Word: timed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spare story that tells-mostly in a well-wrought ladder of dialogue-about two hired gunmen who have come to a small Michigan town to rub out a doublecrossing Swedish prizefighter. When The Killers appeared on CBS's Buick Electra Playhouse last week, the story's reading time of six minutes had been blown up to 90, and it sagged like an Add-A-Pearl, between an elaborate preamble and a rambling finale...
Adapter A. E. Hotchner almost managed to make it to the first commercial before introducing the killers. By the time he reached the ending of the original story, the TV play still had 41 minutes to go. Scenes minced on and off screen without coming to terms with the story or adding to its significance: a cop with a TV announcer's hairdo trying to lead a lady cashier into adultery, the problems of ambitious adolescents who want too much too soon, a priest who unknowingly gives the fighter's address to the killers...
...range pursue their separate villains, but last week they all ganged up on a common enemy-Warner Bros. Encouraged by a withering denunciation of the studio by the Screen Actors Guild, the cowpokes drew a bead on 1) highhanded Studio Boss Jack L. Warner, who spends much of his time commuting between Las Vegas and the Riviera; and 2) William T. Orr, Warner's son-in-law and the studio's hard-driving TV chief. The cowboys' beef: the usual Warner Bros, contract, which binds screen hopefuls to the studio for seven years at a predetermined salary...
...ready for a starring role. He makes only two or three pictures a year. In television, they slap you into the starring role in a series, and you make 26 episodes right off the bat. If the series flops, you're dead. There isn't time to build a personality...
...very few are thinking about getting out, yet only a few are smugly satisfied. There is, among these teachers, something of the attitude of the pioneer, of adventure rather than calculation. Many seem to have a conviction that there are worlds to conquer, and that, for the first time, there are means at hand to conquer them...