Word: kushnick
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Even in death the AIDS victim is shunned. In St. Louis and New York, undertakers have refused to embalm the remains of patients. In Los Angeles, a funeral parlor was asked to handle the body of three-year-old Sammy Kushnick, who had died from AIDS contracted through a blood transfusion. Until a rabbi intervened, they refused to dress the boy in the clothes and prayer shawl his parents had selected for his burial...
...Carter, who co-wrote the screenplay, and director Betty Thomas), and the movie gives a good picture, in broad strokes, of how the TV business runs: badly, most of the time. NBC's executives, surprised by Carson's retirement and egged on by Leno's aggressive manager, Helen Kushnick (Kathy Bates), promised the job to Jay without comprehending how it would upset Dave. Letterman, who felt he was entitled to the Tonight post but was unwilling to fight for it, hired a new agent, Michael Ovitz (Treat Williams), who orchestrated the bidding war that had NBC, at the last minute...
...caricatures rankle. Kushnick was certainly an abrasive advocate for her client; once, furious that NBC let its coverage of the Republican National Convention run long, delaying the start of the Tonight Show, she sent the studio audience home and forced the network to air a rerun. But the movie's portrayal of her power-mad bitchiness, even to Leno ("Stand up straight, for chrisakes; you're the host of the Tonight Show!"), leaves the viewer wondering why Leno was loyal to her for so long. Similarly, the NBC executives are too wimpy and stupid to be believed. In one scene...
...host. But Letterman, once regarded as Carson's heir apparent, was publicly grumpy at being passed over. And Leno, a well-liked and hardworking comic, has suffered a shocking run of bad publicity, much of it stemming from the hardball booking tactics employed by his departed executive producer Helen Kushnick...
EVEN IN HOLLYWOOD, FEW WOULD RECOGNIZE HELEN Kushnick if they passed her on the street. But they all know the talented young comic she discovered two decades ago and guided to glory. Weathering a Sophoclean series of tragedies (her son's death from AIDS in 1983, her husband's death from cancer in 1989), Kushnick became the executive producer of the legendary Tonight show when her protege, Jay Leno, succeeded Johnny Carson in May. Then with an almost willful recklessness, Kushnick reportedly began demanding that stars who wanted to appear with Leno on the Tonight show had to boycott...