Word: hucksters
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...viciously funny glimpses of a commercial photographer, a comedian (Keenan Wynn), an actor's agent (Edward Arnold) and two skilled script-plumbers; and the singing commercials are as horribly funny as the real thing. Ava Gardner is lush as the nightclub singer and Clark Gable plays his huckster firmly...
...still too early to tell what Hollywood will do with Deborah Kerr, or vice versa. She has to huckster a pretty thin role for an actress of her charm and ability-and do what she can with it while M-G-M is huckstering the daylights out of her. She goes through the assigned paces with a good grace, refining them with considerable shrewdness and as much concern for more serious artistry as the heavily commercial traffic will bear...
Flossy disagrees with the cynical huckster's view that she is addressing "slobs in a cold-water flat." She scans with a warmly attentive eye her 500 weekly fan letters (suggested one: "Give us lots of love and philosophy"). Mixed in with the love, philosophy, recipes, and "reviews of all the proper books," Flossy also gives them an occasional unscheduled laugh: e.g., when Bing Crosby visited her show, her eyelashes almost fell off when she learned that a baseball game could last longer than nine innings...
Beating Out the Figures. The "telephone coincidental" reports are gathered, run through I.B.M. machines, beaten into percentages and published every two weeks in "the pocket piece," a small green booklet that is every huckster's Bible. Every network hour is tabulated and every commercially sponsored program is rated by "points." Example: the 31.1 top mark of Bob Hope in the last Hooperating means that 31.1 out of every hundred persons telephoned while the Hope show was going on told the Hooperaters that they were listening to Hope. People who did not answer the phone were counted as not listening...
...listened?" The service makes no claim even to an answer on that. Each Hooper point does not necessarily equal a million listeners (e.g., 31,100,000 for Hope). Hooper says that that rule-of-thumb may be true, but as far as he is concerned, it is just a huckster's sales pitch...