Word: showman
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What's more, II Bidone is clearly the first fumbling version of Fellini's masterpiece-8%. As in 8%, the hero is a man divided against himself: a brilliant but soulless showman inhabited/inhibited by an amiable but infantile idealist...
Both elements are inferentially Fellini, and Fellini labors hugely to reconcile the contradiction. In II Bidone he fails: the showman dissolves into the infant, the infant becomes a sort of devil in diapers. But the failure is not final. In 8½ the opposites attain a higher synthesis: in the infant the showman finds spiritual rebirth, in the showman the infant finds creative release...
...Franklin in Paris is a title in search of a show. This Ben (Robert Preston) is no American Renaissance man but a Broadway showman in knee britches who treats his inventions-the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, the rocking chair-as enticing props to con the yokels of Louis XVI's court. The court is ostensibly Versailles, but the real milieu is the chandelier-lit ballroom of half a hundred interchangeable musicals in which girls in flowing period gowns go swirling into musical-comedy oblivion...
...true that Lohr, an elfin man who at 73 still runs the museum, shamelessly believes in the old showman's rule of "Ya gotta get 'em in the tent." Every exhibit clamors for the attention of the passing public-and then goes on to hammer real knowledge into the heads of people ranging in age, as Lohr puts it, "from two to toothless." The museum, which just received its 50 millionth visitor, is probably the world's biggest institution of informal, nonobligatory mass scientific education...
Show business entrepreneurs complain bitterly that Fair Corp. President Robert Moses seems indifferent to their problems, as when he said recently: "The collapse of a few amusement ventures has been grossly exaggerated." Their backers, who lost some $7,000,000, were not so philosophical. Said one showman: "How does Moses gauge the success of the fair? Well, he's paying off the bondholders, but at our expense. They won't help us, and they won't let us help ourselves...