is
this: that ticket speculators are mulcting the public of millions of dollars every year. Of course, no knowledgeable
theatre man denies that there exists an under-the-counter
market for tickets to hit plays. (Incidentally, there is a similar market for hard movie tickets, concert tickets, World
Series tickets, football tickets, Lincoln Center tickets.) The
myth in the matter is the belief that the buyer is the one
who is cheated; the truth is that the cheated ones are
honest theatre owners and producers, playwrights, stars
and investors, and the less affluent public.
Why isn't the buyer cheated?
Answer: - because he gets what he wants for his money;
he pays the true market price, that's all. The true market
price is set, of course, by the law of supply and demand.
When 6000 people are bidding for 600 orchestra seats,
the market value of those seats will go up. And New York
City always has a full supply of people who want to buy
tickets for the smash hits at their convenience; what's
more, they want choice seats; and what's still more, they
are quite ready to pay the true market price for them.
Moreover, there is no law which forbids these people to
bid whatever they want for these tickets. The situation is
not analogous to a wartime black market where the citizens are forbidden either to buy or to sell rationed foods.
The ticket seekers, with clear consciences, can bid whatever they please, $15, $25, $50 a ticket; and when they
get the tickets, they get exactly what they wanted: choice
seats bought at their convenience. If a man gets what he
wants, he may have paid more than you think he should,
but he isn't being cheated.
What's more, if the speculator demands more than he bids,
the buyer has a very simple way of protecting himself. He
can say, "No." He isn't buying milk for a starving baby,
nor medicine for a stricken wife. No child will ever die of
malnutrition, no family will starve in the streets because
father couldn't afford to pay a speculator's price for theatre
tickets. When I think of the corporate executive wiring his
New York office to get him four tickets at any cost and
then hear people moaning over the way he is being mulcted, I can only wonder at the capacity of the human being
to confuse himself.
The belief in the foregoing myth has also given widespread
credence to a subsidiary myth: that the elimination of ice
would eliminate the under-the-counter market in hit tickets,
or at least reduce the price asked in that market. Let's
be clear here on the difference between ice and a speculator's profit. If the printed price of a ticket is $ 9 and a
speculator feels sure he can re-sell it for $ 2 5, he is often
quite willing to pay, to the box office man, or the theatre
owners, or producer - whoever controls the sale - a premium in order to get the ticket. Let's assume that the
premium is $ 6. That $ 6 is ice. The speculator has then
paid $ 9 plus $ 6 ice, or $ 1 5 for the ticket. When he sells
it for $25, he has made $10. The $10 is speculator's
profit. Now, if he didn't have to pay the $ 6 of ice, he
could re-sell at $19 and still make $10. But if you believe that this is the way of a speculator's life, you are
more naive than I think. He will charge the market price of
$25 and the elimination of ice would only increase his
speculative profit from $10 to $16. You never hear, and
never will hear, a speculator telling a buyer that he is reducing the price because he got the tickets without having
to pay ice.
There is a third myth which press, politicians and public
cling to, although it clearly has no grounds to support it.
This is the myth that the $1.50 limitation on mark-up
keeps the price of tickets down. This is simply the result
of ignorance. There is no law forbidding a producer to set

FEBRUARY 1967

any scale of prices he desires. The $1.50 limitation simply
means that an honest broker makes a small profit. Moreover, out of this slim profit he must pay a license fee and
keep a lot of valueless records. So he has to have his office in an inconvenient spot where rent is low, and must
hire the lowest-priced clerks possible. One of them recently
told me that he had never heard of a play for which there
was an advertisement in his window. In short, the $1.50
law makes for public inconvenience. But it's almost impossible to make most people understand this. And if you ask,
as I have done, why a ticket retailer should need a license
any more than a seller of phonograph records or books or
magazines, politicians will stare as if you had lost your
senses. But they can't give you any answer.
All of which leads to a fourth myth which is so unrealistic
that I hardly know how to present it. I have pointed out
that the buyer in the under-the-counter market is not
cheated; he gets what he pays for. But a great many people feel that because he pays more than they think he
should, they are being cheated; hence, they swallow the
guff that the politicians who favor the $1.50 limitation are
protecting them. Don't ask me to explain why a man in
Queens should feel that if a Hollywood tycoon pays $ 50
for a $ 9 ticket, he - the Queens resident - has been
cheated out of $41; clearly, he is no better or worse off
than if the tycoon had paid $10.50. But that's what people
do feel, and all I can say is that some people evidently
believe in a world of unreality. Maybe too much TV-watching has affected them.
As long as the foregoing four myths are believed in so
fervently, countless sums will pour into the pockets of the
speculator and the iceman; and the press and politicians
responsible for it will shake their heads sadly and deplore
the fact that it is so difficult for Broadway to make a profit
that it can't give us serious plays. And producers who
would like to have some really low priced tickets will gnash
their teeth as they see the money that would pay for the
reduction being siphoned off. To me the biggest tragedy is
that it all could have been so easily avoided. If the theatre
had set one retail scale of prices, had permitted any reputable store to sell tickets at convenient locations, and
made people understand that those who trudged to the
box office got a bargain, there would never have been
one oppressive law. A retail record shop will charge 40%
more than the price at a discount house, but the record
buyer accepts the first as the price and the other as a bargain. He doesn't demand a $1.50 limitation, nor that
sellers of records be licensed and forced into low rent
stores. Well, maybe the theatre will be able to work it out
some fine day.
I next want to mention a few myths that stand in the way
of even the little experimentation which is now legally
possible.
There is a general belief - almost a unanimous one - that
all brokers are crooked thieves who would cheat their own
mothers and fathers. Now, I assume that a broker today
must, at the very least, dabble in the under-the-counter
market or lose some of his best customers. But I do not
bel ieve, for several reasons, that they are all unregenerate
scoundrels. I have met and worked with them and find most
of them no better nor worse than the men in other industries. I know people who have patronized the same broker
for years and have no complaints to make. Brokers sell an
estimated 30% of the dollar sales year after year; they
must keep satisfied customers to do that.
When you drive a group of people into an under-the-counter
market, you will certainly find the group attracting many
scrummy people; give a dog a bad name and he'll live up
to it. There certainly are some gyps, but the notion that

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