Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...best actors in the Ex production played with what-the-hell flamboyance. Timothy S. Mayer (the Devil's advocate) swept about the stage in a huge blue cape. He was as foxy as a Hollywood villain, as haughty as a Jacobean king. He relished his pronouncements like a small boy relishes his lemon drops. The worst actors stumbled towards self-effacement; Michael Boak (Sanitonella) became no more than an occasional buzz...
Gazing at the miles of neighboring urban sprawl and walking through the TV treadmills of Desilu and Warner's, the casual visitor to Hollywood will find it difficult to believe that it was once the habitat of Cro-Magnon man. His name was Harry Cohn, president and production head at Columbia Studios, and he flourished during the movies' Pleistocene epoch-circa A.D. 1930-58-subsisting on the backbones of executives and the egos of movie stars. When he died in 1958, more than 2,000 people turned out for his funeral, prompting Red Skelton to compose the most...
Wide Screen. Clearly, a man who can inspire such passion needs a tough-minded and sensitive biographer; instead he has Bob Thomas, 45, Hollywood reporter for the Associated Press, whose prose style seems derived largely from the wide-screen Hollywood novels of Harold Robbins. Nevertheless, Cohn was one of the last of the great movie despots, in whom absolute power and abysmal ignorance were fused, and he left behind a body of anecdotes that are worth examination...
Nevertheless, there was something instinctive about Cohn's fancy, if not his fanny. He respected talent, and he succeeded in getting some of Hollywood's best people to work for him. Leo McCarey, Robert Rossen, Frank Capra and George Stevens directed his films; Humphrey Bogart, Jack Lemmon, William Holden, Gary Grant, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert and Judy Holliday acted in them. And some of Cohn's features are classics: // Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, All the King's Men, Born Yesterday...
...price that others paid to work for him could be measured only in misery. They were not the only losers; like most dictators, Cohn eventually dehumanized himself by dehumanizing his subjects. Despite Biographer Thomas' cosmetic job, the outlines of the monster cannot be missed. In the new Hollywood, Cohn's kind of vulgarity can still be found-but not his kind of power. The absence of that power has made moviemakers' lives a lot better. The irony is that the same can seldom be said for their pictures...