Tony Mastroianni Review Collection
Dick Button Enthusiastic, Busy Over World's Fair
Cleveland Press March 11, 1964
Dick Button is best known As a skater. But he's also a lawyer, producer, actor and businessman. And he was in Cleveland a couple of days ago as a salesman.
But get him talking and almost all you will hear about is the upcoming New York World's Fair. His comments are a mixture of worry and enthusiasm.
When the Fair opens one of the attractions will be Dick Button's Ice-Travaganza, co-produced by Paul Feigay. The two have been associated in a large number of television productions.
"THE CITY of New York is spending a million dollars to build an ice theater and we'll be spending another million for the show," he enthused.
"There'll be the longest indoor ski run in the world, Olympic skating champions, comics from Europe.
"The place will look like a modified amphitheater! There'll be a proscenium stage with eight levels. That's where the ski run will be along with other acts and regular fashion shows. The ice will be in front of this, just like a thrust stage with the audience ranged on three sides of it."
HE'S LESS enthusiastic about the financial tribulations of putting on the show. An estimate of $5000 on one phase of the work later jumped to more than $30,000. Both labor and material costs are spiraling, according to Button, and there's little anyone can do about it.
Button is just back from Europe where be was involved with the televising of the world figure skating championships. Right now he's visiting department stores (he was at Halle's here) touting Milliken Woolens, producers of stretch fabrics, a material that is being used in the costumes for his ice show.
It's sort of a vacation away from his World's Fair problems.
ENTERTAINMENT NOTES: 20th Century-Fox is shipping $750,000 worth of props from "Cleopatra," "South Pacific" and "The King and I" to New York for exhibition in the Hollywood Pavilion of the World's Fair.
"Today, Tonight and Tomorrow," Italy's box office champion this past winter, follows "The Easy Life" into the Colony Art. The film stars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
Actress Peggy Wood will portray the Mother Abbess in the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music." The forthcoming Jerry Lewis film, originally titled, "The Patsy," has been retitled, "The Patsy, or: How I Learned to Worry a Lot and Hate Show Business."
