Description
SECONDHAND BOOK – EX-LIBRARY
George Tallis arrived in Melbourne in 1886 as a seventeen-year-old Irish immigrant. He secured a job with the growing theatrical concern run by James Cassius Williamson, and remained involved with companies bearing that great actor-manager’s name until the early 1940s.
During the intervening years Tallis rose to the very top of the Australian entertainment industry. Upon JC Williamson’s death in 1913, he became chairman of directors of JC Williamson Ltd – the ‘Firm’ – and established a reputation as a peerless live theatre entrepreneur. He expanded, consolidated and modernised the Firm, pioneering commercial radio and the screening of films as vital components of its portfolio. By the mid-1920s Tallis, as one of the first ‘media giants’, was at the head of the largest entertainment organisation in the world.
Then, like London Bridge, or world stock markets, the Firm came tumbling down.
By any measure George Tallis’s achievements were large, yet his story lies buried. In part, this can be attributed to his own personality: he was a quiet man, not given to self-promotion. The Silent Showman gives this enigmatic man his place in the history of Australian entertainment.
Specifications:
Condition: Good – minor wear to dustjacket, contains library labels and stamps.
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Year: 1999
Format: Hardback, with dustjacket
Pages: 370pp
ISBN: 9781862544314
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