Word: hollywoodizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whole nation barking Hollywood retorts--creepy but all too useful. In the daily battlefield of misunderstandings and impatient busyness, such locutions as Don't go there, In your dreams and What part of no don't you understand? are Nerf-like weaponry: When you're blind with anger or exasperation, you grab the nearest item of modular meanness. Of course, not all coolster coinages are overtly fightin' words. Indeed, some affect affectlessness: Same old, same old; Blah blah blah; Yadda yadda yadda. But given the right nuances, indifference can pack a wallop: Yadda will outsnide blah, for instance but wither...
...executives who run Hollywood have long believed that white audiences stay away from black-themed movies--outside of the time-tested action genre, that is. At $60 million-plus, The Preacher's Wife is by far the costliest all-black picture ever produced, making it one of the industry's most closely watched films during this busy holiday season. Of course, even defining what a "black" film is can be tricky. Studios generally affix that label to a picture that not only has a predominantly black cast but also deals with African-American themes. Thus, for movie executives, an Eddie...
...made for. Each character--the admiral in The Hunt for Red October, the White House chief of staff in In the Line of Fire, the CIA director in No Way Out--was a gruff, folksy, take-charge type, a guy just like--well, Fred Thompson. He got his Hollywood break literally playing himself in Marie, the movie version of a celebrated case he had handled as a trial lawyer, laying bare the clemency-selling scandal that landed a Tennessee Governor in prison. And he had already been a Senator on the screen by the time Tennessee voters got around...
That may sound like a case of putting the cart before the horse, but in Hollywood the cart and horse have been near equal partners ever since Star Wars demonstrated that revenues from film-related action figures, magnets and whatnot could rival a movie's ticket sales--and in at least two cases, Batman and Jurassic Park, even surpass box-office revenues. Some estimates place the overall movie tie-in business at $10 billion annually in retail sales worldwide. Entertainment executives make no bones about merchandising's importance. "It's something we all live with every day of our lives...
This week on television: Titanic, an all-new two-part miniseries on CBS. Why another recounting? "This is an endlessly fascinating and timeless story," defends executive producer Frank Konigsberg before hinting at the tragedy's real resonance for Hollywood types. "It's like the opening night of the biggest movie in the world flopping." This Titanic features a shipboard thief-rapist, played with curious jauntiness by Tim Curry. Unlike his doomed fellow passengers, Curry's character manages to escape from lines like "The ocean is so big, isn't it? It makes one feel so small and insignificant...