Word: dealers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Calvin Worthington, 65, a Los Angeles auto dealer, wears a cowboy hat in his ads and parades around a car lot with animals ranging from pigs and tigers to hippos and elephants, each of whom he refers to as "my dog Spot." Wayne Greenstein, 32, and Brother Marc, 34, whose family owns Coronet juvenile furniture in Westbury, N.Y., have appeared in commercials since 1980. One of their popular spots features the Greensteins sitting in baby cribs and musing about a "talking orangutan." Customers routinely barge into Coronet demanding to see the TV stars, and trendy Manhattan nightclubs such as Danceteria...
Many owners enjoy acting like bozos on the boob tube, but for others the commercials are strictly business. Auto Dealer Worthington insists that if his antics did not pay off, he would never set foot near a TV camera. Says he: "I am not an extrovert by nature. I should get an Academy Award every time I do one of those...
Both Normand and Minter were regarded as suspects. So was Minter's fiercely protective mother and manager, Charlotte Shelby, who happened to own a .38. So was the houseman, Henry Peavey, who had recently been arrested for soliciting young boys. Or was it some drug dealer angered by Taylor's efforts to get Normand off her cocaine habit? Or one of several lunatics who made false confessions...
Still, every season someone attempts to revive the form. This year's example is Social Security, the bawdy but bland story of a Manhattan art dealer (Marlo Thomas), her suburban sister (Joanna Gleason), their respective husbands (Ron Silver and Kenneth Welsh) and the aged mother who drives them crazy (Olympia Dukakis). Playwright Andrew Bergman has written lustily funny movies (Blazing Saddles, Fletch), but he places only ticktock jokework on the stage. Worse, he creates situations of real pathos and then anesthetizes them. The matriarch is 80, unable to get around without a walker, unwilling to be left alone...
Still, the pressure for some kind of reform seems to be strong, if only because RICO keeps turning up in cases that everyone considers preposterous but that the legislative language covers. When Illinois authorities used RICO to sue a gasoline dealer for understating his state sales tax receipts, a federal appeals court ruled with "distress" that the statute was broad enough to allow the suit. In recent years a few federal courts began to balk at the more ingenious applications. But in a 5-to-4 decision last July, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected some of the methods that lower...