Word: lurid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After his death in 1978, Ed Wood got the last laugh: his films were rediscovered, first as camp and now as fodder for a light industry in cultural revisionism. The shaggy hagiography includes a breezily lurid documentary, Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora; a second documentary on the making of Plan 9; and even a porno homage -- Plan 69 from Outer Space. And now there's Tim Burton's surprisingly listless biopic, known simply as Ed Wood. Once a never-was, Wood is now a brand name...
...show. Stone is too fuzzy-headed a satirist to realize that he has got it precisely backward. Tabloid shows like A Current Affair and America's Most Wanted may be guilty of many things, but glorifying criminals is hardly one of them. With their sensationalistic re-creations of lurid crimes, tear- jerking interviews with bereaved family members and relentlessly alarmist tone, the tabloids have, more likely, helped foment the nation's law-and-order frenzy. If anybody deserves blame for romanticizing on-the-run killers like Stone's protagonists, Mickey and Mallory (or freeway fugitives like O.J. Simpson...
...horribly spoiled brat. Cosseted, deferred to, aware that a tantrum could get him anything he wanted, he grew up with serious delusions of creative omnipotence -- which, as time went by, coexisted with equally serious problems of sexual impotence, caused (or so he said) by a book with lurid illustrations of the effects of venereal disease that his father had shown him. Dali turned out to be the exact opposite of Picasso's phallicism. He was thrilled by softness, flaccidity. "Nothing," he wrote, "can be regarded as too slimy, gelatinous, quivering, indeterminate or ignominious to be desired...
...format is too new to have generated any definitive ratings data. But proponents say it comes in response to surveys showing that viewers are fed up with local TV's obsession with lurid crimes. Especially in such cities as New York, Los Angeles and Miami, even routine murders and rapes are given the TV equivalent of screaming headlines almost every day of the week. "The coverage of crime has become totally disproportionate to what's really happening in society," says Joseph Angotti, a former senior vice president of NBC News and now a professor of communications at the University...
...doubt aware in the Entertainment Tonight, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, E! Entertainment Television era -- occur every November, February and May. These are the months when TV stations receive ratings that will allow them to fix their advertising rates for the coming months, prompting the networks to trundle out their most lurid and spectacular offerings. This May, for instance, ABC has scored with an apocalyptic four- part mini-series based on Stephen King's The Stand; CBS is airing a TV movie with the can't-miss title Menendez; Fox inexplicably wasted its own Menendez movie on the nonsweeps month of April...