HOW CAN YOUR EVENT BENEFIT FROM LOOKING AT THE GOLDEN AGE OF INDUSTRIAL EVENTS

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Episode 18 Transcript

JEREMY: Alright, so I am here with comedy, writer, author, and the subject of an amazing documentary, Steve Young. Steve, thank you so much for being on our podcast.

STEVE: Well, thank you for having me, Jeremy. It's one of those weird winding paths of life that has brought me to you.

JEREMY: You've written the book on the subject of the Golden Age of industrial musicals. Now most people probably don't even know that industrials exist or that these corporate live events exist.

I think a lot of people listening to this podcast know about what's going on with corporate live events, but you have really studied and documented this Golden Age. Can you just tell us a little bit about what events were like during that Golden Age?

STEVE: Absolutely. I am a comedy writer by trade. There's no way in the world I should know about this, but the crux of it is from around the mid-50s until the end of the golden age which was the 80s. Corporate events were many of the elements which are eternal speeches, presentations, sometimes films, and videos.

That was always there, but companies used to pay for an entire Broadway-style book musical to create and have performed at a sales meeting, distributor's conference, and annual convention, often involving A-list Broadway talent or people on the way up who would become A-list talent. You would be a Ford tractor dealer in the audience seeing a shockingly, powerful, and slick musical about the triumphs and tragedies of your working life that show why Ford Tractor had your back, knew what you needed for the coming year, and why this was a great team to be part of.

There were literally thousands of these shows over decades and the public couldn't see them even if you were walking past Radio City Music Hall when the Ford Tractor Dealer Convention was there. I don't think it said anything other than maybe “welcome tractor dealers,” but if you went up to the box office window, you couldn't go in. All these things were, by design, hidden from us. It's only decades later that myself and a few other weirdo collectors peeled the layers back and figured out what the extent of this was.

JEREMY: It's such an incredible piece of history and such a fascinating congruence of art and commerce. You mentioned that you had sort of a strange journey to learning about it. Tell us about that. How did you come to find out about these things?

STEVE: I was hired as a staff writer at the Letterman Show late at night with David Letterman in the spring of 1990. On my first day, the head writer brought me down a hall to find me an office, and there was an office vacant. It had boxes of record albums in it. I said, “Oh, what's going on with these records?” He said, “The writer who used to have this office was in charge of a bit of the show called Dave's Record Collection.”

We would hold up the funny, unintentionally weird and hilarious record albums. Dave would have a quip, and the writer in question used to go out and look for weird records. “Hey, maybe you, Steve, could be the new guy captaining the Dave's record collection bit. I said, “Oh, sure, whatever.”

The Die was cast on my first day at the Letterman show. It was not until a few years later that my scrounging in the world of used record stores and thrift shops started to yield these souvenir albums from these corporate events. I think I had Diesel Dazzle, My Insurance Man, and Go Fly a Kite, the General Electric one. I just thought that this is insane that these companies actually went so far as to commission and stage a musical, which is apparently very high quality.

All the people on it sound, utterly, top-level. The songs are actually so good that weeks later I'm still singing the Diesel Engine or The Insurance Song. I’m like, “What is going on?” There are three albums, could there be five, could there be ten?

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

JEREMY: You took all this information and you made this incredibly beautiful book about the Golden Age. I'd love to hear about that process. How did this turn into a book? Then how did the book lead to the documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway, which I hope everybody listening has watched? It's absolutely incredible and joyous.

STEVE: I have been collecting, for a solo project, for a number of years, and there weren't many other people I met who'd ever heard of this stuff or ever seen it, even at a record show. If you went to a dealer who had the weird miscellaneous bin, you'd say, “I'm looking for these corporate souvenir records.” You would not get much of a reply, but then eBay changed the game. America's attics and closets were being dumped onto eBay listings. For a few years there, it was a gold rush.

Every week or two I'd find something crazy that I have never seen before, but I wasn't the only one. There was a guy named Sport Murphy who also had a taste for weird vinyl, including the corporate stuff. He was annoyed because some guy kept outbidding him every time.

