Word: svengali
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...premiere sitcom Svengali, Jim Brooks knows how to create characters an audience can fall in love with. But on a TV series, relationships are never resolved; they are just continued next week. So Brooks concludes Broadcast News with a sitcom ellipsis, not a movie exclamation point. The movie ends, like the '80s perhaps, in resignation and anticlimax. Maybe no one believes in happy endings anymore, or even in endings. Maybe, after Bakker and Hart and Iranamuck, people are too cynical to care who gets the girl. But it is good to know that craftsmen like Brooks can create compelling, pertinent...
...maybe, she wants to turn Hughes off. Molly can hardly regret being made a star in successful comedies written by a man who enjoyed playing both Svengali and pal to a gifted young actress. But gratitude does not mean indentured servitude. "When John moved from Chicago to L.A. after The Breakfast Club," she says, "he changed. I wouldn't say he 'went Hollywood,' but he started looking very GQ. I don't really see him anymore. I still respect him a lot, and if he gave me a good script, I'd read it. But I don't think...
...about any chance for an accomodation with the evil empire. Granted their chances were not propitious, given the beligerent Russian frame of mind and intransigence on Euromissiles, but they were non-existent under the maximalist approach to arms control favored by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger '38 and his Svengali, Ricahrd Perle, who have had the President's ear on these matters...
Until recently such situations prompted many police departments to call in the "Svengali squads," the teams of specially trained police hypnotists that sprang up across the country in the '70s. Pioneered by the Los Angeles police department, the widespread use of hypno-investigators led to hundreds of convictions, many of them in cases where battered rape victims blocked out memory of the crimes. Even the FBI trained some of its agents in hypnosis. But the courts have not been so mesmerized. In recent years a number of state supreme courts have declared that hypnotically induced testimony is inherently unreliable...
...reversed part of the California Supreme Court decision, allowing witnesses and victims who have been hypnotized to testify as to their prehypnotic recollections, while stipulating that sessions be conducted only by disinterested outside psychiatrists. But since it is witnesses' posthypnotic testimony that is most valuable to police, the Svengali squads in California and elsewhere continue to wither away...