Post #575511 by Cammo on Thu, Feb 10, 2011 1:51 PM

Part 3 - Conventions, or A Thousand Fish In A Barrel

Maybe Jerry Lewis’s bizarrest movie (well, maybe not, he made a lot of strange movies late in his career) is “The Bellboy” filmed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach in 1960. Because Lewis didn’t have any money, he used the hotel as is, without any extra props or set decoration. What we see is exactly what the hotel looked like in 1960, which is FREAKING AMAZING! (People have talked about it elsewhere on TC) It’s this GIANT place right on the beach with this ENORMOUS front desk, acres of suntanning gals and HOLY CRAP ya gotta see it! My favorite part, though, is Jerry entering the Grande Ballroom. He is asked to “set it up” and proceeds to pull out chairs, one at a time and set them in perfect rows. (I won’t wreak the gag.) What’s interesting is that Jerry is setting the place up for what the HUGE room is designed for; conventions. But in 1960, Jerry was doing something that seems strange to us nowadays; he was setting up the chairs to be all facing in one direction - towards the stage. The stage had a proscenium arch and a podium with a big microphone right there in front.

Because in 1960 a convention was where a lot of people who usually worked for different branches of the same business went to see a guest speaker in the Grande Ballroom, listen to some more speeches, then have a big dinner. Afterwards they went drinking at the Hotel Bar, talked, met with each other or they went dancing with the wives or to sleep. This pattern is still emulated all over the USA at Lions Club meetings or at local Rotary Clubs. Go to one of their meetings and step back to 1960.

Nowadays, conventions are big business with hotels simply because the secret is out and everybody knows that they are free holidays paid for by the company you work for. And EVERYBODY wants to go to the convention. It used to be the sales staff only, now it’s the IT guy, buyers, accountants, the night watchman. And every union in the country has a convention, every political group, every local city government, all the service groups, every group you can think of in fact can’t even call itself a group unless that have a convention! Heck, even appreciators of 1950’s Tiki even have a freaking international convention!

But it’s even bigger than that. Cause the enormous conventions are not put on by a single business but by a convention management firm that rents space out - booths - to businesses with similar clients. San Diego’s biggest convention each year is the San Diego Comi-Con which is run by an umbrella group which purchased the name from founder John Rogers a few years ago. They have nothing to do with comics, they just hold the convention. It’s interesting that John called it the Comi-Con, originally still stuck in the 1950’s era of his comic collectors going to a Convention. Today people still sit in giant rooms like Jerry set up in 1960, but that ain’t the main reason they came. Today that room would be rented out to vendors.

Now we call them, of course, “Trade Shows.”

And they’re the biggest thing in the WORLD to a hotel manager, for the simple reason that if you have a Trade Show at your hotel you are basically gonna be a millionaire after the weekend is over. And you’re gonna get laid too. Because the hotel gets a cut of EVERYTHING GOING ON, and its wild. It’s like being a 1930’s gangster, only instead of being riddled with FBI bullets you get to eat a selection of cheesecake from the hotel’s buffet when its all over.

The point is this: hotels invest every dime they have in building bigger ballrooms with giant sliding partitions between them to make 1 giant room if need be. Cause they want the conventions and trade shows like a starving tiger wants that goat. They’ll build anything, any size, invest 5 years of profits to get a convention or two, because the business hotel trade I mentioned above is almost mindlessly driven by these yearly conventions and is the first thing the travel department has to examine when they look at hotels.

They have to. Everybody wants to go to the convention.

That’s why there is almost no money EVER left over for decor, or a good dinner menu, or nice rooms. It has nothing to do with taste of the lack thereof. There just ain’t any money or energy going into it. Talking to hotel guys about decor and food is like asking a cop where Santa Claus lives. He’ll just give you a glazed smile and pat you on the head like you’re retarded. Cause the conventions are where it’s at.

Again, think I’m exaggerating? The Hanalei plowed HUGE bucks, a giant percentage of their remodeling cash into making those new ballrooms, with the foldback doors and the seating plan and the microphones in every room and those giant chandeliers. They basically made a whole new state of the art interactive computer controlled building you could play football in, with 50 foot ceilings to make room for long passes and an entry hallway that looks sort of like Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors if Versailles was designed by the guy from Illinois who did the style guide for Sheraton Hotels.

There was NO money left over for anything else.

They did this for a great reason - because they had talked to some really big corporations who promised them that if they had the convention space, they’d book the hotel. In fact, the Hanalei had no choice.

But they made a mistake.

NEXT POST - The Wrench in the Machine, or What Went Wrong