the Selwyn Theatre, one of a chain of Selwyn Theatres. The theater was demolished around 1926 for a parking lot. The Selwyns bought land along 42nd street, Manhattan, where they decided to build three theaters. The first was the 1,051-seat Selwyn Theatre built for them in 1918 in the Italian Renaissance style. The fan-shaped layout ensured that every seat felt close to the stage. The first play they staged there was Information Please starring Jane Cowl, which flopped. Later the theater put on many successful plays and minor musicals. The Selwyns sold this theater in 1927. The building was converted into a cinema in 1934. In 1920 the Selwyn brothers bought the Bryant Theater, between 42nd and 43rd streets, a vaudeville theater with an elegant auditorium. They renamed it the Apollo and were successful staging musicals there until the Depression, when it was converted to a cinema. In 1922 the Selwyns partnered with Sam Harris to open two theaters on North Dearborn Avenue in Chicago. Before they could open they had to pay the mobster Timothy D. Murphy $10,000 for protection. Post-war production In 1919 John Golden arranged a meeting with his fellow producers Fred Zimmerman, Arch Selwyn, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., Winchell Smith and L. Lawrence Weber with the goal of cooperating on common issues such as censorship and ticket speculation. He wanted to set up a forum so the producers could share ideas, and wanted stop the rival organizations poaching each other's stars. This led to formation of the Producing Managers' Association, which may have inadvertently shown actors the value of organizing into the Actors' Equity Association. The Selwyn brothers produced Smilin' Through in 1919. On 2 June 1921 they launched the review Snapshots of 1921 at their Selwyn Theatre, coproduced by the Selwyns, featuring numbers by George Gershwin and starring DeWolf Hopper, Lew Fields and Nora Bayes. The show ran for 60 performances. Reviews were generally favorable, although Variety said there were "boresome periods of blank stupidity" and the New York Times said there was "little or nothing for the adult intelligence." In 1922 Arch Selwyn offered Mrs. Leslie Carter the role of Lady Kitty in W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle. The Circle drew large audiences in the spring of 1922, and relaunched Carter's career. She said "I don't believe I would ever have come back to the American stage had it not been for Arch Selwyn." The