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

Back in those days, it was a little easier to figure out who your competitors were on eBay. He tracked me down and we said, “Okay, I see eye to eye with you. You're another aficionado of the weird mongrel, cultural castoffs that polite society has decided are worthless.” We have decided that there are flavors of gold in there that just haven't been understood yet.

We joined forces. He knew people who had a small publishing imprint, and he said, “I think I know some people who might be interested if we ever want to work on a book.” That's how that went. Sport and I are the co-authors of the book that came out almost ten years ago.

We got some lovely press. I got to go on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I was on the Letterman Show as a guest, and then I started getting inquiries from filmmakers who said, “Hi, I'm a documentarian and I'm interested in this topic. Would you be possibly open to pairing up or teaming up?” I said to my friend Dava Whisenant, “Can you help me with this?” Dava Whisenant was an editor who had worked at the Letterman Show that had gone to LA and was now in a films documentary.

I don't know how to judge whether these people are legitimate or if it's a good match. She came back with, “I'm not sure about these people,” and number two mentioned that if there's going to be a documentary, she would like to throw my hat in the ring on that. I said, “Okay, you just got the job because I like you. I believe in you. You get me.”

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

Much of it is that trust, connection, and chemistry. It turned out to be a four-year process. I had no idea what we were about to do, but you have to be pretty confident in someone else's vision to ride that rollercoaster for four years and not be worried about how it's going to turn out.

The movie was done early in 2018, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, went on to win armloads of awards, and people are still finding it a lot of fun.

JEREMY: That's a great story. There were a couple of the shows that were some of the big hits, in a sense. I know you love all of your children equally, but are there any that are your particular favorites?

STEVE: There are. I would say a pretty healthy top-tier. You heard me mention Diesel Dazzle. That's a 1966 Detroit diesel engine show, a division of General Motors. There's another one called Go Fly a Kite, which was General Electric hosting a utility executives conference. There are several great Ford tractor shows. One is called Fortify Your Future.

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

Some interesting things about the Go Fly a Kite and the Ford tractor one was that I came into this collecting odyssey knowing close to zero things about actual Broadway shows. I just thought this is so improbable and so messed up, and yet somehow, also legitimately great. I just want all of it. What I was missing at the time was the fact of the pedigree of some of these shows.

Now several years into this, I'm showing him this Ford Tractor record I found, and a friend of mine, actually the Letterman head writer who hired me, is looking at the cover and is saying, “Oh, that's crazy.” Then he turns it over, he looks at the back cover with the credits, and his eyes widen. He says, “Oh my God, do you realize who these people are?” I said, “No, I don't.” He said, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote Fiddler on the Roof. I said, “That is news to me but okay.”

At this GE show with the electric utility executives, there were three writers. One was Walter Marks, who I later found out wrote I Gotta Be Me, and then the other two writers were John Kander and Fred Ebb. Two more names I didn't recognize. Two months after the GE show, they were on Broadway with Cabaret and never looked back. Then they had Chicago, the song New York, and all these things.

JEREMY: Those writers that you mentioned were the cream of the crop of Broadway at the time. Tell us about some of the actors, as well, because they had top-name actors too.

STEVE: Cheetah Rivera, Martin Short, and Florence Henderson are all people that I talked to in the documentary. They loved these shows because of the money, but you also worked with a level of people up and down the line. You got better at your craft. Maybe it wasn't exactly the version of show business you thought you were getting into when you had stars in your eyes at age 18, but some people did graduate out of it and become those household names.

I didn't recognize Kander and Ebb, but I recognized the name of one of the cast members, which was Valerie Harper. This was a few years before Mary Tyler Moore, so nobody would've known her or known that name. With the hindsight, you see all these up and coming people moving through the ranks that are using industrials to make a living while they try for the big game.

You could do very well financially by both writing and performing in industrials. I've heard people say you would do better doing industrials than you would being in a sort of mid-grade, non-star on Broadway. It's going to be nearly impossible to explain, even to your own family, what your career is. Forget about explaining to the wider world that no one's ever going to see the show.

