Charles Eckerman & Steven Scott ©

John Bernardoni, Chuck Eckerman and Steve Scott

Chuck Eckerman, Steve Scott, John Bernardoni

John Bernardoni, Chuck Eckerman, Steve Scott

Co-Founders – Paramount Theatre Restoration Project

Charles “Chuck” Eckerman and Steve Scott, my two original partners at the Paramount back in the middle 1970’s, are unsung heroes who received very little attention in the media for their role in the revitalization of the theatre. However, they gave up any semblance of real income to push the dream forward of saving, restoring and rejuvenating the historic landmark. What is more remarkable is that neither of the two had a theatrical background. That is usually a requirement to make an all-consuming, manic driven commitment to a job which pays for a subsistence level life and 100 hour work weeks.

STEVE SCOTT

If you did not know Steve’s background, you would never put it together given his behind the scenes nature and true minimalistic journeyman work ethic. His dad worked for the U.S. State Department in Thailand. He went to school in Bangkok for a year. Thereafter, he attended A&M once back in the states and was on the swim team. He graduated from Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, spent two years in the Army stationed in Chicago then spent a summer attending the University of Mexico. He would go on to marry Judy Stevens who would appear in “The Owl and the Pussycat” at the Paramount, a Ken Johnson’s Center Stage production. He had and has an intensity and drive that was unmatched.

JOHN BERNARDONI

I first met Steve Scott at the Lake Travis resort of Point Venture around 1972. My first job, after college, in early 1972, was assistant manager of the Ramada Gondolier Hotel situated at Riverside Drive and I35. In that role, I was run through the hotel’s many departments, grooming me to be a possible manager at some point down the road. I ran the bar, restaurant, front desk, was the night auditor and even ran the Smithsonian “PBX” phone system with plugs galore for the graveyard shift between 11pm to 7am. At $400 per month, it just wasn’t making it. I left after six months later.

(As an ironic side note, Roberta Reed Crenshaw, Austin philanthropist of renown, owned the Ramada Gondolier Hotel – a fact of which I was unawares until many years later. “Bobbie” became the Paramount Theatre’s most important benefactor by gifting her interest in the Paramount to the not for profit organization in 1977. Without that gift, the Paramount would never have been saved nor restored. See Roberta Reed Crenshaw story)

I had seen an ad for a front desk manager for Point Venture. The resort had a rental pool of townhomes, some owned by individuals and some still owned by the developers. My hotel experience would prove to be invaluable. There was, in fact, no hotel type system, in place at all. It was a Chinese fire drill, every weekend, with prospects and owners descending on the resort from Houston, en masse, only to find lot salesmen shacked up with a “niece” in their townhouse. The first action I took was to re-key the entire complex. That made me the arch enemy with the sales force. The system was established and double bookings became a thing of the past.

Steve was the manager of the food and beverage areas of Point Venture in addition to his other administrative duties which seemed to march on in to infinity. I watched, with awe as he took on every task, no matter how humbling that task might be. He never complained about cleaning up a townhouse because the maid didn’t show or any other of a dozen different jobs. We really got to know each other, in earnest, during the latter part of 1972 and all of 1973. Part of our area of responsibility was to do routine inspections of the bar to make sure the liquor hadn’t gone bad and that “liar’s poker” was run as an honest game! We were adept at these thankless jobs.

 

CHUCK ECKERMAN

Chuck Eckerman had come from Chicago to visit Steve one weekend in 1972 and then again in 1973. The two had been Army buddies. Chuck worked at two nationally prominent advertising firms, in Chicago and San Francisco. He hailed from Iowa. I learned he played acoustic bass in a jazz band and that he was an ardent fan of jazz, in general. Our collective love of jazz would have a major bearing on the early programming of the Paramount with major stars in that genre. Chuck was a reserved, thoughtful, genteel, conservative, tall man, who listened more than he talked. That was fine by me since I did enough talking for the three of us!  Making the ultimate sacrifice, he left those good paying jobs to move to Austin in January, 1975. One month later, we would all produce Dave Brubeck and his Sons as the inaugural test show to see if anyone would actually come to the mostly forgotten Paramount Theatre in a decaying downtown.  Chuck would take on the role as chief of operations and finances, from 1975-1979.  Warren Buffet couldn’t have done a better job of managing the cash flow.

On one of these occasions in the Point Venture lounge, I began to tell them about the Paramount Theatre and my vision for saving and repurposing it as a live performing arts center, thereby resurrecting it from its low point as a Kung Fu movie house. I had been informally working on the project for a year, immediately following my graduation from the University of Texas Radio Television and Film Department in the School of Communications. By 1973, I had stoked my internal passion for this once venerable and historic theatre, to a fever pitch. Being Italian, and naturally pumped up, I gave them a passionate, animated, in depth picture of what I wanted to do. At that time, I had no intention of trying to get them on board, knowing they had real jobs, with no experience in theatrical enterprises.

