Word: seuss
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...this column on venerable pop culture - what I call classic - I usually write about people who not only helped define an earlier era but were moderately famous. Elvis and Astaire, Dr. Seuss and Lenny Bruce. By the standard of fame, Phyllis Jenkins doesn?t exactly qualify. Her name doesn?t appear on many Websites; her exploits don?t grace nearly as many biographies and memoirs as they should. Her death earlier this year occasioned an admiring, admirable obituary in the New York Sun, but the New York Times didn?t acknowledge her demise...
...blown out all those candles for deceased artistes Marlene Dietrich, Richard Rodgers, Ogden Nash, Cornell Woolrich, S.J. Perelman and Ted ?Dr. Seuss? Geisel. Two more honorees, Leni Riefenstahl and Bob Hope, were still alive when they got reached triple digits, though they have since ceded to mortality. I used to unearth these milestones only when I?d hear of some media cross-promotion - a tributary rivulet of books, CDs or DVDs - which often meant playing hectic catch-up. Now I go to the Internet Movie Database at the start of a year and see whose centenaries are imminent. (Click...
...movie is also daring in its extravagant (though seemingly not expensive) sets by Rudolph Sternad, who designed 23 films for Kramer, from "Champion" in 1949 to "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" in 1963. Sternad worked from Seuss sketches to devise rolling, arid science fiction landscapes, ladders that stretch to the sky, gilded bedrooms and grotty dungeons and, for the 500 boys to play at the climax, a gigantic two-tiered piano with 44,000 keys. Seuss peopled these vast, forbidding vistas with characters from his own teeming imagination (and his old notebooks): hulking sentries, their skin painted...
...Apparently some scenes and songs are missing, prompting Cohen to call this "the kind of movie that begs for a restored and expanded release on DVD." I'd also ask for a CD of the score, with Seuss lyrics and music by Frederick Hollander, the cut-rate Kurt Weill who wrote most of Marlene Dietrich's most famous ballads. Most of the tunes are bright and cynical in the Berliner fashion: the perky "Get-Together Weather"; a mock school song for Terwilliker Academy; an elevator song as a guard takes the prisoners to the dungeon and itemizes the evils, floor...
...wanted to work with Geisel was his old Private SNAFU friend Chuck Jones. They were kindred spirits: Chuck used fake-Latin names for his Road Runner and Coyote, as Ted had for his Esso-lube beasties. The cute, round-faced Jones even looked like some of the more benign Seuss creatures...