Theatrical Syndicate
Theatrical Syndicate (English, roughly: Theater Kartell ) was the name of a theater organization for marketing theater productions in the USA, which had great power around 1900. It is often cited as a historical example of how a monopoly was created and broken in the entertainment industry .
history
The producer and theater owner Charles Frohman from New York City founded the organization in 1896 along with five other theater managers. They succeeded in gaining control of all major theater productions in the United States over the course of a year by buying up theater buildings and increasingly contracting actors . This made it possible to coordinate the marketing of successful productions nationwide. Instead of great competition from local producers, there was henceforth a concentration on a few economically successful productions. The binding of actors to a production company continued in film history and is called the star system . Charles Frohman's brother and partner Daniel Frohman is a founding member of Paramount Pictures .
Numerous well-known actors and directors such as Richard Mansfield turned unsuccessfully against the monopoly of the Theatrical Syndicate at the turn of the century. Its power was only broken by the Shubert Organization , which became a serious competitor from the mid-1890s and which in 1910 overtook the Syndicate as the world's largest theater organization. With Frohman's death in 1915, the Syndicate lost its importance, and the Shuberts now had a monopoly in turn.
literature
- John Frick: A Changing Theater: New York and Beyond, in: Don B. Wilmeth, Christopher Bigsby (Eds.): The Cambridge History of American Theater, vol. II, New York: Cambridge Univ. Press 1999, pp. 196-232.
- LeAnn Horn Greer: The Rise and Fall of the Theatrical Syndicate in America, Diss. Univ. of Arizona 1972. Retrieved April 19, 2017 (PDF; 2.9 MB)