Word: manhattanization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jerry Seinfeld is being sued for $100 million by a former friend who says a character in the TV show was based on him, a lawyer for the plaintiff said Monday. In a 29-page civil suit filed Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court, Michael Costanza, 43, accuses the comedian of slander, libel and unauthorized use of his name, likeness and persona for the character George Costanza. A lawyer for the real Costanza says that, like the character played by Jason Alexander, his client is "short, heavyset and bald...
...place. The city is built on simulation, quotation, weird unconvincing displacements, in which cultural icons are endlessly but never convincingly quoted. Here is the Luxor Hotel, that huge silly pyramid with its plaster Anubises and fiber-glass Amon-Ras, its cavernous interior housing a facsimile of the Manhattan skyline. Here, under construction, is a casino in the form of the Doges Palace in Venice, complete with a small-scale version of the Campanile bearing a replica of the original's gilded angel on its vertex. Here too is Caesars Palace, looking like the architectural dream of an illiterate Mussolini...
...world of Dena Nordstrom, a glamorous TV newswoman, people come in two varieties: corn pone and ruthless shark. The former populate the safe, static Missouri town of Dena's early youth, and the latter stalk the corridors of Manhattan, where career-obsessed Dena collapses from stress. She's forced finally to confront the hole at the middle of her existence: the unexplained disappearance of her mother when Dena was just 15. As the narrative shifts in time and place to unravel the mystery, the action is as shamelessly unsubtle as the characters are cliched. That said, this third novel from...
This is show business at its most elemental. The annual Independent Feature Film Market, which took place last month at a Manhattan multiplex, typically features some 200 feature-length movies (many not yet even finished) competing for investors, distributors, exposure, oxygen, life. With an atmosphere of equal parts hubris and desperation, it is a cross between a trade show, a film festival and a bazaar, and a far cry from what most people envision when they think of independent film: Matt Damon smoking cigars at a Miramax Oscar party. Since I had long been curious about the unsung breadth...
...marketing as hand-to-hand combat, an uneasily direct communion between filmmaker and potential audience member. The pitches: a blaxploitation parody starring a white guy! An ex-cop grandma wages war on her grandson's kidnappers! A lost relic with aphrodisiacal powers--Jesus' foreskin--turns up in Manhattan! "Pringles financed my movie," a commercial actor turned documentarian told me. The budget for one "romantic drama" came from the insurance settlement the writer-director received after he was injured in an auto accident. You had to admire the sheer nerve on display. And who knows? Maybe I was talking...