![]() It’s always been a rich irony that indelibly “American” movies such as Some Like It Hot and High Noon were directed-and in many cases, written and directed-by Jews who were here in America to create American myths only because they had fled the German and Austrian monsters who then killed the rest of their families. Hollywood was a place where the ability to act and stage a scene without a lot of center-door fancy was the recipe for stardom and riches. It also made the trip way across town, to the backlots and sound-stages of Southern California where many of those same folks went to work in the sunshine and to forge a new business. He was pushing it, and that was killing the joke.īut the practical show-business savvy embedded in the Throw it away ethos went further afield. My boss at the time was a hugely successful director, and at my very first rehearsal, I heard him tell one of the actors that he was working too hard to make a certain line funny. Here’s a phrase I’ve heard since my very first day in show business: Throw it away. If you close your eyes, you can hear one of the impresarios at the Orpheum on Second Avenue in Manhattan, sometime in the early 1910s, dismissing a production with a wave of his hand and saying, in a thick Mel-Brooks-2,000-Year-Old-Man accent, Too much with the center-door fancy! The phrase comes, I’m guessing, from that great wellspring of show business jargon and tradition, the Yiddish theater. Center-door fancy is something that’s nice-looking, but maybe too nice-looking. The hairstyle of a game-show host, the matching tie-and–pocket square of one of the commentator guys on Sunday football, the dance moves of a South Korean boy band-these are all center door fancy. Something that’s center-door fancy is a little overdone and overproduced. It’s hard to come in through the center door in a natural, spontaneous way. ![]() ![]() When a character enters from that door, it’s an unambiguous declaration that the star has arrived. In a theater, the center door is directly upstage from the audience. It was too center-door fancy, he said with a shrug. I’m not sure I know exactly what it means, but I can guess. A friend of mine from a venerable entertainment-industry family once used a great piece of old-timey show-business jargon to describe a movie he didn’t like.
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