Word: flop
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...executives would not comment on Roseanne's problems with ABC.) Nor are the Arnolds likely to find life outside ABC as rosy as they might hope. Roseanne has shown no ability to draw an audience in any fictional role besides Roseanne Conner. Her last film, She-Devil, was a flop ("They exploited me," she says now), and an April TV movie, The Woman Who Loved Elvis, in which she and Tom co-starred, got middling ratings...
...success, Kiss is also -- and here is the hook that intrigues Broadway -- a proven flop. An earlier version received a multimillion-dollar 1990 tryout off-Broadway -- about 25 miles off, at a suburban campus of the State University of New York. The producers implored critics to stay away because the work was in development, but reportorial instincts prevailed. Reviewers came, saw and slaughtered, halting Kiss and killing its sponsor, a fledgling agency set up to nurture musicals. Prince now says, "Irony of ironies, the fiasco may have helped. The show's political consciousness is much better suited to this moment...
Wynn's ambitions command attention because he has scored one success after another, even if his first Las Vegas venture was a flop. At 25, he took money he had made in his family's bingo business in Maryland and invested $45,000 to purchase a 3% interest in the Frontier Hotel, where he became the slot manager. But several stockholders of the hotel turned out to be stand-ins for Detroit mobsters, and Wynn was forced to sell early. He was never accused of being anything but an innocent in the affair, and he did get something invaluable...
...veteran producer Ray Stark (The Way We Were) for $700,000, evil junk-bond genius Michael Milken was well on his way to jail, the takeover era was over, and the public backlash against the excesses of the '80s had started in a big way. Moreover, the catastrophic flop of Brian De Palma's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990 had cooled Hollywood on the idea of making movies set in Manhattan's financial district. Columbia began to shy away from a project that did not seem to have much appeal to the Terminator...
...delicious spoof of big-time musicals, Gerard Alessandrini is still skewering away -- wicked as ever. His 12th and latest off-Broadway review, FORBIDDEN BROADWAY 1993, is as up to date as Kansas City and as funny as anything that happened on the way to the forum. New shows (the flop Anna Karenina, Patti LuPone in the not-even-yet-produced Sunset Boulevard) are raked over the coals; old chestnuts (a frenzied Les Miz, a nontraditional Miss Saigon) are freshly roasted. The song titles alone delight (to the tune of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a mock Mandy Patinkin sings Somewhat Overindulgent...