Word: cuckoos
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Freud's dazzling and complex theory of the mind?one of the great intellectual triumphs of all time?came along when American psychiatry was doing little more than warehousing the insane and performing the occasional crude Cuckoo's Nest lobotomy. Though most of Europe's intelligentsia remained unimpressed with Freud, a generation of largely Jewish disciples of the master, fleeing Hitler and the Nazis, spread the faith widely in the U.S. It quickly attracted the well-to-do, who could alford the treatment, and enticed the literati, who were smitten by the subtlety and symbolism of these fashionable excursions into...
...during the February sweeps-those weeks when Nielsen and Arbitron take an elaborate TV census-the networks spent a reported $13 million on that Sunday night to throw their heaviest punches at one another. CBS led off with Gone With the Wind; NBC followed with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; ABC, hoping to profit from the Presley boom, countered with its own special, Elvis! For millions of TV viewers, who had spent most of the season slogging through Sitcom Sahara, suddenly the tube runneth over...
Sitting in his Fifth Avenue apartment, even William Paley, 77, the venerable head of CBS, felt the frustration. "I wanted to see Cuckoo's Nest," he confesses, "but I was also curious to see how Gone With the Wind looked today. A lot of people who wanted to see it again were robbed of Cuckoo's Nest, and vice versa. The public is getting an uneven break during these sweeps weeks. Everybody is sick and tired of them...
Perhaps the sickest and most tired was Fred Silverman, 41, the president of NBC, who threw two of his biggest movies into that black hole called the sweeps. "It's tragic," he says. "We had two blockbusters, Cuckoo's Nest and American Graffiti, on the air in this February period, and yet we reached only 32% of the audience. That is absolutely crazy. But the alternative would have been to put ordinary movies in there, and the only people who would have looked at them would have been the people in my family...
...failed to go off. On the other hand, the figures were rarely very surprising. On that famous night of Feb. 11, all the networks did well. ABC's Elvis! was on top with 39% of the audience, CBS and Gone With the Wind had 36%, and NBC with Cuckoo's Nest had 32%. (If that adds up to more than 100%, and it does, it means that some of the families polled had more than...