Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...across to the Dartmouth side. Back then the Dartmouth cheerleaders were Indians, their badges painted red, and they wore breached-clouts. To keep out of the cold they spent most of the afternoon huddled in their teepee set up on the sidelines. I think it was Farwell's idea to surprise them in there and make off with a couple of breechclouts. The teepee took on a life of its own, swaying back and forth, a struggle going on within, and then Farwell, overpowered, emerged missing most of his clothes...
...lobbied to put either chlamydia or rapid-detox on E.R. Chlamydia is a common problem and so, in Hollywood, is heroin addiction; one marquee actor is reported to have gone through ultrarapid detox just in time for this year's Academy Awards. In fact, says Baer, the idea for the detox episode came from a pediatric anesthesiologist invited by E.R. to help generate story lines...
...play within a play, only the player doesn't know he's in it. That's a beguiling idea for a Saturday Night Live skit or one of David Ives' miniature metaphysical farces. But can such a notion sustain a full-length film (even one that clocks in at a svelte 102 minutes)? And will the film satisfy the mass audience's interest in what is, after all, a Jim Carrey Summer Movie...
...cops out on greatness with a few truckling reaction shots at the climax. And one can question Niccol's vision of the future of TV: not 500 channels nattering to niche markets but one big show binding the world in the bogus bliss of pink-cheeked Americana. And the idea of a program uninterrupted by commercials (Christof makes his money from product placement and ancillary markets) is nearly as naive as Truman. The show is also pretty tame. Unlike most daytime-drama characters, Truman is a faithful husband who has no evil twin and does not suffer bouts of amnesia...
...Truman Show was his own paranoia. "I often felt people were lying to me," he declares. But as the '90s devolved into media spectacles of Bronco chases, freeway suicides and Jerry Springer grudge matches, the conceit of TV as worldwide psychodrama seemed prescient. "I used to think the idea was ludicrously farfetched," Niccol says, "but now I have to wonder...