Word: libbed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Breathless has no plot in the usual sense of the word. The script of the picture was a three-page memo. Situation, dialogue, locations were improvised every morning and shot off the cuff. By these casual means Godard has achieved a sort of ad-lib epic, a Joycean harangue of images in which the only real continuity is the irrational coherence of nightmare. Yet, like many nightmares, Breathless has its crazy humor, its anarchic beauty, its night-mind meaning...
...Actor-Playwright Peter Ustinov were to ad-lib a novel on the stage or before a TV camera, it might turn out very well. With his wit, his storyteller's flair and his crafty talent for wedding the ridiculous to the dramatic, he might easily become an important prose bard. But Ustinov wants to write. While he did reasonably well in his engaging 1957 comedy, Romanoff and Juliet, he failed badly last year in his book of short stories. Add a Dash of Pity. To his credit, Ustinov refuses to quit: he has written a first novel...
...Stevenson and Kennedy is that Adlai puts subordinate clauses in all the speeches you write and Jack takes them out." Frequently, sensing the mood of his audience. Kennedy discards his prepared text altogether and speaks fluently off the cuff (both Nixon and Kennedy are at their best in ad-lib situations ). His speeches are breathlessly brief: never more than five minutes in daytime appearances, with an outside limit of 20 minutes for an evening speech. Oftentimes people who have waited long wish there were more. Kennedy seems almost apologetic about keeping his audiences too long; he plunges directly...
Time to Nap? Kennedy got moving like a honeybee in the spring. He patrolled the reaches of Los Angeles in a white Cadillac. Invading caucus after caucus, he made his plea for support, fitting each ad-lib speech to the mood of the moment or the region. Farmers need help, he told lowans; the West's natural resources need development, he warned Coloradans. On and on he pushed, relentlessly, coolly, gathering applause, staving off trouble from the opposition. Between caucuses, he held court with a parade of politicos in his Biltmore suite (Apartment Q), or checked new lists...
...Ball at the Astor, socialites shelled out $150 a ticket only to find themselves at a party snubbed by its hoped-for guest of honor. (Said an aide: "The general does not like to attend empty social affairs.") And for a touchy moment or two, pickets carried placards crying "Libérez l'Algérie," but minus his eyeglasses the nearsighted general never noticed...