Word: axelrod
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...satire and surrealism -- until Frank Sinatra, the film's star, persuaded President John F. Kennedy to give his blessing to the project. Candidate opened in the fall of 1962, to mixed reviews and soft box office. "We had both sides of the political spectrum mad at us," says George Axelrod, who fashioned a terrific screenplay from Richard Condon's scathing comic apocalypse of a novel. "In Paris Communists picketed outside a theater on the Champs Elysees at the same time that Red-baiters were picketing in Orange County. Trouble was, all these people were outside the theater, not inside...
...with Kennedy's assassination. It was all about money. In a dispute with U.A. over profit participation -- there were suspicions, says Director John Frankenheimer, that the studio was cooking the books -- Sinatra withheld rights to the movie. But it is of such snits that cult films are made. As Axelrod has said, "It went from failure to classic without ever passing through success." Now the filmmakers have their chance. The New York Film Festival coaxed Candidate from Sinatra last year, and the picture is doing robust business in six cities, as a promo for its spring debut in video stores...
...should be confused by The Manchurian Candidate today. Axelrod's urbane cynicism plays like aces Wilde. Frankenheimer's aptly flashy technique is now a part of Hollywood's visual vocabulary. The performances are daring and assured, especially Lansbury's holy terror of Momism and Harvey's snide, pathetic pawn, brainwashed by both KGB AND CIA. And the movie's theory of endemic political corruption, which read as seditious in 1962, now feels like the sweet breath of reason. Few movies attempt to anatomize a whole sick society, to dissect the mortal betrayals of country, friend, lover and family; fewer films...
...result: growing numbers of women of childbearing age in the city are infected -- most of them through intravenous drug use or sexual contact with users. Says City Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph: "The IV drug user is the gateway to the heterosexual population." That threat to public health persuaded Axelrod to permit an exception to a state law forbidding distribution or possession of needles without a prescription. His decision legally paved the way for a pilot program for 400 addicts. The group will receive counseling in the ways that sex and contaminated needles transmit the virus. Half of them will also...
...encourage that view. Since 1984 an estimated 70% of the 15,000 drug addicts in the Netherlands have registered in treatment programs, which allow health authorities to maintain regular contact with them for AIDS testing and counseling. The underlying strategy of New York health officials is similar. Says Commissioner Axelrod: "Our needle-exchange program has nothing to do with needles and syringes. The needle gets the addict in so we can educate and counsel." Still, some wonder if the project will even begin to curb the AIDS epidemic among IV drug users. "In view of the AIDS risk," says...