Word: silent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nothin' yet!" cried Al Jolson halfway through The Jazz Singer. Jolson's urgent, boastful bray--an ad-libbed intro to his rendition of Toot Toot Tootsie--cut through the opening-night audience at the Warner Theatre near Times Square like an obstetrician's scissors severing the umbilical cord to silent films, for 30 years the dominant screen language. But the movies had to talk. Thomas Edison thought so. He and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson had devised a talking-movie machine as early as 1889. In the early '20s short sound films appeared featuring vaudeville and opera stars. These were sensible...
...fall of 1928, Walt Disney could claim three dubious assets: a new animated cartoon character called Mickey Mouse, three short silent films featuring the spunky rodent and an idea greater than perhaps even he imagined--adding sound tracks to his little films...
...overuse of DDT and other pesticides--she called them "elixirs of death"--had already upset the chemical industry. Velsicol, maker of two top bug killers, threatened to sue the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which stood firm but asked a toxicologist to recheck Carson's facts before it shipped Silent Spring to bookstores...
...group of silent men in uniforms without insignia weaved purposefully through the crowd. Their uniforms and weapons were not Kurdish, though the new headscarves they had wrapped around their faces were. My interpreter and I looked at each other and giggled. Americans. They were accompanying an older American in the same style of uniform who smiled vaguely as he went into the building. Metal doors clanged shut behind him. The rest of the visitor's security detail did not try to hide their identity. Half a dozen Special Forces men drove pickups into the yard, parking next...
...There's nothing new or particularly progressive in the current casting formula. Minority groups have been in Hollywood B movies since the black infant Allen (Farina) Hoskins joined the silent-screen Our Gang troupe in 1922. And though Asians can be glad they've gained leading-man status after years in the standard martial-arts Yellow Peril role?a kind of Kung Fu Manchu?the studios aren't exhibiting any social enlightenment in pairing them with blacks. Producers are just trying to make films with relatively inexpensive stars that will appeal to disparate markets: half-price actors for, potentially, twice...