Word: gimmick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Denver's Allendale Heights suburban development this week, Homebuilder Jack C. Hoerner (rhymes with corner), World War II test pilot, put finishing touches on the demonstrator model of 40 three-bedroom houses with a unique sales gimmick: a 12-ft. by 14-ft. fallout shelter built into the basement and into the regular $17,500 price tag. The first for-sale version of the house, one of two now abuilding, sold to an about-to-retire Army major who once studied radiation effects, broke off negotiations on another house when he heard of Hoerner's shelter, said: "That...
High Pressure. The viewers at The Tingler's preview in Hollywood last week watched with a kind of critical apprehension. Surely, Horror Movie Expert William Castle, 45, had dreamed up a gimmick more devilish than that. He had. Seconds later, as the tingler was supposedly slithering across the screen, seats actually shivered and buzzed; the audience tingled for fair. Bill Castle had wired vibrators beneath almost everyone in the place...
...died of fright. The picture cost only $80,000, grossed an estimated $1,200,000. This year, Bill released The House on Haunted Hill. The picture cost $150,000, but he spent $250,000 manufacturing skeletons that dance off the screen and dangle out over the audiences. The gimmick has paid off so well that he expects to take in well over...
Vita Manga Est. Last week the menthol drive reached its peak of intensity, proclaimed by full-page ads that touted every gimmick that adman can conceive and machine execute. Philip Morris (Marlboro, Parliament) launched Alpine on a national scale, billed it not only as a long, low-tar, lightly mentholated cigarette with "the longest filter yet," but as one of the few cigarettes since Camel to come in a package with a picture on it (of an Alpine mountain). Brown & Williamson, whose "Thinking Man" Viceroys thoughtlessly slumped 20% in the first quarter, clawed back with two new filters: the mentholated...
...that every playgoer is supposed to bring with him into a theatre. Shakespeare was never primarily concerned with story line, anyway; he was more interested in character than in plot. For All's Well he just snapped up a Boccaccio tale from a secondary source, complete with the trite gimmick of identification of rings. But he failed to expend the necessary effort on characteriaztion as well. Pascal once said, "Every author has a meaning in which all the contradictory passages agree, or he has no meaning at all." This play contains such passages. For example, the first two acts make...