Word: hacks
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...from the Governor's office," Davis says of his chief of staff job in 1974. "It took me about a foot a year to get where I was going." Along the way, he had to develop some armor. He was seen by many as one of those hack career candidates, always angling for something, and few people saw a future for a guy who appeared to have taken the same personality course as Walter Mondale. "You had to be there as a friend to see how bad it was for him with all the ridicule [about his ambition]," says Lynn...
Later, in Hollywood, the fictional Morris becomes a hack screenwriter and spies Reagan and his soon-to-be first wife Jane Wyman on the beach: "This mature Dutch--'Ronnie' she calls him--is tall and sparely straight, constructed in flats, a mobile Mondrian... Even his pectorals are flat and square; he has no bulges in him, of brawn or brain...
...same question might be posed of director Andy Tenant. It seems that Hollywood today seems to be bringing in a new generation of hack directors to usher in a new, more clichd and stale era of movie making . For example, Antoine Fuqua, directing a feature for the first time in The Replacement Killers (another Chow performance) had only commercial and music video directing credits before taking the helm of a full feature length film. The result was high-gloss and largely empty cinema, concentrating largely on impressive visuals but yielding flat and dull content -- which brings us to Andy Tennant...
...club, one might just run into another remnant from that same period of antiquity in the news business. Furry, flabby and foul-mouthed, a dislocated Brit turned foreign correspondent tells an intern about reporting, as he knows it. "Thay're in jayill naow, the fahks." For the old hack, possessed of a cockney so thick it sounds Australian and a mouth as foul as Sammy Sosa's late swing, the march of history is not poignant--it is a hard blow to the gut. He speaks of the former owners of United Press International, scoundrels whose skullduggery contributed...
Recently, I found myself arguing with a friend over the merits of John Williams, the composer of numerous film soundtracks including the upcoming Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. My friend was accusing Williams of being a shameless sell-out, a hack who borrows from a hundred other works, including his own soundtracks on occasion. The Star Wars soundtracks steal voluminously from Holst and Wagner, as well as Stravinsky; the soundtrack for JAWS is an amalgam of numerous traditional sea themes from dozens of sources. But while I attempted to make a comparison of Williams' use of so many different sources...