Word: besting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...star gets what may be his best laugh in Harlem Nights before he appears. The moment occurs when Eddie Murphy's name flashes in the credits for the fifth time. This may represent the new Hollywood record for authorial egotism. It is, in any case, three more mentions than Woody Allen requires to state his creative credentials for a truly imaginative comedy and two more than Orson Welles took for his film directorial debut, which was -- let's see, oh, yes -- Citizen Kane...
...ghostwrite Nancy Reagan's autobiography? "Just say yes," advised William Novak's wife Linda when Random House approached him a year-and-a-half ago. Today My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan has made headlines, sold some 400,000 copies and soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Yet if Novak went with a winner, so did Reagan. Novak, 41, came to the collaboration with credentials of his own. He is the golden mouthpiece of the nation's celebrities, a literary John Alden who can consistently woo -- and win -- the public in their behalf. In 1984 Iacocca...
...more ego gratification and attention from these books than I ever did from my own." But aren't the celebrity books his own too? No. This John Alden, unlike the original, shrinks from speaking for himself. "I don't fool myself into thinking that my books are best sellers," he says. "The celebrities are the selling point...
Bertolt Brecht, who plucked plots from Shakespeare, Moliere and Farquhar, reportedly said the best writers never borrow; they always steal. Brecht's error was limiting his dictum to the best writers. The rest are equally ready to find inspiration where someone else found it before. This is especially true of writers of musicals: attempts at original stories have become all but unheard of. With six weeks left, the '80s have yet to yield a noteworthy American musical not derived from another source, whether fiction (Big River), folklore (Into the Woods), movies ("Nine") or a painting (Sunday in the Park with...
...movie. Brecht's own The Threepenny Opera, featuring rock star Sting as the seductive villain Macheath, is freely filched from British satirist John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera. Sad to say, although each show could boast ingenious design and staging or beguiling acting, far from the best writers have been at work...