Word: gimmick
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...FIRST, Tango seems to be just another avant-garde play with a gimmick. In this case the cute twist is a generation-gap role-reversal. The older members of the family are non-conformists and the young son is a traditionalist. By the time act one comes to a close, the audience feels as if it's being hit over the head with this witty, bizarre, but tediously predictable pattern...
...Wheels. A favorite gimmick to avoid police harassment is to set up shop outside city limits. Eighteen massage parlors just over the city line of Tucson, Ariz., were raided last June by Pima County police. Since then, five new ones have opened...
...Kissinger demotion, this seems to be the clearest publicity gimmick of all. Reducing Kissinger's power slightly helps to project Ford as a take-charge president, a president who's not letting anybody else run the show or get out of hand. But meanwhile, the secretary's national security job goes to General Brent Scowcroft, a devoted disciple unlikely to challenge his policies. Kissinger is thereby appeased, and in fact probably pleased by the entire transition, which eliminates his nemesis Schlesinger and replaces him with a completely non-ideological political appointee, Donald Rumsfeld. And reducing Kissinger's power, even superficially...
White Listeners. One should not dismiss too lightly any of the director's musings on success. It is one subject that he knows all about. Students of the Motown sound have long contended that it was Gordy's basic gimmick-the smoothing and packaging of rhythm and blues-that drew white listeners to his label. Essentially, he applied the same formula to his profitable production of Lady Sings the Blues, turning the hard life and times of Singer Billie Holiday into a muzzy backstage love story. It is also what happens in Mahogany. "I wanted to bring...
THERE'S AN OLD TRICK in English literature; I don't know if it has a name, but generally it's an overused gimmick that's been done well a couple of times. Boccacio first used this trick in the Decameron, upon which Chaucer modeled Canterbury Tales. The idea is to get some people together in a place where they will reveal themselves through some telling story or action. Usually a new perspective breathes life into this old hack's trick. But in Philadelphia, Anyone? the perspective seems almost as old as its technique...