Word: badly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, Ruff...
...Paley, CBS's problems began several years ago, when it ran out of inventory: attractive shows to replace the aging hits that it started the decade with. "We made a very, very serious blunder," he says. "Maybe we were too content, but when things started to go bad, we just didn't have the inventory we used to have. This was during the time Silverman was programmer [before he moved to ABC] too, so he has to take some of the blame along with other people. I frankly didn't know we were that far behind...
...most of his crew had quit, along with all the carpenters and many of the construction workers. The miniatures, used for exterior shots of a speeding train, were wrecked twice, once in a flood, once when an overpowered engine jumped the track. Script and casting problems were just as bad. One script ripped off Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train; another leaned very hard on The Prisoner of Zenda. In addition, most of Curtis' first-choice performers were unavailable so fast. Something eventually came of all the effort, but it scarcely seemed worth the money. Reviews were awful...
...slabs of marble. The results captured the harsh, merciless qualities of the opera perhaps too well. They were undeniably powerful, particularly in the hair-raising scene in which Lulu guns down Schon on an enormous staircase. They were also brutal and at times faintly ludicrous, like some bad dream by Albert Speer...
Each biograph is enlivened by a macabre whimsy: a man is steamed alive "like a lobster" when his car wash malfunctions; children are fed meals of worms; decent folk fall victim to robbery, infidelity and bad genes. Spyker reports it all, creating a community from the disparate characters as well as a portrait of the narrator, an "outlander... struck more by bits of detail than the total sepia haze of the picture: by odd names or locutions, specific items and photographs that have survived, the price paid for caring...