Word: gimmick
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
LAST ACCOMPLISHMENT: In a promotional advertising gimmick for last summer's job, he once singlehandedly put away for breakfast seven cans of "Nine Lives-Super Supper" between 125th and 218th St. on the Broadway IRT No. 1 train...
...doing. The movement attracted him with its glitter and the limelight t assured him. What Marjoe does not acknowledge is the relation between his craving for attention and the cruelty of his mother, who dunked his head underwater or smothered him with a pillow to insure that her young "gimmick" memorized his allegedly God inspired sermons contentiously Rather, he insists that he resented his lather more although he actually hates neither patent because he suggests unconvincingly, he's doing his thing and they were doing theirs...
...gimmick was not lost on Chicago bargain hunters. The most enterprising among them were the four Johnson brothers: Linton, Wallace, Ron and Carl, who managed to be the first four in line. They planned their vigil carefully, arriving at the bank's door at closing time the day before the sale. Said Linton, the eldest at 24: "We had all we needed. We brought some sandwiches for dinner and breakfast and a record player with some of our sounds." The Johnsons made a party of it, dancing and singing through the night...
Sometimes it became a little too obvious that the candidates made their tours not to elicit votes but as a gimmick for the press. On one stop in a paper factory, McGovern's press following outnumbered the employees by about two to one. Not only were the press overwhelming in number but they were not very subtle. One plump middle-aged woman with a "Re-elect the President" button complimented McGovern on his lovely daughter, telling him. "I can't vote for you. I'm voting for the President because I'm a WASP." One member of the press chortled...
Properly handled, such a gimmick might have launched a spoof of James' involuted style or a parody of Freudian criticism (scholars have wrangled for decades about whether the ghosts of Quint and Jessel are merely figments of the new governess's sexually starved imagination). Director-Producer Michael Winner, however, tries for a pretentious shocker in fancy dress. He serves up a pastiche of sexual sadism, witchcraft (two dolls are burned in chamber pots) and a pair of Quintessential messages: love and hate are synonymous; the dead just hang around wherever they are killed...