JEREMY: That issue of nobody really understanding what you're talking about persists to this day. Before I was doing corporate live events, I was in theater, and when you tell people you're a director, a playwright, and you're working off Broadway, they know what you're talking about. They get it. You tell people you're a creative director for a corporate live event show, blank stares. No idea. What in the world could that possibly mean?

The industry remains out of reach for most people. You talked about this a little, but what about the budgets for these shows? This must have cost a pretty penny.

STEVE: There were enormous amounts of money sloshing through these things during the golden years. I think some of it was like an arms race. If Chevy did a show with 20 dancers, then Ford's going to want to do one even bigger the next year. If Massey Ferguson Tractors had the biggest blowout anyone's ever seen in the tractor world, then John Deere better step up the next year and prove that nobody's going to knock them off the top.

You had a certain amount of competitiveness, but for a long time, I do think it was tax deductible as some sort of business expense. That may have eventually changed. Hank Beebe, composer, dear friend, and mentor of mine, wrote the music for Diesel Dazzle, for Got to Investigate Silicones, and a whole slew of other ones. He told the first industrial he did was in 1956. He wrote the music for the show introducing the 57 Chevy line to the dealers, and he said the budget for that show was $3 million in 1956.

BETHANY: This is behind the scenes Bethany breaking in with a fact check. Three million dollars in 1956 would be worth over 33 million dollars today. For comparison, Hamilton the Musical cost an estimated 12 and a half million dollars to be produced on Broadway.

STEVE: Every time an audience of people at a screening of the documentary hears Hank say that you hear the gasp of intake of breath because people are struggling to understand the scope of this. If you're coming to a cold and you think it's just some people from the accounting department doing a skit in the cafeteria, no it’s not. It was like, how much money do we need to put on something that stands up against anything on Broadway? Alright, there's your budget.

JEREMY: That is unbelievable. You've brought up Diesel Dazzle a couple of times. I would love to play a clip from that.

STEVE: Yeah, I enjoy that.

JEREMY: It's gorgeous. It's so much fun.

STEVE: I love the title Diesel Dazzle because you get two words and four syllables that kind of sum up the entire genre. You got the heavy industry on the diesel side, and you got the showbiz glamor on the dazzle side. These two things are slamming together like matter and anti-matter, and it shouldn't work.

This is the other part of it is that these folks said we will not do mediocre work just because it's some corporate gig that might only be heard once by 300 people. I loved that these people said that we have only one setting, and yes, we want to be well paid and get another convention next year. Here we are right now and we're going to make this as good as it can be.

I thought anybody who does creative work in a difficult environment dealt with a lot of rejection, like at a TV show or I'm sure what you guys are doing. Clients that change their minds all the time. Riding that line of caring enough to keep doing your best work all the time and not getting crushed by the twists and turns of it was very inspiring to me. I think that is when it started turn from this is weird and silly thing to I need to listen to these people because they've been through something that is not completely dissimilar from what I go through, but they have kept their spirit and their dignity, even when nobody could understand what they were doing.

JEREMY: Again, that persists to this day. We can be working on a show for months and months, and you get one crack at it. There's no previews and long run. It goes once. That sequence that you were working on is two and a half minutes long, and it plays. You hope that it has the desired effect. It makes them laugh, it makes them cry, it makes them cheer, and then it's over. You keep moving on, but we put everything into it. We absolutely want it to be the best, whatever it is that it can be.

STEVE: I was really entranced and inspired by the top end of extraordinarily talented people doing work that. I could not get out of my head.

JEREMY: We work with a group called Song Division, we can link to this in the show notes, and they create songs at corporate events with the audience. The audience will be polled about what's on their mind, what's going on, what selling techniques work or don't work, or whatever the issue of the day is that they want to capture. They'll turn it into a song on the spot. The songs are fantastic and great work.

STEVE: One thing I love is what you're saying about involving the actual concerns of an audience. That's when you take it from a nicely composed and executed "hooray, everything's great" cheerleading song to this psychologically interesting thing, which was the companies that were wise and brave enough to tell writers like Hank Beebe for the Diesel Engine show that.

