Word: breen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dick Breen joined the staff as a writer-producer...
Webb was impressed; Breen, just out of the Navy, had worked in New York. Breen was impressed, too. "Jack," he recalls, "behaved as if he had a Hooper rating of 28 and was in direct competition with Jack Benny." Breen moved into Webb's $30-a-month room. A little later KGO was asked to fill an empty Sunday night half hour "for a Pacific feed" (all West Coast ABC stations). Breen, who was fascinated by San Francisco's Embarcadero, put together a hard-boiled private-eye show about waterfront crime, called it Pat Novak for Hire. Webb...
...Breen assaulted his audience with sex, violence, and sounds of foghorns and lapping water. He loaded the script with similes (sample: as difficult as "sandpapering an oyster"). But as the first program began, he stood in a control booth frantically waving at Webb to underplay. The show was an instant success, and for the first time Webb knew the delights of fan mail. Pat Novak ran for 26 stirring weeks. Then Breen simultaneously quarreled with the station management and got a Hollywood offer. He quit. An hour later, Webb quit, loaded his jazz records and clothes into his 1941 Buick...
...Hollywood, the Breen Office suggested that Producer Leonard Goldstein remove from his new film. Princess of the Nile, certain scenes in which Cinemactress Debra Paget performs bumps and grinds while dancing. Protested Goldstein: "The Egyptians didn't call those movements bumps and grinds. We are now arguing with the Breen Office as to what is a bump and what is a grind...
...remarkably similar to Ralph Edwards' NBC weeper, This Is Your Life. Comedian George Jessel, ABC's new man-of-all-work, tells the story in his best toastmaster style as the subject under scrutiny squirms alongside. For the premiere, Jessel took former Child Star Bobby Breen in hand, told how he climbed from cold-water flats to Hollywood fame, then became a has-been at 13, when his voice changed ("There was panic in the studio"). At show's end Bobby, now 26, sets foot on the comeback trail by singing a song (his voice...