Word: masterfulness
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...most appropriate tribute would be an hour and a half of silence. For Pinter was the master, virtually the copyright holder, of the pregnant pause that never gives birth. Words hurt in his plays, but the withholding of them can inflict deeper wounds - on the characters in his plays and on some of perplexed members of the audience. "Pinteresque" came to suggest an edgy break in an uncomfortable conversation, and the playwright tended to these ellipses like a doting mother. "I did change a silence to a pause," he said about a scene in one of his plays...
...Welles, Hawks and Ford. But what of the filmmaker who didn't try to stick out so much as fit in; the man-for-hire who could saddle up to any studio assignment - even a work in progress - and mold it to perfection? In Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, Baltimore Sun film critic Michael Sragow argues that Fleming - who directed The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind - was such a man, denied his rightful place in the cinematic pantheon...
...Cowardly Lion, Fleming escorted her off the Yellow Brick Road, said, 'Now darling, this is serious,' slapped her on the cheek, then ordered, 'Now go in there and work.' It must have been one carefully calculated slap from a man with impressive upper-body strength who was also a master of the 'corkscrew punch.' ... Apart from that smack, he stuck to his approach of treating young actors like adults - and the results could be startling...
...Lowdown: Not only persuasive in its argument that Victor Fleming was one of the unsung titans of his era, An American Movie Master also makes for a fascinating case study in how power was acquired, wielded and lost during the 1930s and '40s. Fleming knew the score as few did, working his way up the ladder to take control of some of the most ambitious, unwieldy and risky epics in movie history. For readers with a limited knowledge of the movie industry, its transition from silents to talkies, and the rise of the big studio picture, Sragow's thorough scene...
...Served in the Office of Hispanic Affairs under the Carter Administration and later in the Office of Management and Budget while earning a master's degree...