L. Lawrence Weber
| L. Lawrence Weber | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1869 New York City, New York, USA |
| Died | 22 February 1940 New York City, New York, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Stage and film producer and theater manager |
L. Lawrence Weber (c. 1872 – 22 February 1940) was an American sports promoter, stage show producer and theater manager. He was active in arranging vaudeville shows, legitimate theater and films. He once tried to bypass laws against importing a boxing film to the USA by projecting it on a screen just across the border in Canada and filming the screening from the USA side.
L. Lawrence Weber was born in New York City in 1869. At the age of thirteen, in 1882 he organized a company of young amateur minstrels who toured Long Island, New York. He posted the company's bills, took tickets and performed on stage. In 1883 he joined the Excelsior Minstrels. For a period Weber was the secretary of the British Minister to Japan, and became the American representative of the Japanese Government Tea Syndicate. In 1897 Weber was proprietor of Weber's Olympia Company and the Marion Extravaganza Company. These consisted of two touring theater companies and two other attractions.
Weber became one of the leaders of the Columbia burlesque wheel, or the Eastern Wheel, with Samuel Scribner and Gus Hill, later to be part of the Columbia Amusement Company. They wanted to attract women to their shows, and promoted relatively clean entertainment. In 1908 they banned wrestling and prize fighting from their circuit. However, Columbia set up a second circuit in 1915, the American Burlesque Association, that staged raunchier shows.
On 4 December 1910 Weber announced a plan to form a circuit of popular theaters, the Lawrence Weber Co-operative Booking Circuit. The investors were Weber, Sam A. Scribner, John Herbert Mack and Rudolph K. Hynicka. They planned to acquire forty theaters in cities around the United States and Canada, and to supply them with forty theater companies playing in rotation. They would put on equal numbers of melodramas, society plays, comedy dramas, farce comedies and musical comedies, charging popular prices. The partners were all associated with the "Eastern Wheel" of burlesque theaters, which had a similar business model.
Weber was one of the sponsors of a film made of a boxing match in Havana, Cuba, on 5 April 1915 between Jack Johnson and Jess Willard. He obtained the copyright on the film. He was refused permission to import it on the basis of a Federal law prohibiting import of such films for public exhibition. Weber argued that this law was not constitutional, since it infringed on the rights of states. The case was heard in the Supreme Court in December 1915, and decided against Weber. In 1916 Weber made a widely publicized attempt to bypass the restriction. He set up a motion picture camera 8 inches (200 mm) south of the border between New York and Canada, pointing to a screen on the Canadian side on which each frame of the film of the 1915 Havana fight was projected, thus creating a duplicate negative. He lost the court case that followed on the basis that he had violated the spirit of the law.
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