Word: tough
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Today it is already fashionable to forget how few people gave the show a chance to survive at all with a tough TV audience -night people already addicted to six-gun cowpokes or to the time-defying charms of late movies, with their youthful Gables and ageless Garbos. Could the All-American boy with the dimpled chin and the dinky toupee move the merchandise against such competition? At first NBC bigwigs were talking about a well-integrated variety show. Says Paar: "A television executive doesn't know what he wants to do, but he can put it on paper...
...Tough Damn Job. From this moment on, Paar is assured, professional, unfaltering. During each station break, after every commercial, whenever he is off camera, he finds a moment to lean over to chat with a guest, give instructions to an assistant director, and check the time schedule. The peering cameras, the prodding teleprompters, the signaling technicians seem not to bother him; he is at home. With Jack Douglas, head writer of his show, whom he puts on as a guest from time to time, he ad libs quickly and surely. With other guests, he is gentle, humble, anxious...
...Lindy comedians Jack so often criticizes, has dropped in to watch-as many show business pros do. Says Youngman: "This guy gives 200%; he wants to be double good. He gives out a feeling of love, that's why they look at this man. This is a tough damn...
...Viet Nam inherited a rigid, rigorous school system from the French. Huge hoppers of facts must be memorized, and exams are tough. Students cram ceaselessly, go without vacations to study. Only 2.6% are able to cram in enough to pass their ninth-year exams, and only a minority of these survive their bachots four years later...
Equally unconcerned is Sergeant Croft (Aldo Ray). Tough as teakwood and cruel as a gibbet, he shoots prisoners to loot them of their gold teeth, crushes a broken-winged bird in his bare hand. He too builds power on tiers of terror, cries drunkenly to his platoon: "The generals take orders just like I do. It's just as much my army as it is theirs...