HowlRound: I’m going to guess that very few of you have ever heard of a man named Erol Onaran. I think you need to know his story.
Erol was a Turkish American businessman who made a nice living fixing televisions (and, eventually, VCRs) in and around Washington, DC in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1980s, he decided to start renting video cassettes out of his flagship store, and before long Erol’s Video had become the largest movie rental chain in the United States. He sold the whole thing to his rival, Blockbuster—you’ve heard of them, right?—for a whopping $40 million in 1990.
A guy who repaired televisions! $40 million! And he didn’t stop there.
2 comments:
I THINK THIS IS GREAT! Honestly! It's awesome to see someone was so passionate about what he did that even the $40 Million didn't stop him from continuing to fix electronics. (I have always wanted a job I was so passionate about that I would never want to retire!) He was an innovative thinker and in this day and age, that can do wonders! With all this new technology and advancements that we have at our fingertips, who knows where theater can go! It would be devastating to lose the theater experience and it is heartbreaking to read that it is losing its value.
Theater for me has always been an escape. Though only very recently have I entered the backstage world where all of the magic is made, being in the audience had always been extremely special for me. It's hard to explain, but watching a show was literally magic. All of a sudden, the curtain goes up and you go numb. Everything on stage becomes you and for a few hours, you escape the world.
Bringing innovative ideas and new ways to produce these feelings to the theater may help draw in more people that once before never thought of coming. Though I think we should keep some of the traditions, why not try a little change with the times, it could never hurt to try!
I really connect to this article. Especially to the following quote: "He realized that, at a deep level, the service he provided wasn’t fixing radios: it was making sure that people were connected to entertainment."
I came to CMU without any theatre experience. And a lot of people asked me why I wanted to learn theatre and how come I feel confident that I'll be able to do theatre. And I always felt that at a deep level, what I want to do is to emotionally move people. And it can be in any art form, music, art, film, or theatre.
So I know that even though I don't have any theatre experience, I have music experience and I know what it means to be creative, to move people, be an artist. So I feel confident that like Erol Onaran I'll be able to take my artistic ideas into any field I choose to. And in this case - theatre.
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