Word: grossness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...five workers farm, but the ancient techniques are pathetically underproductive. By 1979, famine was a possibility, as disastrous typhoons and war with China hit simultaneously. The country now depends on Moscow for $2 billion a year, an amount equal to more than 20% of Viet Nam's gross national product...
Every day for a decade, images of the faraway country came flooding into the U.S. on tape and film and photographic paper, pictures of Viet Nam by the hundred gross. Bit by visual bit, Americans accrued a vivid (if distorted) portrait of the country where their sons and husbands were dying, a terrifying multimedia montage of nervous teenage heroes behind sandbags, of Saigon's beleaguered charm, of a green, green countryside with helicopters hovering everywhere...
While cineasts around the country were rushing out to see if Amadeus deserved all those Oscars, millions of other moviegoers, most of them between the ages of eleven and 19, were going to the gross-outs. "Children love dirty," says Jerry Paris, who directed Police Academy 2, "and they love the silliness of this kind of comedy." Tom Sherak, president of domestic distribution for 20th Century-Fox, becomes almost misty-eyed when he talks about going to a theater a few days after the first Porky's opened. "I sat behind a group of kids who had already seen...
...those screams mean big bucks at the box office. Animal House (1978), the Godfather of gross-out, cost only $2.9 million and made $150 million; Porky's (1982) cost $4.8 million and brought in $180 million; and Police Academy (1984) also cost $4.8 million and made about $150 million. Studio executives are awed by such huge returns from such small investments, but, being over 20 themselves, they find it hard to tell which gross-out will make a big pile, like Porky's, and which will make a little pile ($22 million), like Hot Dog . . . The Movie. "Kids know what...
...studio's instruction to me was, 'Give us Animal House.' I gave it to them but tried to layer it with some humanity and real characters. I didn't think anything was tasteless as long as it was funny." But tasteless is not really in the vocabulary of a gross-out scriptwriter. Some movie people shiver when they think of great film scenes: Gloria Swanson descending the stairs at the end of Sunset Boulevard, or Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walking into the fog at the conclusion of Casablanca. Gross-out writers receive a similar thrill when they remember John...