Word: hollywoodizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kopit's Bone-the-Fish is a malicious and effective send-up of David Mamet's Broadway hit about Hollywood greed, Speed-the-Plow. Yet it has a vigor, and vinegar, of its own. Kopit's wry premise is to take the rhetorical excesses of ambition -- people saying they would slit their wrists, eat excrement or give up an intimate body part to achieve some goal -- and render them literally. His hustlers from the fringe of the movie business (Joseph Ragno and Bruce Adler) are more than a little crazy. Even crazier is the fact that their self- abasement might...
Where are the teenpix of yesterday? Gone with the demographic wind. As the U.S. movie audience ages toward thirtysomething, Hollywood has discarded the teen genre like so many Molly Ringwald paper dolls. What's left? Only caustic satire, as in the new black comedy Heathers, or retro fantasy, as in Sing...
...cliches of a Broadway backstage story to a decrepit Brooklyn Central High and populates it with Sesame Street renegades. Each class puts on a musical skit, or "sing," with groups led by a black, a Greek, an Italian and a Jew -- the "rainbow coalition" that exists only in Hollywood musicals. Yes, the tough Italian stud (Peter Dobson) falls for the sweet Jewish girl (Jessica Steen). And, honest, when the star of her skit gets knocked unconscious, the stud takes over and saves the show. You're going out there a punkster, but you've got to come back a star...
Schama's splendid recounting soon convinces us, however, that much of what we thought we knew is wrong, a collection of Hollywood versions of 19th century romances: Leslie Howard as "that demmed elusive Pimpernel," or Ronald Colman doing a "far, far better thing" by accepting the fate prescribed by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. Schama's reality is very different from the legends...
Austin (Kevin Connell) is an uptight Ivy grad struggling desperately to sell his romantic "period piece" to a Hollywood producer. Lee, (Alex Norman) his older brother, is a macho, beer-guzzling thief with considerable disdain for Austin's sheltered intellectual life. When the brothers get holed up together in their mother's house, sparks fly. Insults fly. Silverware, toasters and golf clubs fly, too. By the end of Sam Shepard's True West, the kitchen is a disaster area worthy of any Harvard undergrad's living quarters. Not even the cast from Risky Business could clean up this mess before...