Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...second color-television commercial, an elaborate mock subway entrance was built on an empty Hollywood lot, and the lion performed on it. The rest of the lion scene...
Died. Frances Farmer, 56, honey-haired Broadway and Hollywood beauty of the late '30s; of cancer; in Indianapolis. Her fourth movie, Come and Get It, was a smash hit in 1936, and she conquered Broadway with equal ease a year later in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy. After that came raging fights with coworkers, bouts of alcoholism and finally, mental breakdown. Eventually, she recovered her health and went on to host a popular Indianapolis TV show...
Nothing else in American fiction radiates the compacted fury of this little parable. Some critics were stunned and said so-Miss Lonelyhearts seemed certain of a big sale. But just before copies could be shipped to the bookstores, West's publisher went bankrupt. West fled to Hollywood, where with occasional interruptions he spent the rest of his life composing movie scripts he considered "unadulterated bubameiser...
...book puts a cute left spin on the old Horatio Alger story and burlesques the American Dream as a horribly funny fascist nightmare. West was never a Communist but in 1935 his radical sympathies were strengthened by the experience of being down and out on the seamy side of Hollywood. Supported by S.J. Perelman, who had married his sister, West lived in the Pa-Va-Sed, a scabby little apartment hotel in the lower depths of movieland. The experience hurt his pride and damaged his health, but it gave him the boiling background for the best novel ever written about...
Like West's other books, The Day of the Locust (1939) is essentially a loose society of sketches that enlarge a theme. The World's Illusion is objectified as Hollywood, and Hollywood is personified in Faye Greener, a bitch every man in the book is after. There are no full-fleshed characters, but the book is scaled like a snake with glittering little momentary selves: studio Eskimos, horseparlor dwarfs, rentable Texans and a legion of sad-eyed nobodies who have "come to California to die." Eros is their ethos, violence their pastime. They drift toward a climax...