Word: carsons
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Appearing on NBC's Tonight Show, Truman Capote told Television Host Johnny Carson that he and his friends were playing the most wonderful new game. What was it? Johnny asked. Well, said Truman, you list as fast as you can the 25 most boring people you know. The trick is to name people everyone else thinks are fascinating. Truman's top bores: First, Howard Hughes, because "who cares about his reclusion, his plane flights, his hiding and his money." Second, Aristotle Onassis, because "all he is doing is sitting in the corner of a nightclub thinking of ways...
...script is shoddy enough so that Reynolds might well have been tempted to send it up; maybe that is what he meant to do with the Carson impressions. Screenwriter Beckerman lifts at least two scenes from Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep. He may know quality but he cannot duplicate it, and never makes up his mind whether to do straight hard-boiled melodrama or imitation Damon Runyon. No such doubts apparently plagued the director. He establishes a consistent tone of massive mayhem. Kulik attempts to disguise every lapse in logic with a lapse in taste...
Burt Reynolds must be the first actor ever to have been influenced by a television star. In Shamus he often seems to be doing Johnny Carson impressions, as if too many appearances on the Tonight show have left him with a chronic case of mimesis. "Healthy devil, aren't you?" he murmurs to a top-heavy ingenue, who promptly melts at his wit. 'Thought we might do a little skindiving," he suggests to a hat-check girl, who replies, "Bring your snorkel...
Reynolds not only sometimes sounds like Carson, with his voice full of curdled cuteness, but acts like him, too, doing long, innocent, slightly baffled takes and little-boy expressions of wonderment. Why Reynolds bothers with this remains mysterious, because when he is doing the material straight, he is truly funny, dexterous and quite winning...
Married. Sandy Duncan, 26, sunny heroine of TV's Sandy Duncan Show until its cancellation last month; and Dr. Thomas C. Calcattera, 35, California surgeon who removed a tumor from behind Duncan's left eye in 1971; both for the second time; in Carson City...