Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wrote and sold the script for Doin' Time on Planet Earth, a film about a teenager who thinks he's from outer space. After that, Star never looked back. Today, at 30, he draws a six-figure income as the creator of Beverly Hills, 90210, the Thursday-night melodrama that has captured the teen audience by portraying youthful angst and L.A. glitz. Star owns a house in the Hollywood Hills, drives a Porsche convertible, lifts weights and romps with his retriever at his Malibu beach hideaway. "I based 90210 on my experience coming out here," says Star. "What a different...
...some particularly weird moment in the latest installment of the Great American Melodrama, I had a consoling thought: well, at least it can't get any worse than this. Maybe it was when Howell Heflin, playing Senator Beauregard Claghorn, was in the midst of some bloviation, the point of which seemed to have escaped him. Or maybe it was when Orrin Hatch, playing Perry Mason, revealed that a key piece of evidence, a pubic hair, actually appeared on page 70 of The Exorcist and therefore couldn't possibly have been in Clarence + Thomas' Coke...
HARLOT'S GHOST by Norman Mailer (Random House; $30). This huge (1,300-plus pages) novel starts off briskly with some Mailerian melodrama and metaphysics and then bogs down in a recapitulation of one man's life in the CIA from the middle 1950s to the early '60s. It ends with the three most ominous words in recent American literature: "TO BE CONTINUED...
This long opening riff is fine and engaging, comparable to the best passages -- fictional or otherwise -- that Mailer has ever written. Harry's narrative sails forward on a river of Scotch, melodrama, sex, paranoia and typically Mailerian metaphysics (Harry knows why his waitress-girlfriend was so pleasant to him the first time she worked his table: "She saw money coming in all kinds of emotional flavors. It took happy money to buy a dependable appliance"). At the end of all these pyrotechnical effects, which include a persuasively real ghost in Harry's basement, the hero has achieved some pressing problems...
...final passage (Woolf aptly calls it her "peroration") is out of character with the rest of the play. The crisp sarcasm and dry humor deteriorate into slightly forced melodrama and moralizing that have very little Virginia Woolf in them...