Main Street to Broadway is a 1953 American romantic musical comedy-drama film by independent producer Lester Cowan, his final credit, in collaboration with The Council of the Living Theatre, which provided tie-up with a number of well-known Broadway names.
The backstage story features Tom Morton as an aspiring playwright who hopes to stage a Broadway production, Mary Murphy, as a young lady from Indiana, and radio-TV humorist Herb Shriner in a rare acting role as a hardware store owner.
The list of Broadway luminaries also playing themselves, in smaller cameos, includes Ethel Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore (in his last film), Shirley Booth, Louis Calhern, Faye Emerson, Rex Harrison, Helen Hayes, Mary Martin, Lilli Palmer, John Van Druten and Cornel Wilde.
The black-and-white film, which has a running time of 97 minutes, was directed by Tay Garnett, screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, based on a story Robert E. Sherwood, and photographed by James Wong Howe.
Others as story characters include Gertrude Berg, as a landlady, Agnes Moorehead, Rosemary de Camp, Arthur Shields, and, in a fantasy sequence, Florence Bates, Madge Kennedy, Carl Benton Reid, Frank Ferguson, and Robert Bray.