Word: improvement
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...movies but are squeamish in showing the eroticism that once was crucial to the genre. The generation of "kids with beards," as Billy Wilder called Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, took their cues from a wide range of movie sources - Saturday-matinee serials, John Cassavetes improv dramas, European angst-athons - and if they got excessive, it was in kitsch and violence, not sex. Rodriguez got some puffs of grindhouse steam going in Sin City; but here, he and Tarantino are as puritanical as their predecessors. All bang-bang, no French kiss-kiss...
...with the premiere of the CW Television Network’s third season of “Beauty and the Geek,” it just might be the case that Dern’s outsider status is revoked for good. Last April, while handing out flyers for his improv comedy group, the Immediate Gratification Players, Dern was approached by a scout from the realty television show who invited him to an open casting call. “I was wearing a small red jacket and a bright yellow tie (the usual for members of IGP), and I had scruffy...
...performers are criticized as being "too hip for the room" or "playing to the band." Lenny was plenty hip, maybe excessively so; his performances were crash courses in bop argot and Yiddish. And he did love cracking up the musicians, since he thought of himself as their kinsman: an improv artist with words. But he gained a large following, even though his material, even in his early prime, was deemed too controversial for TV. (Remember, there were only three networks and some independent stations. And this was the 50s. Only Steve Allen, an early and loyal fan, booked Lenny...
...showbiz behavior. A live performance, for comics and rockers and actors, was henceforth designed not to seduce the audience, to play to the old expectations of charm and propriety, but to confront, challenge, titillate, outrage it. I think only jazz musicians had tried that before. Secure in their improv skills, they dared to investigate the farthest reaches of aural experimentation. And if the ringsiders didn't get it ? if a Charlie Parker was literally playing only to the band, and sometimes even they couldn't follow him ? too bad. If Miles Davis did a whole set with his back...
...veteran of the Harvard stage, but even so, he won’t feel adequately prepared when he gets behind the podium to give today’s male Ivy Oration. And that’s the way he likes it. “I have a tendency to improv in public speaking, which can sometimes lead to disastrous consequences,” says Burkle, leaning back in a chair in Quincy courtyard. “I feel like as long as I don’t make a racial slur, I’m okay...