Word: larking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Aside from a few major hits such as Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid and When Harry Met Sally . . ., Columbia's movie-production unit has been floundering for years. The most spectacular flop: Ishtar, the Dustin Hoffman-Warren Beatty desert lark released in 1987, which lost $25 million. Three top-management teams have come and gone since CEO David Begelman was forced out in 1978 amid a financing scandal. Coca-Cola, which bought the studio in 1982 and still controls 49% of its stock, fired British producer David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire) in 1987 after barely a year at the helm, during...
...revelry from which it springs, is of a story that concludes with a vision of unity, of natural harmony. So, after all the lunacies and bumps of Shakespeare's starlit night are over, the spirits come down to put everything to right, and the lovers awaken with the morning lark only to suspect that it was all a dream. Love is blind, and its victims are mad, the poet suggests, but only for a night, a brief, forgetful spell. Perhaps even in 1600 that might have seemed an escapist thought; in 1989, however, a midsummer night's dream...
...built through steady work in look-alike roles. But in these free-for-all days, actors -- and especially actresses -- are on their own. They are defined more as artists than as stars; they market their craft, not their luminous personalities. They may win star parts or, on a lark, show up in cameo roles. They may take a year off to work in the theater or have a baby. The easy momentum of the golden age has vanished in an industry where most of the box- office breadwinners are men, and an actress's career rides on an audience...
...read outside hard-covers, are now routinely bounced off satellites with the weather reports. "Making love," one of the sweetest phrases in the language, now suggests a cause of death. Still, the world is sharply divided into the sick and the well, and AIDS can be something of a lark if you are a robust heterosexual college student at a safe-sex lecture where the instructor demonstrates condom use on a cucumber. Only 4% of adult cases are known to have been caused through heterosexual contact. But for homosexual and bisexual males, who account for 63% of the cases, AIDS...
...finds some of it on the delicate border between life and art. In "Put Yourself in My Shoes," Carver tells the story of a young writer named Myers who gets together with his wife on Christmas eve. He and his wife seem to be separated. For a lark, they visit their old landlords, the Morgans. The Morgans are a stodgy and selfish couple, who try to spin a few yarns for Myers, sententiously advising him to recycle the yarns as "material...