They actually did this. We'll pay your travel expenses for a couple of weeks. We want you to go to a whole bunch of the Detroit Diesel franchise locations. Talk to the guys and ask what's actually bothering them that they think the people back at headquarters don't understand.

It might be hard for us to hear some of that but bring it back. Let's figure out an honest way to reflect that in the show in a way that will be hilarious and musically fun. Tell these guys no. We are paying attention. We have not magically solved the problems on day one, but we are here to make a down payment during this event by saying, “We understand things need to be better and we're not shying away from it.” I thought that is very smart and brave. Not all companies had the foresight to do that.

JEREMY: Along those lines, in doing these events, clearly the higher ups had a message and had things they wanted to convey to the audience. How did they do that? Would the CEO be in the show or would the top executives come out and give a speech?

STEVE: It can be hard to tell sometimes from what survives on a vinyl record. Sometimes there are a speech or two on the record along with the songs. I heard it went a couple of different ways. Sometimes you would be doing an exciting song, the song ends, then someone comes out to the podium, talks for 45 minutes, the electricity in the air from the production number kind of dissipates, and then you're cold again. You have to start up.

Sometimes they just threw the whole show up at once and let it roll like a real show. Some of these events, and probably some of the ones you do span several days.

I recently worked on writing lyrics for a pharmaceutical company's big meeting, and that spanned several days. There was an opening kickoff number that reprised at the end, but most of it, in the middle, didn't really have the musical elements. It could go any different way. For instance, there was a real book musical with characters in a story, there was a review with occasional songs that pop up that aren't really linked, or there might be the company's event theme song at the beginning and the end. I'm sure you've seen different iterations of this.

JEREMY: Yeah, absolutely. That is very similar to what we do, but the idea of an actual book musical has been lost to time. Maybe you're aware of something, but I'm not aware of anybody doing that today.

STEVE: The last one, again it can be hard to tell what creeps out and what bootleg items reach their way to me, but State Farm seems to have had a long running commitment to these shows. Not every year, but every three years there would be some big convention. Last one I have real proof of was 2018. That's still pretty recent and it looked like the cast of dozens of people and giant sets.

Sometimes I have a bootleg DVD, and I'd have to go back to see if it was a book musical with a plot. I think it was, but that is like the last few dinosaurs alive on an island somewhere. It's rare, now, that anybody in this age just assumed that. We are creatures of screens now and everything's got to be a zoomy, sassy video or something.

There were always films mixed in with this stuff, even back to the 1950s, I think. One of the trends was in the 1950s. Broadway musicals were very much solid, middle class, mainstream entertainment like My Fair Lady and South Pacific. Every middle class home had one or two of these soundtracks in it.

By the 1970s and 1980s, that was no longer the case. You had new generations of people who grew up on the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and musical theater that wasn't really quite in that same central zone anymore. I do think the wheel has turned, and now we have people and teenagers who can't get enough of Hamilton, the Book of Mormon, or other ones that probably are too hip for me to even know about. Maybe that is part of why the time may be ripe for more of this again.

JEREMY: It's interesting what you say about screens because of course that is true. That is our current society. I come back to that thing about the medium being the message.

If an executive has a message that they want to give, they could send an email. That's a way to deliver a message. They can make a video. That's a way to deliver a message, but if you're going to have a live event and you're going to put several hundred or thousand people in a room together, why not take advantage of that medium? Use it to its fullest capabilities to deliver your message.

Again, if all you're going to do is play a video, they have their place, and I love them, but we're not here to watch TV. We're here to watch you. What can we do in the live setting that makes that message the most impactful and resonates? I'm with you, let's bring it back.

STEVE: Yes, when people are on stage, 20 feet from you and belting it out, you feel like they're up there without a net. They are talented and just giving it everything they got right now, in this moment. There's no going back. I do think people's heart rates spike and people are galvanized by it. If the message is what you do matters, the company that you belong to is making a difference, our success is America's success, and is mankind's success, it turns all the dials in such a way that, people who worked on these shows used to tell me, they would watch the audiences from the wings and see these sort of middle-aged tough guy managers, dealers, and salesmen with tears streaming down their faces. Somebody gets it and understands that we want to dare to believe that this matters. It was not that height every time, but sometimes when all the ingredients came together right, it really could do something that even the best speech or the best video couldn't do.

