Mysterious Broadway door?

Factual Questions
1

A minor mystery to which I’ve been unable to come up with even a hint of an answer… Maybe someone here can shed some light on things?

At work one fine day, my manager - who is partial to trivia and regards me as a handy font of otherwise useless information - pointed out an interesting bit of visual synchronicity. The insert art of the DVD version of Woody Allen’s 1984 film Broadway Danny Rose features a door. The insert art of the soundtrack CD for the 2001 Broadway production of The Producers (the Matthew Broderick & Nathan Lane version) features the protagonists flanking the very same door.

Frank (the aforementioned manager) deduced that this particular door held some significance in Broadway history. I agreed that this was obvious and offered to perform a cursory search after work. The only thing my research resulted in, however, was an interesting discrepancy. The *Producers *door bears the number 716, while the poster art for Danny Rose features the number 254, rendering a simple address search (“712 Broadway,” for example) useless. The addresses are clearly fictitious, but then - why the obviously intentional use of the same door by two graphic designers, 17 years apart?

Alas, further Googling along the lines of “famous Broadway door” produced no useful results, either.

Here are links to the images in question:

The Danny Rose door

The *Producers *door

While it is not immediately apparent from these particular low-res photos, a close examination of both reveals identical scratches, dents, and markings; it is clearly the same door in both images, albeit with altered text and address numbers.

So, is this door truly some sort of Broadway icon of which Frank and I are simply ignorant, or merely a convenient piece of photographic frippery? Any assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and Happy New Year to you all!

  • Phasmos

P.S. Thanks to CK Dexter for routing me to this board!

2

The first thing that comes to my mind is that both graphic designers might have simply used the same stock photo source.

3

Yes, that occurred to me as well, but then it begs the question: Why, of all possible subjects to choose from, would these designers select a banged-up door to represent fame and fortune on Broadway?

4

Just chiming in to say this is the kind of mystery that I love. I hope we figure it out.

5

Because in both of those movies, the protagonist starts out the film on the low swing of the pendulum. Danny Rose has a slew of incompetent and lousy clients and one potentially successful one whose career is JUST beginning an upswing when the movie starts. Max Bialystock is losing money hand over fist on his legendarily bad shows.

The door is a typical interior office door for a slightly shabby office building.

6

I am a graphic designer, and the way I see it there are two possible answers.

If I were a less-than-adequate designer, I’d rip off something that someone used many years ago, and hope nobody would notice.

But being a better-than-adequate designer, I would notice a similarity between *Broadway Danny Rose *and *The Producers, *and I’d hint at that similarity by deliberately using the same graphic element . . . and the room number would also have some significance . . . and hope that people would catch on, and try to figure out the connection.

A good designer likes to play around with details like this.