The Hollywood agent Irving Paul Lazar wants to sell Jack L. Warner a play. He has just spent a long meeting with him and did not mention it.
The screenwriter Garson Kanin asks why not.
"Because I'm going to wait until the weekend after next, when I go to Palm Springs."… "Look," said Irving impatiently, "I know what I'm doing. I know how to sell Warner. This is a type of material that he's uneasy with, so I have to hit him with it hard and suddenly to get an okay."1
Then the actual plan:
*"Because in Palm Springs, every day he goes to the baths at The Spa. And that's where I'm going to be when he's there. Now there's a thing about Jack: He's eighty and he's very vain, and he doesn't like people to see him naked. So when I walk up to him naked at The Spa—I mean he's naked—well, I'm naked too, but I don't care who sees me. He does. And I walk up to him naked, and I start to talk to him about this thing, he'll be very embarrassed. And he'll want to get away from me, and the easiest way is to say 'Yes'… So to get rid of me, he'll probably say, 'Yes.'"*1
Two weeks later Warner Brothers acquires the property.
*I phoned Lazar and asked how it had been accomplished. "How do you think?" he asked. "In the buff, that's how… just the way I told you it was going to work."*1
Most of Law 33's cases require an interpretive read. This one contains the analysis inside the quotation, delivered by the operator, in advance, with a prediction that then comes true.
*I'm naked too, but I don't care who sees me. He does.
That sentence is the whole method. The condition is symmetrical and the discomfort is not.
Lazar is not exploiting a hidden vulnerability. He is putting both parties in an identical situation in which only one of them has a weakness, and then simply being present.
Which makes this the chapter's cleanest instance of something the six-method plan never describes: you do not have to press a weakness. You can construct an environment in which it presses itself, and then stand there.
The move's real mechanics are about cost of escape, not about persuasion.
Warner is not being talked into anything. Lazar does not argue for the property, does not sell its merits, and says nothing that would be answerable in an office.
He creates a situation with two exits:
And he makes the second cheaper by being explicitly relentless: "he knows if he says 'No,' then I'm going to stick with him, and stay right on it, and not give up."1
The yes is not agreement. It is the shortest available route out of a room.
Which is worth naming because it recurs in ordinary settings without any nudity: the meeting that will not end until a decision is made, the request delivered while someone is trying to leave, the approval sought in a corridor. Whenever the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of agreeing, consent stops carrying information.
The thing Kanin cannot follow — "Irving, I'm more and more confused" — is the timing, and the timing is the professional element.
Lazar has already had his meeting. He was in a room with Warner and deliberately said nothing.
Then he waits: not this weekend, because Warner has a preview; the weekend after. He is scheduling around the target's diary to reach a specific fifteen minutes in a specific building.
That is the part that separates this from opportunism. The vulnerability — an eighty-year-old man's dislike of being seen naked — is fixed, known, and located, and it is only available in one place. So the entire operation is an exercise in getting the conversation to happen in the right room, and everything else is trivial.
Two weeks of patience to buy a venue.
⚠ And note what it implies about the merits: "a type of material that he's uneasy with." Lazar's own assessment is that Warner would not buy this on the argument. The environment is selected precisely because the case is weak.
Warner Brothers acquired a property because its studio head wanted to get out of a bathhouse.
Greene includes this approvingly and does not follow it. The company bought something its chief executive was uneasy about, for reasons unrelated to the material, and the mechanism by which that happened is a matter of public record because the agent boasted about it to a screenwriter who published it.
That is worth stating plainly, because the chapter's framing — a clever agent, a neat trick — obscures a fairly ordinary organisational failure: a decision made under a pressure that had nothing to do with the decision.
⚠ The source is Hollywood, Garson Kanin, 1974 — a named work with a date, and Kanin was present for the first conversation and made the follow-up call. Better sourced than most of this chapter, and still an anecdote told by an insider about an industry that enjoys stories like this.
The defensive version, because the offensive version is a nuisance.
Notice when a decision is being sought somewhere that is not a decision-making place. A corridor, a doorway, a car, a lift, the end of an unrelated meeting, a social occasion, anywhere you are physically constrained or exposed.
The tell is not the request. It is the venue, and specifically a venue where the cost of not resolving it now is higher than the cost of resolving it wrongly.
The counter is one sentence and it should be a reflex rather than a judgement: "Send it to me and I'll come back to you."
That works because it costs nothing, requires no confrontation, and does not depend on you recognising what is happening — which matters, since by construction you are in a state where recognition is unlikely.
