Word: magician
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Show-biz stirrings came early. As a teenager, Hall hired himself out as a magician at parties and played drums and bass guitar in a couple of groups. He started college at Ohio University and finished at Kent State, where he majored in speech communication and played the lead in the musical Purlie Victorious. After graduation, Hall went to work in Detroit for Noxell, the makers of Noxema skin cream. But one evening after tuning in to a Tonight show segment, he decided the moment had come "to do what I'd been dreaming about." He quit...
...drawings to children's book editors. "Everybody else called them odd," he recalls. "I didn't." The editors liked the oddness. In 1979 Van Allsburg made his debut with The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, in which a boy and a dog stumble onto the house of a magician who wears a fez and blows perfect smoke rings. Typically, the story ends in ambiguity: the reader never knows for sure whether the magician turns Fritz, the signature bull terrier that has appeared in all of Van Allsburg's subsequent books, into a duck...
...world, America has lost some of its radiant pride of place. Japan has risen. Europe is organizing itself into a new collective power. The Soviet Union is struggling to escape the dustbin of history. Gorbachev, a magician of much elan, attempts to rescind the hoax of Communism without denouncing its idea. It is fascinating to watch a smart man trying to defend a premise that is beneath his intelligence...
...Herman and George Lucas? Features an earthquake, a shipwreck, a giant bee, several gunfights and a zillion other acts of harmless mayhem? Cost about $500 million to produce -- as much as ten whole Ishtars? And, with gobs of charm, sly wit and relentless good cheer, brings off the film magician's trick of making make-believe believable...
...failure). A Cleveland native, Hall started his show-biz career as a stand-up comic and became host of the TV series Solid Gold. But he claims he has wanted to do a talk show since age twelve: he calls Carson his "idol" and, like Johnny, was a child magician. When Paramount TV initially offered him his own show, Hall was reluctant, but he had a vision as a guest with Carson. "During a commercial, he and I were comparing coin tricks," he says, "and I realized that it was my mission in life to do a talk show...