Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pattern. The packagers could never have risen to their present power were it not for the fact that, as Packager (Screen Gems) Harry Ackerman puts it, "the networks are run by businessmen, not showmen." Robert Edmonds Kintner, 50, has no quarrel with that situation. A Swarthmore graduate, he started out as a New York Herald Tribune Wall Street reporter in 1933. Son of a Stroudsburg (Pa.) schoolteacher, Cub Kintner, a lean, spectacled Hall-of-Ivy type at the time, at first "didn't even know where Wall Street was." But he learned quickly. Though an ardent New Dealer...
...wares. He set up the kind of crassly commercial operation so successfully carried on by his successor, Oliver Treyz, after Kintner left in a quarrel with ABC Board Chairman Leonard Goldenson in 1956. Says Kintner now: "If I were still at ABC, I wouldn't have carried the pattern that...
...while he was there, the pattern was clear: crowd-pleasing filmed series, westerns, cops, crime. Kintner feels that he had no alternative if he wanted to save ABC from being crushed by its two bigger competitors. During Kintner's presidency, ABC added 60 stations, boosted ratings. Kintner signed up Disneyland (for $2,000,000), built a good newscasting staff, including John Daly. He also turned down a chance to sign up The $64,000 Question: "It didn't seem to make sense-not, I hasten to add, because of moral grounds...
...Pattern Repeated. Within 48 hours after he quit ABC, Kintner had an offer to join NBC as executive vice president in charge of color coordination ("I didn't know a damn thing about color"), took charge of TV operations in February 1958. That July he was named president, with a ten-year sliding-scale contract that pays him upwards of $150,000 yearly. Kintner frankly admits that he applied his ABC formula: canned series, westerns, private eyes-plus quizzes. He knifed Wide Wide World, Omnibus, live dramatic shows (including Kraft Theater). Says he: "I had to catch up with...
Last Monday's opening of Tosca fitted all too well into this pattern of steady, but Grade B, musical performances. Yet, it was not a bad job nor a purely indifferent offering. The main problem was one of casting. Tosca and Cavaradossi must be sophisticates; they are people of passionate conviction, important in the world of fashion and art. As portrayed by Lois Marshall and Thomas Hayward, the lovers seemed like the uncertain adolescents of Blue Denim. They sang well, though the round, supple tone of Miss Marshall is well known and pleasing, as is the light, lyric vocalism...