And the diagnostic to apply afterwards: if you agreed to something and cannot reconstruct the argument for it, you did not agree, you exited. Those feel identical in the moment and are entirely different in the record.
On the other side: if you find yourself choosing a venue because your case is weak in a boardroom, you already know the case is weak. Lazar did. He said so, out loud, before he did it.
Strongest evidence. A named work with a date (Garson Kanin, Hollywood, 1974), a witness who is not the operator, a stated plan in advance, and a confirmed outcome — the prediction and the result are separated by two weeks and a phone call. This is among the best-evidenced anecdotes in the entire build, because the method was described before it was executed.
Tension — the case is filed under a search plan and involves no searching. Warner's vanity was known; the operation is entirely about venue and timing.
Tension — the chapter approves of a purchase made to end a conversation. The organisational cost is not mentioned.
🚩 [POPULAR SOURCE] · 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY for the transaction itself — the play is unnamed, the sum unstated, and "I read of the acquisition" is the only confirmation. 🚩 MOTIVATED REASONING — an agent's account of his own cleverness, transmitted by a screenwriter with a good story.
Open questions. Which property was it, and did it succeed? A studio acquisition obtained this way has a checkable afterlife and neither Kanin nor Greene supplies it. And: did Warner know? An eighty-year-old studio head who had been in the business for fifty years may well have understood exactly what was happening and said yes because the property was fine — which would leave the anecdote intact and the mechanism unproven.
Within Law 33, this marginal is the chapter's only environmental case, and it exposes a gap in the plan.
Every listed method operates on the person — their gestures, their history, their concealed opposite, their position, their voids, their emotions. Lazar operates on the room, and the person is left exactly as they were.
That is a seventh mode, alongside Schopenhauer's trifles as the seventh diagnostic, and the chapter lists neither. See The Strategic Plan for Finding Weakness.
Against Law 31, this is where it belongs. The Horns of a Dilemma is a field arranged so both exits are bad; Lazar arranges a field where one exit is cheap and it is the one he wants. And Law 31's own tempo finding is here too — "deny the victim the time to think of an escape" — with the escape denied by nakedness rather than by speed.
Filed under Law 33 because a vanity is involved; demonstrating Law 31 because the vanity is never touched.
Negotiation practice — the venue as a term of the deal. Clausewitz and the Negotiation Trap treats the conditions under which talks occur as substantive rather than procedural — who set the time, the place and the duration has already shaped the outcome before any position is stated.
Lazar is the reductio: he changes nothing about the offer and only the room.
The insight neither produces alone: negotiation literature treats venue as one variable among several, usually about comfort or home advantage. This case shows it functioning as a direct substitute for argument — Lazar's material was weak on the merits, he says so, and the room replaces the case entirely. Which yields a defensive rule sharper than be aware of your surroundings: the strength of somebody's case is inversely related to how much they care where the conversation happens. Someone with a good argument will present it anywhere. Someone who has scheduled two weeks to reach a specific fifteen minutes has told you the argument does not survive a normal room.
Psychology — consent that carries no information. Present Bias and Hyperbolic Discounting establishes that an immediate cost is weighted disproportionately against a distant one, and that the same person will choose differently depending purely on which is nearer.
Warner's exposure is immediate and continuous; the consequences of acquiring an unwanted property are diffuse, deferred and shared with a company.
What the pairing produces is the general form and it is more useful than the anecdote. Any situation that makes not-deciding immediately costly will produce agreements that do not reflect the agreer's actual assessment — and this covers far more than bathhouses. Deadline pressure, an audience, physical discomfort, social awkwardness, a meeting overrunning: all convert a considered choice into an escape. So a yes obtained under any of those conditions is not evidence of agreement, and the honest operator's version of this insight is defensive rather than offensive: if you need a decision that will hold, you must remove the cost of not deciding today, or you will get a yes that dissolves the moment the person is comfortable again — which is presumably why Lazar needed the acquisition announced before Warner got dressed.
Sharpest implication. Lazar does not press a weakness — he constructs a situation in which both parties are in identical conditions and only one of them has a problem, and then stands there. The yes is not agreement, it is the shortest available route out of a room, and the two-week wait is the craft: the vulnerability was fixed, known and located in one building, so the entire operation was getting the conversation to happen there. And the tell generalises: the strength of somebody's case is inversely related to how much they care where the conversation happens.
Generative questions.