Word: burrough
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, 83, novelist, cult figure and perhaps the most audacious member of a Beat Generation trinity whose two other divinities were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; after a heart attack; in Lawrence, Kans. Burrough's groundbreaking novel Naked Lunch, first published in Paris in 1959, was both praised as a work of genius and denounced as incomprehensible garbage and pornography. His life was as extreme as the experimental fiction he pioneered, involving alcohol, heroin, homosexuality, a celebrated obscenity trial in Boston and, in 1951, his accidental killing of his wife while shooting a glass...
...helped that HBO had a very good book (the 1990 best seller Barbarians at the Gate, by Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar) and a very big leveraged buyout (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts' epic $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1988) to work with. And the $7 million HBO earmarked for the project probably came in handy too. The film remains reasonably faithful to the spirit of the book, while vastly simplifying the plot. Whereas Burrough and Helyar recount a story that involves dozens of rapacious financiers, greedy executives, odious publicists, duplicitous bankers and devious attorneys...
...Johnson is kind of a super maitre d', a guy who really knows how to work a room," Gelbart explains. But in the book, Burrough and Helyar also portray him as a Machiavellian cutthroat who betrayed numerous colleagues on his way - to the top, a spendthrift who moved the RJR Nabisco headquarters to Atlanta -- callously firing thousands of employees in the process -- in part because he didn't like "bucolic" Winston-Salem, and a derelict CEO who repeatedly misled his shareholders, his employees and his board of directors...
...years when KKR took over his company. Seeking to illustrate the human carnage of leveraged buyouts, she informs hubby that the man went home and shot himself. Johnson looks concerned. Here, the film is taking real liberties with the truth. This conversation did not take place anywhere in Burrough and Helyar's book. This conversation did not take place anywhere on this planet...
Freeman said he believes a book Burrough wrote based on his article shows that the article "represented a concentrated effort by the publication and its editorial staff to obtain a lucrative book contract--at the expense of the facts...