Word: melodrama
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...facts of the California case were more tortuous than a television melodrama: a family therapist, acting under the demands of a 1980 state law requiring that child abuse be reported, gave Solano County officials information about a physician who was alleged to have molested his stepdaughter. The information had been obtained during a counseling session with the doctor, his wife and the girl. As a result, the stepfather was charged with child molestation. He signed a confession, but Amy's corroborating evidence was needed in order to prosecute. When she refused to testify. Judge DeRonde found her in contempt...
While watching this melodrama from his Houston headquarters, Pennzoil's Liedtke sensed that Gordon Getty might welcome a partner. Liedtke made his first move two weeks ago, with a $1.6 billion offer of $100 a share for 20% of the oil company. Then while the rest of the business world watched bowl games the day after New Year's, Getty and Liedtke huddled over plans in Getty's apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Liedtke, 61, a lawyer and Harvard M.B.A., outlined a strategy that would make Getty Oil a private firm owned 57% by family heirs...
...heart are engaged by artful storytellers, questions of duration become irrelevant. One enduring Hollywood epic, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, ran for more than 2½ hours in 1915, when the most popular movies were Charlie Chaplin's two-reel comedies. Another Civil War melodrama, the 1939 Gone With the Wind, clocked in at 222 minutes. Yet both films tell their tales faster than Star Wars and with twice the sweep...
...John Herzfeld has chosen a different 1978 hit to emulate and trash: Heaven Can Wait. God (the voice of Gene Hackman) sends a quartet of angels (led by Charles Durning) to earth to help a couple of mean-mouthed losers (guess who?). Nothing works: not the whimsy, not the melodrama, not even the food fight in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel. A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out Staying Alive for Worst Picture of the Year...
DIED. Robert Aldrich, 65, film director whose works of macabre-to-macho violence included the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford shocker What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the Burt Reynolds gridiron prison melodrama The Longest Yard (1974), and The Dirty Dozen (1967), which at the time sparked complaints about its relentless brutality; of kidney failure; in Los Angeles. Scion of a prominent New England family and a Rockefeller cousin, Aldrich rejected a banking career to start as a $25-a-week production clerk at RKO studios...