Word: compaction
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...immense story that Richard Collier (The City That Wouldn 't Die, The Sands of Dunkirk) attempts to tell. He has selected perhaps the only popular method possible: a compact narrative out of which the reader may pull facts and anecdotes as if from an endless Pandora's box Of Kleenex...
...compact dynamo who hums with confidence, Los Angeles-born Brown admits to being incurably stagestruck. At age nine, he attended a performance by French Singer Edith Piaf. He can still feel her impact: "She suffered more than anyone could." Too self-conscious to be an actor, he says: "It used to worry me. Now I think it is my strongest asset because I have had to develop a method of communication that does not include illustration." He leaves actors alone, but "they can show me anything." He never comments on a character, instead draws out a motivation from the actor...
...dream singer, must strike similar bargains with Swan, juicily played by Paul Williams, who also composed the film's good score. Swan in turn owes his power to an earlier Faustian deal of his own, a pact that borrows a few wrinkles from Dorian Gray's compact. This repetition reduces contemporary middlebrow mythomania to absurd shambles...
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the American Dream is close to realization. The Melting Pot has done its work, and all today join together in complaining that the Internal Revenue Service is overtaxing us. Those who might differ are ringed off into compact enclaves, like blacks squeezed into downtown Detroit or the Italians ringed off by expressways and skyscrapers in Boston's North End. Ideological differences take the form of squabbles between Democrats and Republicans in the House Ways and Means Committee. The American future is mirrored in the tree-lined streets of Bethesda and Grosse Point and Scarsdale, insulated from...
...about "what people are doing in America," Rod is back driving cabs, grooming horses, baking cookies and selling ice cream in the streets. Hardly anybody has recognized him so far. But when Rod was pumping gas at a station recently in Miami, a woman drew up in a blue compact and gasped: "You can't be." "I'm not," agreed Rod. "I didn't think so," she said, and drove away in a happy daze...