Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately, the fun comes to a screeching halt when Gideon re-enacts Fosse's heart attack. Though it is daring for a film maker to dramatize his own brush with death, Fosse does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body...
DIED. Ann Dvorak, 67, brunette film star of the '30s and '40s who debuted as Paul Muni's sister in the 1932 gangland classic Scarface; of cancer; in Honolulu. The smoky-voiced Dvorak was best known for playing suffering, hard-luck women opposite such stars as James Cagney (The Crowd Roars), Dick Powell (College Coach) and Spencer Tracy (Sky Devils...
...singer she plays in The Rose has often been compared to Janis Joplin, who died of an overdose of drugs in 1970. Though Midler admires Joplin, the rock singer in the film is, in many respects, Bette Midler. Rose grew up in warm Florida, Bette in balmy Hawaii, and they were both unhappy. In Bette's family, as she remembers, there was always a lot of angry bellowing from her father, a house painter for the Navy. Even today Fred Midler has not come to see one of her shows, a source of obvious pain to his daughter...
...legend!" Bette told him, and he did, or almost did. Like Alan Bates, who plays Rose's tyrannical man ager in the movie, Russo dominated Bette's life and her career, in terms of the job his advice was impeccable. Until The Rose, he turned down every film role that was offered, waiting for the one that would let her shine brightest. People laughed at the time, but on her European tour last year, he even demanded that she be paid in gold. He was turned down, but the idea was far from laughable. Gold has since more...
...preserves them in strips of celluloid that promise eternal life. Hollywood embalms desire. Hollywood is a necropolis lined with deities made to appear more beautiful and menacing than they really are. Hollywood, In short, is a good read, even when encountered in Moviola, an overwrought, eulogistic novel about the film business. The book is a greenhorn-to-mogul saga with cameo performances by great stars of the distant and recent past. There is even a bit part for Thomas Alva Edison, without whose inventive genius...