In Las Vegas parlance, owning one's own show is called "four-walling." The term is used when an entertainer, or a producer of entertainment, pays rent on the room where the performance takes place.
As far as we've been able to ascertain, four-walling dates back to the early 1900s by black filmmakers who were blacklisted by distributors and theaters and, thus, couldn't show their movies to audiences. In response, they made their own spaces. All they needed were the movie, a projector, "four walls," and a bit of advertising and they were in business.
The origination of the practice is credited to Oscar Micheaux, a black writer in the early 1900s who, to get his books published, had to start his own publishing company. Widely considered the first black filmmaker, to get his films onto screens, Micheaux had to bring his own projector and rent screen space.
Four-walling enjoyed a resurgence in the 1960s and '70s with movies made outside of the Hollywood production and distribution system, such as Billy Jack, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, and plenty of low-budget regionally based indie flicks over the years.
In Las Vegas, four-walling has become a common arrangement, practically the norm in this day and age. In the traditional scenario, the performer received a set fee from the casino, which assumed all the risk on return. For example, back-in-the-day headliners such as Sinatra, Liberace, and Streisand earned upwards of $100,000 per performance and the casino struggled to break even. With the four-wall arrangement, the casino simply rents out the venue and the performer or producer assumes all the other business responsibilities, from the marketing to the maitre d'.
One of the most famous recent four-walled bombs was Robert Goulet, who rented the Venetian showroom for his show, Robert Goulet: The Man and His Music, for $15,000 per night in 2001. And the rent was just one of Goulet's many expenses. Goulet lasted a month before throwing in the towel, calling it "the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life."
On the other hand, one of the most successful four-walled performers is George Wallace, now in his seventh year at the Flamingo. Wallace majored in advertising and marketing in college and worked full-time in sales before taking a job as a staff writer on "The Redd Foxx Show," then branching out to perform his own comedy. In addition to renting the showroom, he employs a staff of two dozen -- sound, lighting, stagehands, wardrobe, management, assistants, ushers, and, of course, himself. Wallace, like all four-walled producers, makes his money on ticket sales.
In today's Vegas entertainment market, there are many more performers and shows than stage space, which gives hotels the flexibility of picking and choosing among shows, and dropping one show and adding another when they please. Which is the main reason why shows come and go so often and so fast around here.
According to David Saxe, who's produced more than 100 Las Vegas shows and is an adjunct professor in Hotel Administration at UNLV, only about 10% of four-walled shows make money. He says, "It's a tough town."
George Wallace agrees. "You have to be a freakin' idiot to try it."
Neither the casino nor the entertainers are too revealing about four-walled arrangements; in fact, the typical contract often calls for non-disclosure on the part of both parties.
So we went to one of our ace sources, Las Vegas Review-Journal entertainment writer Mike Weatherford, also author of our book Cult Vegas. He tells us, "I try not to use the word 'four-walled' in print, because there's no standard definition."
Penn & Teller is a good example, he says, of why he doesn't. "P&T are different in that they self-produce without a middle party -- though the degree to which the casino agrees to kick in on advertising would split hairs on whether its a 'four-wall' or 'two-wall' and, again, why I try not to use the phrase."
But he adds, "All Harrah's entertainment now is rent-the-room to the producer. Harrah's is also mere landlord on Caesars Colosseum, which AEG Live operates."
Finally, he says that "Some variation on rent-the-room has become the norm. In fact, the Wynn guarantee to Garth Brooks may be the only example of the old ways of doing things: Paying an entertainer a guarantee so big that ticket sales alone don't pencil out, just for anticipated ancillary casino drop and/or bragging rights."
So there you have it, more, probably, than you ever wanted to know about Penn & Teller owning their show.