Whatever I said that day began to snowball. Before I knew it over the next several months, the three of us decided to take a flier on the Paramount project. By theatrical osmosis, Steve readied himself to leave the resort business, throwing his hat in the ring of fire that was to become an odyssey for the ages. Once an Army buddy always an army buddy!

The time zipped by as we started, from scratch, to divine what the Paramount project would be, how it might work, what programming we could arrange and a dozen other issues, in order to take on a task that would go light years beyond what anyone anticipated in complexity.

We hired an attorney to create Paramount, Inc., which was set up as a “for profit” corporation to operate the Paramount. I pause for a moment to allow for hysterical laughter, guffawing, chortling, sniggering and gut busting, hiccupping so bad you couldn’t breathe emotional meltdowns. Paramount, Inc. was to profit what a thermos was to E=MC². More on that later.

Next, we had to grapple with financing the venture. I put together the first and only Paramount, Inc. prospectus, in 1973. A copy of it is in the Paramount collection at the Austin History Center. If you’ve had a tough week and you need a Big Bang laugh attack, go and read it. In my defense, I was only 25 at the time with not an ounce of business experience. My college degree skipped over the real world.

It was time to fess up. I opened my wallet. I had the flies to fuel our flier and little else. Chuck’s money was tied up in stock and, therefore, frozen. Lucky for him! Steve, however, owned two stunningly beautiful hill country lots very close to Point Venture with a magnificent view of Lake Travis. In 1974, I think they were worth about $10,000 each. He hocked them to the degree that they became “sides of cliff” lots. To be fair, my two erstwhile partners were five years older and had more time to accumulate some assets. Tough to squirrel money away at $400 a month at the Ramada and $780 a month at Point Venture, two years removed from college, while supporting a UT student to whom I was married.

After pooling Steve’s money with our metaphysical money, we found we had a stake in the amount of $5,000. And, seeing as I was dead broke, Steve apportioned me another $5,000 to see me through a very long period of zero income and no savings while I pounded the streets of Austin to try and generate support for the project. I did pay back the loan. Who else would do that for a skinny Italian kid? Only Steve Scott!

After producing three test shows in February of 1975, including the aforementioned Dave Brubeck and Sons, Herbie Mann and Texas Opera Theatre’s “Turn of the Screw” (a foreshadowing), we felt that the public buzz and media attention were good enough indicators that the Paramount could be resurrected back to its former glory in the first half of the 20th Century. The “how” of it was foggy!

Out of the blue, Charlie Root, the then city manager for Interstate Theatre Circuit’s seven Austin theatres, called us and said that Interstate was not renewing their lease set to expire on April 15, 1975. We had a little over one month to put up or shut up i.e. take over the lease or find a rewarding career in the service industry. See three grown men hyperventilating in harmony. We took the plunge and signed the lease for $1,500 a month for a year. There was no business plan. We just did it. We were bankrupt in two weeks. Chuck performed miracles with credit float and our vendors. Otherwise, game over. And, we made monthly trips, two blocks up Congress Avenue, to sign ongoing loans with City Bank, all of which were repaid, on time.

Over the next four years, from 1975 to 1979, we created the template for operations and programming that is still being followed today, some four decades later. With respect to administrations that followed ours, the heavy lifting to save, restore and rejuvenate the Paramount in to becoming a nationally prominent performing arts center was achieved during those years.

Steve left in 1978 to pursue a career in real estate with his wife, Judy. He had the gall to move from hot dogs and popcorn to steaks and potatoes!

Chuck left in 1979 to get his head examined after working with me those four years. That experience would serve him well in his next career.

John would stay on, for the next six years, as artistic director, restoration liaison between the architect and contractor, show booker, marketing and advertising planner, fund raiser, board of directors game show host, member of the so called “Arts Mafia” with the Symphony, Zack Scott and the Austin Civic Ballet, coordinator with the IATSE Local 205 stage hands union, producer, public relations schmoozer and the face of the Paramount until June, 1985. He had earned a membership to the Sunnybrook Home for wayward, blinky eyed, mumbling visionaries.

Rather than repeat much of the information that has already been written, please go to the tab marked “John’s Stories” for all of the adventures we shared in common during those Hellzapoppin four years.

It was the ride of a lifetime and a true miracle that the hundreds of elements necessary for the Paramount to be what it is today, came together via a combination of our threesome, the media, the entertainment industry, a number of community and business leaders who put their own shoulder to the wheel, the City of Austin, the Department of Commerce and, most importantly, the hundreds of thousands of fans of music, comedy, plays, variety acts, classic movies and more who became the Paramount’s new soul and purpose.

It was truly an honor, for all of us, to have been at the forefront of the Paramount miracle which, after 40 years since we opened on April 15, 1975 with the 1930’s “Top Hat”, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, has touched the lives of millions of people from all walks of life, and will continue to do so for decades to come.

To re-write a famous George M. Cohan phrase to our specific situation in this play…

Charles Eckerman thanks you,

Steve Scott thanks you,

John Bernardoni thanks you

And Austin thanks you!!!