Word: magoo
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Maney's stunts are those of a born tongue-in-cheeker. When he did the publicity for The Great Magoo, which the critics drubbed, he had a hand in the decision of its playwrights, Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, to lie in state in separate coffins at a funeral parlor. For Billy Rose, Maney concocted an advertisement for "100 bona fide noblemen" to serve as dancing partners at Rose's Fort Worth Frontier Centennial. "In answering," read the ad, "submit photographs in uniform, with orders, ribbons and decorations evident. . . . Bogus counts, masqueraders and descend ants of the Dauphin...
Ceiling Zero (by Frank Wead; Brock Pemberton, producer). The cycle of breezy institutional drama started by The Front Page has exploited the Salvation Army (Torch Song), the circus (Privilege Car), the side show (The Great Magoo), the hospital (Men in White) and even the penny arcade (Penny Arcade). But until Ceiling Zero came along, no playwright had felt qualified to dramatize the excitement and color surrounding the operations of a commercial airline. That job has fallen to Lieut. Commander Frank Wead, U. S. N. retired, leader of the Navy's 1923 Schneider Cup squadron, who turned to fiction...
Unfortunately, a posthumous cast is almost all that distinguishes Shoot the Works from innumerable other cinemusi-comedies. It was loosely assembled from Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler's loose play, The Great Magoo, and named after "a revue produced by Heywood Broun two years ago. Retold is the familiar narrative about a young actress who makes good and her overconfident lover, a sidewalk concessionaire named Nicky Nelson (Jack Oakie), who absents himself during" the middle of the story to facilitate her career. Best song: "With My Eyes Wide Open, I'm Dreaming." Best joke: the reply of Nicky...
...Great Magoo (by Gene Fowler & Ben Hecht; Billy Rose, producer). Broadway, Burlesque, Privilege Car, Lily Turner led a diminishingly interested theatrical public behind the scenes of a night club, a burlesque show, a circus, a medicine show. With one savage sweep, hard-boiled Messrs. Fowler & Hecht have cleaned up the list by setting their play in a sideshow, musicomedy rehearsal hall and flea circus. What happens: A barker (Paul Kelly), who considers all women "magoos" (unflattering sideshow epithet), finally falls in love with a carnival queen (Claire Carlton). When ambition leads her to throw in her lot with a theatrical...
...Great Magoo, Ben Hecht & Gene Fowler's candidate for the Pulitzer Prize...