Word: stardom
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Tadanori Yokoo, 51, is among the most well-known graphic designers in Japan -- and a rebel. In the '60s he achieved pop stardom for his paintings and for psychedelic posters promoting his fellow members of the avant-garde underground. Unable to survive on his painting alone, Yokoo turned to commercial assignments. "I loved to quarrel with corporate clients," he says with a smile. "And I refused to compromise. I wanted to express something very personal. So my design was called antidesign, and I was pushed out of the design establishment...
...would be accused of doing shtick. It is ever thus. At the movies, comedy may be king at the wickets, and most of Hollywood's nouveau novas -- Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase, Tom Hanks, Dan Aykroyd, Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Pee-wee Herman, Martin Short -- may have won their early stardom cadging laughs on TV or in the burgeoning comedy-club scene (see following story). Yet the Motion Picture Academy continues to lay laurels on lesser mortals whose roles require that they cry over the phone, commit suicide or speak with an English accent...
...Ritchie's ruthless desire for stardom and his utter contempt for all things that threaten the American pop-culture status quo which makes La Bamba so contemptible...
Almost always dressed in a natty but rumpled suit, Pivot, 52, is an unlikely candidate for stardom. The son of a winegrower and grocer in Lyons, he attended journalism school in Paris. In 1958, after dabbling in financial reporting and writing a novel, he applied for a job on the literary supplement of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Pivot knew little about literature, but the editor happened to be a wine connoisseur and was impressed by Pivot's knowledge of Beaujolais, the wine from the countryside near Lyons. Thus Pivot broke into the life of letters "totally by chance...
...thundering herd of chorines tapping out a Busby Berkeley abstraction. "I didn't think I had too much of a chance," Astaire would later say -- with good reason. To be sure, he and his sister Adele had worked their way from Omaha through small-time vaudeville to stage stardom in New York and London. But Adele had retired, and at 34, Fred was not obvious star material: a skinny fellow with a reedy voice and an unassuming...