Word: formula
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...make them with that in mind. I read somewhere that some journalist had said that "Fast, Cheap, and out of Control" was some kind of cynical attempt on my part to make a commercial movie. I thought that was really insane. Yes, it's like that commercial formula we're all familiar with-the robot scientist, the topiary gardener, the mole-rat photographer, and the lion tamer...
Money drives the culture. Television has recently hit on the old successful formula of big-money quiz shows. The new ones give away millions to people who know which Presidents' faces appear on different dollar bills. (The most candid of these shows is called Greed.) The likable and funny fellow who is host of Win Ben Stein's Money may turn out to be the symbolic spokesperson of the age. He challenges contestants to match his wealth of information and simultaneously implies that education for its own sake is preposterous. If you're so smart--Stein asks merely by existing...
...unfunny film that is made. To cheer themselves up, they write a spec script about the worst auteur in cinema history, Ed Wood. Batman director Tim Burton reads it and signs on, and when the movie garners critical praise, the guys decide to stick with their new formula. "Most biopic pitches you hear in Hollywood are about 'The first person to blah-blah-blah,'" says Columbia's executive vice president of production, Michael Costigan, who oversaw The People vs. Larry Flynt. "But Scott and Larry are not concerned about a particular person's achievements as much as they are about...
...SANTANA Supernatural (Arista). Let's face it: most '60s rockers have headed out to pasture. But with a little help from his friends (Lauryn Hill, Everlast), 52-year-old Carlos Santana stayed alive by renewing the formula that once took him to the top: blues, Hendrix-style guitar work and chugging Afro-Latin rhythms. Rock history, written by lightning fingers...
...society's thorniest problems. His dollars-and-cents approach has led him in some controversial directions. Posner famously suggested that the adoption system might be improved by allowing babies to be sold. And he has written that whether abortion should be banned can be evaluated by some mathematical formula in which V is the value of a fetus' life and N is the average number of abortions that would be performed without...