The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals Shines Anew at the Alamo Drafthouse

From roughly the 1950s to the 1980s, corporate America commissioned tremendous numbers of lavish Broadway-style shows about sales and service for industry conventions that weren’t open to the public. Some of those shows, though, were filmed.

Yes, and –

Guess who’s got a collection of those films?

Ladies and gentlemen, veteran Letterman writer Steve Young is coming to Austin – where he’ll be helming a gig in Texas for the first time, the goddamn Yankee – to present a night filled with such wacktastic splendors as General Electric’s Silicones, Silicones, and a Hamm's sales-meeting film animated by Hanna-Barbera, and the nigh on legendary The Bathrooms Are Coming! musical that American-Standard produced back in 1969.

Now, a guy who’s got an interest in these industrial musicals, of course that guy’s gonna want to share his passion with the public – whether in the form of this coming Tuesday night’s screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz or the book Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals (co-authored with Sport Murphy).

But what’s the origin of such a passion in the first place? What is it that inspires a man to celebrate the team-spirit-pumping theatrical efforts of last-century industrial giants?

”I stumbled into this accidentally through my work at the Letterman show,” says Young.

“When I started as a writer there in the early Nineties, they already had a long-running comedy bit called ‘Dave’s Record Collection.’ This was a bit where Dave would hold up actual, unintentionally funny record albums, and we’d play a little sample. And part of my job was to go out to thrift shops and record stores and see what I could find for the raw material. So it was mostly a lot of singing celebrities (who shouldn’t have been singing) and the weird instructional records, things like that. But I started coming back, occasionally, with these souvenir record albums from company events – and was rather stunned to discover that they weren’t speeches, but full-fledged, custom-created musicals about selling insurance or servicing diesel engines or typewriters or tractors, or any of a thousand different things.”

“And, as a comedy writer,” says Young, “this absolutely thrilled me, on just a conceptual level – because these things just don’t seem to go together at all: show tunes and lyrics about tractor transmissions or nuclear power plants or whatever. So I loved it because of the crazy smashed-together juxtaposition. But, although many of them weren’t very good, the ones that were good were fantastic. And as I did more research and more talking to people, I learned about the huge amount of talent that was drawn upon for these things. Companies had vast amounts money to spend on these productions and were getting really gifted singers and songwriters and choreographers and everybody to make these things stand up to a very high level of quality.”

And then he discovered that some of these audio-recorded productions had also been … filmed?

“Yeah, that came about more slowly. The book I co-wrote came out almost three years ago, and at that point I thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of it.’ We talked about our favorite records and kind of planted the flag permanently for that genre existing and being worth a look. But then, more and more, I started getting films. From film collectors, and I was also buying things on eBay sometimes. A lot of the best stuff has come from the performers or composers themselves, people who’ve had film canisters sitting in their basements or attics for decades, not thinking that anyone would want to look at it again.”

And where better to showcase such things in Austin than in one of the storied rooms of The House That Those Leagues Built? That’s a rhetorical question, yes – but what led Young to the Alamo specifically?

“I’ve been going around the country for the last year, doing these film-clip shows where I present my favorite clips and talk about them, weave people into this world. And after I did one in Los Angeles last fall, a friend of mine said I should contact the Alamo Drafthouse, because they’re a wonderful chain of theatres that would probably like the show. And I sent out an inquiry, and the folks at the original Alamo in Austin said ‘This sounds fascinating, we’d love to set this up.’”

And so that’s where Young will be putting on the dog, as it were – a 1967 Purina song-and-dance extravaganza is part of the collection he’ll be screening – and it’s where we’ll be, too, all eager to witness the celluloided array of toe-tapping salaryman spectacles from decades past.

Just the kind of thing to keep our increasingly capitalistic city of Austin weird, right?

“Well,” says Young, “as much as it’s freaky and weird and hilarious, it can also be very touching and inspiring – especially when you hear the stories behind the shows, the anecdotes from the people I’ve interviewed. It’s really turned into something much different than when I was looking for things to make a cheap joke about. It’s blossomed into this whole universe.”