Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bazaar of movie merchants who had arrived in the U.S. barely before the masses they hoped to enlighten. The roll call of Jewish-immigrant moguls has since become its own Hollywood legend: Adolph Zukor, the Hungarian who had worked as janitor in a Manhattan fur store (president of Paramount Pictures); Carl Laemmle, the bookkeeper from Germany (founder, Universal Pictures); Samuel Goldwyn, the glove salesman from Warsaw (founder, Goldwyn Studios); Louis B. Mayer, the scrap-metal dealer from Minsk (vice president and general manager, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer). By the 1930s Mayer was earning $1.25 million a year and was presiding over...
...poignant one-reel comedies taught the world how to love movies. Pickford, with her ringlets and coquettish ways, was hardly less popular, and no less resourceful. In 1909 the little girl from Toronto cadged an audition with Film Pioneer D.W. Griffith; by 1916 she could tell the bosses at Paramount Pictures, "No, I really cannot afford to work for only $10,000 a week" (which is precisely the fee she settled for). This sudden affluence did not short-circuit the masses' identification with the movie stars. It merely confirmed the public's image of them as extraordinary ordinary people. They...
...Tieying is the very model of what China's paramount ruler Deng Xiaoping, 80, calls a "third echelon" party leader: young, educated and experienced. Last week Li, 48, became the youngest of nine up-and-coming officials named to head key government agencies. The average age of the new appointees is below 55, and all of them have the equivalent of university degrees as well as other professional qualifications. That meets Deng's criteria for bringing up a new third echelon of party leaders in their 40s and 50s. Deng represents the first echelon, while Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang...
Wearing a gray Mao jacket, Premier Zhao Ziyang delivered the keynote address last week at the opening session in Peking of the National People's Congress, China's nominal parliament. His theme was "socialist economic construction," a euphemism for the wide-ranging reforms instituted by Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping that have decentralized economic planning and decision making. Zhao spoke of "gratifying major successes" over the past year in industry, housing and agriculture. Then, in a surprising admission before the 2,712 delegates, he acknowledged that there were problems...
...boardroom coup in the wake of the Cleopatra debacle. He made his son Richard president, then kicked him out, only to be forced aside himself a few months later. (Richard had another stint at Fox, and coproduced such films as The Sting and Jaws.) While other studios, like Paramount and Columbia Pictures, were being swallowed by conglomerates, the purchase by Davis and his partner Marc Rich seemed to presage a return to Hollywood's good old bad days of iron rule...