Word: lehman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...taut, 96min. primer in the ways bright people talked, dressed and hurt each other. Yet the film was a flop at the box office (Winchell announced, with apparent pleasure, that it lost $2 million) and invisible at awards time (it was the only one of Lehman's 50s scripts that did not win a Writers Guild nomination). Since then, "Sweet Smell" has become a retro-classic. Its wonderfully ornate cynicism is cited in "Mad Max," "Diner," "Rain Man" and "Boogie Nights" and on "The Simpsons"; this week's A&E special "New York at the Movies" had Martin Scorsese, Spike...
...Sidney Falco - what underworld poetry that name expresses! What an amalgam of Jewish brain and Italian muscle! What a collision of the scurrying nebbish (Sidney) and the soaring predator (falcon)! Sidney is the protagonist of "Sweet Smell of Success," originally a novelette by Ernest Lehman, published in 1950 in Cosmopolitan. Seven years later, the story, rewritten by playwright Clifford Odets, was made into a film directed by Alexander Mackendrick and starring Curtis as Sidney and Lancaster as the Winchellesque columnist J.J. Hunsecker - another fabulous name, for an Attila who sucks the honey out of his minions and spits it into...
...brother makes a rotten father and mother, especially if he also happens to be J.J. Hunsecker." - Susie Hunsecker in Ernest Lehman's 1950 story...
...This was an inside job - a story that could have been written only by a press agent. In the early 40s, Lehman had ground out flackery for the noted press agent Irving Hoffman, who was close to Winchell. A-brim with fascination-repulsion for the Broadway milieu, Lehman wrote a long story about a columnist and a press agent. He sold it to Cosmopolitan. But before the issue hit the stands, Hoffman was leaked (what else?) the story and felt betrayed, not just for himself but what he saw as calumny toward the powerful columnist. To Lehman, the complaint must...
...plot of Lehman's original story is duplicated in the film and elaborated on in the show. Goes like this...