Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...show was memorable not as a play but as a document of the frightened fascination with which some writers regard Hollywood, as if it were a basketful of hypnotizing snakes. In The Velvet Alley, produced on CBS' Playhouse 90, TV Playwright Rod Serling told the story of a struggling 42-year-old TV playwright from Manhattan named Ernie Pandish, who sells a script and overnight becomes rich, famous and an s.o.b. Where once he listened to music while he worked (he apparently owned only one phonograph record, Swan Lake), now the only music heard is the snarling...
Though Ernie Pandish was ably played by Art Carney, The Velvet Alley never made clear why a man cannot make $100,000 a year without being a heel, or why, somehow, little old New York is a safer place to be successful than Hollywood. The most intriguing fact about the play was not seen on the TV screen: Author Serling's own partial identification with his hero. Working on the show, said Serling, "I left strips of flesh and blood all over the studio. The externals of the play are definitely autobiographical -the pressures involved, the assault on values...
Tall Story, latest comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Grouse (Life with Father), pleased Philadelphia (and was bought immediately by Hollywood). Adapted from a rather more serious novel (The Homecoming Game), the story concerns an overly ethical professor of ethics (Hans Conried) faced with flunking a star basketball player before the big game. A fellow facultyman: Playwright Marc (The Green Pastures) Connelly, making one of his occasional appearances as an actor. Wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer's Henry T. Murdock: "An evening of hearty laughter with no complicating complexes." Opens on Broadway...
...things can be as dull as satires on Hollywood except possibly satires on psychiatrists, but NBC's Omnibus this week combined both in a show that, in its half dozen best moments, reached comically irrational heights rare on TV. The hour-long (and far too slow-paced) show: Malice in Wonderland, by lampooning, lapidating S. J. Perelman, veteran of movie-writing stints (Around the World in 80 Days). Most of Malice enmeshed Dr. Randolph Kalbfus (Keenan Wynn) an innocent Manhattan psychoanalyst who goes to Hollywood as technical adviser on psychological movies. The doctor (crying, "I'm sorry, Sigmund...
...thumb. The familiar tall story and its tiny hero, tastefully refurbished by Hollywood...