Word: disney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That was when a performer considered damaged goods teamed up with a studio aching for mainstream success: Bette Midler made three comedies for Walt Disney Studios. Zinnng! A sprinkle of stardust, and here comes the happy ending, one as unlikely as the transformation of a white elephant into a soaring Dumbo. Her first, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, was tenth among 1986's box-office winners; the next, Ruthless People, ranked eighth; Outrageous Fortune has earned more than $25 million in the first 25 days of release. The cheeky trio made Disney a major movie studio and Midler Hollywood...
Thus is joined a fictional battle involving real-life combatants. But Author Max Apple's second novel does not try to generate much suspense over the outcome. Even in the wackiest narrative, the existence of Disney World would be difficult to ignore or disprove. Instead, The Propheteers uses a supposed struggle in Orlando as a farfetched excuse to noodle imaginatively and affectionately with some American myths. What, specifically, might it feel like to be someone whose private, obsessive vision is miraculously rewarded with fortune and fame...
That of course happened to Walt Disney, Howard Johnson and Margery's father, C.W. Post. Apple invents their stories through a series of flashbacks and vignettes. Here is Post, a zealous vegetarian, who sees dry cereal not as a means to get rich but as a way to "save all the animals on the face of the earth." There is Johnson, who spends much of each year being chauffeured across America, picking sites for future motels through some instinctive knowledge of where future tired travelers will want to be treated to the comforts of home. Among the three dreamers, Disney...
Near the end, Margery meets her friend Johnson and her enemy Disney in an Orlando drugstore, and they all have lunch: "It was an odd coincidence, she realized, that she and Walt Disney and Howard Johnson were human beings." It will not seem odd to readers of The Propheteers that legends can live and breathe in a gentle fable as fabulous as the truth...
...question nags at directors of suspense movies: What would Hitch have done? Like Walt Disney with cartoons, Alfred Hitchcock was thought not just to have invented a film genre but to have patented it. His trademarks -- the mortician's wit, the danse-macabre pacing, the elegant economy of his editing -- entertained moviegoers and enlightened moviemakers for a half-century. It's not that nobody did it better, but that everybody did it his way. Everybody still does. Almost seven years after his death, Hitchcock's bluff majesty continues to influence and intimidate all those who would make crime pictures...