So if you’re Chuck Harris, you don’t let the little indignities wear you down. In his market segment-which, surprisingly, exists-he’s both unique and supreme. Methane? Stevie Starr, also known as The Regurgitator, who can swallow 10 numbered coins and bring them back up in any order the audience requests? The best quick-change artists, nose flutists, bucket drummers and break dancers, knife-throwers, plate spinners, trampolinists and living statues around? In this town, at least, you have to go through Chuck Harris. You want to book the Lizardman? The Cat Man? Rubber Boy? Mr. Harris receives a weekly four-figure sum-which, uncharacteristically, he’d rather not describe-as a creative consultant, charged with uncovering wild and crazy variety and “street” performers for comedian-actor Steve Harvey’s hourlong weekly program. He’s making quite a good living, thanks for asking, as do many of his clients, and the argument could even be made that he’s closer to the real beating heart of show business than the legions of moguls, moneymen, brand managers, lawyer/agents and MBA-degreed yes-men who’ve never heard of him. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Chuck Harris is a theatrical manager who mainly represents freaks, geeks and assorted other oddities and novelties. This is a success story about a man who’s turned many of the supposed rules of The Industry-you’ve gotta make it by 30 you have to operate on the cutting edge of technology and pop psychology there are no second acts it’s who you know-on their heads. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Once there, a receptionist informs him that Madeleine Smithberg, the executive producer he has come to see, is “tied up in editing.” He sinks deeply into a couch in the waiting area, still jaunty, and waits.Īt this point some might suspect that they’re reading about a loser, a man at the self-deluded fringes of show business, a West Coast cousin of Broadway Danny Rose.

There are many odd-shaped holes in the show’s lineup of future guests, and he knows just what it will take to fill them. Harris parks and proceeds on a brisk quarter-mile walk to the WB Network variety series’ production office. After no small amount of time the quasi-cop reemerges and grudgingly allows Harris onto the lot. The guard motions him to drive forward to a holding area, then disappears into his shack to make further inquiries. Harris sighs patiently-a subtly nuanced sound rarely heard hereabouts. “Nothing here for Chuck Harris,” he says. The twentyish security guard is unimpressed. “Chuck Harris for ‘Steve Harvey’s Big Time!’ ” he says jauntily. With his moptop of white hair, the unlined face of a child actor, which indeed he once was, and the square black Swifty Lazar-type eyeglasses of extreme magnification, he pulls up to the guard gate at the KTLA studios in Hollywood. At the wheel of a dusty 1997 Chrysler convertible on this warm, cloudless mid-September afternoon is a shortish, roundish, 66-year-old man known mostly these days as Chuck Harris.

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