Word: agent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Broadway's Far East kick is creating a huge, cumulative casting problem, and the man who is coping with most of it is Agent Tony Rivers, Manhattan's leading Oriental flesh peddler (he inherited his business from his former boss, Kaie Deei, a part-Egyptian, part-Zulu agent, who specialized in Negroes, Orientals and American Indians). Agent Rivers is finding the white man's burden heavy. Biggest problem: Asians tend to act with rigidity and gliding formalism. To fill the part of Sammy Fong, unofficial mayor of Chinatown, Flower Drum's Casting Director Ed Blum finally...
...make up for such casting lapses, Agent Rivers and the producers he supplies try hard for authenticity in other respects. Before Suzie's costume designer, Dorothy Jeakins, ever laid out a hemline, she imported coolie suits from Hong Kong, even interviewed newsmen who had lived in the Orient and were "more or less familiar with brothels...
...Columbia, to turn Oriental inflections into speech that is understandable to American audiences. He is currently working with Japan's Miyoshi Umeki and the rest of the cast of Flower Drum, shaving vowels, changing consonants, even breaking Comedian Storch of his New Yorkese. Just about the only time Agent Rivers got off the Oriental beat this season was when Producers Feuer and Martin insisted that they would cast their new musical Whoop-Up only with full-blooded Indians. "I scoured the area," says Rivers. "My God, I had hundreds of Indians down for the auditions. You know what Feuer...
...East-of-Suez shows to town far into spring. "Damned if I can explain it," says Producer Irene Selznick, one of the few who has yet to find a place in the new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. "But it's good for international relations." Says Agent Rivers: "Sometimes it's all the great unwashed. This season it's Orientals. When this phase is over I'll be left on my tail...
...British Secret Service needs in Havana. The proposition is first put to him in the men's washroom at Sloppy Joe's bar. A worldly friend advises him to take the money and send in false reports. Wormold, who feels he could never be a real secret agent, accepts the advice: he hires imaginary agents, composes false reports, even sends in drawings of vacuum-cleaner parts as diagrams of a devilish weapon being developed in a rebel province of Cuba...