Word: compton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks before the critical test at Alamogordo, the Interim Committee, charged with advising the President on the Bomb and atomic energy, met in a two-day session. The committee -chaired by War Secretary Henry Stimson and including Scientists Vannevar Bush, Karl T. Compton and James B. Conant-recommended that the Bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. The objective, they also recommended, should be a "dual target," a military or industrial site surrounded by more lightly constructed buildings. The attack should come by surprise. The argument was that the U.S. must exhibit its new power spectacularly...
Fear and Frustration. Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick) is a $60,000-a-year Manhattan advertising executive whose young daughter (Susan Sarandon) has run off to live with an East Village junkie. She is not there when her father goes to her apartment, but he gets into an argument with her boy friend and inadvertently beats him to death. He staggers into a local bar where Joe (Peter Boyle), a $160-a-week welder, is holding forth. When Joe finally screams, "I'd like to kill one of them!", Compton looks up and whispers, "I just did." Joe later realizes...
...becomes Compton's Jonah. They form a curious but substantial relationship, a fraternity based on fear and frustration. Joe takes Compton to a bowling alley, and Compton shows Joe the fashionable Ginger Man, passing Joe off as a top-drawer adman. Slowly, Compton's harmless, homogenized ideas and civilized manners give way before the barbaric force of Joe's fury. "Sometimes when I'm with Joe," Compton tells his wife, "I feel almost as if I'd performed a humanitarian...
Together they comb the East Village for Compton's daughter and end up wallowing in a smoky pad with a group of hippies. Joe looks at the welter of nude flesh in wonder. "This is an orgy, ain't it?" he asks (pronouncing "orgy" with a hard g). But the kids taunt them mercilessly, steal their wallets and take off for a commune. Joe and Bill track down the youngsters in a closing scene of such horror that Joe must surely rank in impact with Bonnie and Clyde...
...Much advertising today has a numbing sameness, says Delia Femina, but the adman is to be pitied, not blamed. He often finds it impossible to create individual selling pitches for the rising number of nearly identical products. "Some poor son of a bitch is sitting in his office at Compton right this minute," says the author, "trying to figure out what to say about Ivory Soap that hasn't been said may be 20,000 times before. If you're doing an ad for Tide, what do you say? What do you do about Axion...