Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...unwittingly caricature their own fallibility as spouses. ABC was shrewd enough to cast Jack Klugman, the only possible substitute for Walter Matthau, as the slovenly sportswriter. This time around, his fastidious roommate is played by Tony Randall who, if not up to Broadway Predecessor Art Carney, is apter than Hollywood's Jack Lemmon. Pray for Simon's babies...
...auto-critique section of the movie, that concept is used like a dissecting needle to tease at our ideas about films and filmmakers. In such a schema the director is an oppressor, and actors are members of an oppressed class. An actor, especially a Hollywood actor, is a tool of his own exploitation because he willingly and professionally dons new selves dictated by the convictions (whims) of the director. It becomes impossible to make a movie about repression, for any movie is repression. The auto-critique, the attenuated scenes of actors applying make-up, the unmoving shots held for four...
...self-loathing Maria experiences in the course of a routinely blase abortion-alone? To escape, or perhaps just to survive, Maria "fixed her imagination on a needle dripping sodium pentathlon into her arm.... When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernardino and straight out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world." Again, the desert. It all leads back to the nothing that is desert...
Marion shared that vision when he fled the duplicitous world of his mother's Hollywood entourage. But Marion was cursed with an intensely painful moral sense-he never escaped adolescent dreams of becoming a priest-which ultimately short-circuited his attempts to destroy himself and those around him in great purges of oblivion. BZ is equally disgusted-and so, it would seem, is Joan Didion, who writes of her allegiance with Marion in an essay entitled "On Morality"-but BZ lacks Marion's moral fervor. BZ is simply tired. The fervor has long since burnt away. BZ confronts Maria with...
...there is any deficiency in the novel it lies in our lack of preparation for BZ's confession of fellowship with Maria. To credit it to the hypocrisy-shattering side-effects of his homosexuality is not enough. Lord knows, in Hollywood, where homosexuality seems just another building block in the whole rotten institution, the posturing that goes into both concealing and flaunting homosexual tastes is just as appalling as all the other pretenses with which the town is infected. But then the novel is Maria's story, and that alone would prevent us from understanding more...