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Scott is willing to risk not only his reputation but his bankbook. Shortly after he gained the first financial security of his life in 1961, he and his wife Colleen Dewhurst moved from New York to Detroit to establish a community theater. It was Scott's dream that his Theater of Michigan Co. would give direction to the national theater movement in America and eventually revitalize Broadway. The group's first two plays were badly received in Detroit and lasted a total of 15 performances when they finally limped onto Broadway. To keep the company going, Scott had spent $70,000 of his own money. When it collapsed in 1962, Scott personally paid off a sizable portion of the original debt. "When we finished," Scott says, "I didn't have a dime. It took a few years to clean up all the debts, but it was done."
Scott is also generous with his talent, quick to offer assistance to colleagues, though sometimes loudly impatient with what he considers ineptness. Mike Nichols says that "after three days' rehearsal for Plaza Suite I told him I didn't know what I was going to do with him for the next three weeks because he was perfect. But he stayed around anyway, working with the other actors." Richard Lester, who directed Scott in Petulia, found him "intelligent, constructive, decent, professional. If there was a difference of opinion between us, we worked it out in five or ten minutes." Enormously sure of his own instinct for material, Scott was handed the manuscript of Plaza Suite in a restaurant by Playwright Neil Simon; he left to read it and returned little more than an hour later to say he would act in it. During the filming of Scott's TV series, East Side/West Side, Jim Aubrey, then president of CBS-TV, summoned Scott and Producer David Susskind to his office and informed them that the episode they were working on required a happy ending. Scott peeled an apple with a favorite switchblade knife as he listened to Aubrey deliver his spiel. Then, glaring malevolently at his boss, he said, "That's a lot of bull." The network president quickly retreated.