Word: half-hour
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...hypothetical condition. It arises in worst-case scenarios about what might happen-in the guidance systems of rockets, in outer space over the North Pole, in underground silos beneath the incinerated landscapes of the American Northwest and in the minds of men in Washington and Moscow-during the first half-hour of World War III. While highly conjectural, the problem of determining vulnerability must still be taken very seriously: avoiding World War III depends on the superpowers feeling secure, or at least feeling equally insecure, in the face of each other's nuclear arsenals. The U.S. now feels insecure...
...food, strikers are moved, past cheering cellmates, to continue their fast in the nearby prison hospital, a modern, one-story building where they are locked into individual rooms. Here they regain the status of prisoners who conform to regulations, and they are allowed to have visitors for one half-hour each day. The trays of food are always there. Radios are in each room and the strikers listen for special songs played for them by name by a sympathetic local station. But the men are even more interested in the hourly news, often interrupting conversation when they realize the program...
Which is not to imply that all of Victory's simple but highly effective values are to be found in its last half-hour. The funny, smart script does what sports pages do before any big game: provide brisk sketches of the leading participants. Max von Sydow is the German officer who conceives the contest -a gentleman anti-Nazi who thinks nations should settle their disputes in games. Michael Caine, player-coach of the Allied team, is working class and quite bedeviled by the Oxbridge types who run the escape committee and deplore people who play boys' games...
There was no dearth of seductive offers. CBS reportedly talked to Brokaw about 60 Minutes and its planned, half-hour Up to the Minute, an afternoon news show aimed at women. ABC News President Roone Arledge, according to one insider, "went after Brokaw money, marbles and chalk," in an attempt to sign him up for ABC's multiple-anchor World News Tonight team, which occasionally includes the fast-rising Ted Koppel. But NBC responded in kind. The top brass urged a willing Chancellor to give up his New York anchor position by April 1982, six months earlier than planned...
...Ivan Reitman is a canny merchant. He knows that the easy laughs are the surest, that teen-agers love to watch goofballs shape up without losing their shambling style, and that it doesn't hurt business to insert a sorority shower scene or nude mud-wrestling match every half-hour or so. Stripes will keep potential felons off the streets for two hours. Few people seem to be asking, these days, that movies do more...