Word: lear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hopes that the new sources of money for program development from the three networks will help diversify TV's offerings. But in Hollywood, independent producers shuddered at the commission's actions. Alan Horn, president of Norman Lear's Embassy Communications, feared that the ruling meant that new shows would once again be dictated by the networks. Said he: "The networks will be even more powerful tomorrow than they are today." He recalled that even so small an issue as whether Archie Bunker should be seen diapering his grandson had been contested by CBS. Viewers saw Archie change...
...younger director has since achieved nearly their stature. As for Kurosawa, he has been able to realize only three films since 1965-all outside the studio system-and in 1971, frustrated by the industry's intransigence, attempted suicide. His latest project, a retelling of King Lear set in medieval Japan, was recently postponed when Kurosawa's old studio, Toho, declined to invest in the film...
...Star Wars gave him visibility, but Raiders made him a box-office draw. "People want fairy tales in their lives, and I'm lucky enough to provide them," Ford says with a touch of cynicism. "There is no difference between doing this kind of film and playing King Lear. The actor's job is exactly the same: dress up and pretend." Nonetheless, he wanted Han to do something different in Jedi, and that was to die. "I thought it would give the myth some body. Han Solo really had no place to go. He's got no papa...
...this prankish revisionism, good-natured but a touch self-smitten, is the work of Peter Sellars, 25, the director who has worked similar changes on other classics: Handel's Orlando set at the Kennedy Space Center, King Lear featuring a Lincoln Continental. (Subject for a future master's thesis: Automotive Metaphor and the Sound of Cultural Collision in the Early Work of Peter Sellars.) Sellars clearly seeks not so much to rejustify all these stage pieces as to re-examine them, even reinvent them, for a contemporary audience. What is up-to-date in The Mikado is timeless...
...Lear, at "four score and upward," requires no such exploits, but in this production he must ride a horse, swing heavy swords, be bucketed with 900 gal. of water, go shirtless, eviscerate and eat a rabbit. With the grip of mortality shortening every Olivier breath, each gesture can seem heroic, each line he utters a precious gift from the depleting stock of his time. But there are reasons beyond enlightened sentimentality to treasure this Lear. To support him Olivier has assembled an actors' aristocracy: Diana Rigg and Dorothy Tutin as Lear's treacherous daughters Regan and Goneril, Colin...