Word: tora
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...like seeing a movie, any movie, when the Liberty Tree Mall loomed up out of the North Shore fog. On the other hand, I was sure The Towering Inferno was going to be a disaster film in more ways than one. After all the genre included such winners as Tora! Tora! Tora! (which destroyed what was, when assembled for the film, the world's 14th largest airforce, and nearly drove its producers, Twentieth Century Fox, into bankruptcy) and the Poseidon Adventure, whose unexpected, (and undeserved) success spawned the current crop of wipe-'em-off-the-ceiling films...
...angry stockholders and ravenous conglomerates killed the second. Louis B. Mayer, the feared stable master of the great M-G-M dynasty, went under in 1951; Darryl F. Zanuck, truncheoning all comers, held out twenty years longer, finally going under with the Japanese planes in his $25,000,000 Tora, Tora, Tora! They were monarchs, intuitive monarchs. But they were the "I wouldn't-let-my-daughter-see-a-movie-like-that" types, despite the fact that they did worse things than any movies they imagined could show. Their successors, though some still have tinges of the old craziness (Frank...
...FRIDAY: Tora! Tora! Tora! I never saw this $25 million production, but I sure was unimpressed with the preview clips in which the Japs bomb the living shit out of our boys at Pearl Harbor. I imagine there's lots of action and maybe even some blood and gore to sustain the kind of dull plotless romance one generally finds in war movies (and at Harvard). This movie bombed at the box-office and crippled traditional Hollywood in the same way the Japs scuttled the Pacific Fleet. 8:30 on Channel...
...courtly, goateed Farago (pronounced Far-ago) has a shelf of books to his credit, including Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, on which the movie Patton was partially based, and The Broken Seal, which was one basis for the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! He has also contracted, for an advance of more than $150,000, to write two books for Doubleday, one of them on J. Edgar Hoover. But first, he proposes to expand his Bormann material into a book for Simon & Schuster, with whom he contracted last week for an advance of more than...
...biographies of Louis XIV and Stalin in the book section of the New York Times. As biographies become flabby compendia, so historical movies-with the notable exception of Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV -go up in factual pretension while they go down in quality. Darryl Zanuck in Tora! Tora! Tora! spent millions to reproduce historical fact, but sacrificed artistic coherence for lavish commercial packaging. Hughes' Cromwell also fails, though on a smaller scale. But even as a larger financial venture, Cromwell's soupy musical score would probably just have been soupier (kettle drums beating more often as Cromwell...