Question of the Day - 10 July 2021

Happy to.

In Las Vegas parlance, when an entertainer or group of entertainers owns his/her/their own show, it's called "four-walling." Put another way, to put on a four-walled show, an entertainer, or a producer of entertainment, pays rent on the room where the performance takes place.

It differs from the traditional payment structure, in which the performer received a set fee from the casino. By paying the performer outright, the casino assumed all the risk. 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. Today, performers can earn upwards of $1 million per show. That's a lot of risk for the casino company. 

With the four-wall arrangement, on the other hand, 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'.

As far as we've been able to ascertain, four-walling dates back to the early 1900s. It was originated by black filmmakers who were blacklisted by distributors and theaters and, thus, couldn't show their movies to audiences. In response, they created 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 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.

One of Las Vegas' most famous 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. The rent, of course, was just one of Goulet's many expenses. He 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 was George Wallace, whose 10-year residency at the Flamingo ended in 2014. 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 employed a staff of two dozen -- sound, lighting, stagehands, wardrobe, management, assistants, ushers, and, of course, himself. Wallace, like all four-walled producers, made his money on ticket sales.

In the pre- and presumably post-pandemic Vegas entertainment market, there were/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, 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, former Las Vegas Review-Journal entertainment writer Mike Weatherford, also author of our book Cult Vegas. He tells us, "I tried 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 didn'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 tried not to use the phrase."

But he adds, "All Caesars entertainment now is rent-the-room to the producer. Caesars is also mere landlord for Caesars Colosseum, which AEG Live operates."

Finally, he says, "Some variation on rent-the-room has become the norm. In fact, the Wynn guarantee to Garth Brooks [for his 187-show residency from 2009 to 2014] 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."