Word: agente
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...been opened." Then, running down the usual list of thank-yous and being pressured to wrap up, she said, "74 years here, I've got to take this time!" - as if she were making up for three-quarters of a century of inequity by thanking her lawyer and her agent...
...Ernest Lehman had written the story "Sweet Smell of Success" in 1950, when he was an ex-press agent, a nobody, and Walter Winchell was the most powerful newspaperman in America. The veiled fiction about the columnist didn't seem to ruffle him. "I don't fool with the Ernest Lehmans of the world," Winchell supposedly said. "I go after the Westbrook Peglers [a right-wing journalist]." Five years later, Lehman was a big-shot screenwriter ("Executive Suite," "Sabrina") and reluctant to have the romanette-a-clef turned into a movie. But the indie-prod outfit Hecht-Lancaster...
...Sweet Smell of Success' destroyed us all," said Mackendrick, who would never again direct a major Hollywood film. But that's press-agent reverse-spin. In the projector lamp of history, no one cares whether the film's makers had a good time or whether the film was a commercial and critical flop. (TIME did put it on its 1957 Ten Best list.) What matters is the creepy, elevated pleasure it gives today. The movie proves how savory and nourishing a cookie full of arsenic...
...novelette, which was originally called "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," runs 60 pages as reprinted in a recent collection of Lehman's short fiction. It's good reading, from the title - itself a press agent's misrepresentation of a story drenched in sour stench - to the abrupt ending of Sidney's discovering Hunsecker at the door, seeing his furious face and crying, "J.J.! Jesus! Don't!" (Is he about to beat Sidney up or actually kill him? Is this tale, like "Sunset Blvd." of the same year, narrated by a corpse...
...scene from the book is played almost verbatim in the film. Sidney reads an advance copy of J.J.'s column, sees that he has praised Herbie Temple, an old vaudeville comic, and learns that J.J. ran the bit without a press agent's urging - simply because he thought the fella was funny. Sidney rushes over to tell the comic he can get him a mention in J.J.'s column, then makes a phony phone call, pretending to dictate to J.J. the exact item that will appear later in the day. The novelette has a twist not in the film...