Word: prestons
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MADCAP: THE LIFE OF PRESTON STURGES by Donald Spoto...
...stayed around -- the contempt for self and cinema that Mankiewicz's cable winks at. How could one be paid so much to have one's literature ground into pulp by the coarse merchants who ran the movies? In the '30s and '40s a few screenwriters, pre-eminently Preston Sturges, seized the means of production and became their own directors. The rest mostly complained about their six-figure serfdom, partly because they were so good at it. "It is as difficult to make a toilet seat as a castle window," Hecht wrote in 1962, "even if the view is different...
Sturges' mother was a much-married dilettante who befriended Theda Bara, Aleister Crowley and Isadora Duncan. While working for his mother's cosmetics firm, Preston invented a kissproof lipstick. His life was as eccentric as his films. How does Donald Spoto make it read like forced labor? Some biographies, the good ones, offer a vivid picture of the artist's life. Others, like Spoto's, remind you of the biographer's trudge through library morgues and dead-end interviews. Sturges' film world was so open to American experience that even a bartender, asked for a special concoction, could exclaim...
...sweetest of all cups, the Eastern title, would soon find a home in Cambridge. Two weeks after their win over Penn, the Harvard heavies won the Eastern title in Worcester. The Harvard lightweights did the same. On May 21 in New Preston, Ct., the Radcliffe heavies bagged the Eastern crown...
Although it hasn't raced competitively since May 7, the top-ranked Radcliffe heavyweight crew (8-0 overall) is still favored to capture the Eastern Sprints Sunday on Lake Waramaug in New Preston, Conn...