Word: hollywood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This grim Beverly Hills hyperbole is the characteristic verbal coin of a man who is the quintessence of movie-industry cynicism and success. Bill Dozier, 60, started in Hollywood in 1935 as an agent for Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, and has since been a top production executive at several movie studios and the executive producer of several TV programs, including You Are There, Studio One and Batman. Such is his reputation for plain talk that one-fifth of the registrants in his Monday-night course are not U.C.L.A. undergraduates but Hollywood directors, producers and pressagents...
...genesis of the dilemma lay in the industry's lack of foresight and a still-prevalent attitude where movies were regarded as commercial property, not art worth preserving. When William S. Hart didn't sell any more popcorn, Hollywood didn't care much about preserving his films. A no-longer-commercial commercial film fell subject to varying fates: films were allowed to rot in forgotten Hollywood vaults; original producers sold their distribution rights to smaller distributors; copyrights elapsed and films were turned over to family heirs; others were chopped to ribbons, sections used in the making of other films; legal...
Although the AFI represents a rare example of America rising to meet a crisis before it reaches insane proportions, much of an archivist's dream can no longer be made into reality: many films are permanently lost, and Hollywood's history includes stories that fill a modern-day film anthropologist with disgust. Directors rarely had the right to edit their own films, and it became common practice for studios to re-cut and mangle films they thought potentially commercial...
...Hollywood is beyond parody. Almost anything said or written about it, no matter how absurd, somehow, somewhere, some time comes close to the truth. Author Richard Condon, who spent 22 years as a pressagent for Producers Cecil B. DeMille, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, et a!., has tried to defy that basic Hollywood tenet by inventing a story so preposterous that it cannot possibly seem real. He has only partly succeeded...
Characterization is equally inconsistent. Stephen Kaplan's truly fascinating Menenius at times conveys Polonius-like age, at times wisdom, then steps out of character suggesting a Hollywood agent who has lot his client, then a deeply jealous suitor disappointed at Volumnia's success over his own failure...