Word: formulaic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...formula for maintaining a healthy relationship is simple. Writers criticize if they must but avoid the "cheap shot" (it's hard to define the term but we all know one when we see it), while the athletes take the bad with the good...
...Dreaming of fame on the minstrel circuit, he teams up with Charlie Bates, a shady con-mannerist portrayed by Tony Award Winner Ted Ross (The Wiz). The stage is still the white man's domain, however, and Bates, Brown and their fellow black performers must stick to the formula of blackface makeup and plantation humor. They are forced, in vaudeville's looking-glass world, to imitate the white man's parody of blacks...
...face of death are bound for disappointment, for Cussler has simply used the old wreck as a pawn in a far-fetched modern spy thriller. But the book tries to make up for the deception with a smorgasbord of romantic espionage, classical sleuthing and high-seas heroism, and the formula seems to have worked. Though so egregiously trite and poorly written that the souls of Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Herman Melville must all be cringing at Cussler's perversion of the literary forms they mastered, Raise the Titanic! has become immensely popular--and if the three old masters...
...LeCarres, the John D. MacDonalds--enthusiastically. Rather, the problem stems from the fact that the public can only buy what the publishers put in the bookstores--and American publishers have long labored under the misconception that the public does not want quality fiction. The familiar "Charlie's Angels" formula of writing--fast cars and faster women wrapped around a couple of gimmicks and out-dated cliches--now enjoys unprecedented popularity in most publishing houses, and so the public must regularly deal with works like Cussler's. Faced with no other choice, it buys them...
...formula starts with a play within a play or, in this case, a screenplay...