Word: horowitz
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...viewer wrote, "My mother recently had an unfortunate experience with Mrs. Smith's chicken crepes." The audience tensed. Host David Horowitz let the suspense mount, holding the letter in his hand, pausing as if he were about to hop a slow freight into the twilight zone. Then he related the outcome: Mom-who isn't the kind of person who usually does these things-sat down and dropped the Mrs. Smith folks a line. She told them what one of their featherweight delicacies had done to her dental work, and the folks at Mrs. Smith sent...
...quite. Horowitz runs a lively, sometimes hectoring weekly half hour of consumer advocacy out of Los Angeles' KNBC, which is syndicated to 36 stations and takes a special delight in giving TV commercials the hotfoot. There are other raisers of consumer consciousness who are just as solid-NBC's Betty Furness, or 20/20's John Stossel-but none can quite match Horowitz's zealous show-biz savvy. Looking a little like the recording secretary of the Beverly Hills Jaycees, Horowitz gets cozy with his studio audience. He answers their questions; he invites them up at show...
...investigative reporter," says Horowitz, 43, a former NBC News correspondent. "Our show is basically the opposite end of what they do on Madison Avenue. Fewer and fewer people believe commercials-with good reason." The Tonka Toy Co. ran an ad that showed one of its toy trucks surviving a stomping by an elephant. Horowitz got his own Tonka and submitted it to pachyderm pummeling at the Los Angeles Zoo. When the vehicle was removed from the cage, it was crushed flatter than a shadow...
...Watching Horowitz unsuccessfully trying to shatter glass with a high note recorded on Memorex tape is a little like watching Houdini expose a séance. Commercials are viewed as a kind of ghost hunting; the greater fun is for viewers to see how they are being fooled, to see the bamboozler bamboozled. Most of the products Horowitz tests pass with high marks-he estimates 75%-but the blood sport is watching the advertisers turn into bozos when Horowitz can't wipe the scrawl off the Sherwin-Williams paint job, when three dozen eggs (out of 14 dozen...
...ALWAYS liked the music. He started with piano lessons when he was four. In junior high, he won the Griffith Foundation New York-area piano competition; in high school, after his third attempt, he won the New New York Times/WQXR piano competition. Judges for the latter competition included Horowitz, Rubinstein and Serkin, Krieger recalls, "and if I don't remember which one judged the contest, I can tell you this: they all had blue eyes...