Word: rko
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...later, Hughes produced the best and most brutal of the early gangster dramas, Scarface. After a decade-long vacation from films, he made The Outlaw, a notorious Western whose main point of interest was Jane Russell's bosom. By the mid-1950s, he had run a major movie studio, RKO, into the ground. Then he vanished into eccentricity...
...that last bit is a fib, concocted for Ball's press biography by publicists for RKO, the studio she was under contract to in the late 1930s. They made it up because they--and the rest of Hollywood, for some two decades--had no idea how to best promote or cast the woman who in mid-life would become perhaps the most popular actress of the 20th century. Ball didn't easily fit any of the standard movie-star niches. The saucy girl from Jamestown, N.Y., was pretty (a former model) but not va-va-voom sexy; she was down...
...stormed Hollywood at 25 in the soaper A Bill of Divorcement. All elbows, and eyes that raked the screen, Hepburn managed to upstage John Barrymore and was immediately a star. Her studio, RKO, put her straight to work: 14 films in the next six years. A year after Divorcement, she played the headstrong, stagestruck ingenue in Morning Glory and won her first Oscar...
...fourth, he fifth in Flying Down to Rio. They were filler, but when they stepped out in the musical number The Carioca, audiences knew that the gangly guy and the pert ingenue were an ideal match. Here was emotion expressed in motion, the finest blending of passion and technique. RKO would go on to pair Fred and Ginger in eight romances that would define how two bodies can flirt and fuse in dance...
...humor out of the lyric and music. What follows is my attempt to render complex emotions and glorious movement in prose; it's just the Cliff Notes to a blithe masterpiece. So rent or buy the "Top Hat" VHS. And get the album, "Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers at RKO," two CDs of great music and fabulous vibes. Right now. I'll wait...