Word: instants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nostalgia is a fine thing, but Fenway Park, once the quaint sanctum of the national pastime, now has a snazzy electronic instant replay board to keep the spectators from missing anything and moving baseball caps to keep pitchers from walking. Fans can lament the passing of real grass and the batting pitcher, but the Grand Old Game has gone the route of Playboy; the magazine is still around, but the presentation is not quite the same. This is show-biz, folks, less rehearsed and manipulated than TV or the movies, but big-time mass entertainment...
...exonerate himself, or at least present himself as a tragic figure, a modern-day Caligula. "I brought myself down. I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and twisted it with relish." So even if he is guilty--and Nixon never admitted that for an instant--at least, he claims, he's a hero. But Nixon's analogy is faulty: Caligula was trapped by life and a personal moral vision. That's something Richard Nixon conspicuously lacks...
Polaroid Founder-Chairman Edwin Land is a showman who likes to use his corporation's annual meetings to stage splashy demonstrations of the company's latest instant-photography miracles. Last week he had a stunning new one to display: instant movies, which Polaroid is preparing to market on a limited basis in the fall after 30 years of experimenting. So Land put on a show that lived up to his own dry comment: "Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess." Each of the 3,800 shareholders present in Needham, Mass., got a chance to shoot films...
Shareholders had more than the new Polavision system to cheer about. The company's instant still-picture cameras, including the Pronto line (the cheapest sells at discount for less than $50) introduced about a year ago, are doing very well. They have prevented archrival Eastman Kodak, the giant of U.S. photography with sales of $5.4 billion, from grabbing as much of the market as expected in its first year in the instant-camera field.* Polaroid's 1976 sales of $950 million missed the magic billion-dollar mark by a shutter click, and its first-quarter 1977 profits jumped...
...problem that Polavision apparently will not encounter, at least any time soon, is competition from Kodak. At the Kodak annual meeting, held on the same day as Polaroid's, Chairman Walter Fallon indicated to a generally critical audience that the company is not trying to develop an instant-movie system. Instead, it is concentrating on other goals, including trying to eliminate the flashbulb in still photography by making a whole new series of amateur cameras to use high-speed film. In March Kodak introduced a fast color film with an ASA rating...