JEREMY: When I left theater to go into this industry, my fear was that I was going to miss that interaction with the audience and those emotions coming back from them. You don't get it every time. The meeting doesn't warrant it every time, but I've absolutely been at these corporate events where people are crying, cheering, and celebrating each other in ways that are different. It is, certainly, equally as emotionally powerful as anything you'd find in a Broadway theater.

It's funny that you said that you didn't come from musical theater. You didn't have that initial respect for musical theater as a kid. Then at the end of Bathtubs Over Broadway, you have this unbelievable production number, so you've really come quite a long way.

I'd love to hear about that. That was a Kuta film, a Kuta theater, a Kuta comedy, and a Kuta to your heartstrings. It was just brilliant and beautiful. Whose idea was that? How did it come to be? Where did you shoot it? How did you get all the costumes, choreography, and the way the camera was used? It was just brilliant.

STEVE: I'm so thrilled that it hit you the way that we hoped it would. Dava and her team realized, at some point, that we've been insisting upon the power of this stuff to be magical, even in unlikely circumstances. Really, the last card we have to play conceptually is to prove it. Do it yourself. They talked about it like a Muppet movie ending where all the people you've met along the way in the road movie adventure are in the final production number.

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

There was a bit of that feeling to it, but the emotional heart of it was bringing together a couple cast members from the American standard musical, The Bathrooms Are Coming, which I'm sure we'll want to talk about a little bit more. My friend Hank Beebe and I, who I'd known for like 20 years at this point, had been talking on and off over the years, but we said let's have Hank and I write a song together.

They had gotten some production money from some investors and spent a lot of it on that finale. We had the Warner Brothers back lot for one day, and once the sun went down past the buildings, the day was over.

They had to plan like for a D-Day invasion. First shot is at 6:00 AM, as soon as the sun is over the top. We got to run hot all day and cram in 94 shots, or whatever it was, and have the cameras on cranes and get costumes. We went over to the Edith Head costume department at Universal, and everybody got to put on these swanky retro costumes.

Somebody knew somebody who brought in a bunch of vintage car owners who drove in their cars for the day to put on the streets of the back lot. Suddenly you have 55 Chevys, 66 Mustangs, and all these things, just so many ways that the details were tweaked. It wasn't going to be a B+, it was going to be A just across the board.

JEREMY: Thank you for that behind the scenes look at that moment. You brought up The Bathrooms Are Coming, which is a big part of the documentary. I don't know how you could watch that film and not fall in love with that show. Maybe we could play just a clip from that.

MUSICAL AUDIO: My bathroom, my bathroom is a private kind of place, very special kind of place, The only place, Where I can stay making faces at my face.

JEREMY: The sincerity, beauty, and commitment to The Bathroom is just phenomenal.

STEVE: As you know from the movie, it took a long time, but I did track down a lot of people associated with that show. The woman who sang that vocal in 1969, Pat, had a very wise observation once because she knew I'd been collecting all this stuff. She said, “the tractor shows and everything, that's all great, but not many people have a tractor. Everybody has a bathroom, and that's why this record strikes something with everybody.”

They just can't believe it's real, and then the songs are really good. Then they think about how can that not have been made up by comedy writers.

JEREMY: Speaking of comedy writers, I'd love to ask you a couple of questions about your time on the Letterman Show. People who watch the show, the average viewer, might not even think there are writers. Doesn't Dave just get up, tell his jokes, and then interview his guests? Maybe they think that there is a bit here that someone wrote. Clearly, it's not so easy.

I'm sure that you never had one day that was exactly like the next, but what was it like? What were you actually doing? What did it feel like? What was the job?

STEVE: First of all, your observations are about our average viewers really thinking about if there are writers. When I was a teenager, I saw the Letterman Show for the first time and that wasn't on my mind. I was dazzled by how crazy it was and fell down on the floor laughing, but I didn't immediately think I want to be a writer for the Letterman Show.

