Word: allene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...George ((Burns)) and Gracie ((Allen)), still working for CBS, were involved in a running gag about Gracie's 'missing brother' George Allen . . . In working out their opening exchange ((for a guest appearance on Rudy Vallee's radio show on NBC in the 1930s)), all hands agreed it might begin with Rudy saying, 'Hello, Gracie, have you found George yet?' Scripts were prepared accordingly. NBC in a last-minute ruling, decreed otherwise. The missing brother gag, NBC held, was a CBS promotion and nuts to a rival network promoting itself over NBC facilities. The script would have to be rewritten...
...completely. The Clinton Administration is increasing taxes to fight the deficit, and consumers and corporations are frantically digging out of debt. "I encourage people to wipe the 1980s from their minds from the point of view of investment strategy, because the hyperinflation and high interest rates are gone," says Allen Sinai, chief economist for Economic Advisors, a consulting firm. Today's investment climate looks more like the 1950s and '60s, Sinai says, when inflation and interest rates were reliably low year after year...
...friends and colleagues. Mike Reiss, an executive producer of The Simpsons, recalls that "we'd be working on rewrites, 16-hour days, with sweaty men glowering at each other. And Conan would always entertain us; he was the comedy writers' comedian. I'd call him the '90s Steve Allen: smart, funny and very likable, with a more modern sensibility." The key is likability -- that elusive, soft-core charisma. Has Conan got it? "He doesn't have the sardonic glibness of Letterman," says Betsy Frank, a senior vice president at advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, "which a lot of people like...
...help of Vegas-obsessed bandleader Paul Shaffer, he took deadpan aim at show-biz phoniness. He griped about his NBC bosses, turned stagehands into stars, conducted elevator races in the hallway. His medium-twisting inventiveness was influenced by Ernie Kovacs, his man-on-the- street playfulness by Steve Allen. But Letterman seasoned them with his own sardonic, cranky, cooler-than-cool personality. For a young generation of viewers bored with television's formula and fakery, Letterman was fresh, liberating, indispensable...
...highly personal kind of deal, done in a quiet hallway of a New York City hotel, man to man. The place was the Waldorf Astoria, and the players were Robert Allen, chairman of AT&T, and Craig McCaw, head of McCaw Cellular Communications. In the middle of an edgy negotiation, they had left their factotums, emissaries and lieutenants behind and paced the corridor together for just 20 minutes before shaking hands on a transaction in which the largest U.S. telephone company would buy the No. 1 provider of cellular service for $12.6 billion in stock. In the process, Craig McCaw...