Word: abc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Color Purple, Oprah formed a production company, Harpo Inc. (Oprah spelled backward), to develop TV and movie projects. Its first co- production, The Women of Brewster Place, a drama based on Gloria Naylor's novel in which Oprah plays one of seven ghetto women, is scheduled to air on ABC this season. The company has also bought the rights to Beloved, Toni Morrison's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel about slavery (Oprah wants to play the lead role), and has even approached some of Oprah's talk-show guests about turning their stories into TV movies...
Oprah's charmed career has not been without a few snags. Her second film, Native Son, based on Richard Wright's novel, was a flop at the box office, and a prospective sitcom for ABC, starring Oprah as a talk-show host, was scuttled after a mediocre pilot. Most of her attention is now focused on bringing to the screen projects that are close to her -- like Beloved and Kaffir Boy, an autobiography set in South Africa. "I want to do movies that are about something, that move people and leave them feeling uplifted." Though most of them involve black...
...result is that last week some network news chiefs were re-examining whether such events ought to be subjected to the full-blown assault that TV has traditionally given them. Even before the Democratic Convention was over, ABC News President Roone Arledge suggested that Democrats and Republicans, perhaps in concert with the networks, ought to change the present setup and "come up with something more appealing." Observed Arledge: "The political parties are turning off the American public...
This year the networks had already significantly scaled back their convention forces. ABC, NBC and CBS each sent between 325 and 450 staffers to Atlanta, an overall reduction of about one-third from the manpower deployed in 1984. Those pared-down troops still produced about the same amount of airtime as four years ago (coverage both years began at 9 EDT on most nights), indicating that the excess personnel had been mostly fat. "Production shortcuts have made our lives a little more difficult," acknowledged NBC Executive Producer Joe Angotti, "but in terms of what the viewer sees at home...
...Heyward has changed his mind about Hart, perhaps because the Senator is being interviewed by ABC. Bradley and Zirinsky are not happy; they could have got to Hart first. Now they rush over, divert Hart from an imminent interview with a Spanish station and bag him for Bradley...