I was unable to form that thought until years later, but yeah, the thing about writing at the show changed when I started in 1990. It was a pre-internet world. When we ended the show in 2015, it was the white hot, everything has got to go viral, and everything's on the internet instantly.

17,000 people are writing the same current events jokes on Twitter every 11 seconds. It was such a different landscape. We became much more current events oriented as years went by. I think Jon Stewart helped push the whole genre in that direction. A lot of it was an office job where you come in the morning, and in the later years, you come in and go into the big writer's room to have a pitch meeting.

Hopefully you've prepared a few reasonably decent ideas for bits, fake commercials, live interruptions, or whatever. The head writer says, “okay, you write that one. I like that. How about you two guys or ladies collaborate and figure out the missing piece of that and put a bunch of scripts into production.”

We had the top ten list every day. Everyone pitched in on that. First, you propose topics, and then run hard on writing jokes when you're not juggling your other things. I was also running the monologue for 11 years, so that was part of my day. Most writers on the show were doing several different things at the same time or in quick succession most days.

Then suddenly, it's late afternoon, and the treadmill has thrown you off at the end. Now it's the show, let's see what actually happened, what did we get done in time, and what did Dave like? Dave loved this, and the audience kind of wasn't sure or Dave wasn't sure about this. Amazingly, the audience loved it.

Many ways for things to not go quite right. Like I was saying before, you had to learn to ride this line of caring enough to do your best job without being devastated by the particulars of how it turned out.

JEREMY: It must have been an absolutely incredible experience and time. I imagine being filled with tension and stress can be very difficult but also unbelievably satisfying and joyous at times.

STEVE: Yeah, there were tough days, better eras, worse eras, and moments of glory where everything clicked, and it was magical. In a way, thinking about organizations and how they motivate people, I wanted to please Dave Letterman. I wanted to make him laugh. I wanted to make my fellow writers and staff members laugh.

I wanted to satisfy myself, so part of what these companies in these industrial shows were tapping into was your pride. I don't want to let down the team because it's not an abstract thing. The team is my friends, my own employees, and my colleagues who depend on things getting done right. I'm sure this is the same way in your world. There are so many moving parts and specialists, so you don't feel like it's your job to be the genius every day.

Actually, my friend Hank Beebe, told me a wonderful quote once. He said, “A professional is someone whose best work is outstanding and whose worst work is acceptable.” I thought that's pretty cool. It's always going to be, at least, pretty good.

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

JEREMY: What are you up to today?

STEVE: It's suitably ecliptic in this confused world we live in. In some corporate gigs, people who see Bathtubs Over Broadway approach me and say, "hey, would you be interested in helping out?" I've recently been involved in creating some songs and lyrics, which I mentioned. Other ones were for some big companies that want a funny video to kick off a keynote address or something. I like those.

I appreciate it, not sure if it's irony, that I started out looking at these things and thinking, “what the hell is this? Who would work on something like this?” Now here I am happily working on corporate gigs. I've gotten very interested in songwriting during the Letterman era.

Toward the end, I was starting to write songs and jingles that were on the show. Then Bathtubs accelerated that process. I'm officially going to put out a batch of my own music pretty soon.

Sometimes there's a flicker of possible TV show work or something. I suppose that it will be unlikely that I'll go back into an office for years at a time at this point. I just don't know if that's something I would want to do, even if it came up. If somebody who has a big time TV show wants me to come into their office, let's talk.

JEREMY: I don't have a big time TV show, but I do some corporate gigs, and I would love to have you on a corporate gig. I'll be looking for opportunities. I think that would be a blast.

Alright, I'd love to move on to our Lightning Round.

[AUDIBLE THUNDER]

This is three questions that we ask all of our guests. The first is, who's your biggest get? A speaker, entertainer, or subject matter expert that you would either love to see at a live event or someone who you would love to coach.

