Word: three-act
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FOUND. BEAT GENERATION, a long-forgotten play by American counterculture icon Jack Kerouac; by his agent; while going through old files in a New Jersey warehouse. Kerouac, whose semi-autobiographical stories featured his enlightenment-seeking, hard-drinking literary buddies Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, wrote the three-act play in 1957, the same year his epic novel On the Road was printed, but it was never performed or published. Best Life magazine, which will carry an excerpt from Beat Generation in its July issue, describes it as "a day in the drink- and drug-hazed life of [Kerouac...
...cacophonous ensemble of clashing rhythms and timbres as all the major characters sing simultaneously and Prospero exults, "My high charms work!/ and these, mine enemies, are all knit up/ in their distractions. They are in my power." What Eaton has done is not merely to set Porter's concise, three-act libretto, but to retell it in musical terms, creating a cognate of Shakespeare's play. It is a formidable intellectual as well as musical accomplishment...
...three-act structure of most movies, Kaufman proved, may be satisfying, but it doesn't unearth honesty. "I don't know what the hell a third act is," says Kaufman, a former sitcom writer. "It's not a concern of mine." So after being embittered by George Clooney's conventional direction of his script for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the painfully shy Kaufman (who until last month's appearance on The Charlie Rose Show didn't show his face in the media) is going to write a new script, pick his own actors and ask a studio...
...patience. He takes his good-natured time with this movie, filling out his principals' backstories before introducing the horse. He also adds documentary sequences (narrated by David McCullough) that lightly, effectively fill in the social history that shaped these lives. Finally, this is a man unwedded to the three-act structure, perhaps because history is rarely so neatly structured...
America's Rudy, meet New York City's Rudy: that's the idea behind the biopic Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story (USA, March 30, 8 p.m. E.T.). Giuliani's story fit the standard three-act arc neatly. He rose to glory, busting crime first as a prosecutor, then as a two-term mayor; he fell into ignominy by mishandling alleged police-brutality cases and dealing callously with the public disintegration of his marriage; and he was redeemed by 9/11 as well as by the mellowing effects of his 2000 diagnosis of and battle against prostate cancer...