Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...real obsession: to analyze the psyche of a society in conflict. He hopes soon to look at the 18th century, in a film about the Sioux culture. That movie, Cimino insists, will be told in subtitled Indian dialogue. No doubt the sounds of switchblades and garbage-can covers in Hollywood will follow close behind...
This school of hard knocks made Keaton a superb physical comic. It also drove him inward, to a place where neither friends, wives nor biographers could succeed in following. He was a passive, gentle, largely inarticulate man. His Hollywood career flourished as long as he had a producer, Joseph M. Schenk, who gave him independence and financial protection. Under such conditions, Keaton made at least two films, The Navigator and The General, that are unquestioned classics of the silent era. Unfortunately, Keaton's comedies did not show the profits of Chaplin's or of Harold Lloyd...
Keaton's decline was ghoulishly documented by the industry that caused it. He appeared as increasingly deteriorating versions of himself in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965). He turned his anger inward and drank himself to distraction. Yet he also lived long enough to become the somewhat puzzled darling of academics and film historians. Samuel Beckett sought him out and wrote a screenplay, Film (1964), in which Keaton starred. When the two met for the first time, they discovered that they had almost nothing to talk about...
Dardis' telling of this poignant tale is serviceable. He knows the early days of Hollywood; his previous book Some Time in the Sun was a good account of how writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West functioned at the dream factory. Yet too many sentences creep along under the crustacean weight of adjectives: "The staggering impact of the immense success of these shows on the entire entertainment world . . ." Worse, Dardis too often strains after bogus significance: "Like Ernest Hemingway, who also spent childhood summers on a lake in Michigan, Buster early became an extremely proficient duck hunter." Such...
...route to better pay, to say nothing of avoiding drastically shifting hours, is to work only on a temporary basis, hiring out to hospitals through agencies. In California alone, there are about 800 such agencies; their popularity has created serious shortages among regular hospital nursing staffs. Pay at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, for example, is $93 a day (after agency fees) for a temporary vs. $64 for a staff member...