Word: detail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Concentration on the telling detail is a way good writers have of avoiding both melodrama and sentimentality, which blanched the hard truth of Kramer vs. Kramer. As he proved in Melvin and Howard, Bo Goldman is a very good writer, a man whose world appears to be filled with mild eccentrics and funny overheard remarks that he gets down just right in his mental notebook. His specificity seems to have disciplined Alan Parker, who in the past has liked to stress the ugly metaphorical overtones in his material (in Midnight Express he kept insisting that the whole world...
...photograph of the Hearst editors published in a new company brochure limns the chain's recent history in decapitating detail. "When I saw that picture," says one current editor, "I thought to myself: there's something funny about Harry." Indeed there is. The head of Harry Rosenfeld of the Albany Times-Union sits atop the body of Reg Murphy, former editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Says James Bellows, who is still in the picture despite leaving the Los Angeles Herald Examiner last November: "Harry is wondering where his body is. He thinks [David] Halvorsen might have...
...days after FDR's election to the paper, disaster of a sort struck--The Harvard Lampoon issued it first-ever parody of The Crimson, a stinging sheet playing on the stolid greyness that was the paper's hallmark in its early days. The lead story discussed in excruciating detail the replacement of one oarsman with another; buried beneath it was a one-paragraph item headlined "A Dangerous Attempt." A passerby, the item informed readers, had noticed a lighted fuse attached to Memorial Hall; at its end was enough pieric acid not only to "wreck" Memorial Hall but also to damage...
...elevated to managing editor. Like all his predecessors, and his successors from many years to come, he followed a standard principle in assigning articles and dummying his front page--concentrate on sports. Four days out of five a sports story led the paper; the Crimson, for instance, covered in detail every practice of the football team. FDR seemed to realize that the emphasis on athletics could get out of hand: once, trying in an editorial to drum up attendance at a lecture, he wrote, "In these days of strenuous athletics and other somewhat unacademic pursuits a good many people wonder...
...regulations, turned chaotic, deregulated, by a blast of real winter and a single slap of metal on metal. The jets from Washington National Airport that normally swoop around the presidential monuments like famished gulls are, for the moment, emblemized by the one that fell; so there is that detail. And there was the aesthetic clash as well-blue-and-green Air Florida, the name a flying garden, sunk down among gray chunks in a black river. All that was worth noticing, to be sure. Still, there was nothing very special in any of it, except death, which, while always special...