Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rerunning some of the old films of Van Doren in the Twenty One isolation booth, mopping his brow and muttering, "Let's skip that part of the question till later, please," and pretending to struggle for an answer that he had been handed, complete with acting script, a few hours before. Old Twenty One fans particularly remember one script, asking for the name of the character in Verdi's La Traviata who sings Sempre libera. "She sings it right at the end of a party given by . . ." whispered the sweating Van Doren at the time. "What...
Buying Without Looking. The situation has given rise to a dangerous new breed of editorial irresponsibility: the purchase of shows sight unseen. Last spring, Packager Don Sharpe sold Mr. Lucky to CBS; at the time he had neither cast nor pilot-only a script that was later discarded. Independents can sucker networks into financing even the shabbiest of productions. NBC spent $1,300,000 to bankroll 26 episodes of a dreary filmed comedy called Love and Marriage, managed to get some of its money back only by plopping the show into a favorable time (Mon., 8-8:30 p.m. E.S.T...
...version of Anniversary Waltz (TIME, April 19, 1954), a common mattress farce, put together by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields, that packed the Broadway tourists in for more than 17 months. The plot is just a house of comic greeting cards, but Chodorov and Fields, who also wrote the script, have stacked them up with impressive skill. David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor, it develops, are a big-city couple in the five-figure set who are celebrating their 13th anniversary. All goes well until Husband Niven gives his in-laws the likkered-up lowdown on what used to happen...
...other top shows, TV came close to realizing its greatest potential: The Moon and Sixpence (NBC) presented Sir Laurence Olivier with a script that, despite faults, gave his immense talent full range. Somerset Maugham's biting novel of a man in the grip of artistic demons was formidable for transformation into less than 90 minutes of television drama. Before Playwright S. Lee (People Kill People Sometimes) Pogostin was called in, along with Director Bob Mulligan, two other scriptwriters had fumbled the job. After 48 hours packed with pencil work, pep pills and black coffee, Pogostin and Mulligan had built...
...Mouse gets out of this narrative trap, but in the process its tail end is somewhat mangled. Up to that point, though, the Roger MacDougall-Stanley Mann script is a fairly witty example of a rare film form: political burlesque. It keeps the show bouncing along despite a director (Jack Arnold) and a star (Peter Sellers, a sort of second-company Alec Guinness playing several roles) who have not mastered the light-fantastic style that suits and supports this sort of flimsy British whimsy...