Time & Perspective Quote by Florenz Ziegfeld

Ziegfeld is letting the curtain slip on a truth most showbiz memoirs polish over: a chorus line isn’t just a job, it’s a long audition for a role that may not even exist yet. The sentence sprawls the way his enterprise did, with time (“several months”) doing as much work as talent. He frames development as accumulation - rehearsal and performance blur into one continuous proving ground - and the producer’s gaze is the engine that converts effort into destiny.

The subtext is bluntly asymmetrical. The “girl” is training, but for whose vision? Not hers. Even the “future production” isn’t “definitely fixed” in his mind, which makes her labor both speculative and obedient: she must become versatile enough to fit an idea still forming in the man who holds the booking power. It’s a quietly transactional portrait of ambition under the Ziegfeld system: he cultivates performers the way an editor cultivates writers, shaping raw material toward a marketable persona, except here the raw material is a human body in motion.

Context matters. Ziegfeld’s Follies industrialized glamour in early 20th-century America, turning femininity into a spectacle with an assembly-line precision disguised as fantasy. This quote captures the managerial poetry of that world: the promise that today’s anonymous ensemble member could be tomorrow’s “feature,” paired with the reminder that the ladder is controlled from above. It works because it sells hope and control in the same breath, a producer’s benevolence that also reads like ownership.