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This is what I'm interested in.

There are two cities where about 90% of the plays are sold, and they are New York and Hollywood. And the other 10% I would say go around to the rest of the country. There are a certain number of people who collect plays, plus anything to do with the theater. So with even a total failure, you can count on an 800 sale, anyway. But it's rarely that a play in book form sells more than 2000. That's par for the course.

There are always exceptions. Of course, O'Neill, as I think I told you, was a great best seller. The first play we did of his, “Ah, Wilderness',” sold over 50,000. O'Neill was fashionable.

In the 1930s, just for the financial aspect, how many would you have to sell to break even--do you have any idea?

Oh, I would say 1500. You see, there's practically no advertising. A play does its own advertising.

This is just interesting in retrospect.

Now you have to sell really well over 2000 even though the price has gone up so much, and today you can take a sizeable loss with a bad play. So we've had to cut down on publishing some of the failures, which we did just to please people we knew in the theater. Playwrights all like to have their plays