Word: payoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...past fortnight, the networks have scrubbed four quiz shows worth an estimated $20 million in sponsors' fees-$5,000,000 each for NBC's Tic Tac Dough and CBS's Name That Tune, Big Payoff, Top Dollar. The number of quiz-panel-contest shows that survived was still 13 at week's end. If they are dropped too, the total loss in sponsors' fees will bulge to a bank-breaking $80 million...
...called "Operation Embarrassment," French Finance Minister Antoine Pinay opened the nation's previously secret tax records to public scrutiny, was soon inundated by anonymous letters from citizens who wondered how their neighbors could afford a new car on an income of $600 a year. Last week came the payoff: picking up their evening papers, three French businessmen and an elderly widow found themselves the subjects of headline stories branding them as consistent tax evaders...
...responsible for what appears on their schedules." With that belated recognition of the obvious, CBS President Frank Stanton announced that his network will no longer permit "games whose major appeal is the winning of large sums of money or lavishly expensive prizes." CBS followed through by axing The Big Payoff, Top Dollar and Name That Tune...
...judging from audience response, Gloria Film Co.'s Menschen in Hotel was a Kassenschlager (boxoffice hit). And to Gloria's greying, violet-eyed boss, Use ("Kuba") Kubaschewski, the payoff is all that matters. Hardly had the house lights gone down for the start of the show when the boss sneaked off to her theater-top penthouse to read more scripts, study attendance records, sign checks. At 49, canny Kuba is head of the hottest movie-production outfit in Germany. She has fought her way higher than any other woman in the movie industry-Hollywood included-has ever reached...
...first he succeeds. He blackmails his wife anonymously. She borrows from him to raise money for the payoff ("It is easy to be generous," he tells the audience, "when you are sending money to yourself"). Later, he smoothly implicates her lover as a blackmailing gigolo. But the methodical husband has touched off a larger explosion than he designed, and the film resolves itself in a series of novel twists, most of which are so awkwardly handled that they seem to come off only in Director Edouard Molinaro's heavy hand...