Word: backdrop
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...comes from the ancient Scandinavian warrior custom of running around and pretending to be one. Paleolithic Europeans may have worshipped bears; at least a cavern discovered last year in southern France featured a bear skull, "placed on a large rock set in the middle of a gallery against a backdrop of bear paintings." Besides, wouldn't it be kind of sad if the only vestige of Ursus horribilis were some fat little fellows named Teddy...
...backdrop of The Last Don may be operatic ("God's world was a prison in which man had to earn his daily bread, and his fellow man was a fellow beast, carnivorous and without mercy"), but the setting and characters are commedia dell'arte. Puzo playfully admires the aging Don Dom. "Early on," he writes, "he had been told the famous maxim of American justice, that it was better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent man be punished. Struck almost dumb by the beauty of the concept, he became an ardent patriot...
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, whose striking portraits of America's aspiring Olympians appear in this week's issue, spent four years crisscrossing the U.S. to find just the right setting to showcase her subjects--posing a group of child gymnasts against the backdrop of a vast, dry lake bed, for example, and shooting synchronized swimmers from under water. Leibovitz, a Vanity Fair contributing photographer and arguably the world's leading portraitist, describes herself as "more interested in what people do than in the way they look." In these exclusive pictures from her upcoming book, Olympic Portraits (Bulfinch Press), Leibovitz offers images...
...Sayles does indeed treat the small Texan Town ("Frontera") as a kind of continuous backdrop, across the generations, for all the plotlines. His camera technique reflects this: in lieu of the sudden cuts to flashbacks, he uses one, long camera movement to go back in time. The effect has the relaxed feel of a huge storybook page being turned. One moment, we see a confrontation between a young black man and old Sheriff Wade, ages ago, in a bar. Then the camera sweeps upward slowly--and we're staring in the face of Sheriff Sam Deeds, present-tense, listening...
...CAMPAIGN YEAR, WHAT HAPPIER AND MORE PATRIOTIC backdrop could an incumbent leader want than an Olympics in his own country? President Clinton's advisers have closely studied how Ronald Reagan made use of the Los Angeles Games in 1984, even in his TV ads. It is Clinton's telegenic duty to declare the Atlanta Games open. White House communications director Donald Baer recently scouted Atlanta sites for other appearances by the "First Fan." Meanwhile, a series of public events will tie the White House to the Olympics, from Mrs. Clinton's presence at the lighting of the Olympic Flame last...