Word: roper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. AUDRA LINDLEY, 79, veteran actress best known as sex-starved, muumuu-clad landlady Helen Roper on the sitcom Three's Company; of complications from leukemia; in Los Angeles. A daughter of actors, Lindley played Broadway, big-screen and television roles, most recently as Cybill Shepherd's mother on Cybill...
...tens of thousands of women into the armed forces since the early 1980s. Many married service members have chosen to cheat with one another instead of using prostitutes. Linda Bird Francke notes in her new book, Ground Zero, that 64% of the Air Force personnel responding to a Roper Poll of Gulf War units reported sexual activity in their squads. Not that it bothered them: 77% of the Roper respondents said it had little or no effect on readiness for battle. Yet the brass has been unconvinced, especially when fraternization--the extracurricular association of officers with enlisted personnel--was involved...
...there's probably nothing that Warner or anyone else can do about these trends. Strategic philanthropy and cause marketing are hot because they serve business well while raising billions of dollars for worthy causes. It's a classic win-win. A recent survey by Cone Communications and the Roper Group found that 76% of consumers would switch to a corporate brand or product that supports worthy causes, provided that the price and quality were on a par with other goods. That's up from 66% in a 1993 study...
Murphy is Scott Roper, a San Francisco cop making up his own rules in edgy face-offs with the criminal class of the Bay Area. Roper is no Dirty Eddie; he's a negotiator who has to ingratiate himself with the malefactors before he can blow their heads off. This offers plenty of chances for Murphy-style comedy, none of which writer Randy Feldman or director Thomas Carter bothered to exploit. Except for a decent scene in which Roper mimics a white bandit as a test for his galoot partner (Michael Rapaport), there's no room for Eddie...
...Roper is issued a regulation villain (Michael Wincott, whose menacing baritone was used to better effect in the recent Jim Jarmusch corpse opera Dead Man) and a girlfriend in peril (British stunner Carmen Ejogo). A shame the star wasn't given a character to play, witty dialogue to speak or clever plot twists to unravel. But though Roper is often at gunpoint, Murphy wasn't when he agreed to make Metro. In his bumpy tryst with filmgoers, how long will he make us wait for another Nutty Professor? How long until we can love Eddie again...