Real-Life Producers Don’t Have to Seek Out Clunkers

Max Bialystock had “Springtime for Hitler.”

Susan Booth has “Oh God, the Scallops!”

In the 1968 Mel Brooks film “The Producers,” which has been adapted for the stage in a Broadway-bound production that had its world premiere here recently, Zero Mostel’s Bialystock devises a scam that relies on intentionally producing a very bad play.

“For the scheme to work, we’d have to find a sure-fire flop,” Bialystock tells his partner, Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), as he lays out the plan. The result of his search, of course, is “Springtime for Hitler,” a musical about the Nazis that is in such gloriously bad taste that it perversely becomes a hit.

But unlike Bialystock, Booth, director of new play development for the Goodman Theatre and other production companies in Chicago’s theater community, said she doesn’t have to go looking for plays of, shall we say, questionable quality. The plays seem to find her.

“The ones that come immediately to mind usually come from internal sources,” Booth said. “You know, a staff member’s brother has decided to write a play, or somebody’s daughter is in her freshman year at NYU and is taking playwriting, that sort of thing.

“While we have a rather stringent admission policy, when someone who signs your check is standing in the doorway with a script in his hand, there’s not much to be said.”

Except maybe, “Ugh.”

Booth had no trouble picking her top dog, the aforementioned “Oh God, the Scallops!” It was written by “a friend of the uncle of . . . let’s just say a high-ranking member of our artistic staff,” Booth says. “We’ll leave it at that; I like my job.”

Enclosed with the manuscript was a photograph of the playwright, dressed in chef whites. His synopsis explained that the play, a comedy, was about “high jinks in a gourmet restaurant kitchen.”

“I’ll tell you one thing: As a rule of thumb, anything that is a self-described ‘romp,’ or refers to its contents as ‘high jinks,’ I’m a little predisposed to say no,” Booth said.

“And this one did not in any way change that opinion.”

Booth has erased most of the details of the script from her mind. But not all of them.

“I do remember an indelible moment of stage business involving a kitchen door swinging open suddenly and knocking an unsuspecting and scantily clad waitress into a giant pot of bouillabaisse.”

Ross Lehman, artistic director for Apple Tree Theatre, had one play that came quickly to mind.

Some playwrights, before sending a script, will first offer a brief description of their work. Not too long ago he received one such submission that also included quotes from several people in the industry.

“These are famous people--I’m sorry but I don’t want to name anybody--saying things like, ‘This is brilliant,’ ‘a marvelous theatrical tour de force,’ ‘funny,’ ‘engaging,’ ‘moving’ . . . you know, all these adjectives from all these famous people,” Lehman said.

Intrigued, he had the author send him the script. Once he got his hands on it, Lehman couldn’t wait to let go of it.

“Very often, within two pages, you know. And I knew. This was just awful.”

He described the play as “a campy ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ with a happy ending.”

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But why did all those well-known actors and playwrights have such nice things to say about the play (which shall go nameless)?

“In the first couple of scenes, there were all these references,” Lehman said. “He had two characters. One was a playwright, one was an actress, and they were spouting theatrical references as if to say a famous name as a joke. Like, he would say, ‘You’ve got more Jewish angst than Wendy Wasserstein, darling.’

“I got into this first scene and I realized that some of the people he had quoted, saying this play was marvelous, were some of the same people he referred to in the script. So I think maybe they saw their own names and were flattered enough to give him a nice quote.”

Some plays that aren’t off-the-charts horrid may be unproducible for other reasons, such as logistics.

“We had one guy who pitched us a 1940s-era musical. It had a cast of, like, 25, and an orchestra of 30,” said Sharon Evans, artistic director of Live Bait Theater, a 70-seat storefront theater with no orchestra pit and just one small dressing room. “We asked him if he’d ever been to Live Bait; he said no. And we explained what our situation was. His counter was, ‘But it’s a really good show!’ ”

Evans also recalled another writer who just didn’t get it.

“He claimed he was in the CIA during the Kennedy era and knew who assassinated Kennedy,” she said. “He handed us a huge typed treatment and said, ‘Here’s my story, I want to turn it into a screenplay and make a million dollars.’

“And again, we explained to him, we’re a theater, we’re not exactly the right people to help you turn this into a screenplay. And his response was, ‘It really happened!’ ”

Luckily for artistic directors--and audiences--there are plenty of scripts out there to choose from. Booth says that 800 to 900 are submitted to the Goodman, almost all of them through literary agencies in New York and California. Dennis Zacek, artistic director at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, estimates he gets “hundreds a year.”

Unfortunately, Zacek said, most rank right up there with “Oh God, the Scallops!”

“I don’t know that I can give you an instance of the worst script,” he explained. “I know I can tell you that most of the scripts are not good. Because most of them don’t get produced.”