Word: hollywood
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More than 20 hardware manufacturers plan to release the first generation of DVD players this spring (probable asking price: $500 to $1,000), and computer makers are scrambling to produce new PCs equipped to play DVD-ROMs. What's less clear is how quickly Hollywood studios will clamber aboard the DVD bandwagon and release their movies on the untested new format. DVD's raison d'etre, after all, is to send VHS tapes and laser discs, the studios' cash cows, the way of all eight-tracks. This week's blizzard of dvd-themed press releases at the Las Vegas show...
...instance, there was the bitter strike of Hollywood screenwriters, partly over the studios' insistence that the writers accept a rollback of the rerun payments called residuals. Studio executives were saying writers had to make some sacrifices in the leaner economic conditions the industry was facing. Then, in an article in the New Yorker, Joan Didion pointed out that the total received in residuals by all 9,000 members of the Writers Guild was $58 million and that Eisner's 1987 compensation was an estimated $63 million...
...make up my mind about the Oakland, California, school board's decision last month to certify Ebonics as an official language for black folks, so I decided to consult the experts. I put in a call to the Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes in a black section of Hollywood. The Kingfish answered. "Holy mack'rul dere, Andy, somebody wants to talk 'bout dis 'ere Ebonics. Could you or Tonto tell Buckwheat come to da phone? He de resident expert...
Ingrid Bergman "wasn't beautiful like Garbo, but she was radiantly appetizing...her presence was like breakfast on a sunny morning," Christopher Isherwood confessed to his diary in 1941 when he was a recent arrival in Hollywood, writing scripts for MGM. Nine pages later, he's not only describing the Marx Brothers jumping all over Somerset Maugham, "screaming like devils," but also watching Aldous Huxley and Charlie Chaplin singing old London music-hall songs on the Santa Monica Pier. No wonder the unchanging center of Isherwood's life, the Hindu Vedantist teacher Swami Prabhavananda, asked his worldly disciple to bring...
...human got the better of his longing for the divine, and his decent and sincere commitment to a life of goodness was undone by his distrust of goody-goodness. Yet he never stopped trying: during the war he joined the Quakers in Pennsylvania, helping refugees. Later, returning to Hollywood, he lived for two years as a monk, escaping now and then to friends' houses as "a haven of peace after the tumults of monastic life." How "delightful religion used to be," he notes, "in the days when I wasn't doing anything particular about...