Word: bio
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Granting that the stage bio is among the most debased of theatrical forms (a decent impersonation, a little library research and--presto!--you've got a play), Bankhead offers unusually rich material. The masochistic anecdotes just keep on coming. In Tallulah we learn that the star once fired a young Marlon Brando from her play The Eagle Has Two Heads because she couldn't stand him "yawning and pawing his privates during my speeches." In Tallulah Hallelujah! we find out that she had gonorrhea, wanted the Bette Davis part in Jezebel and turned down the role of Blanche...
...years - say, 1954 to '56 - he was everywhere. Besides hosting "The Tonight Show" Allen starred in the bio-pic "The Benny Goodman Story;" he wrote the songs (including "This Could Be the Start of Something Big" and "Impossible") for a TV book-musical "The Bachelor;" he recorded some spoken-word fairy tales with hipster lingo that became hits and a book (the still-funny "Bop Fables"); he published a collection of short stories ("Fourteen for Tonight") and a study of TV comics ("The Funny Men"); he wrote the lyrics for movie themes ("Picnic," "Bell, Book and Candle"); and he started...
Everyone, I'm sure, has their favorite Baldwin brother. Some people prefer Stephen, won over by his goofy smile and his scintillating performance alongside Pauly Shore in 1996's Bio-Dome. Others pick Billy, the soulful middle child, whose star wattage has dimmed somewhat since his heyday in films like Sliver and Backdraft. And some, I imagine, plump for Adam, the oft-forgotten Baldwin boy whose work, for some reason, tends to scurry straight to video...
...take it, in any case, that we are now at a clumsy and primitive stage of body-perfecting. Given the mapping of the human genome, given the future of bio-tinkering, I cannot imagine it will be long before the International Olympics Committee faces questions of fascinating and far more complex implication: Forget drugs. Entire Olympic teams might be bio-engineered and compete on their margins of mechanical perfection, like computer-designed Grand Prix cars and racing yachts. Swimmers, for example, engineered with enormous webbed feet and fabulous lung capacity. The new-model C. J. Hunter should be able...
...Gore's 60-second "1969" likewise picks up from his convention debut, namely, from his "Wonder Years"-style bio film. "Nineteen sixty-nine," the voiceover declares, to footage of riots and police with nightsticks - "America in turmoil," thus fulfilling the customary obligation of using "turmoil" in the same sentence as any reference to a year in the late '60s. "Al Gore graduates college. His father, a U.S. senator, opposes the Vietnam War. Al Gore has his doubts, but enlists in the Army...