Word: gimmicked
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...series actor). In 1971 Bouton enlivened one of his news spots by taking an interview with Alex Webster, then the coach of the stumbling New York Giants football team, and running part of it backward on the air with no sound. Webster was not amused by the gimmick, which made him look like a demented Donald Duck. Claiming that he had been portrayed as a "dullard and a stupid person," he sued Bouton for $3 million...
...like family drives one member after another into the hell of politics. In fact, campaigning is more purgatory than hades, and families are more likely to be consumed by television coverage than hellfire. Still, the extensive use of the family as campaigners smacks of cynical exploitation, a show-business gimmick calculated to dazzle and distract. And what of the politician who (Nielsen forbid!) has a homely wife or less than bright children? The day seems not far off when he will be barred from running. Should families skulk back to the home or suppress their need (if it exists...
...weeks at a luxury vacation condominium or resort at 50% below regular rates every year until 2016? Sounds like the grand prize behind the sequined curtain on some TV game show. Actually, it is a fairly typical example of the kind of arrangement available through a holiday-financing gimmick called time-sharing that is stirring interest among budget-minded vacationers...
Until fairly recently, the French did not take the telephone very seriously. Successive governments scrimped on expansion; from 1935 to 1968 almost no new equipment was installed. As late as 1962, the French Secretary of State for Posts and Telecommunications blithely dismissed the phone as a "gimmick." Charles de Gaulle would not even tolerate a telephone in his presidential office at the Elysée. His successor, Georges Pompidou, had a single phone on a side table but rarely used it; one of Pompidou's aides reportedly got only three calls from him in nine years...
...some innocents (a mother and two children) captured by some baddies (in this case lunatic political terrorists) and sequestered where they are rescue-proof by conventional means (a deserted monastery on top of an isolated peak). The whole idea is to make an improbable -and cinematically novel-rescue gimmick a logical necessity, and in this the scriveners succeed...