Word: verbalization
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Spring and a little man, with a megaphone hit the Cambridge police department yesterday, and as a result, busy passerbys spent their time dodging traffic to the accompanyment of verbal instructions from the police department...
After he has made the agreement, usually verbal, to spend hundreds of thousands or millions, he has little more to do with a picture until it is ready for distribution. But then his problems begin. He is, in effect, Britain's movie censor, and as such often gets into brangles with Hollywood's Johnston Office. On one of these occasions, when there was too much "cleavage" for the Johnston Office in a Rank film, he spluttered in bewilderment: "But in England, bosoms aren't sexy...
These losses, which Rank can ill afford, have taught him to change his way of treating his stars. He had been content to make verbal contracts with them. But when Phyllis Calvert, the No. 2 female star in Britain, went to Hollywood to visit and came back with a written contract, he decided that he had better get tougher. (He refuses to make another picture with Calvert, saying sadly: "I have turned her picture to the wall.") Rank now leashes his people with seven-year contracts before letting them loose in Hollywood...
Such stars as Ann Todd, Michael Redgrave, Patricia Roc, Stewart Granger and John Mills will take their suntans and return to Britain as better attractions at the U.S. box office. Some of his artists, including Margaret Lockwood, are still on the verbal agreement basis because Hollywood is no lure to them. They prefer-out of patriotism and regard for Rank-to stay in England. Director David Lean (Great Expectations) is a case in point. After previewing the movie, a Hollywood executive wired Rank to find out how long his contract with Lean ran. Said Lean, who has no contract: "Forever...
...picture goes on so long, and under such darkness and chill, that the lazier-minded type of cinemagoers will probably get tired. Chaplin overexerts, and apparently overestimates, a writing talent which, though vigorous and unconventional, weighs light beside his acting gifts. As a result, a good deal of the verbal and philosophic straining seems inadequate, muddled and highly arguable -too highbrow for general audiences, and too naive for the highbrows...