STEVE: I would love to see one of two people, but neither are going to happen. One of them is dead, and one of them is 94. I've enjoyed the work of the witty songwriters, Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman, both of whom did industrials by the way.

I have proof of that, so I know it did happen. Tom Lehrer did a Dodge dealer film in the 60s, which is crazy.

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

I have an LP of Allan Sherman's custom written material about vending machines and Scott paper cups, which was distributed to vending industry VIPs in 1966.

JEREMY: Alright, second question is what is one thing you wish presenters did more of or less of? Typically, we're talking about executives getting up on stage, giving the presentation, and what kind of mistakes they make.

STEVE: I haven't been to so many corporate events that I'm familiar with the ins and outs of executive speeches and presenters. Although, by talking to people who used to work in this field decades ago, I found it fascinating. Some of them would not only work on songs, lyrics, or bits but executive speeches.

I remember one writer telling me that he was working with, it might have been the head of Buick, had to get up and give the big sort of yearly kickoff speech about where they are with the new models. It wasn't going well. The guy just was stiff and uncertain. Finally, the writer who was coaching him said, “put those pieces of paper away. Look me in the eye and tell me why you're psyched about what you got.” The guy's eyes lit up. He said the way we got this figured out was so great. Now we got this whole thing.

If we can just get your legitimate energy, excitement, and lightly corral that, and still have it be you up there with what you just did, that'd be the lightning in a bottle. I suspect that is a conundrum that people have faced through the decades.

JEREMY: Oh, a hundred percent. Sometimes when you just ask people, “what do you actually want to say,” you get something completely different than what was in the script. That's wonderful advice.

Last question is, what is something, could be a book, a movie, a song, whatever you like, that was a big influence on you and particularly, if possible, influenced your professional career?

STEVE: That's interesting because I was not a comedy nerd growing up, at all. You hear so many people who've come into being a stand-up, comedy writer or screenwriter say things like, at age 11 I had every comedy album by Steve Martin or that I'd seen every Eddie Murphy piece. I was not paying attention to that.

I guess comedy writing can be such a broad field. We're not all exactly the same, but I do remember that I had a bunch of MAD Magazine anthology paperbacks. By the time I had them, like in the late 1970s, they were the stuff from 1962 from before I was born. It was full of references that I didn't even get, like politicians from the Eisenhower era with the punchlines. I was like, “who the hell is Estes Kefauver?” I don't know, but it sounds like it must be funny.

There were once in a while, logical twist that I would really just stare at. I had a set of Woody Allen paperbacks. He had written a lot of short plays and humor pieces, and I would study the way jokes worked in those times. He led you over here and then pulls the rug out from under you, so part of me was trying to see how the gears worked in that. I was not really paying attention to being a comedian. I was just a weirdo.

JEREMY: Those are great. I hav en't thought about MAD Magazine in so long. Well Steve, it's such a delight to talk to you. I'm so tickled that you agreed to come on the podcast and talk to us. I know that all this work that you've done, all this research, the archiving, the beautiful book, and the incredible documentary was in part to tickle your own curiosity and, in large measure, to honor these incredible artists from the past.

For those of us who are still carrying that torch in whatever way we are, it just meant the world to us. What you've done in honoring those folks is incredible, and by extension, in some small way, allowing us to feel honored, as well. I'm just tickled and very moved. Thank you again for taking the time.

STEVE: Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you Behind the Scenes Bethany.

JEREMY: Well, getting to talk with Steve about the Golden Age of industrial musicals was a real thrill. For me, there were tons of takeaways, but these are the four tops.

                   • Number four, during the Golden Age of industrial musicals, corporations used a full book musical to make their messaging impactful, and many of the writers                            and actors who honed their craft on these shows went on to become some of the most successful talent in Broadway.

                   • Number three, the budgets for these shows in today's dollars would be in the tens of millions. Some of the shows that they did back then were quite brave in                            addressing what the companies were worried about and what their employees were truly struggling with.

                   • Number two, using elements of musical theater is a great way to use the emotional power of theater to get your message across to your attendees.

                   • Number one, the artists who created these shows gave a hundred percent of their talent and created truly exceptional work.

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