Word: showbiz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Director Robert Greenwald has produced more than 50 TV movies and a handful of feature films during his 30-year showbiz career. But he's best known now as the rabble-rouser behind politically charged attacks on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News (Outfoxed), big-box department stores (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price) and now the mercenary and munitions companies getting rich off of U.S. Defense Department contracts. Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers will open the same innovative way Greenwald's previous documentaries have screened - in a select few theaters starting September 8th, a DVD release...
...makes his first appearance onstage at the top of a lavish Hello Dolly staircase - with his head cut off by the top of the proscenium. It's a fitting way to get things started, since Fame Becomes Me, his slick, scattered, very funny new Broadway musical, is all about showbiz ego being cut down to size. Short calls it a one-man show - but five terrific performers are on hand to share the spotlight (and on occasion upstage him). He bills it as the story of his life - troubled childhood, years of hoofing in Broadway chorus lines, the inevitable drug...
...Fame Becomes Me uses the autobiographical device as an excuse for a demolition of earnest showbiz tell-alls, Broadway-musical clich?s and just about any other media target that it can lay its hands on. Some of it goes by so fast you want to do a quick rewind - Short's buttery impression of Ray Bolger, as an animated fencepost in a spoof of The Wizard of Oz, for example, or the spot-on impressions of Jodie Foster and Ren?e Zellweger announcing the nominees in Marty's Oscar category (he loses, but makes a soused acceptance speech anyway). Some...
...Many of Lenny's routines were either tart showbiz tales (his 20min. saga of a lousy comic playing the London Palladium) or just funny-silly (a woman comes home to find her husband in bed with a chicken ? a love object that, 10 years later, Woody Allen would turn into a sheep and, 35 years on, Edward Albee would make a goat). But the repertoire he had in mind was much broader, deeper, riskier than those. So, with a mixture of bravery and bravado, Lenny decided to bring the intimacy and threat of uninhibited talk to the nightclub stage...
...Lenny made plenty of enemies. But in saying what he thought, at great price, he liberated stand-up, and all showbiz behavior. A live performance, for comics and rockers and actors, was henceforth designed not to seduce the audience, to play to the old expectations of charm and propriety, but to confront, challenge, titillate, outrage it. I think only jazz musicians had tried that before. Secure in their improv skills, they dared to investigate the farthest reaches of aural experimentation. And if the ringsiders didn't get it ? if a Charlie Parker was literally playing only to the band...