Word: shoguns
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...Good Morning America finally broke the 27-year domination of NBC's Today show early this year. For 33 weeks straight, from Jan. 14 through Aug. 29, ABC was either tops or even with NBC in the Nielsen ratings. Then NBC gradually inched ahead, helped by Shogun and the World Series: viewers tend to leave the dial where it was when they went to bed the night before. During the past two months the lead has bounced back and forth. The most recent count gives ABC a 5.9 rating, NBC 5.1. Since each ratings point is equivalent...
...SHOGUN (Sept. 15-19, NBC). As his opening bid in this high-stakes game, Silverman has scheduled the twelve-hour mini-series of James Clavell's novel Shdgun. This saga of an Elizabethan seaman's initiation into the ways of feudal Japan has sold over 4 million copies, and soon another 3 million will be on sale. The NBC version cost over $20 million, perhaps the most ever spent for a TV film...
Even literature comes to life, after a fashion. "Shogun" was the story of 17th-century Japanese warriors. In a major mutation, Shoguns have evolved since into $7 "die-cast metal warriors" with arm-mounted rocket launchers. Not only that, they have "vertilift" airplanes. Not only that, people buy them...
...even though costs are spiraling, a paperback remains an exceptional entertainment value. As one reviewer once put it, "Shogun is a summer vacation." So are most other bestsellers. The trick is to book readers into the right vacation. N.A.L. hopes to sell more than 10 million copies of Fools Die and their edition of The Godfather. There are already 13 million paperback copies of the Mafia classic in print...
Aside from tales for the kids, Silverman rarely reads anything but scripts; when he does, his tastes run to popular bestsellers like James Clavell's Shogun. Though he now has the use of a company limo, he and Cathy, an attractive woman with short, dark hair, live in most ways like Middle Americans. Their apartment is furnished like a suburban split-level, and when they buy paintings, they try them out first on the walls, just to make sure that they like the colors. Freddie is vague about the artists' names...