Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Anne Hurd, a year younger, who produced the picture and had an editorial say in the script ("Jim does most of the writing; I do most of the deleting"). It was their passion for the project, very much the result of adolescent years spent watching movies and reading science fiction, that rescued Aliens from being one of those tempting ideas that Hollywood loves to lunch over and hates to launch...
Nobody but Cameron, that is. He thought Alien was the best science-fiction horror film ever made, "a high-water mark in the genre . . . There was a total philosophy in that film -- the way the actors were cast, the costumes, the way the sets looked functional and used and a bit grungy, the sounds of clinking chains, dripping water . . . People really believed while they were watching it that it was a true experience...
Those of us who wander across this country -- hard-core itinerants, escapees from a Stanley Elkin fiction, a ragtag of peddlers, truckers, journalists, compulsive tourists -- meet in flyspecked cafes off the interstates and gossip about the cities that are our temporary destinations...
Even so, Archer is a master entertainer, and on the trail he produces one of the best MacGuffins of recent popular fiction. (MacGuffin was Alfred Hitchcock's name for the object or secret that sets the plot churning.) The time is 1966, and Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, no less, is trying desperately to find a famous icon spirited away from the Winter Palace in the last days of the Czar. It passed through the hands of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring, who gave it to Scott's father, his jailer after World War II. The late Scott Sr., in turn...
That sense of the ominous haunts Brooke Astor's novel: the worst is waiting to occur immediately after the curtain falls on the kind of fiction that has been out of style since the period it concerns. In this dry, sparkling comedy of manners, reminiscent of Edith Wharton's lighter works, the glitter is incessant. Emily Codway, a widow of a certain age -- nearly 60 actually, although she will only admit to 49 -- carries on a sunset flirtation with a fortyish Italian prince, Carlo Pontevecchio. Her sister-in-law Irma Shrewsbury, also a moneyed widow, is romanced by Charlie Hopeland...