Word: pitchman
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Elkin is America's master literary pitchman. No fiction writer sells ideas and myths with more elan and imagination. His fantasies about popular culture and allegorical burlesques have been set in places as disparate as a department-store basement (A Bad Man), an all-night radio station (The Dick Gibson Show) and heaven and hell (The Living...
...game he could not see ("The shortstop is going over after the ball and makes a wild stab, picks it up, turns and gets him out just in time"). This showed, he said, how the basic truth can be "attractively packaged." But that is closer to a pitchman's attitude toward facts than a reporter...
...This is the most successful commercial in history, and it's all done with amateurs," boasts Mickey Spillane, detective novelist and sometime pitchman for Miller Lite beer. Spillane concedes, however, that the high jinks that accompany the filming "would drive regular actors up the wall." Last week Spillane and pals gathered at a bowling alley in Teaneck, N.J., to shoot another of the award-winning spots. Those present included Comedian Rodney Dangerfield, Actress Lee Meredith, Boston Celtics President Red Auerbach, former Oakland Raiders Coach John Madden, ex-Baltimore Slugger Boog Powell and retired New York Jet Matt Snell...
...scalpers' tickets) was on the tenor. Of course, the man who was singing Verdi's Egyptian captain for the first time in his career was no ordinary performer: it was the portly mink-coat model, frequent guest on the Tonight show, American Express-card pitchman, would-be movie star and, these days, part-time primissimo tenore. Yes, Giorgio, there is still a Luciano Pavarotti, superstar...
...show's only professional actor is Doug Llewelyn, 42, a onetime Washington, D.C., news anchorman and a former pitchman for Sears. He does the introductions, occasionally polls the studio audience for its reaction, and conducts post-trial interviews in a mock-marble hallway. Aside from such embellishments, and the musical hype, the unrehearsed program steers clear of game-show razzmatazz, and the result is a reasonably authentic legal confrontation. James Nelson, presiding judge of Los Angeles municipal court, believes after screening several episodes that the program could generate grass-roots support for the judicial system and induce viewers...