Word: segal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Segal writes screenplays, beautifully thin scripts for beautifully thin people to act in beautifully thin films. When he took his screenplay Love Story to Paramount Pictures more than a decade ago, they told him to turn it into a novel while they were making the film. The ruse worked, and for one glorious week, Love Story stood at the top of both the hardcover and paperback bestseller charts and was the number one grossing movie in the country. Not bad for a Harvard man who teaches Latin and Greek literature at Yale...
Unlike Oliver and Jenny Barrett, who were nearly perfect, Segal has wilted under Mammon's gaze and added Oliver's Story to the screenplay-novel genre. And now comes Man, Woman and Child, the kind of novel a writer produces only thrice in a lifetime, a literary tortilla, a hardcover hors d'oeuvre...
...professor Segal spent more than two weekends writing this modern fairytale, he worked slowly. He probably went to see George Roy Hill's A Little Romance and Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer and decided America wanted more in the cuddly little boy and cute little girl department. With his track record...
...Woman and Child, Segal obeys all the rules of screenwriting. He writes in short, never-more-than-five-minute scenes in which visual images carry more weight than language. Typically, we hardly know what the characters look like so we won't be disappointed by the movie version...
...When words fail, comfortable cliches are always nice to fall back on," Sheila admits halfway through the book. Segal knows about comfortable cliches all too well. He struggles to add narrative to his script. His prose is not simple or spare--it is empty...