Word: burtness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movies are a machine that makes art. But what are we to make of films in which the machine is the main attraction? Burt Reynolds may be at the wheel of his Trans Am, Harrison Ford can maneuver his Millennium Falcon in hyperspace, Roy Scheider may occupy the cockpit of the Blue Thunder helicopter, but the hardware is the hero. It knows neither fear nor fatigue; it does the job it is programmed to do and never complains; if it is destroyed, a comradely clone can take its place. For a nation that has cause to doubt that nobody does...
DIED. Robert Aldrich, 65, film director whose works of macabre-to-macho violence included the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford shocker What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the Burt Reynolds gridiron prison melodrama The Longest Yard (1974), and The Dirty Dozen (1967), which at the time sparked complaints about its relentless brutality; of kidney failure; in Los Angeles. Scion of a prominent New England family and a Rockefeller cousin, Aldrich rejected a banking career to start as a $25-a-week production clerk at RKO studios...
...with its own deployments. Haig's principal arms-control deputy, Richard Burt, then director of State's Politico-Military Affairs Bureau, believed it would be almost impossible to get a deal before the new American missiles were in place. Therefore the U.S. needed a proposal that would look equitable to the West Europeans and that would shore up their resolve to go ahead with deployment of the new weapons in the face of a stalemate in Geneva. "The purpose of this whole exercise," the harddriving, sometimes abrasive Burt told his staff, "is maximum political advantage...
...late summer of 1981, Burt was squared off against Perle over what proposal to make. The Pentagon was advocating the zero option-elimination of all SS-20s in exchange for cancellation of the Pershing II ballistic-missile and Tomahawk cruise-missile programs. Paradoxically, that idea had originated among leftwingers in West Germany. Earlier in the year, National Security Adviser Allen had publicly derided "pacifist" elements in Western Europe who, he said, "believe that we can bargain the reduction of a deployed Soviet weapons system for a promise not to deploy our own offsetting system. Common sense, as well...
...negotiations at the end of November, he had only the sketchiest instructions. The bureaucracy back in Washington was still bickering over the details of the U.S. position. While waiting for those issues to be resolved, Nitze prepared a series of general opening statements, but Haig's aide Burt insisted that even these be cleared in ad vance by Washington. Nitze balked...