Word: detail
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...play. The line goes hopelessly slack in the second and third acts when Playwright Sergel keeps falling back on his first. Even the major Anderson characters seem thin, and for a good reason. Anderson merely sketched them with evocative daubs; his adapter failed to fill them out with the detail demanded by the theater. Out of misapplied reverence for the original, he painstakingly spliced pieces of Anderson's dialogue, sometimes borrowing the words of one character for the mouth of another. When he ran out of the dialogue for big scenes, he decided to let them speak to each...
...Tycoon. His talents were great. In a time when a Briton's fate was largely fixed by his birth and when regulations governed life down to the smallest detail (e.g., the fine for "toying with a maid." fourpence; for breaking a glass, twelve-pence), young Wolsey's best chance to advance in the world lay in the church. He went as a scholar to Oxford, excelled his fellows by becoming a bachelor of arts at 15 (he was known as the Boy Bachelor). He was ordained a priest before he was 30. A tireless writer and an administrator...
...trips into the countryside to inspect one of his projects. Out of long experience, his bodyguards always keep packed bags at the office, and Turkish Airlines is instructed to hold open at least two seats on every Ankara-Istanbul flight. Along with his energy goes a monumental memory for detail. Says one aide: "He knows things like telephone numbers, how many bags of cement such and such a construction project will require, and how much rainfall there was yesterday all over Turkey...
...Hear." Such judgment, backed by meticulous attention to detail, has made New Yorker Jim Hagerty by every standard the best-and most powerful-White House press secretary in U.S. history. Day in, day out, year in, year out, between presidential speeches and press conferences, during Eisenhower vacations and Eisenhower illnesses, Hagerty is the authentic voice of the White House and, to an extent rarely recognized, of the whole Administration...
This feeling is largely due to the director, John Heffernan, who successfully sustains a flow of nuances. Delicacy is certainly one of his fortes; understanding of understatement and detail are others. His blocking turns a two-faced stage into an advantage, and, less technically, his bits of madness and sadness are woven into the actors and action as pleasantly as Capote wove them into the script...