Word: hollywoodism
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While her childhood daydreams may have stopped at the beginning of the alphabet, Mira’s meteoric rise has shown no signs of slowing down. Before bursting onto the Hollywood scene, her penchant for As got her all the way to Harvard, where she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian Studies. As the former Cabot House resident—she loved the Quad, by the way—lounges in a spacious conference room on the second floor of the luxurious Ritz Carlton Boston Common, she chats casually about her latest film, Triumph of Love, while reflecting...
...decision to spurn the Hollywood life in favor of a normal childhood was the right one, but the acting bug was never fully squashed. Mira eventually got a manager at the age of 16 and began auditioning for parts prior to her first year at Harvard. During these early years of her career, the opportunities were less than stellar. “In the middle of college,” says Mira, “I was offered a horror movie which was so salacious and disgusting that I turned it down. The director said, ‘I don?...
...America and its film industry had not been so profoundly racist, Robeson would have been on his way West. But Hollywood thought that blacks should simply shuffle and mewl; so Robeson's one major U.S. film role was in Dudley Murphy's 1933 independent film production (released by United Artists) of "The Emperor Jones." The spectacle of Robeson lording it over not only black savages but a white trader in the 1933 "Emperor Jones" film was galvanizing. And threatening: he'd have to find film work elsewhere...
...often signed for films expecting script approval, only to feel trapped in stereotype by the time of shooting. So the camera catches him in the corpse of his original enthusiasm--an actor's version of passive resistance. Perhaps his naivety was as huge as his talent. He believed that Hollywood moguls would give a black actor (any actor) final cut, and that Stalinism was not slavery but liberation. Through three decades of Soviet tyranny (including the murder of one of his Russian-Jewish friends), he remained faithful to the U.S.S.R. And here his charm failed him. He could sell sand...
Granted, it is unlikely that budding Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz said to himself fresh out of college, “I want to be famous, but I think Hollywood is too phony, so I’ll become a professor.” But a hotshot professor may be tempted to coast on the wake of early accomplishments into a prosperous but unproductive middle age. Harvard should not be in the business of providing office space to professors who have outlived their time in the academic sun, even if they are faddish talking-heads or best-selling...