Word: hacks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...over how it will all turn out. After three years, $30 million, a typhoon named Olga and a shared Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm for Best Picture, Director Coppola still struggled to find an ending for his Viet Nam epic, Apocalypse Now. Should Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) hack Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) to death and then emerge from the colonel's hideout? Or should Willard kill Kurtz, sail down the river and then order the site bombed into the Stone Age, or at least until the credits roll? Each finish was filmed, and each had its supporters...
...Coming Decline of the Chinese Empire were the creation of some hack novelist, it might be dismissed as turgidly written and historically inaccurate-for it is both of those-but it is in fact the work of Victor Louis, 50, Moscow correspondent for the London Evening News, world traveler, bon vivant and a man widely reputed to have close connections with the Soviet KGB. The book thus can be interpreted as a Soviet government fantasy of China's eventual political and geographical disintegration-and a rationale for direct Soviet military intervention...
Carpenter's name, critics have been quick to point out, provides the best definition for his particular kind of talent: he is a first-rate carpenter, a makers of suspense shockers, scare pictures a good hack working an old saw. The wood may be warped and a little green, but he is not going very deeply against the grain. Whether he might rank among the architects of the traditions he so admires is an open question. Whether he can resist the beveling and varnish a big budget often imposes remains to be seen...
...Mayor Daley Marathon and his socialite wife lent a much-appreciated cultural air to the city. His fiscal and political leadership proved skillful and he moved to innovate in areas ignored by Daley for years. Polls showed him popular. If not exactly a reform independent, neither was he a hack. Bland was a better word. Chicago politics seemed to be turning into something of a snooze--a change from Daley's iron-fisted but always colorful 20-year reign. Bilandic was considered such a shoo-in that no one but Byrne bothered to challenge him. It was pointless...
...African right of way.Three hours out of Dar, our express came to an abrupt halt; it had killed a young giraffe that had wandered out of the savannah. An hour was lost as the crew replaced a broken brake hose, while passengers crowded around the carcass to gawk and hack off chunks of meat. At Mkushi, one of the many Zambian bush towns that have been revitalized by the railway, we waited for two more hours under a broiling sun. Our engineer and conductor lost an argument with station controllers over whether our express or a lumbering local should have...