Word: viewer
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With increasing frequency, network reporting aims toward a necessarily simplified but often illuminating explanation of events. ABC's Cordtz, a former writer for FORTUNE and the Wall Street Journal who is recognized even by rival network executives as the best on the beat, specializes in giving viewers a primer on how things work. In one stock market story, for example, he included a step-by-step description of how a share of stock is bought and sold; in a report on the downturn in retail sales, he ticked off the roles of Government, business, foreign buyers and consumers...
...challenge: how to transfer its achievement, on tape, to TV. Would the production be "too ... tremendous" to fit into the home screen? Ideally, actors would have crept out of the TV frame, perched on top of the console, strolled across the living-room rug to shake out the viewer's passive complacencies. Practically, TV Producer Colin Callender and Director Jim Goddard had two options. They could create a new production for television, with naturalistic sets and discrete scenes, thus reducing the grand babble to Masterpiece Theater whispers. Or they could allow the actors to trace their familiar patterns, asprawl...
...however, be initially confusing to millions of Nickleby novices. As host for the four-night series, Peter Ustinov provides helpful plot synopses and snippets of historical background, but he leaves some important unanswered questions for home viewers. Why are most of the actors doubling and tripling their roles? Why are characters breaking off a scene to describe their actions in the imperious third person? Why, when two characters are supposedly alone in a room, are other actors standing around watching them? Why, if this is television, does the camera occasionally cut to a theater audience cheering the performers-even...
...Styron himself learns only gradually that the beautiful woman who lives upstairs in his boardinghouse is haunted by a terrible past. Extended flashbacks, shot on location in Europe with English subtitles, slowly unfold the extent of that terror up to Sophie's final and tragic "choice," so that the viewer's reactions parallel Stingo's own. Longer than the conventional flashback, these sequences demonstrate Pakula's scrupulous care in reproducing Styron's tone. An actual concentration camp in Yugoslavia forms the background, and Meryl Streep as Sophie appears with near-shaven head, made up to look perceptibly younger and gabbling...
...film's ability to bypass all this does wonders for the tale's drama and digestibility. But it also tends to turn marginal implausibilities most glaringly, the life led by the pivotal character. Nathan, played by Kevin Kline--into enigmas that strain the viewer's credibility. And the one scene that returns focus entirely to Stingo--a ludicrous unsuccessful sexual conquest--seems oddly out of place...