Word: studioful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...City, the much anticipated sequel to its 1995 sleeper hit, Babe. But even before arriving in theaters, the new Babe has taken a sudden turn down a dark alley. Last week Universal took the perhaps unprecedented step of canceling a star-studded premiere of the film. The studio said it canceled the Los Angeles event, which was to have been a benefit for the Children's Defense Fund, because the talking-animal special effects weren't done. But that was, well, double-talk. In fact, the studio brass hadn't seen the finished film until last week. When they...
Problems with the potentially invaluable Babe franchise are the last thing Universal needs. The studio has been in turmoil for months, firing a number of top executives and misfiring with a number of expensive films, including Primary Colors and Mercury Rising. Late last week came reports that Universal Studios chairman Frank Biondi was out of the top job. Adding insult to injury, the aborted Babe benefit had been arranged by Biondi's wife. Universal made a contribution to the Defense Fund. Now it has to hope that Miller can turn Babe from a sow's ear into a silk purse...
Stine (Christian Roulleau '01) is a hack writer who churns out detective pulp to feed the studios, living vicariously through his fictional hero and alter ego, the hardboiled gumshoe Stone (Dan Berwick '01). As Stine and his artistic integrity wrestle ineffectually with Buddy Fidler (Kevin Meyers '02), the big cheese at the studio, to produce a ratings safe screenplay, the hapless writer fantasizes by typewriter Stone's life of adventure. The fiction parallels the reality, and the reality is finally defined by the fiction, all in a convoluted but highly enjoyable way. Throughout, a bristling stable of beautiful, gutsy women...
...competently brought together by a first class cast. The actors don't let themselves get in the way of the screen flatness of their characters, so that Stone is just like every though talking, rough playing sleuth you've ever seen, and Buddy every double dealing, triple timing studio exec to have graced the realm of film stereo type. It is a tribute to the cast's talent that their characters outlive their interpretations. In a sense the script is so solidly seductive that the lines each time they speak. Cy Coleman's music and David Zippel's lyrics...
Fifteen years later, the sign still shines in a steady constant glow so that "sometimes when [BU students] get bored [they can] turn out the lights, look out of [their] window and pretend that the Citgo sign is a giant disco ball shining light into [their] own private Studio 54." Well, no one ever said Boston was that exciting anyway...