Word: gimmicks
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...quality of these works ranges from excellent to nauseating. But it is a fact that treatment of the theme has changed. "Homosexuality used to be a sensational gimmick," says Playwright Crowley. "The big revelation in the third act was that the guy was homosexual, and then he had to go offstage and blow his brains out. It was associated with sin, and there had to be retribution." These days a movie or play can end, as Staircase does, with a homosexual couple still together or, as Boys in the Band winds up, with two squabbling male lovers trying desperately...
Died. Matsutaro Shoriki, 84, Japanese newspaper publisher who brought the grand old game of besuboru to his homeland; of a heart attack; in Tokyo. In 1924, Shoriki purchased the dying Tokyo daily Yomiuri (circ. 40,000) and as a promotional gimmick sponsored visits by American baseball teams featuring such stars as Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. The tours were overwhelming successes, and the game soon became as popular in Japan as in the U.S. Today, Yomiuri's circulation is 5.1 million, in no small part because of the thoroughness of its baseball coverage...
Some of Wexler's techniques are a drag for his own medium of film. In one of the opening scenes he has his ideas about news coverage batted around in a cocktail party. A real bad gimmick. When the characters speak, they are making statements to the audience of the movie not to each other. A film should always make sense within itself...
...hard-rock music or soar into the oscillating wail of European ambulances. The VW's short-stroke engine remains untouched, but its exhaust is channeled through complicated "extractors" or straight pipe "resonators" that make the humble bug sound like a snarling Ferrari or thundering Offenhauser. A less expensive gimmick is to wire a bottle of water under the exhaust pipe, where it produces a joyous shriek as exhaust blasts across its top. Thus, cars that leave the factories merely muttering turn up on the roads making more noise than factory machinery...
...morality, some say. How about the end of a gimmick and the beginning...