Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...than for Lulu. The best written part of the play, it seems to me, is Sir Flute's second-act monologue (which resembles Tom Stoppard's New-Found Land in a lower comic vein); here Wood seems to be speaking for himself, evoking the romantic America of Paramount and MGM: "You said all that pretentious rights-of-man nonsense, and then you went out and did it." With our hands on our guns and our heads in the sky, one might add. Wood is launching a broadside attack on this mythical America, the only one that many Britons know...
That is the beginning of The Formula, an MGM film that opens nationally this week and stars George C. Scott and Marlon Brando. The movie panders to the many who believe that the energy crisis is all just a plot by Big Oil. In this case the energy companies have a formula for cheap fuel, but they are keeping it a secret in order to maintain high prices and gouge the public...
...companies are naturally unhappy about once again being cast in the role of the heavy. Mobil Oil lawyers have met privately with MGM officials to object. Says a Mobil spokesman: "This is not even a good piece of fiction." The clear winner from the film is Marlon Brando, who received a reported $250,000 a day for ten days' work. That is a real formula for making money...
...refitting an old building can be twice as expensive as installing the same system in a new one, and owners are usually reluctant to do so voluntarily. Las Vegas fire department officials, for example, claim they have urged the MGM Grand Hotel and other hotels built be fore the 1979 building code to install sprinkler systems and smoke alarms, but to no avail. "Retrofitting of the older hotels has always been an economic tug of war," says Clark County Manager Bruce Spaulding. Perhaps now they will. Says Gordon Vickery, director of the U.S. Fire Administration: "We usually lose people...
...Clarke demonstrated that in 2001. The computer HAL not only operates the space ship and talks in a supercilious tenor but is so exalted by its own superiority ("I am incapable of making an error") that it starts killing the astronauts who interfere with its plans. In a 1976 MGM effort titled Demon Seed, a presumptuous robot goes even further and fulfills the sinful ambition of making Julie Christie pregnant. But then came Star Wars, in which the cutely diminutive Artoo Deetoo and See Threepio help to rescue the imprisoned Princess Leia. Thus Hollywood found ways to reduce Frankenstein...