Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Brooks' comedy depends on individuals, not situations, and in most shows a viewer would be hard put to retell the plot. Ted Baxter's cheapness on The MTM Show is as funny to this generation as Jack Benny's was 30 years ago, and Lou Grant's scowls are as familiar now as Groucho's raised eyebrows were back then. "Character is what fascinates me," says Brooks. "I love populated things. The great thing about literature is that it tells you that you are not alone...
...Flaubert could say "Madame Bovary, c'est moi,"Brooks could c'est the same of Lou, Ted, Rhoda, Phyllis, Murray and the always resistible Sue Ann. "I've identified with everybody but Mary," he admits. Ted's meeting with his long-lost father, the plot of one of the best MTM shows, was based on Brooks' meeting with his own dad, whom he also had not seen in years. Told that he was in a hospital in New Jersey, Brooks walked in and saw a man so old and decrepit that he was stunned...
...book, rarely the strong point of an opera, invariably suffers most. The plot line of The Most Happy Fella is the kind of story that babies tell to babies. An elderly Italian-born Napa Valley grape grower named Tony (Giorgio Tozzi) is smitten with instant love for Rosabella (Sharon Daniels), a young San Francisco waitress. Tony woos and wins her by mail, aided by the deceptive use of a photograph of his strappingly virile farm manager, Joe (Richard Muenz...
Nonetheless, Vonnegut's messages emerge from beneath the overplayed Harvard motif and a typically bizarre plot. Starbuck's biggest claim to fame, for example, amounts to a piddling job in the Nixon administration as the President's Special Advisor on Youth Affairs. His office, hidden in the dank basement of the White House, becomes the resting place for large sums of illicit Watergate pay-off money, and when the break-in and cover-up arrests are made, he is duly escorted to a minimum-security prison in Georgia--undergoing the pains of prison minus the Watergate infamy...
...Nathan stretches to the far-fetched in his attempt to imagine real life. Several plot contrivances mar the novel. But its richness and vitality cannot be overstated. It reads quickly, much like a longish (180 pages) short story, and so stimulating a novel is hard to relinquish to the bookshelf. The Ghost Writer ends too soon...