133: Sales
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Consider for a moment all the art forms that were created on this continent by Americans, jazz, blues, musical theater, rock 'n' roll, phonograph recordings themselves, television, motion pictures, video games. I would argue that all of the American clips by the art form had which we truly excel as a nation, the art form which more Americans practice than any other, the art form which actually dominates all the other art forms and our political life as well. And that is the art of selling. That's what we do most reliably. From Wall Street to the pollsters and market research firms and focus group operations all across the fruited plain, from the telemarketers who phone us during dinner, to the junk mailing operations that fill our mailboxes in the morning, from James Carville selling candidates on our televisions, to the gang kids on Chicago's West Side selling weed in Humboldt Park, from the corny ads on every other radio station to the pledge drives that I participate in myself, on this very station. From sea to shining sea, sales is our great democratic art form, and I would argue nothing wrong with that. And in any case, we don't have any choice about it so we may as well decide to feel good about the whole thing. To help you do that. Today on our radio program, inspiring case studies, and some horrifying ones too, a whole gamut from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's American life, America Glass. Today's program, sales. America's greatest art form. At one of our show today, how to talk your way into half a million dollars in just 45 minutes. In that eccentric single, a company's a Hollywood screenwriter as he tries to sell a movie idea. Act two, jail cell, that's S-E-L-L. A story from Danny Hock in which a true American salesman gets thrown in the slammer for simply being an entrepreneur, and has a few words to say about it, believe me. Act three, who's the man? We have the story of how becoming a salesman can change your life, make you more confident, make you able to charm anyone, and why you might decide that that's not such a good thing. Act four, the secret to being rich and happy. The life of 76-year-old salesman Jimmy Roy in Braddock, Pennsylvania, raises the possibility that being a rich salesman and being a happy salesman might be mutually exclusive. Stay with us. Act one, how to talk your way into half a million dollars in just 45 minutes. Friends, let us consider one of the many crossroads where art and commerce meet, and ask the question, is commerce the greater art than art itself? In our first story today, writer Sandra Single takes us into a setting that as an occasional screenwriter, she knows well herself, the Hollywood pitch meeting, where movie and TV deals are made, and we thought we would start a show here because it is a sound situation where the stakes are enormously high, where things are decided very quickly, and where people who often like to think of themselves as artists, and we writers and producers and people like that, are basically forced to be salesman.
Transcription truncated.