Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Benjamin Britten: Spring Symphony (Soprano Sheila Armstrong, Mezzo Janet Baker, Tenor Robert Tear, St. Clement Danes School Boys' Choir, London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Andre Previn conductor, Angel). Berlin born and Hollywood bred, Previn continues to show a surprising flair for English music. Here he leads a zesty performance of a piece that, like so much English music, makes a strength of its provincialism: it has medieval and folk echoes, strikes a resolutely winsome and pastoral note, and is steeped in native literature (with settings of verses by poets from Herrick and Blake to Auden). Britten composed it when...
Apocalypse Now becomes one more film afflicted with the disease of the terminal. Movies with two endings, or no endings, or three endings, or appended endings are as much a part of Hollywood history as Schwab's Drugstore or Hedda's hats. New closings tend to be happier than old ones, with boy getting girl after all, or star surviving rather than perishing. In Apache (1954), Burt Lancaster was first killed, then allowed to live on. What's Up Doc? (1972) initially ended with a bittersweet goodbye between Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand...
When the ending of a film is altered late in production, the change-Coppola notwithstanding-is usually made in the hope of raising box office receipts. Alterations often come after a preview audience has seen the movie and filled out questionnaires, which are studied by Hollywood executives with the same kind of eager dread White House aides must feel when they pore over the latest Gallup. Even the best and most independent directors find audience reaction helpful: Stanley Kubrick first filmed a wild custard-pie fight between the Americans and the Soviets as a final scene for Dr. Strangelove...
Many directors, of course, do not have the right of final cut, or editing, that most crucial of Hollywood privileges. If it belongs to the producer or the studio head, the director is outclimaxed. William Wyler, for example, directed Wuthering Heights for Samuel Goldwyn in 1939, closing the film with both main characters, Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) and Catherine (Merle Oberon), dead. Such a somber ending greatly disturbed Goldwyn, and he asked Wyler to insert a brief clip of the two lovers in heaven. The director firmly refused. Thus it was a stunned Wyler who attended the premiere and watched Heathcliff...
...correct. Still, that is the way it was intended to be. When I called the Boston Clamshell office the Wednesday before the rally, a member told me that Saturday's rally was not planned to be large and that Sunday's rally was going to be the Hollywood production. I feel Sunday's event lived up to this billing. The field was crowded with enthusiastic people when I left. Jonathan D. Rabinovitz...