Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FIGURE THAT HOLLYWOOD promised to most of America what the Gatsbys did once upon a time: the possibility of godhoods and kingdoms of wealth not as afterlife's reward but as descended upon the chosen among men. It is not, after all, by accident that socialite and actor alike go by the name of "star"--star who could be god to more men than any man might be devil, star whose mortal success might so seem to fulfill the richest reddest blooded fantasies of the most American that it could appear as immortality achieved on earth. Gatsby would...
...preposterously, that God gives all things equally to all men. Then if mortal life is rotten for most, the soul's reward will be golden. Then too, mortal stardom as every man's dream may be the star's nightmare. As it was Gatsby's, it would later be Hollywood's. Yes, Gatsby's falling star might have seen it writ in the stars that he and his kind would pass on the dreams of America to Hollywood. The talent though not the creed would change, and the next generation of immortals might be his progeny...
...Hollywood was indeed, by the 1940s, consumed by a spirit not unlike the one which had so driven Gatsby: the golden dream of love and money. Though Gatsby's funeral was unattended, the devil of his opportunism rose as a phoenix in Hollywood, there to mainline his ambitions into the blood-stream of America, and to deposit his dreams in a substratum of the American mind...
...part of a lot of people; more theatrical ingenuity and musical panache than most of this year's desperately gauzy Broadway revivals. Everyone knew from the start that The Wizard of Oz couldn't be put back on the stage in toto, so they didn't try to out-Hollywood Hollywood in the cloying way that's made so many recent Harvard musicals hopelessly wan and disappointing...
...sometimes frigid tinsel of the movie, and most of all, fresh music. Music director David Garlock, working with half a dozen orchestrators and a fine 21-member orchestra, has shined up the original score with some fairly sophisticated arrangements that owe more to modern classical music than to Hollywood. But these changes are never pretentious and the orchestra can rip into genuine schmaltz when it's called...